David Beisel

Capital Efficiency and Aggressive Growth Can Coexist

Today NextView’s portfolio company Hatch was acquired by Yelp for $270M. Having led the company’s seed round and served on the board, I’m grateful for the journey – and the lessons learned from founders Chris Bache and Bill Violante 👇 First and foremost, congratulations to Chris, Bill, and the entire Hatch team for creating something truly special and achieving a strong outcome for everyone involved. This experience reinforced two insights that I'll carry through the rest of my career. LESSON #1: Capital efficiency and aggressiveness are not opposites. They can reinforce each other. After I led the company’s $2.5M seed round, Hatch raised only one additional $11M round. While spending less than half of that capital, the company scaled to tens of millions in revenue. The phrase “capital efficient” is often used as shorthand for slow growth or a cautious posture. Not here. Chris and Bill are disciplined and frugal operators, but when they identified opportunities to accelerate the business, they acted decisively. Their mindset was not to raise eye-popping sums to build a war chest. Instead, it was to take the capital they had and deploy it exceptionally well. LESSON #2: Do not just listen to your customers. Truly understand their businesses. While Hatch is a horizontal messaging and voice marketing platform with customers spanning verticals, the vast majority of its customers are in the home services space. Chris and Bill have embedded themselves in this industry since day one: from substantial time spent at trade shows to extensive one-on-one conversations. They strive to understand how their customers' businesses truly work. This paid off when generative AI arrived. Hatch was already a scaled, successful business when the ChatGPT moment hit. Because Chris and Bill understood their customers' workflows so deeply, they didn't view AI as a novelty or a feature in search of a problem. Once they gained access to OpenAI's API, they didn't need to guess what to build. They already knew. Hatch's AI product launched in spring 2024, and market reception was immediately positive. Because the team understood precisely how AI could benefit their customer base, they moved quickly and established a meaningful lead over competitors. Deep customer understanding doesn't come from listening alone. It comes from sustained immersion in how your customers actually run their businesses. I believe this acquisition signals what lies ahead. Public companies increasingly recognize that an AI-driven transformation is underway, and many are moving to acquire AI-native businesses outright rather than simply buy software from vendors. It has been a pleasure working with Chris and Bill, and the broader Hatch team, including longtime friends of NextView such as Tim Geisenheimer, John Peña, Diana Hsieh, and Eric Blumenthal; and alongside friends and co-investors Kent Bennett and Lindsey Li at Bessemer Venture Partners.. Excited for what's next.