Four years after it was accidentally launched by a VC company, the GTMFund founder and the Max Altschuler General Associate increased a second $ 54 million fund. It was targeting for $ 50 million.
Gtmfund It is one of a growing “operator LED” capital harvest, which means that limited investors are people who work or currently work in successful technology companies (known in VC Parlance as “operators”).
“It is, for the most part, actively in their current company, or maybe it has just ended a run to a company that went from zero to a few hundred millions of revenue,” Altschuler says. LPS includes people from places such as AWS, Openai, Procore, RY -R -Debuto and snowflake, he says.
These LPs are largely marketing and sales experts, known to Silicon Valley-Speak as “Go to the Market”, hence the name GTMFund.
In addition to contributing their cash, LPS also helps to guide portfolio companies in sales strategies – a sector where many newly established businesses need help – and with sellers. They also help the fund find and evaluate the new boot companies worth investing.
The first fund, launched in 2021, had about 250 exploitation bodies and only a few institutional investors. He supported companies such as the author of AI Composer (worth $ 1.9 billion in November), the AI Data Center Tech Atlan (which has recently won $ 105 million in $ 750 million) and the Vanta Security Compliance Company (Lastly $ 150 million to $ 2.45 billion), among others.
With this history, Fund II attracted 300 lps operator, as well as six institutions, such as Bain Capital Ventures, Harbourvest, Inovia Capital and Franklin Park.
And Altschuler finds himself scanning in an increasing emerging fund.
This was not actually its original intention. Altschuler was once employee no. 8 at Udemy, running sales through its first days. He later helped start the Saastr community and informed some newly established businesses, then he began his own blog called Sales Hacker, which he sold to surpass 2018 (though he bought it since). He began investing in Angel, writing early checks for Gong and Carbon Health.
People in the important network of Altschuler continued to ask them to show them how to invest Angel. So he decided to try to do that.
He sent an email to a list of GTM people and shared an idea: “What will happen if we uploaded a million dollars between 20 and 50 of us and put it to 10 companies and then meaningfully supported these companies?” suggested. “And he went gangbusters. We ended up raising $ 22 million for Fund I.”
The LPs in the cashier can choose to do as much as possible or as little as they want to help, from the silent investment to highly involved in portfolio companies. GTMFund has also created community functions: such as a deal channel where LPS can chat. And hosts six dinners a year as well as annual retreat.
“It has been, for me, just a work of love. It’s a lot of fun,” he said. “I get the same from that as our LPS is. I like to work with all these different founders, all these different companies to help them with this type of GTM issue. ”
The GTMFund structure as an operator is not common, but it is also unheard of. For example, Mallun Yen founded the Collective Operator in 2019, which started from the gateway with $ 45 million and increased the second $ 92 million in 2022 and also has an enviable portfolio. Another more recent example is the coalition of Ashley Mayer, which began in 2022 with $ 12.5 million.
Concerning the second GTMFund fund, Altschuler states that the goal is to support about 40 early stage companies in pre-spades, seeds and occasional A-ME-ME-MILLING sizes between half a million and $ 1.5 million.
