Co-Authored by Nick “Walt” Walker
If your goal is to become a SaaS CEO at a startup company, you’ll have to learn several skills:
- Building a business strategy
- Motivating the team
- Executing consistently
- Raising money
- Repeating CEO cliches over and over again
While I find all parts of the job to be interesting, there are some unique lessons you get during fundraising. For us, that learning came from multiple rounds with Battery Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Ventures, and Sixth Street Partners. Most recently, we added Vista Equity Partners to our board.
Looking back, those investors were early believers in the Customer Success movement before it was a proven concept. Fast forward to today, VC and Private Equity firms have made Customer Success strategy and strong Net Revenue Retention a core part of their investment diligence process.
Top Ten VCs Committed to Customer Success
Given that context, I wanted to look at which VCs in the market “get” Customer Success more broadly. We used our client database as a representative sample set.
After running an analysis, we found that 76% of our customers had VC-backed investments. Of the 2,773 VC firms that had invested in these companies, over 5,000 investments had been made to companies with solid Customer Success strategies.
Because Gainsight is so popular overall in the market, usage of Gainsight is a semi-scientific look into how much a given investor prioritizes Customer Success at the Board level. So I present to you the top investors in terms of their demonstrated commitment to CS.
While many investors believe in Customer Success now, it’s clear that the ten above prioritize it at the Board level. If you’re a CS executive looking for a role, check out the portfolio companies of the firms below. And if you’re a CEO raising another round, consider contacting the above firms. And if you do, tell them Gainsight sent you!
