Market Update- March 2020

For the last 20 years, Kindred has partnered with privately-held technology companies across all market conditions. We are committed to doing everything we can to help support our clients, partners and executives- especially through these unprecedented times.

We know that COVID-19 is having and will have a massive impact personally and professionally on all of us, and we hope that you and yours are safe and healthy.

Of course, we don’t presume to know how our world is going to change over the next days, weeks or months. What we can say with certainty (and we’re not the first to point this out, obviously), is that great companies are going to be founded, funded, built and scaled through this turmoil. We partnered with some incredible portfolio companies during brutal market conditions:

• 2001–2003 Google, AMI Semi, Opsware, Shutterfly, etc
• 2008–2009 MuleSoft, Coupa, ProofPoint, Siri, etc

In past downturns, we experienced a shift in the types of searches we completed across our portfolio. While our data reflects trends specific to Kindred, we wanted to share some of those insights:

DISCIPLINE

• We saw more CEO searches (wartime CEOs?)
• We saw more Engineering and Product searches
• Senior sales searches were steady through ups/downs
• We saw fewer CFO, HR and Marketing searches
• We have no data for Customer Success searches from the last downturn (which tells you how this role has grown in the last 10 years), but our expectation is that the CS function will become even more important in a downturn

STAGE

In past market corrections, we experienced a clear shift towards searches in earlier-stage companies as a percentage of our overall portfolio.

We have already seen some of this shift over the past year. In 2019, 30% of our total searches were with Seed and Series A companies. We believe this trend will accelerate as investors put money to work in new companies at lower valuations. (Good blog with supporting data from Tomasz Tunguz at Redpoint)

REMOTE WORK

Over the years, we’ve worked with a few truly distributed companies like Automattic, GitLab (good updated blog with advice and resources from their remote experiences), Sonatype and TeamSnap.

Prior to COVID-19, we were already seeing significantly more senior executives hired outside of HQ. Given our current environment and mandatory WFH initiatives, there’s reason to expect that companies will find and hire the best senior talent no matter their location.

Please reach out if you’d like to discuss best practices around remote interview management and/or the larger topic of a hiring process through this unprecedented time of challenge.

Stay safe & healthy- The Kindred Team

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