Edwin S.

Insightful breakdown from my great Partner Omri Amirav-Drory on the simple factors that really separate the top 1% of investors from the rest, and how more operators should become investors! https://lnkd.in/gEiZdT2h

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Let's finally get rid off the "VC alphabet song" and redo the system to become more founder friendly. "The benchmarks set by funding stages are often arbitrary and not necessarily aligned with the actual development needs of individual startups." #vc #venturecapital #founder #fundraising #startups #fundingstages #funding #fundingrounds #pitchbook

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Ever since we launched SHAKTI, every quarter we write a letter to our LPs = Each letter includes an update on the portfolios, the GP's (our) view on the zeitgeist, an interview with a portfolio CEO and an interview with a TITAN = So far, we have 16 such letters = it's been on our "to do" list to share these publicly (i am lazy) = then Google comes along to save lazy people like me (thank you NotebookLLM) = here's a 10 min podcast summarizing our journey since Dec/2020 with the 16 LP letters as source = if you wanted to know what we are about, this is a pretty good place to start = https://lnkd.in/db7K2TrT cc SHAKTI

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Many of today’s startups are making the exact same messaging mistake I made a few years ago. Here’s the messaging test that failed to attract developers and (hopefully) you can learn from. At ScraperAPI we had messaging centered around managing proxies and CAPTCHAs. But that wasn’t what people were buying our product for. What they were buying was the major pain point ScraperAPI solved - being able to scrape any page with a simple API call. This is the exact same mistake AI startups are making today with talking too much about LLMs and not enough about the things customers actually care about. tl;dr: Messaging should focus on the benefits, not the implementation or features.

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Parker just posted Rippling's new fundraising memo. It's the manifesto for compound startups and one of our initial inspirations for building Atlas. Here's a nugget that I really liked that summarizes how we feel about the competitive advantage of all-in-one startups over vertical startups (in customer support especially): "When we build corporate cards, we're not innovating on the way we issue corporate cards (through Stripe issuing or Marqeta) or the way we scan and extract metadata from receipts (which is mostly a vendor relationship for us today). We're going to win on the capabilities we have that are common to all Rippling products—the integration with the rest of Rippling and with employee data, the platform capabilities, and the common UX described above." Here's the full doc: https://lnkd.in/gYH59HVZ

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Instacart is a market leader when it comes to leveraging AI tools to boost productivity at work. I had an amazing conversation with JJ Zhuang, Instacart’s Chief Architect, who has shepherded over 50 AI-driven initiatives to market across the org. We explored what catapulted Instacart to the forefront of AI integration, supporting radically diverse use cases across various functional areas. One striking insight (echoed by Ethan Mollick and others elsewhere) is that you often don't need specialized tools for specialized work. Frontier models like GPT-4 can seamlessly adapt to a wide range of functions and use cases. They're not just for engineers; they're incredibly versatile tools used by marketing, comms, and legal teams. From generating code to proofreading and ideation, GPT-4 empowers every department to leverage AI for enhanced productivity and innovation. By integrating LLM’s like GPT-4 into their workflows, teams can streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and unlock bandwidth for new creative possibilities. How can you harness the power of AI in your own work to boost productivity? Share your thoughts below 👇 Want to hear more insights from JJ? Check out the full podcast episode by clicking the link in the comments.

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During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth + good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

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Not many topics create as much buzz in 2024 as AI. Hot takes abound. I enjoyed my grounded conversation with Bryan Chappell, CEO of Scout, who is helping companies all over the US incorporate AI into their workflows (Quipli is one of them). While the topic can get heady quickly, I appreciated his thoughts on how rental companies can benefit today in the quickly evolving AI landscape. "One use case today, is that you can turn customer support from a cost center to a profit center. You still keep a 'human in the loop', but AI allows you to give much higher levels of customer support, to a much larger level of customers. This is totally different than we were five years ago with simple AI chat bots. Five years ago we were riding bikes. Now we are driving a Ferrari. With technology today, AI can draft hyper personalized messages using the structured data you have, that ultimately speeds up the response time to customers while simultaneously delivering better service." Listen to the full episode, and all 30+ episodes on Spotify, Apple Music, and Youtube of The Rental Roundtable at https://lnkd.in/ewCCfsAf.

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I’m excited to share this one! Redactive has raised a $11.5M seed round -- their mission is to become the trusted GenAI engineer for enterprise teams. Blackbird co-led this round alongside Felicis with participation from Atlassian Ventures and Zapier. Andrew, Alexander and Lucas are working to solve an urgent problem hidden in plain sight – empowering GenAI applications to meet their promise of "magic" in an enterprise setting. GenAI applications are only as useful as the data that they have access to, and for most enterprises, the most valuable data is sensitive and permissioned. We all want a chatbot (“ChatGPT for…”) at work that can search the data that we share in private Slack conversations or store in private folders on Sharepoint but first, we need to trust that our data will be kept safe – from prying eyes and accidental disclosure to others in the organisation who should not see it. Redactive keeps your sensitive data safe, giving developers the trust to connect it to GenAI applications and build products that you will love. Here's to the next decade. https://lnkd.in/gPuEAFvW

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Over the past two years, Integral Labs had the privilege of contributing to the creation of the Polkadot Community Foundation. Polkadot has already pioneered one of the most active and robust DAO governance systems to date, including tokenholder management of a nine-figure treasury. As the DAO continues to mature, the need to represent and serve tokenholders’ interests off-chain has become increasingly apparent. That’s where the Polkadot Community Foundation comes in. Designing the corporate structure, governance, and operating model, Integral Labs joined a working group led by our friends at Actum Node with a mission to extend the reach of Polkadot's onchain governance into the offchain world. This project was a first in the industry, with a novel design that stands apart from traditional DAO "wrapper" structures. Unlike foundations that subsume treasury assets and delegate limited powers back to the DAO, the Polkadot Community Foundation works as an optional, unopinionated side-car entity that any DAO member may utilize in their proposals. This ensures the DAO retains full autonomy and control of its treasury while enabling offchain activities such as holding real world assets, entering commercial agreements, making fiat payments, owning IP, and more—all for the benefit of, and under the explicit direction of, the tokenholders. The governing documents and bylaws are open source and available for future use by Polkadot or other DAOs. We hope is that this modular design becomes a blueprint for a future constellation of real-world businesses to permissionlessly cooperate and compete to serve DAOs by extending their existing onchain governance systems. The Polakdot community voted with over 98% support to establish the Polkadot Community Foundation. Now incorporated, community members have begun to publish treasury proposals that utilize the foundation, including the creation of what will be the first mobile app owned by an open community, and increasing accountability for vendors and service providers in the ecosystem. You can read more here: https://lnkd.in/ebCJKsjD Integral Labs is proud to have contributed to this project alongside Michael D'Alto of Actum Node, James Hutchings, ACA, CFA, Theo Louw, Michael Preston, and Kevin Foster-Archibald CA(SA) of Autonomous, Edward Noyons of Marfire, Matthew Shaw and Gregory Peacock of Webslinger Advisors, Glenn Kennedy of Leeward Management Limited, Jonathan Bain of Bridgestream, Ignatius N., Jonathan Hernandez, and David Manadom (formerly) of Fenwick & West, Melissa Lim and Justin Wretham of Walkers, Björn Wagner, Raul Ignacio Romanutti, Dieter Fishbein, and the Polkadot community.

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DeepCast shipped a number of really cool new features recently in advance of a broad outreach push to podcast listeners. One new feature is our new Daily DeepDigest tool that sends you a concise daily email including any new episodes from the trailing 24 hours from any podcasts you Subscribe to (on DeepCast). Think daily podcast cliff notes or podcast news ticker tape, with a hint of Morning Brew various brews or PitchBook News—it's increasing information throughput when you're pressed for time. And this feature is rapidly evolving to distill other key extractions from shows you're already interested in, but also exposing you to other shows you might be unfamiliar with that also have nuggets to share—and thus increasing your aperture yet still conscious of your time. Want to go deeper on any given episode? Click the episode detail and you're off to an episode on DeepCast, where you can subsequently read a longer form distillation of that episode or go straight to the source and listen to the episode. (And podcaster friends, these pages are definitely increasing indexing and thus Google entry points to your shows!) I'm loving this feature as a user, personally. Can't wait to see what others think! #BuildingInPublic #Podcasts #AllTheWorldsInformation #HowYouWantIt

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Looking forward to discussing how changing demographics and culture norms are affecting investment opportunities in longevity, health and well-being at The Care Summit today Alongside Cake Ventures' Monique Woodard, Ziegler's Dan Hermann, Oak HC/FT's Billy Deitch and JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s Jennifer Edwards, we’ll dive into the trends shaping how we are investing in the space: - Last year marked one of the most significant social and economic moments in modern times: The number of older adults—those aged 50 and over- surpassed the number of children under the age of 15 for the first time. - In 2020 the 50 plus population contributed $45 trillion to global GDP, or 34% of the total. That equates to about 3x the revenue of the world’s 100 highest- earning companies in 2020. - The U.S. population grew by 24.5 million from 2010 to 2022, and Hispanics accounted for 53% of this increase – a greater share than any other racial or ethnic group. - Women around the world and across all ages drive 64% of consumer spending

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Team San Diego! I though you may find this as surprising as I did...we are not alone. Read this quick article from Jon Prentice's (Silicon Valley Bank) interview with with James Newell (Voyager Capital), published in GeekWire on Seattle's innovation ecosystem....they lament the SAME issues as we do in San Diego: * Lack of angel investors, (Especially, it calls out, given the local giant tech co's) * "We need low-conviction check writers." * Lack of "cachet associated with being an angel investor" - We have similar efforts (as described in the article) to drum up angel activity: NuFund Venture Group and, Interlock Capital (read the article and you'll see why the Interlock effort is tops as relates to "paying back into the ecosystem") Connect.org strives to 'connect' innovative companies with investors of all types (angel, VC, PE...) - just see "Innovation Day". Their Springboard program provides another great way for experienced entrepreneurs to give back through mentorship...as for the companies going through Springboard: "Ask for advice, and you often get $$" Your thoughts on the article or San Diego innovation ecosystem? https://lnkd.in/gfwq6mfq

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The Internet was on FIRE over this long weekend with Founders talking about Paul Graham's "Founder Mode" essay -- the case where Founders at scaling companies like AirBnB are all going against traditional advice of delegation and instead getting involved in the details to drive scale, profitability, and free cash flows for their companies. This got me thinking about early-stage Founders... What does "Founder Mode" look like for early-stage Founders? It means that you're embracing Founder-led GTM. It can be super tempting in the early days to get someone else to do your GTM for you, whether it's the Junior Marketer, or the Demand Generation Agency, or that Fractional CMO (who can't get a real CMO job). But almost every early stage Founder who outsources GTM fails. The ones that embrace Founder-led GTM in the early phases almost always win. Why? Because they get so close to their target customers and market, they always pivot and find a way to win. Something no one else can do. This is the early-stage Founder's version of Founder Mode. This is the early-stage version of getting involved in the details that matter the most at the early stages: distribution. The Founder-led GTM phase is one of my most favorite phases of the startup journey. Here's why... It feels like magic. You're talking to customers, you're iterating on product, and you're finding the intersection of the right product feature, value and price to serve your ideal customers. The product isn't perfect, the vision isn't all there, but man... that initial set of core features sure do feel great, especially when you start to see Happy Customers. You do the math and you realize you're just getting started. The market of idea customers is massive, and there's so much to be done to spread your message and get your product into the hands of more people. This is the phase you'll always remember fondly even after you scale. This is the phase your team will always look back at fondly as "man... those were the days.." Why? Because time flows like narnia, you're obsessed and focused on serving the customer, and you're iterating on the product and your GTM faster than ever. It's all new, it's all coming together, and it's all beautiful. You're exactly where you're supposed to be. Now here's the catch. In order to experience all this, you need a functioning Founder-led GTM machine that's getting you into conversations with your ideal customers. If you're a SaaS Founder and you're looking to embrace Founder Mode and Founder-led GTM, then start by grabbing a copy of my 5-Point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide. Just follow the link in the comments below 👇

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As the founder of Authenticate®, one of the most common questions I hear—from government organizations and early-stage startups—is: "Can I customize the security screening process?" The answer is yes you can! At Authenticate, we're all about: 🤖 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 📏 𝐒𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 🎨 𝐂𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 ...and so much more. By integrating our screening and fraud prevention APIs into your system, you can automate your identity verification in less than a day. So, is your business harnessing the power of APIs, or are you still doing things manually? Let's connect and see how we can streamline your processes together.

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Interesting concept to rename rounds by milestones. But "Series Client Expansion Extension" just doesn't have the same ring to it 😋 . Maybe we can start incorporating it into a descriptor to add context, "Series Seed Extension: client expansion." #startups #venturecapital

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Founder mode? "Dangerous"! Fund raising? "Waste of time"! OKRs? "BS"! Plaid's CEO and co-founder Zachary Perret shares some unconventional opinions in this episode of The Twenty Minute VC with Harry Stebbings. Here are our main takeaways 👇 ✉️ Subscribe to our newsletter for more podcast insights! (links in comments) #entrepreneurship #startups #business #founders

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Can creator-led education businesses get to venture scale? And more importantly, should they? Listen in as I discuss this topic and more with Blake La Grange on the most recent episode of The Expertise Economy podcast.

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A cautionary tale for any entrepreneur including warrants in their fundraising efforts. Techcrunch ran a story yesterday on the collapse of Newchip and how warrants flowed through the bankruptcy proceedings. I am guessing in this situation, there were NO clauses protecting the startups from the insolvency of Newchip. If true, my heart aches for these startups now fighting to protect their equity pool/CAP tables from unknown outside investors coming into their company at likely ridiculous valuations via bankruptcy actions. It's a cautionary reminder to get solid advice from legal counsel—or, failing the ability to afford outside counsel, seek advice from experienced entrepreneurs who know their way around term sheets and investment terms. Best of luck to those companies mentioned in this article. And for anyone reading this who is a startup founder or entrepreneur, worth a read! #startup #entrepreneur #fundraising https://lnkd.in/gsvzQ_wT

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