Press release

Shasta Ventures Launches Shasta Ignite Platform to Help Early-stage Founders Ignite and Accelerate Growth

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Shasta Ventures announced today that it launched a platform dedicated to helping founders and executives of its early-revenue startups acquire and retain customers.

Shasta Ignite is a platform focused on Shasta Ventures’ early-stage companies that accelerates growth by applying best practices in sales, marketing and customer success. The platform includes a dozen industry expert mentors and teachers, content modules, events and workshops.

“Acquiring and retaining customers is the most important undertaking for early-revenue startups,” said Jason Pressman, Managing Director of Shasta Ventures. “For too long, founders have had to piece together growth plans from a patchwork of generic advice and dubious sources.”

“That’s what we’re changing today,” added Pressman, whose investments include Zuora, Nextdoor and Glint. “We’re making this a formal program that helps our early-stage companies apply best practices in sales, marketing and customer success.”

Shasta Ignite is designed to help early-stage enterprise founders accelerate revenue growth by providing practical “how to” advice customized to the specific opportunities and challenges of their firms and markets.

“The B2B SaaS Cloud is 20-years-old, and there are well-understood best practices for growing early-revenue companies,” said Shasta Ignite General Manager Michael Lock, who was a founding member of Google Cloud, scaling it from infancy to beyond $1 billion in revenue. “Yet too often we leave entrepreneurs to figure it out for themselves. That’s where the Shasta Ignite platform comes in, helping founders apply those best practices to their unique businesses to ignite growth.”

To help its founders successfully scale, Shasta Ignite has four different components overseen by Lock and managed by a stable of Shasta’s investors and partners: 16 half-day workshops covering the complete spectrum of early-revenue challenges; hands-on mentoring and networking for functional executives of Shasta startups; an online forum where founders can ask questions and get answers from Shasta partners and advisors; and a launch assistance program.

Shasta was an early investor in Anaplan, Glint and Appsheet; and it created Shasta Ignite as an outgrowth of its close partnership with entrepreneurs and has been piloting the program with several of its early-revenue Enterprise companies.

“Shasta was an early investor and a fantastic partner in my first company,” said Max Rudman, who founded SteelBrick, another Shasta investment, which was acquired by Salesforce. “Naturally, when the time came to fundraise for my new company Prodly I turned to the Shasta team. This time I am leveraging their resources even more with Shasta Ignite who offered practical and timely advice on everything from sales management to hiring my new sales & marketing leadership.”

For more information, please visit https://shastaventures.com/shasta-ignite

About Shasta Ventures

Shasta Ventures puts entrepreneurs first. A leading early-stage venture capital firm, Shasta partners with bold creative entrepreneurs who are passionate about building great products that deliver amazing work experiences. Founded in 2004, Shasta Ventures has more than $1B under management and specializes in enterprise software start-ups. Our portfolio features Anaplan, Appsheet, Apptio, Glint, Zuora and many promising start-ups. Find out more at www.shastaventures.com.