Choosing the Right Venture Investor: Aligning Problem Realization

Name: Choosing the Right Venture Investor: Aligning Problem Realization
Uploaded: 2024-04-07T13:04:43+00:00
Duration: 54 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: Jason M. Lemkin built a SaaS business to $1M/month revenue before selling to Adobe. His team's search infrastructure kept failing, forcing them to…

7 Apr 2024 · 1 min

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Jason M. Lemkin built a SaaS business to $1M/month revenue before selling to Adobe. His team's search infrastructure kept failing, forcing them to migrate from an in-browser solution to Lucene, but they lacked the engineering talent to scale it. Founders should pick investors who understand the specific problems they're solving.

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one of the main reasons I think I've seen founders pick their venture investor is the alignment of realization of problem. You feel the problem of search and they see that in you. They feel your passion. And you've said before about betting on what you know when you go from CEO to VC. Yeah.
What did you mean by this, Jason M. Lemkin? Yeah, it's the same advice I give to lots of operators. Look, I came out of a second-generation SaaS company now called Adobe Sign. And I had— we hit $1 million a month when we sold to Adobe, $12 million a year, growing 100%. But we had a tiny team. And I had so many headaches. And my biggest headaches were— we talked about our search servers going down. We used a cool in-browser thing that didn't scale. Then we switched to Lucene, which is basically Elastic today. But it was an early deployment. And we didn't have the right engineers to make Lucene scale.