Jonas Ngoenha

Beazy

Co-Founder and CEO

Google

Amongst top 5% of applicants accepted for Google Black Founders Fund Europe 2022.
Thank you to Google for selecting us out of 700+ applicants to receive funding AND support 🙌 We could not be more thrilled!
€100K equity-free funding, €200K Google Cloud credits  and, most importantly, a 6-month acceleration program with the amazing Google team and mentors 🤩

Following Google’s commitment to building a more equitable future for everyone, Google for Startups created a $4 million Black Founders Fund and selected 40 exceptional startups from six countries in Europe who have been awarded up to €100,000 in equity-free cash, paired with up to €200,000 per startup in Google Cloud credits and support from experts at Google.

Check out what happens when you #FundBlackFounders → goo.gle/BFF

Google BFF Europe 2022 Recipient

Facebook Small Business Grants Recipient

The Berlin School of Economics and Law

Berliner Startup Stipendium Recipient

École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Beazy has been awarded CHF10K as part of the Y-Grants by the EPFL.

EPFL Y-Grant Recipient

Social Impact Award

Beazy won the Social Impact Award Switzerland 2018 and got incubated at Impact Hub Lausanne & Geneva.

Social Impact Award Switzerland Winner

GreenHub

GreenHub is Berlin's newest Start Up Incubator focused on early-stage startups with a sustainable or socially impactful goal. We're looking for young startup tackling one (or multiple) of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.
Starting January 2020, early stage startups will be selected every month to participate in our three months acceleration program in the heart of Berlin’s Proptech scene.
They have the opportunity to access key tools to grow successfully, including investment, expertise and mentoring.
I'm in charge of Marketing, Strategy and act as Event Manager as well.

Head of Marketing, Strategy & Event Manager

Wesser und Partner

Fundraiser and team manager

Co-Founder & CEO @ Beazy | Google BFF "22

I'm Jonas, the co-founder & CEO of Beazy 😄

I'm currently building Beazy, the operating system for the creative industry. It’s an all-in-one platform for teams to plan, produce and deliver content from start to finish 🚀

We make content production easy by bringing together brands, professionals, equipment owners and locations around projects and giving them the necessary collaborative tools to make their vision come to life! 📸

📈 We worked with amazing companies such as Zalando, H&M, Bolt, Pinterest, Gorillas, UrbanSportsClub, SAP, Bombinate, TaxFix, Babbel and many more
🌍 Created a community of creatives active in 150+ cities in 50+ countries
💻 Built an incredible fully-remote team
💸 Raised multiple successful rounds of funding from great investors!

📩 Feel free to get in touch with me at jonas.ngoenha@beazy.co

www.beazy.co

Former VC Investor - Now Supporting Tech Businesses Turn Strategy into Execution – Whilst Sharing Insight from Both Sides of the Fence

Hey!

I’m Kiran. I’m a VC investor by trade but I quit in 2024 as I knew I was an operator at heart and I wanted to be on the field, not watching and shouting from the sidelines.

In my time as a VC, I met hundreds of founders, deep dived on most sectors within enterprise SaaS and I invested into a dozen companies and sat on each of their Boards. When it comes to startups and scaleups, I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.

I founded Catenae in 2024 to support enterprise software businesses with their scaling plans. I undertake fractional Chief of Staff roles with my retained clients to help founders translate their strategy into repeatable execution whilst increasing their capacity and making sure the tasks that really move the needle get done. I also work as a coach and a mentor to those looking for less hands-on support but someone to soundboard their ideas, plans or problems with.

If you’re interested in working together on a retained basis, hit me with a DM. If you’d like to book in some coaching time, check out my Hubble page: https://www.hubble.social/kiranmehta.

Alternatively, if you just want some daily insights from one of the few people in the UK that has both investing and operational experience, hit that follow button and ring the bell.

Kiran Mehta

The hardest part about fundraising is almost every investor is different. It's not like banking or real estate investing where analysts all follow the same prescriptive process and formulas. VC investing is so nuanced and what most investors want to see is based on their lived experience and therefore it isn't reflective across the whole industry.

That's why a lot of the '5 things an investor wants to see in your pitch deck' posts aren't really helpful. Some VCs want a 5-year forecast, others will laugh you out the room if you're planning for anything more than the next 12-18 months. Some think TAM analysis is a pointless exercise, others turn to it as the first thing they look for in a pitch deck. The list goes on and on.

When you accept that you can't please everyone, as everyone has built a different mental model, it really flips the narrative of how to think about fundraising as a founder. You can't control what each investor wants so you need to have clarity of thought about what you want, how you want to showcase your business and, as a result, the likely type of investors that you will attract on the back of that.

Never forget, you don't need a yes from everyone, you only need a yes from a handful of the people you want to work with.

Most of the advice on LinkedIn comes from investors and that's great but a lot of it doesn't reflect what your customers are feeling and doing. If you're a consumer business or B2SME then maybe vibe coding is a good way to get started, if you're enterprise SaaS asking people to part with 5 figures per year then the likelihood of getting your solution vibe coded platform adopted by clients is a number extremely close to zero imo.

There's a huge irony here that there's a V missing from the right hand side of this graphic and after half a dozen re-prompts I still couldn't get it to change it without it changing the rest of the image, so when it comes to vibe coding, images is hard enough, never mind full stack SaaS platforms.

One of the features LinkedIn could launch that would be an absolute game changer is a 'feed filter'. Not necessarily ongoing curation, that's already some what taken care of, but just a couple of simple toggles you could switch on and off depending what mood you were in.

Things like 'only show content from people with <10k followers' or 'only show me content from founders within a 50 mile radius' or 'only show content from people I've interacted with in the last 28 days', etc.

The creation side of LinkedIn is great but I also love reading what others are speaking about too and engaging with purpose but, unless I've overlooked it somewhere, there doesn't seem to be any filters for the type of content you want to see on a given day.

I've seen a rise in the narrative that fundraising is getting easier because through 2025 and into 2026 we've started to see a rise in the amount of capital that VC funds are deploying.

This is one of the most misleading stats I think I've ever seen. Yes, the global VC market is growing at a good pace but it is estimated that 40%+ of VC money is now deployed into rounds of $100m or more.

It's not getting easier to raise money at all, in fact it's getting harder as the capital is getting concentrated into fewer and fewer businesses.

I think it's as tough now as it's been since 2022 and I don't see any signs of it getting easier.

I'm not saying this to be negative but I think it needs calling out because when you accept that the funding market is still tough, you think of other ways to progress your business without VC dollars. The narrative that it's getting easier gives too much false hope and less time for real planning.

'I'm not paying the invoice from the sales consultant we've been working with as they haven't got us to £250k ARR'.

I'm hearing things like this more and more, from a small subset of founders, and it just isn't right. I can relate to all of the pressure a founder is under and why they feel like they need to guarantee success but you can't buy outcomes, you can only buy inputs and occasionally outputs and it's your job as a founder to try and by the best inputs that will lead to the desired outcomes but there's no guarantee of that.

When it comes to ARR growth it's the responsibility of Tech, Product, Marketing, Customer Success and Sales so you can't lay it all at one person's door. Whether it's an employee or a consultant, it's real bad form to refuse to pay someone that's done all the things you've asked for and for reasons outside of their control it hasn't yielded the results you wanted.

For the avoidance of doubt, this isn't a post bashing all founders, 99% don't do any of the above but it's slightly worrying that the minority that do seems to be getting bigger.

I've never seen a better example of how to run a fundraising process then the last deal I did as a VC, when one of my portfolio were raising a £6m Series-A. When the CEO said they were embarking on a chunky scaleup round in what was the toughest market conditions I'd ever experienced, I was a little bit skeptical. Then, I saw him get to work.

He pulled together a list of investors that had invested into their sector before, in the UK, EU and US. He asked everyone around the board and the majority of the angel investors to suggest anyone they thought was suitable and should be added to the list.

We then had a session to go through each of the names, validate who knew those investors, if they were the right target investor and if anyone could provide a warm introduction - in the majority of cases the answer was yes.

The list in the end spanned 50-100 well qualified names and everyone set about with their introductions, where they could, and where the were no easy intros the founder scoured further for some and if needed went cold with some highly tailored outreach.

Every two weeks we met as a group to go through the pipeline, I can still remember the HubSpot pipeline tracking done in the exact same way as a sales process was, where we got a 'no' feedback was sought and helped refined the ongoing process.

The founder was an absolute machine and six months (yes six months!) later, having spent over half of his week on fundraising every week they brought together the whole round with some amazing value add investors, and they had optionality on who to work with.

If you want to raise in the post-2021 world that's the process you have to follow. Whether you're pre-Seed, Seed, Series-A or anything else, you've got to run it like the slickest of sales processes. The days are long gone of sending a dozen cold emails and getting a cheque.

There's no quicker way to destroy your business than getting your early hires wrong. When I was an investor I turned down an investment opportunity because there was 19 people in the business, one of which was employee number 52. Yeah, they'd burnt through almost two hires for every one that was still with the business and at that point I wasn't interested in hearing about anything else, it was an immediate no.

It's much more common than you'd think because a lot of the time hiring is something most first time founders have to figure out on the job. This week's episode of Unconventurenal unboxes some of the common problems I've seen and provides a framework for how you can avoid some of those pitfalls.

Welcome to the Newsletter (Regular Readers Feel Free to Skip!) Welcome to another edition of Unconventurenal, the newsletter where we look deeper than

Open article: How to Actually Hire Your First 5 People: A Practical Guide for Founders Who’ve Never Built a Team Before by Kiran Mehta • 5 min read

How to Actually Hire Your First 5 People: A Practical Guide for Founders Who’ve Never Built a Team Before

A founder I know well recently told me they'd been working 10+ hour days for 8 months straight, hadn't taken a day off and their growth had still stalled.

I suggested maybe some time off would help them zoom out, think laterally and ask themselves the question of what they could do differently.

Yes, there are some things that just take time and you've got to grind them out, I get that, but that shouldn't be the default setting. Despite the hustle culture narrative, it isn't the hours that you do that matter, it's what you do in the hours!

Almost every scaleup SaaS business I've ever met should be charging more. When you launch a business, the first instinct is to remove the possibility that someone is going to say no to you based on price. In my experience, that isn't the way the majority of enterprise SaaS businesses work, you're almost always competing on features and value proposition and the price is very much secondary.

The danger with setting a low price to get going is it makes it harder to scale (if you're charging less you have less to invest) and it also seems to psychologically anchor the business to that price and rises are often seen as a % value instead of getting to the true value of the platform. If the true value is 3x what you've charged your early adopters, start to charge all new customers 3x and don't be afraid to nudge your existing customers up each year too.

It sounds like a blunt tool but most of your customers will not churn when you increase prices and, if some do, it likely isn't due to the price anyway.

Every business I work with hits a ceiling at some point. Revenue plateaus. Growth slows. The stuff that used to work stops working.

The response is almost always to do more: more sales calls, more features, more hires, etc. but often the answer is actually to stop, assess and decide if you need to do more or if you need to change the framework and operating system that got you to this point in order to get to the next.

In this week's Unconventurenal, I break down the four ceilings of growth that I often see, what causes each one and, most importantly, what actually works to break through them.

Intro Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked a lot about getting started, but today we’re looking at once you’ve got started and things are going well,

Open article: How to Know When Your Business Has Hit a Ceiling – And How to Break It by Kiran Mehta • 5 min read

How to Know When Your Business Has Hit a Ceiling – And How to Break It

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Jonas Ngoenha

Kiran Mehta

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The Battle

Jonas Ngoenha

Kiran Mehta

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Kiran Mehta's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreKiran Mehta's LinkedIn Performance