Tracy Lee

Two years ago I met Damien Howley through the local Charlotte GTM community. We instantly aligned philosophically on the existential challenges facing the SaaS industry today. Why would enterprises still opt to “buy” when they can now “build” their own fit-for-purpose solutions at a fraction of the cost with AI and not have to deal with a vendor’s BS? But more critically… what does this new buyer-empowered era mean for startups, scale ups, and enterprises building and selling software B2B? What emerged after numerous late night conversations across time zones was a thesis: in order to justify existing in the AI era, software companies MUST regain their purpose… solving their customer’s biggest business challenges. We have way over indexed on specialization and forsaken effectiveness for the allure of “efficiency”. What does mean in practice? Siloes. Siloes. Siloes. Siloes. Siloes. And guess who feels that the most? Your customer. This is the reason churn has increased dramatically over the last 12 months. Customer experience has now become a chop shop of connecting disparate experiences across a GTM “journey”. Sales hand off to Services hand off to CS providing feedback to Product who prioritizes across Sales Services and CS while updating Marketing on how to talk about product to Sales… and it’s way more confusing than that, going on and on and on. … fast forward 12 months and Damien has published the ANSWER to this incredibly thorny problem. It’s called The Purpose Code and you’ve got to give it a read. If you are in GTM writ large for tech companies (Product, CS, Sales, Marketing, Exec), this is your guide for how to navigate the chaos of the world today and help your organization regain its true PURPOSE. Very grateful to have been able to play a part in the development of this book. Also very grateful to have met you along this crazy journey of starting a company Damien. Thank you for your friendship, intellectual sparring, and for sharing the most important message that technology leaders across business need to hear.

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Many state governments have invested heavily in custom development projects to solve their child care woes, only to face blown budgets, delayed timelines, and poor user adoption. More communities are recognizing the benefits of SaaS (software-as-a-service) models over custom builds because of the ease of implementation and cost-effective pricing. The data says:  SaaS platforms are designed for ongoing updates and enhancements, avoiding the need for costly legacy system overhauls. SaaS solutions often provide better user experiences for families, providers, and agency staff out of the box. As state and local leaders seek to modernize their early childhood systems, take a look at SaaS versus custom development for a stronger return on the public's investment: https://lnkd.in/eCndEhvn

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Thrilled to share the news today that Bonterra has acquired OneCause! OneCause is the premiere solution for event and auction fundraising for nonprofits. Bonterra now offers the #1 or #2 market leading SAAS solution across every nonprofit fundraising channel. In the months ahead, we'll be integrating OneCause into our fundraising and donor management suite to enable nonprofits to deliver a coherent and coordinated donor experience across every fundraising channel. And Bonterra Que, our new agentic AI platform for social good, will also be extended to work and help fundraisers with OneCause powered events. An exciting milestone for both Bonterra and OneCause customers. Congratulations to Steve Johns and the entire team at OneCause!

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Harpoon Ventures + Black Flag is teaming up with Microsoft for Startups to provide founders with access to up to $250,000 in Azure credits, empowering builders to scale faster, train models more efficiently, and access world-class AI infrastructure. What’s included: ⚡ Up to $250K in Azure credits (usable across Azure OpenAI, Grok 3, Llama 4, and more) 💻 On-demand GPU VMs for model training and fine-tuning 🧠 Access to GitHub Enterprise + Microsoft 365 Business Premium 🤝 Dedicated Microsoft technical + GTM support This partnership is designed to give deep-tech and dual-use founders the tools and resources they need to win. To keep pace with an increasingly hostile near peer environment, we need the complete resource stack: political, capital, technological. This is a great addition.

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99.4% telemetry distillation. That's the latest benchmark for OtterMon AI's MVP build. But you might be surprised to hear data optimization isn't our primary focus... Our platform is designed to help customers *prevent* security incidents and business outages instead of them constantly reacting to problems. We accomplish that by sitting on top of their existing DevOps tools and analyzing their holistic digital footprint. What are they monitoring? What vendors are they using? What critical context is hiding in documentation, code, and runbooks? Today, trying to process all that data just doesn't scale. But by solving the data volume problem first, we also solved the data silo problem. And now our customers can see auto-detected issues, risks, and optimization opportunities instead of drowning in disparate dashboards and endless alerts. That's the power of Unified DevOps Intelligence 🚀

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Many startups structure their design partnerships to be frictionless. Logan Randolph, Sierra’s first GTM hire, took the opposite approach: “You need mutual investment and risk.” “We told partners upfront: ‘We'll give you dedicated engineers, direct access to our founders, and our cell phone numbers. But in return, we need real investment from you — payment, access to your systems, and weekly meetings to get candid feedback,’" he says. When building Sierra’s design partnership program, he: -Required a payment as a percentage of total contract value to disqualify “AI tourists” -Time-boxed the engagement to create urgency for both sides -Clear expectations around what partnership required: strict launch deadlines, access to partner systems, weekly meetings and shared Slack channels, and defined swimlanes The result was a 100% partner-to-customer conversion. To learn exactly how he created Sierra’s design partnership program from scratch, read more on The Review.

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I’ve been talking with founders about how painful enterprise customization still is — even in 2025. David Dworsky and Gordon Ritter just put words to what we’ve been seeing: the age of point-and-click configuration is ending, and the next category winners will make customization conversational. For early-stage founders, this is the wedge: - Own one painful workflow - Capture the data - Build toward becoming a system of record If you’re building in this space, I’d love to hear how you’re approaching it. Link to the full article on this in the comments. 

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Great founders know where to focus. Bret Taylor knows how to break it down. We pulled some key insights from the Sierra co-founder and CEO's Frameworks for Growth episode—on customers, selling outcomes instead of features, and what some startups miss about pace, product, and predictions. 🧵 Highlights in the carousel 🎬 Watch the full ep: https://lnkd.in/g9WmVtzf

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Growing from an early stage startup to a late-stage company is no easy feat — especially when it comes to building out Revue Operations. In our latest GTM Navigator, "From Seed to Scale: Growing RevOps for Success" Nick Daley, Senior Associate at Fin Capital, is joined by Bryan Caplin, CRO at Newsela & Advisor to Thoropass, to discuss how to to set the right foundation & avoid costly mistakes when building out your revenue operations team. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/g8FTuwXR #GTMStrategy #Revenue #Operations #RevOps #FounderResource #Navigator

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