Blake Bartlett

Blake Bartlett is a partner at OpenView Venture Partners credited in Kyle’s corpus with popularizing the term “PLG” — Product Led Growth. He is the author/recommender behind Product Led Growth: The End User Era, where he appears as the OpenView partner who coined and championed the framing that the end user, rather than the executive buyer, drives modern software adoption.

Bartlett also recurs in Kyle’s venture-capital essay research as an example of the “productized investor” — a VC who builds an audience and content engine (OpenView’s PLG brand and newsletter) as a sourcing and positioning strategy. He appears in both The Productization of Venture Capital - Research and The Death of a Venture Fund - Research, where Kyle notes that a fund’s inability to raise a new vehicle is “fairly applicable to all firms, not OV specific” — most often a signal that returns weren’t strong enough, though that usually takes more than five years to play out.

Context: Blake Bartlett is a partner at OpenView Venture Partners (a Boston-based expansion-stage software VC) widely credited with coining and popularizing “Product-Led Growth,” which he has promoted through OpenView’s content, podcast, and newsletter. Note: distinct from Logan Bartlett (Redpoint) and Blake Brown (Tidemark), who appear in the same VC research lists.

Where this appears

• Product Led Growth: The End User Era — the OpenView partner who popularized the “PLG” term; recommender/author behind the work.
• The Productization of Venture Capital - Research — cited as an example of the content-driven, “productized” VC.
• The Death of a Venture Fund - Research — used to illustrate fund-raising failure as a generalizable industry signal, not OpenView-specific.