Norwest Venture Partners

The Norwest Growth Marketing Summit made a triumphant return this week, uniting B2B, B2C, and healthcare portfolio marketing leaders and friends. The timing couldn’t be better — with 2024 planning underway, we gathered our community in a safe space for inspiration, learning, and frank conversations about common challenges. Our CMO, Principal & Operating Executive, Lisa (Ramirez) Ames ended her opening remarks with 3 challenges to everyone in the room. 1) Aspire to change at least one behavior based on what you learned 2) Instill more wonder and rigor into your work (our keynote speaker Natalie Nixon, PhD touches on this in her book, The Creativity Leap) 3) Lead with humility and courage in a more expansive way than you’re already doing This is a challenge to our broader community, too! Leadership — brave leadership — is one of the most important ways we can add value, especially in these times. Natalie Nixon, PhD’s keynote inspired all of us to view ROI through another perspective — creativity. Creativity is the balance between wonder and rigor. It’s the engine of innovation and it has an ROI. Inventive thinking leads to new revenue streams, collaboration leads to lower costs, and being obsessed with serving your clients leads to greater value. All of these returns are fueled by creativity and innovation! How can you instill more wonder and rigor into your work today?

4 ways clinical beauty brands can maximize their valuations. Swipe 👉 Read the blog for more: https://lnkd.in/dRk4xpBJ

Building a software company? 5 questions you need to ask (and answer) before talking to VCs. 👇 1️⃣ What’s the problem you’re targeting? Every good business solves a problem. 2️⃣ What is your value proposition? Define what makes your solution unique. 3️⃣ Who is your target customer? Understand who they are, what they do, and what success looks like for them. 4️⃣ Does your product fit into a category that people already understand? New solutions are often a double-edged sword: innovation is valued yet change often creates uncertainty. 5️⃣ How will you monetize your product and who’s going to pay for it? It’s not essential to have a pricing model at the outset, but you should at least have a vision for monetization in the future. Dive into even more guidance from Norwest General Partner Dave Zilberman: https://lnkd.in/gFB8QTWn

Company culture doesn't change overnight. Change takes months — sometimes years. These are the 5 steps every HR leader should consider to drive cultural transformation. Norwest People Advisory Principal Laurie Tennant, SPHR invited Velocity Global Chief People and Culture Officer Linda Lee (she/her) to share her playbook for implementing culture change during a workshop. Laurie outlined Linda's framework in a blog recapping the discussion: https://lnkd.in/gKsf6Y3B

For Norwest CRO Operating Executive David Rudnitsky, being “enterprise ready” is two sides of a coin: how you act and how you sell. Read his guidance on judging whether your company is ready to go upmarket: https://lnkd.in/gWr6vD-D

Our Talent Principal Teri McFadden recently had the opportunity to hop on the mic with Morgan Stanley’s Invested at Work host Rodney Bolden to discuss trends in private equity, the evolution of exit horizons for startups, and the importance of employee education regarding equity. How should companies educate their employees about stock options? Teri shares that by communicating potential risks and rewards and illustrating clear examples, the gap in perception of future liquidity events can be bridged to help companies keep top talent motivated and engaged for the long haul. Tune into the episode to learn more actionable advice and expert insights from Teri. https://mgstn.ly/3ykED6J

“The bison have escaped and are heading towards the interstate. What should we do?” Just two months before Norwest VP Scott Mitchell was expected to have an answer for that pressing question, he was in private equity – far from rampaging bovine. He’d left that job to join a company in the regenerative agriculture space. As the CFO, he thought he’d be building spreadsheets, forecasting cash flow, and optimizing KPIs. Instead, he says he spent most of his time managing vendor relationships, handling HR issues, and performing risk management. Which, in this case, involved deciding how to handle some loose bison. After three years in the “real world” as he calls it, he returned back here to Norwest with a newfound appreciation for just how hard it is to run a high-growth business. He also gained a deep respect for the value that a strong board can bring to a company… if it applies the appropriate perspective. His experience on both the operator and investor sides informs how the Norwest Growth Equity team shows up as a partner, or as we call it — an invited guest. After watching the video, take a deeper dive into Scott’s blog: https://lnkd.in/gM8qxhmS 

In the light and warmth of a live fire, we gathered Sales and Marketing leaders from the Norwest portfolio to share their stories, learnings, and challenges from the year. Thank you to our Operating Executives Renee Cohen, Lisa (Ramirez) Ames, and David Rudnitsky, as well as our Senior Advisors, Tyler Elliston and Jill Melchionda, for hosting and leading discussions around the room. Here are 5 takeaways from their conversations: ◼ Self-reported attribution continues to provide valuable insights regarding the actual source of lead generation. Too often, Google ads and organic search get the “credit” which potentially obfuscates the role of word-of-mouth and brand efforts. ◼ Moving up the funnel with customer acquisition is a gradual process (typically from click-based and trackable to view based and minimally trackable) that's often slowed by historic norms and expectations around tracking, as well as CAC and the difficulty of getting cross-functional buy-in at the same/right time. ◼ Think about how you position AI in prospect engagements. Don’t lead with AI (everyone does that), instead explain how it enables your solution and drives value. ◼ Marketers, consider using AI as a decision-making and problem-solving tool. For example: take screenshots of SFDC error messages and ask the AI to explain what the user did wrong in their report and come back with a solution. (Works only in paid version). ◼ Consider integrating influencers into the B2B marketing mix. In more established B2B sectors, recognized thought leaders and industry experts are easy to identify and engage. In emerging or evolving categories, identifying the influential voices must be incredibly organic (and time-consuming) or investment is required to develop voices internally. There’s no better place to talk through communal challenges and insights than around an inventive meal, and Osito was the perfect setting for the dinner. Thank you to our portfolio for continuing to show up and share out their knowledge!

Behind the scenes with Norwest Partner Sean Jacobsohn and photographer Andria Lo for the The Wall Street Journal. ICYMI, read about why Sean created The Failure Museum, the standout items in his collection, and why he believes investors shouldn’t be afraid to support innovators who have failed.

Security teams’ jobs are getting harder as modern applications get more complex and the risk of breaches and vulnerabilities grows. Heeler is tackling this problem – and we’re so energized by their approach that we’re leading their Seed Series funding (alongside Storm Ventures). Our General Partner Dave Zilberman recognized how Heeler’s team is pioneering a new and much-needed approach to application security. Their vision: Transform application security by delivering: ✅ Real-time security and business context ✅ Detection, enrichment and posture management ✅ Response orchestration How they’ll do it: Heeler’s ProductDNA delivers something new – a frictionless chain of custody between the intended state in code and the running state in production. Unicorn startups and Fortune 500s alike are already using ProductDNA, and it will be generally available in Q4. Who’s at the helm: Heeler’s founding team of Christopher Hertz, James Green, Trever McKee, and Chris DeRamus have proven they have what it takes to scale Heeler. They’ve launched application security and cloud security products at enterprise scale and brought companies from initial stages to acquisition and IPO.