Notion Capital's Chris Tottman Answers Investor Questions

My job last week involved chatting to a man who sold a company for $700m. Chris Tottman came on our AMA. He joined MessageLabs as an early employee, rose to Chief Commercial Officer, and later sold to Symantec for $700m. He then went on to co-found Notion Capital, where he’s backed over 500 founders since. Our members spent an hour asking him anything they liked, and he answered all of it, including the questions people usually get media training to dodge. Somewhere in my inbox right now are the next few guests. If the confirmations land the way I think they will, this series is about to get real.

What did the Buffalo say to his little boy when he dropped him off at school? Bison. 🦬 Continuing my 11 years in tech series, this one's about the deals I was happiest to lose. I ran a lot of demos at Frontegg - and my favorite ones weren't the perfect fits, they were the ones where we said "it doesn't seem like this is a good fit." What that looked like: someone comes in asking for "identity," but what they actually want is an IDP for their workforce (internal logins for their own employees). We did customer-facing identity: the login your end users see. Easy mix-up, incredibly common. So we'd always slow down, listen, and dig in to be sure there wasn't a real fit hiding in there. Sometimes there was. But when someone genuinely just needed an internal IDP, there were better tools for them, and the honest move was to point them there. And I'll be honest, it's thrilling. Not because I like losing demos. Because a qualified demo doesn't end at the demo. It becomes a POC. It becomes research on my end, a build plan tailored to the customer, regular sync meetings and weeks of my time poured into getting them to a yes. Which is the right time investment, when the deal is real. When it isn't, every one of those hours is spent chasing something that was never going to close. The cost of a bad-fit demo isn't the hour you're in it. It's all the hours after it. So I learned to disqualify well: get to the pain point fast, honestly, no ego about it. My product doesn't need to solve every problem, let's see if it can, and should, solve yours. #8: Qualifying out is a skill, not a failure. A clean "no" today saves you a month of stress on a deal that was never going to happen. Guard your future time, future you will be future glad you future did. 3 posts to go! Hehe, Bison 🦬

Most software demos are a little bit of theater. A polished screen, a hopeful number, a "trust us" where the real thing should be. In trading, that gap between what you're shown and what's actually running is where people get burned. This week SigmaVue closed that gap on purpose, and made it a house rule. The desk you watch is the real floor — the actual agent runs and statuses, as they happen, not a staged screenshot. Ask our in-app assistant a question and it answers about YOUR account: your real positions, your real limits, your real context — not a generic canned reply. And when a feature isn't ready yet, the button says so honestly instead of pretending it works. That last one matters more than it sounds. It's easy to claim capability you don't have. Choosing to only claim what's actually live — and letting the interface tell the truth when it isn't — is a quieter, harder standard. For a platform that touches a prop eval, a funded account, and a live account on someone's behalf, "if it's on the screen, it's real" isn't a tagline. It's the trust the whole thing rests on. We build in public, and the next feature ships tomorrow. Follow along. #buildinginpublic #fintech #trust

"So what is Texture, exactly?" I get asked this a lot. Usually by co-op folks who've sat through enough vendor demos to be skeptical, and fair enough. Our CEO Sanjiv Sanghavi shares the vision, the challenges and the broader software landscape. He gets into why the grid's real gap isn't hardware, it's the software layer underneath it, and why that matters most for the co-ops and munis everyone else ignores. https://lnkd.in/gah2xuhh

5 founders just exited their companies. All 5 are already building again. Just a new company and a fresh registry filing. This week's batch: a Gamma founder (sold to Palo Alto Networks) building payment infra, a Civil Maps founder (sold to Luminar) gone stealth, and 3 more moving before the news does. Swipe for the full list. Follow Gravity to be in on the earliest moments of enduring companies.

There's a version of this post I didn't put on the slides. Loudcloud almost died. Like, actually almost died. Horowitz once said their stock went from $10 to 35 cents and he still had to walk into the office and lead. Most people don't know that company eventually got sold for parts, and the piece that survived became Opsware, which sold to HP for $1.6 billion a few years later. The comeback nobody saw coming started with him just... not explaining himself anymore. That's the part that stuck with me. If you're building something right now and it's not going the way you thought, you're in good company. Every founder we've worked with at ScaleCraft has had a version of this moment. The ones who make it aren't the ones with the best excuse.

BC Tech's Scaleup Academy library features real-world wisdom from founders, executives, and industry experts. Each video is designed to help BC companies scale smarter.    Check out the newest addition: Sales & Marketing - Compliance as Market Access featuring Matt Meanchoff (Absolute Security), Zac Cohen (Trulioo) & Michael Burgener (Vancity)

Less than 12 months after our seed round, Hush Security is announcing a $30M Series A. It is awesome to see Akamai Technologies join alongside the continued support from Battery Ventures and YL Ventures. In a lot of conversations I've had recently, one theme keeps coming up: discovering NHI's and AI agents is the starting point. As AI agents and other non-human identities get real access to enterprise platforms, teams need to understand what they're doing, govern what they can access, and move away from long-lived credentials. I'm grateful to be a part of this team, excited about what we've built, and what the team will continue to build. If you're at Black Hat next week, let's chat! If you'd like to learn more, here's the full announcement: https://lnkd.in/e9gGDy2z

With more than 6.5 million Trump Account signups, CEO Robin Vince joined CNBC's Squawk on the Street with Leslie Picker live from the White House to discuss the important role BNY plays in managing the national infrastructure for the program, bringing this groundbreaking initiative to life for families across the United States. 👇 Watch now 👇

An IPO can be a defining milestone — bringing new opportunities, greater visibility and added complexity. Founders, executives and employees should consider steps to help safeguard personal information, assets and family privacy while going public. Explore practical strategies to help protect what matters most. Read the guide. https://lnkd.in/dP6xidwp