Blake Bartlett

Blake Bartlett is a Partner at OpenView Venture Partners, a venture capital firm founded in 2006 by Scott Maxwell. OpenView describes its focus as helping expansion-stage software companies after early product-market fit, with support across pricing, executive hiring, capital markets, and go-to-market execution.

Bartlett joined OpenView in 2013. Since then, AppDirect says he has led investments in Highspot, Calendly, Expensify, Postscript, and Cypress, among others. OpenView’s own author page lists him as “Partner / OpenView” and shows him publishing on product-led growth, SaaS, product, leadership, and pricing.

He is best known for coining the term “product-led growth” at OpenView in 2016. In an AppDirect interview, Bartlett explained that OpenView saw companies such as Expensify and Datadog growing quickly while staying efficient, and identified a common operating model where product was the first lever for acquisition, conversion, and expansion.

OpenView’s status changed materially in December 2023: Axios reported that the firm suspended new investments and laid off most employees less than a year after raising a $570 million seventh fund. That makes current outreach to Bartlett more likely to be about existing portfolio support, thought leadership, or network access than a standard new OpenView-led round.

• Product-led growth is his signature thesis. Bartlett defines PLG as “a go-to-market strategy that relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion.”
• He looks for software companies where self-service adoption is meaningful: users can start without talking to sales, activation and retention are visible in product metrics, and expansion can later be assisted by sales or customer success.
• He is not anti-sales; his PLG view is that sales becomes optional early and more assistive later, especially when usage expands from individual users to teams, departments, and larger enterprise contracts.
• He has emphasized that PLG product-market fit can be assessed before heavy monetization by looking at user acquisition, activation, continued use, invitations, and conversion behavior.
• His sector focus is concentrated in B2B SaaS and cloud/software, with visible activity in scheduling/workflow software, sales enablement, ecommerce messaging, expense management, and developer tools.
• Signal/NFX lists his investment range as $100K-$5.0M with a $1.5M sweet spot.