Bessemer Venture Partners

Introducing STRIVE, our holistic wellness program designed for high-performance leadership: bvp.com/strive Building and scaling a business is an endurance sport. 🏃♀️ A CEO's health and well-being directly impacts their business outcomes and shapes their company's culture. The strongest companies are led by leaders who prioritize their physical and mental performance. At Bessemer, we're committed to supporting entrepreneurs who want to perform at their best. #STRIVE

Anyone who gets up close and personal with a founder or CEO can see the visible toll that these roles take on one's mental, physical and spiritual health. The jobs are often all-consuming and can come at a cost - even when the company is doing fabulously well and you love what you're building. We at Bessemer Venture Partners spent many months conceiving of a program, now branded STRIVE, designed to help support these builders in meaningful ways, and we were thrilled to launch it to the world last week via partnerships with Exos and Next Legacy Partners. We hope more VCs prioritize founder health & wellness with the core belief that healthy founders build and cultivate healthier leadership teams, which then allows them to build a healthy and successful company more effectively and with less collateral damage along the way. And may we all strive to be the best versions of ourselves no matter what role we play!

✨ Leadership requires 𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞, 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐥𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐥, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 — the often overlooked fundamentals of upholding one's vision and driving company success. ✨ At the root of becoming a 𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 is self-awareness and the emotional skills to self-regulate so you can model the beliefs and behaviors you want to cultivate in your team. 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐧 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬? 🌱 𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞 7️⃣ 𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐬 — ✅ Meditate ✅ Journal ✅ Work with a coach or therapist ✅ Find better questions to ask ✅ Seek new experiences and contribute beyond yourself ✅ Discuss your life goals with others ✅ Study your self-talk In partnership with Exos, we share frameworks and holistic best practices to help you become the best leader you can be. You can get all these resources when you sign up for 𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 today — https://www.bvp.com/strive More details and the full article are in the comments. ⤵️ #leadership #health #founderwellness #wellness

New The Heart of Healthcare Podcast episode! In this month's Digital Health Download, we cover Bessemer's State of Health Tech Report, HLTH Inc., and U.S. election season. Sofia Guerra, Steve Kraus, Michael Esquivel. Listen today: https://lnkd.in/gDtzVDtS

🌟 New ICYMI newsletter: 💤 Sleep science for peak performance 🩺 Three health tech biz models to know 💡 Bessemer news & highlights Dive in ⬇️

✨ 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐬. ✨ Despite the myths about executives sleeping just four hours per night and speed-reading hundreds of books each year, 𝐮𝐧𝐛𝐚𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐫 𝐮𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐭 𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐭. However, nourishing your brain and body will give you more willpower and help you make better decisions cumulatively. At the beginning of 2024, we had nearly 100 CEOs participate in a survey on founder wellness; to be blunt, the data was concerning. But what we learned might not surprise anyone reading this — 𝐂𝐄𝐎𝐬 𝐭𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐠𝐠𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐱𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐲, 𝐬𝐥𝐞𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 due to their 60-80+-hour work weeks. Yet, a huge majority (70%) of those who took the survey 𝐝𝐨 𝐧𝐨𝐭 currently work with a coach or therapist to help them in different areas of their lives. (In fact, many also suggested that they experience burnout and have seriously considered giving up the CEO job over it.) That’s why we see 𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 as a foray into your wellness and leadership development — we care about the outcomes of the businesses we back and the people building them. 𝐒𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐮𝐩 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐭𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐲! https://lnkd.in/gVTpwdq9

Thank you to Stanford, MIT, and UC Berkeley! Our investors Janelle Teng, Rayouf Alhumedhi, Kent Bennett, Maha Malik, Grace Ma, and Caty Rea had a great time meeting with students and talking about our analyst program. We’re hitting the road to visit a university near you. Come meet us! - Harvard - University of Michigan - University of Virginia Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/gAU6gJNj #analyst #investor #collegeinternship #venturecapital #venturecapitalist

✨Meet Solmaz Shahalizadeh — Bessemer Operating Advisor, angel investor and tech executive specializing in data and AI, with an extensive expertise in scaling teams and products in emerging tech companies.   🚀 During her nine years at Shopify (2013-2022) as VP and Head of Data Science and Engineering, Solmaz oversaw the company’s data infrastructure and user-facing data products and played a key role in the company's growth. She built a data organization of over 500 people, helped lead Shopify through its IPO, and scaled the platform from 100,000 to over two million merchants. She also scaled the development of Shopify’s AI products, including Shopify Capital, which has enabled over $5 billion in cash advances to merchants through AI-powered models. 💡   👩💼 In 2021, Solmaz co-founded Backbone Angels, which focuses on funding women-led startups. She also joined the board of Fullscript. 🌟 Currently, as a Bessemer Operating Advisor, Solmaz works with our portfolio companies, helping them tackle challenges related to data and AI—whether it’s identifying new product opportunities or guiding leaders in building and scaling AI-driven products and data teams.

Three health tech business models to know ⤵️ 1️⃣ Healthcare SaaS: Traditional B2B workflow software and data and analytics businesses. These businesses sell to SMB, mid and enterprise customers at payer, provider and pharma stakeholders. Ex. Veeva Systems, Phreesia, Definitive Healthcare. 2️⃣ AI Services-as-Software: B2B services that leverage AI to sell an outcome or deliverable for SMB, mid and enterprise customers at payer, provider and pharma stakeholders. These businesses use AI capabilities and agentic workflows to autonomously perform tasks that have typically required human intervention. Ex. SmarterDx, Plenful, Qventus, Inc, Abridge. 3️⃣ Tech-enabled clinical services: Care delivery and navigation services that touch the end consumer or patient. This category includes companies that leverage technology to deliver care more efficiently and effectively, often incorporating elements of value-based care. Ex. Hinge Health, Accolade, Inc., hims & hers. Not every AI-enabled health tech business counts as Services-as-Software, our newest category for 2024. Healthcare SaaS businesses will create AI-enabled features within existing workflow products, and tech-enabled services companies will leverage AI/ML to stratify patient risk, enable admin workflows and even triage patient interactions. If you’re building in healthcare, we want to hear from you. Dive into our 2024 State of Health Tech report for more benchmarks and trends - link in comments!

As students of the public cloud market, we’ve been on the hunt for another market that has the likelihood to achieve commensurate total addressable market (TAM)—and for a team that has the technical rigor and execution chops to become a market leader. That market is the foundation model layer, and that team is Anthropic. Congratulations to the team on launching its new Claude 3.5 Haiku model, upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, and computer use public beta! Read our thinking behind our prior investment in Anthropic ⬇️