Tom Humphrey

Tom is a partner at venture capital fund Blackbird and is on the investment team. Prior to investing, he spent 8 years on the operating side, getting into startups by joining OurDeal, a D2C ecommerce company based in Sydney that grew fast to 80 FTEs and an exit to News Corp just 12 months from founding.
He then headed to San Francisco to launch a company with his sister called Kanopy, a B2B video streaming company that eventually exited to private equity. He returned to Australia in 2021 after 10 years in the USA.

tall trees, vertical, nature,
Business strategy

How AI can turn a SaaS startup from horizontal to vertical

- June 11, 2024 6 MIN READ

TL;DR The last decade has been the ‘heyday’ for horizontal SaaS, and vertical SaaS has been comparatively quiet. What has held vertical SaaS back is simple: bad customers. Go-to-market motions in vertical SaaS have been stuck in clunky enterprise mode, while horizontal SaaS has consistently cracked product-led growth that has underpinned rapid and efficient scaling. AI is… Read more »