Alex Cusell’s Post

Similar to an amazing colleague of mine, 👋 Danny Brown, I too wanted to partake in a bit of shameless self-promotion. At our Tech Team Onsite in May, amidst a group of my gifted peers, I was privileged to be recognized as a living embodiment of Upstart's core values. I received the 'End to End Ownership' award. But what truly pushed me, and acted as the catalyst for my success, was an insatiable desire to turn tech efficiency from a concept into a quantifiable reality for Upstart. I've been privileged to spearhead our Cost program since Q1, leveraging my comprehensive understanding of our tech and AWS. Getting to the heart of our cloud cost structure and uncovering opportunities for significant savings has been an immensely rewarding and inspiring journey. This initiative has enabled us to realize savings that blew past my expectations! And it's worth noting that during our most recent earnings call, our founder specifically mentioned the success of our OpEx cost reductions - a success that my program is proud to be a part of! This accomplishment has been a testament to our collective team spirit and relentless drive. The sense of ownership and the thrill of the chase have been truly fulfilling. Now, I'm eagerly looking forward to driving even more savings and efficiency! We've had a thrilling journey so far, and I can confidently say, we're just getting started. Stay tuned for the exciting path ahead! Shoutouts to: - My awesome leadership team who has supported me and helped push me towards success - All of the Engineers who have supported me across the cost saving efforts - Upstart for making every dollar count #upstart #community #platform #finops #costfather #aws #cloud

😇 Last week, I had the opportunity to be a panellist at the Exesquad - L’Expert du Scaling en Belgique event by Jaime A. Catalán Pinto → Someone in the audience asked a question that I found very interesting. 🧠 "How do you as a start-up avoid the risk of scaling too early, too fast? 🔥 I answered with a very simple phase in my personal case: I think you have to stay concentrated and focused on the market right from the start. It's the market, and therefore sales, that dictate the pace. So, if this notion is quickly understood, you can't take any more risks, because if you don't sell, you can't scale, and if you do sell, growth comes quite naturally. To take the case of IFREQ, we actually launched the project more or less a year ago. We were and still are in a period of R&D, and for many people this period is synonymous with intensive burn! 🤣 😎 Despite this, I decided to challenge our solution on the market quickly to ensure there was demand! We marketed an unfinished product as if it were finished via all our acquisition channels, and we realised that even at that stage, people could buy and validate it! So, for us, scale is no longer a risk but a necessity because it's been dictated by sales and the market from the outset. 🤝 To confirm this, I'd like to share with you our latest marketing nugget. Our content has reached over 2.5M people entirely organically. We've been doing better than competitors on the platform for years! Well done, guys; seeing what we can do with such a small, competent team is incredible! I can't wait to see what will happen next! Chris Bo͏u͏r͏a͏n͏d Nicolas Van Rymenant Adonis Karpowicz

Celebrating 2023 at Crowdcube 🎉 It’s fair to say it’s been quite the year. We’ve conquered challenging macroeconomic headwinds, have a more diversified offering for retail investors than ever before, and continue to have the pleasure of working with thousands of wonderful businesses and founders. Some key stats from the year so far: ✅ A 22% increase in EU registrations, expanding our wonderful community of investors - which now sits at 1.7m people. ✅ New partnerships with the likes of Octopus, Haatch and TaxScouts - giving retail investors the chance to participate in asset classes at a lower threshold, and tax efficiently. Over 1,250 people have already invested in our new VCT and EIS offerings. ✅ Completed the acquisition of Semper, one of Europe’s leading secondary liquidity platforms, opening the door for retail investors to participate alongside sophisticated institutional investors in secondary transactions with some of Europe's most promising startups for the first time. ✅ On top of this, we’ve partnered with industry-standard legaltech platform, SeedLegals, to make fundraising infinitely quicker and more efficient for startups The potential to create the largest private market investment platform in Europe is vast, and we believe we’re just getting started! Here's to an even more exciting 2024! 🚀

It's time to catch up on Viropay's progress - things are moving quickly. These past weeks have been intense. Being part of Startupbootcamp's accelerator program has been both exhilarating and demanding. The pressure is increasing with demo day approaching on June 20th, we're pitching at TNW! It's all about showing off our MVP (minimal viable product), which is the first rough version of our product, to showcase Viropay to potential clients and investors. Normally, a ''demo'' can be put together in weeks, but we're processing financial data which changes that quick and dirty approach. Meeting security standards means our process takes longer. Either way, the team works around the clock to get it done. I will post more often to showcase the process of building a demo and our path towards the big day on June 20th. Now, back to work 👋

Here's our superstar Chief Revenue Officer, Varghese Cherian 💫 speaking earlier at GITEX GLOBAL Largest Tech & Startup Show in the World. He chatted about how AI has changed the software development landscape, using our AI Product Manager as an example of how the future will look. Catch our app experts at booths CC2-6 👈 and 👉 H20-B10 and tell us what you want to build!

As Greek islands burn, coral bleaches, the grid shudders, people around the world suffer health wise from increasingly intense heat waves which will no doubt give way to an increasingly intense hurricane season here again, etc. As even the most pessimistic climate scientists continue to say, this is a little worse a little quicker than we thought. Proud to working on innovative software to help aid de-carbonization and provide incentives and tracking of movements away from fossil fuels. I'd be lying if I thought it was enough though. -- It's increasingly clear that we are in an "all hands on deck" scenario even sooner than we thought with the effects of climate change, and we need people focusing in all areas - political, outreach, direct activism, market-based solutions, legislative mandates, scientific advancements, voluntary reduction of energy use, etc - everywhere - if we are going to steer this planet towards any sort of a softer landing (any type of actually soft landing seems to be pretty much off the table at this point, but we can avoid the worst trajectories and make sure that adapting to the new world remains a global priority, not just a burden that we lash the most ill-equipped to deal with it with) -- The amount of rapid change we need is almost head-spinning, though it's clear many things could be within our reach. Not only at the industrial level where solar and wind cost literally pennies of what they cost even 15 years ago, and battery technology advances rapidly (with the hidden costs of the extractive labor used for such things) - but within reach other ways as well. But that pales to the amount of rapid change we'll continue seeing if we don't make it a top priority of us all as humans to focus on it in whatever ways we feel are the most useful. Phoenix got below 90 degrees today for the first time in over 3 weeks. Any time day or night. Those temperatures require a tremendous amount of energy just to make them livable and stress every system we have. -- Happy to be playing a small part in innovation for transitioning towards net zero, but if this summer doesn't show it I'm not sure what will. We have already begun to see a few theorized runaway feedback loops kicking off, and by all metrics, things are proceeding faster and more unpredictable than we thought even ten years ago, even as projections have dropped below 3 degrees warming. We are well into danger territory, and it is proving to be more dangerous than we thought. Let's keep innovating, and also simplifying - our lives and our priorities. There is no economy on an earth that can't sustain one.

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April was a big month for the Everything Marketplaces community! Here's a few highlights from our monthly roundup & recap post that I shared: -We're now 2,300+ marketplace founders & teams in the community -We had really incredible group chats with Casey Winters, Sara Mauskopf from Winnie, & Marco Zappacosta from Thumbtack -We had lots of other online events like our female founders meeting, fundraising meeting, & weekly office hours -We had meetups in New York City (at FJ Labs) & San Francisco (at Craft Ventures) -We had lots of founders share wins like launches, closing funding rounds, & also hitting major growth milestones + lots more Looking forward to another big month in May and also sharing some exciting news for the community soon!

🚨 Quick heads-up! Have you thrown your hat in the ring for PitchFest yet? ⏰ If not, the clock is ticking! ⏳ The application window will be slamming shut on September 22nd. Now's your shot to flaunt your SaaS company to investors who are actively on the hunt for the next big SaaS company. 💼🎯 Not just that, but you'll be doing it in front of a captivated audience of thousands. 👀👏 Here's why it's a no-brainer: 💡 Get Invaluable Insights: Receive feedback that's like gold dust, coming straight from investors and fellow entrepreneurs who know the ropes. It's like a shortcut to turbocharge your business growth. 💰 Cha-Ching Potential: There's real money ($10,000) on the table – need we say more? 💸 🎉 Serious Fun: Who said business can't be a blast? PitchFest isn't just about hard pitches; it's also about the thrill of sharing your passion with an eager audience. So, if you're ready to take on the challenge, and grab the attention of the SaaS industry's elite, then gear up for the most exhilarating pitch event of the year – SAAS NORTH PitchFest! 🌟 #saasnorth #saas #pitchfest