Managing Your Ecosystem
Virtual CEO Summit Recap
WITH JERRY NEMORIN AND RUPA GUPTA
Managing your Ecosystem with Jerry Nemorin, Founder & CEO of LendStreet and Rupa Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO, Sown To Grow
Following our open mic session, we kicked off the afternoon portion of our Virtual ONE WORLD CEO Summit, with the topic, “Managing your Ecosystem.” Breaking the topic into two parts, we had Jerry Nemorin, Founder and CEO of Lendstreet, a consumer facing debt restructuring platform, focusing his talk around “Managing Investors.”
Key Takeaways, Insights, and Resources for Raising Funds and Managing your Investors:
Fundraising is about giving investors the confidence in your ability to execute against a stated plan - starts with showing a history of doing that
“Right size the milestone or right size the round, make sure you get the right amount of capital that is necessary to meet the next milestone”
Important to meet milestones to show to investors that you are hitting the marks and then also adding as you go through funding rounds
Investors looking for conviction on your ability to execute. Either rightsize the milestones on what you create or rightsize the round
Putting out goals and being able to meet them, credibility is everything in the world of fundraising
You want investors that have deep conviction in you, in the product and the solution that you’re bringing to the market. Ideally have investors in the beginning that have operations experience
You don’t need to talk about the impact to have the impact that you’re having, you can lead with the business with traditional investors and let the social impact be woven into the mission
Build a fundraising process that will help mitigate the emotional aspect (fundraising is often “soul crushing”)
Resources:
Investable - support with fundraising strategy & tactics
“That Will Never Work” - Book by Marc Randolph from Netflix is really good on bringing perspective on their journey
During the second part of this topic, we had Rupa Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of Sown to Grow, an edtech platform designed to improve social, emotional, and academic health in students. For her portion, Rupa focused on “Customer Success,” and addressed steps to make sure that you close the sale with customers.
Key Takeaways, Insights, and Resources from Ensuring Customer Success:
Think about customers as partners, rather than customers (different mindset)
The only way to scale your startup's impact is when your customers/partners are successful in their implementation of the product
Unique strategy aspect is that the implementation process is part of the “sales” funnel: We don’t see a product successful, unless we’ve completed the full implementation
Early on, you often have to say “yes” to everything, a lot of feedback from a wide variety of sources helps with product development
Be open minded early on, what does the context need to look like for success to be there with the customer
Also be aware what the context needs to look like for your team success to work with the partner
Resources:
Public Benefit Corporation - (impact stamp to be validated)
BCorp - (Certified B Corporations are a new kind of business that balances purpose and profit).
NPS - the best and most humbling way to improve yourself and your business
Tech tools recommended to use:
Zendesk - for customer support
Hubspot - for CRM and sales
Trigger.digital - is our ads team
DEAR - (Cloud ERP software)
Find Jerry and Rupa’s session from 2:34:45 to 3:24:20
Find the Recaps of our other CEO Summit Speakers Here: