Panos Papadopoulos

Excited to share our 0-1 #DevGTM Playbook for early-stage technical founders building developer tools and infrastructure! We at Speciale Invest had the privilege of working closely with many brilliant technical founders and evaluating many Devtools/Infra Cos. During our in-depth discussions, we discovered a recurring obstacle that many of these technical founders face: despite identifying problem statements and developing cutting-edge technology but crafting a clear and effective GTM strategy often proves to be a significant challenge. Recognizing this gap, we set out to create a comprehensive playbook tailored for early-stage technical builder/founders in their 0-1 journey. My colleague Aryan Pareek and I have spoken to over 50+ #DevTool founders, GTM experts, and #developers from companies like Amnic, Appsmith, DhiWise, Dyte, Esper,Hashnode,Hivel,Keploy 🐰, LambdaTest, Neverinstall, Portkey, Reo.Dev, Requestly (YC W22), ToolJet, Tailcall, Typo, Unstract , videosdk.live, Zenduty and many more. And we consolidated the best examples and learnings into our playbook. We dive deep into various aspects of #developer GTM, including defining your ICP, buyer journeys, messaging for developers, #SEO, content strategy, and more - all tailored for dev founders. Check out the playbook here: https://lnkd.in/g425vuqy Huge thanks to all the #devfounders and #GTMExperts who shared their invaluable insights and experiences with us. Special shoutout to Dev founders and all the amazing developers and GTM experts who gave us their valuable time. 🙏 📣 Special Creds to the devfounders who helped us with this: Sachin Jain Achintya Gupta Navaneeth Padanna Kalathil Vishal Virani Anirudh Murali Shiv Sundar Kshitij Mohan Sudheer Bandaru Venkatesh Radhakrishnan Harini Janakiraman Arjun Kava Narendran Hariparanthaman Sidhant Goyal Madhukar Kumar and many more.... (lol - I've exceeded the maximum mention limit) Special thanks to Freshboost for assisting us with SEO strategies. *Please tag technical founders/builders who would find this useful, and feel free to share your feedback with us over DM* P.S.: It's still a work in progress, and we'd love to hear from more technical founders about your experiences and challenges about your GTM journey. Your feedback will be invaluable in making this resource even better for the broader dev ecosystem. Arjun Rao Vishesh Rajaram #TheDeepTechVC — Build from India for the World

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Me and Christopher Niall Rayner had a discussion about Switzerland’s new open-source law and it sure is complex. Switzerland's recent mandate that all government software must be open-source has sparked a lot of debate. On one hand, it promotes transparency and community collaboration, but on the other, it poses significant challenges, especially for smaller companies. Smaller companies pour blood, sweat, and tears into developing software that manages that no one else uses. However, under this new mandate, they will be required to open-source their solutions if they want to compete for government tenders. Me and Niall discussed some pros and cons of this. Pros: 1. Transparency: Open-source software allows for greater transparency, making it easier to identify and fix security vulnerabilities. 2. Collaboration: Encourages community contributions which can lead to faster innovation and improvements. 3. Cost Savings: Reduces costs for the government as companies avoid licensing fees and have more control over the software's development. Cons: 1. Exclusion of Innovative Solutions: Smaller companies might be excluded from tenders if they are unable or unwilling to open-source their proprietary solutions. 2. Security Risks: While transparency can lead to security improvements, it also means that vulnerabilities are exposed to potential malicious actors. 3. Financial Impact: Companies which rely on proprietary technology for their competitive edge, may suffer financially if forced to open-source their software. In practical terms, this policy means that innovative but proprietary solutions from smaller companies might not be considered in government projects. When selling these policies to the public, the focus is often on reducing the dominance of big tech. However, it can inadvertently stifle innovation from smaller players who can't afford to give away their trade secrets. While the move towards open-source in government software has its merits, it's essential to balance these benefits with the need to foster and protect innovation from smaller companies. Otherwise, we risk creating an environment where only the largest companies can thrive. What are your thoughts on this? How do you think smaller companies can navigate this new landscape? Will companies like Microsoft etc. get exceptions as they offer OS, Office? Read more: https://lnkd.in/dvxq3ukN #OpenSource #GovTech #Innovation #SmallBusinessChallenges

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Groq is certainly addressing a major painpoint that plagues many people. It is not a great UX when the system takes multiple seconds before the users sees a response. A response needs to be provided within 300 ms. Note, that humans may also sometimes have to think for a few seconds before a verbal response is produced. That is ok, because the non-verbal cues clearly indicate to the user that their counterpart is thinking, is confused, or is contemplating. The round-trip time to non-verbal cues is what matters so that the users is not left wondering if their counterpart actually understood or heard what was being said. This is why non-verbal communication is super important and the "Agent" needs to have affordances that can effectively express that immediate feedback. That's our perspective at Embodied and what we do on Moxie.

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Everyone is focusing on how powerful models are. But everyone might be thinking wrong. Why?  In a post last week, I was discussing the decision of Meta to not rollout Llama 3 in EU. The decision was mostly driven by a conflict on the origin of the data used to train the model. And this is the most important part : the data used to train the model. For must of us, the problem when using an LLM isn’t how powerful the model is but the quality of data To compare it, if you give expired food to the best chef in town, you’ll still end up sick. On the other hand, it has been showed, especially in financial forecasting use cases that a simple model can have amazing results with the good data. So next time you’re looking at an AI product or startup to invest-in try dig as fast you can on how and where they get their data from.  Start-ups that have an intelligent way to have or a create a proprietary dataset will have a huge advantage on those relying on API and third parties. Now more than ever data is the oil of the 21st Century. 

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One of the biggest challenges for improving performance on Meta is teams beeing held accountable for daily (and sometimes hourly) results. This isn't enough time to try new strategies or products. So by optimizing towards a daily ROAS goal in the short term, might hurt performance in the long run as you could be missing out on new solutions.

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$29.96 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻—that's the growth projected in the MMO gaming market by 2028. But if 𝘆𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘆, don’t just look at the games. 𝗟𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 powering them as well. Let me break down where I see the biggest value creation happening: S̲e̲r̲v̲e̲r̲l̲e̲s̲s̲ ̲A̲r̲c̲h̲i̲t̲e̲c̲t̲u̲r̲e̲ 40% cost reduction in this sector is just the beginning. What excites me more is how it’s democratizing game development. This creates opportunities in DevOps and Infrastructure. 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀: Look for startups building developer tools and middleware solutions. A̲I̲/̲M̲L̲ ̲I̲n̲t̲e̲g̲r̲a̲t̲i̲o̲n̲ Remember when game development was just about coding and graphics? Now, I'm watching a $5B+ analytics market emerge. Companies aren't just building games; they're building intelligent systems that learn and adapt. This creates new roles like AI Game Designers, ML Engineers, etc. 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀: Companies working on predictive analytics and dynamic content generation C̲l̲o̲u̲d̲ ̲G̲a̲m̲i̲n̲g̲ The most common pitch I hear is 'Netflix for games.' But here's what most miss: It's not about content aggregation. It's about infrastructure; sifting from product to service model. The real winners will be those building the backbone of this $17B market. 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀: Look for infrastructure providers and startups that are working with streaming tech. M̲i̲x̲e̲d̲ ̲R̲e̲a̲l̲i̲t̲y̲ ̲&̲ ̲I̲n̲f̲r̲a̲s̲t̲r̲u̲c̲t̲u̲r̲e̲ I believe that the next unicorn in gaming won't be just a game studio. It'll be a specialized game studio solving the complex infrastructure challenges of real-time, cross-platform play. 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀: Look for startups dealing with hardware-software integration plays. What tech are you most excited about? Comment below! #GamingMarket #AI #ML #Devops ##OnlineGamingCommunity #GamingIndustryNews #VirtualGamingExperience #eSportsWorld #GamingTrends #OnlineGamingStrategy #GamingCommunity #GamingInfluencers #VirtualRealityGaming #OnlineGamingCulture #MonaMotwani

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2025: When $100M ARR Companies Are Run By Teams of Five We have witnessed a significant shift from the era when "software was eating the world" to the era of "AI is now eating software." However, software is far from dead. While the application layer of AI is garnering a ton of attention, it's tough to imagine a clear winner here (from an investment standpoint) as well, given: Development Costs & Speed: shorter (low-to-no-code) development times and reduced costs will significantly lower barriers to entry, leading to increased competition and heavily compressed margins. However, the savviest companies and founders will navigate these changes and adjust accordingly as SaaS margins will likely compress to between 30% - 40%, which is typical for most developed industries over time. But therein lies the opportunity thanks to: Operational Efficiency: Thanks to advancements in AI and the emergence of agents, the number of employees needed to operate these businesses is also drastically reduced. (AI sales, customer support, developers, designers, etc) Therefore, my prediction for 2025 is that we will see the emergence of the $50M-$100M ARR company with fewer than 5 full-time employees. As a former entrepreneur, I think this is fascinating, but as an investor, I am still proceeding cautiously. Ultimately, one thing is certain: with the rapid evolutions in AI, it is impossible to predict anything-- which is exiciting!

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Silicon Valley Thoughts At Mento vc, we review about 100 projects a week, and 85-90 of them contain an AI thesis. This is no surprise: Silicon Valley and San Francisco have long been the AI ​​capital of the planet. What surprises me is that the talk here is no longer about AI, but about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). This is a form of AI that is capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge in any area of human activity, just like humans do. AGI will come, and it's only a matter of time. The questions that currently concern IT people in the Valley are: - What will we, as humanity, do when AGI arrives? - How quickly will AGI be able to spread? - What regulations will be needed, and are they needed? And investors are in an even greater duality. On the one hand, they invest a lot of money in AI projects, on the other hand, they understand that AGI will come and kill most of them. For investors, this means writing off investments. Over the past six months, at least, we have added a point to our project review: what will happen to the startup if AGI appears? In general, when you spend a long time in the Valley, you may get the feeling that the whole world is already thinking about AGI, and that new discoveries are about to happen, but Portugal is very sobering for me: there everyone enjoys life - the sun, delicious food and a leisurely look at the ocean, where every second person is on a surf... We live in interesting times, friends!

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Nvidia the most valuable company in the world. A market cap of 3.11 Trillion USD. But what about the PE ratio? Price to earnings, ie revenue... NVDA is a revenue machine, and they currently have a monopoly. Looking at the PE ratio you can get a much better picture of the company over time, how overpriced/underpriced it is. See the bottom chart, blue bar. - The current PE ratio is around 73x - The 10 year PE ratio was lower at around 49x - The 5 year PE high was around 146x in Q2 2023 The 5 year PE high happened right before the companies stock priced doubled in a quarter, ie CHATGPT. The market priced in some expected value from future datacenter GPU sales. This paid off. The stock price was around $28 USD in April 2023, with the 146x PE. The stock price now is around $120 USD with the 73x PE. Which is close to the 5 year PE average. NVDA is a revenue machine, AMD is not even in the race. Future predictions are impossible. What is always true is reversion to the mean. Questions I think about: - So are the datacenter sales going to slow down? - What is market saturation for GPUs? - Will AI inference and training get more efficient, needing less GPUs? - By what degree is AI overhyped, dictating future datacenter demand growth. - How will the consumer market increase? - Will governments GPUs demand change? Nationalistic sentiments around AI. - What IP moats has NVDA created? GPUs are not something you need to buy every year. The other factor is electricity use running a 48gb consumer GPU is expensive this naturally limits the consumer demand to 'professional' use. Not quite a Benjamin Graham style 'value investor', the price is directly proportional to AI hype. Short or Long.

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VC Platform explained, in apples. By the nature of what I do, I think about social systems a lot: how do we build a platform of founders supporting other founders? It’s so easy to get caught up in complexity here, that I make myself think about it, quite literally, in apples. Give it a try: * If I have two apples, and give you one, how many do I have left? One less than I had, so down to one apple. * But in real life the correct answer is that I now have an apple and a relationship with the culture of sharing with others when you can. I‘ll be able to lean back on that relationship when in a twist of fate it’s now me standing with no apples. I am now part of a system. * Can I rely on someone else to start this system? Yes, I can. But apples in life are a bit more complicated: — Maybe the person in front of me doesn’t share the apple with me, because she has already committed it to someone else. — Maybe she borrowed the apple from someone else in the past, and now wants to return it. — Maybe she hasn’t eaten in a while, and now needs not one, but both apples to sate herself. — All these people might be generally willing to share an apple with me—but maybe not this exact one, the timing may be not right at the moment, they are part of a bigger group where they have agreed to only share apples inside the group etc. Yes, the analogy with deal-sharing is intended, too. :) * When we factor in real-life circumstances, it’s hard to tell if the person, in fact, has a spare apple or not. Besides, when I wait for someone else to share an apple first, I make myself dependent on an external factor over which I have no control. I shouldn‘t, therefore, be surprized to find myself in a situation when I would want someone to share an apple with me, but the system is not there yet. * So, in reality, the only sure way to become part of a system like that is to wait for a moment when I have a spare apple and share it. * For this to work, the person I am sharing the apple with should actually need the apple. Let’s imagine I try to share an apple with someone who has just had two, doesn’t like apples, or has an apple tree. In the best case, it just won’t work. In worse cases, if let’s suppose I insist on giving the apple, the person might grow irritated. So, I need to share my spare apple with someone who actually needs an apple at this point in time. * This example is fabulous, as it helps answer other questions as well. For example, should I then give both apples, so that the relationship is 2x stronger? My answer will follow in the next post. PS. The artwork frivolously used by me to illustrate my thoughts is by a generative artist @dmitricherniak on inst who considers automation his artistic medium. He makes it seem easy, but after spending an hour in DALL•E and getting a bunch of really ugly apples in webs, I am a raging fan.

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Vishal Sachdev highlights the strategic integration of open source and proprietary tech in architecting tech stacks, developer ecosystems and resulting business models. The world class companies effectively balance value commoditization in open source and value capture in proprietary tech. This is the strategic challenge for companies operating in #blockchain and #AI. I believe those who operate at the intersection of blockchain *and* AI stand to win this strategic battle...

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We started what became OpenCover back in 2021 🌱 🪴 🌳 Keeping users safe onchain is one of the pillars of opening up blockchain as a credible extension to traditional infrastructure and finance. Here's to the next three 🎉

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"It’s fundamentally changing the dynamic of Seed-stage funding and how startups grow and raise. Pre-Seed is the new Seed, Seed the new A, and A the new B. I wanted a simple, useful heuristic, so I propose categorising Seed into two distinct groups: Seed Inception, which Ed Sim describes well as initial ticket going in, and Seed Expansion, which describes rounds where founders have already achieved some milestones and metrics. Founders can use the above framework as both diagnostic and roadmap. Orient yourself and set your operational priorities; know where you are and where you’re going. For investors, it provides a more granular understanding of where a Seed-stage startup is at so they can tailor funding and support, align on priorities and expectations, and help founders navigate their early stages of growth more effectively. By focusing on the progress of the company, investors and founders can re-orient the company, raise, and valuation back to the fundamentals: level-setting capital against where the company’s at on its journey and clarifying what the capital should be spent on. You can also better judge burn rate, pegging it to the level of product-market fit, not how much cash is in the bank." https://lnkd.in/gj8rDnAb

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Our portco NodeKit is working with Particle Network to bring composability to chain abstraction and unlock the full potential of blockchain. The vision of #Web3 is to mirror the seamless experience of the internet, where users interact with services effortlessly. This is achieved through chain abstraction, which eliminates chain-specific balance management and composability which enables the facilitation of cross-chain balance transfers atomically. Chain Abstraction simplifies user interaction with multiple blockchains. Imagine buying an NFT with assets from one chain, used on another, without manual bridging. Composability allows applications to function together seamlessly across chains. The fusion of chain abstraction and composability is essential for unlocking the full potential of Web3. Together, they address both the user-facing and technical challenges of blockchain technology, paving the way for a decentralized web that is accessible, efficient, and powerful. Particle Network leads in chain abstraction with Universal Accounts, providing a single point of interaction across all chains. This simplifies user and developer experiences significantly. NodeKit provides composability with superbuilders, enabling atomic cross-chain transactions. This means transactions either complete across all chains or fail, ensuring no partial executions. More here: https://lnkd.in/dc4s-FA5

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It's been just over 3 years since we announced Patron and our Fund 1. A lot has changed in both the startup ecosystem as well as the venture capital ecosystem in that time. 2021 was a year that saw an explosion of companies raising venture capital funding, and a record number of new venture capital firms raising initial funds. Even then it seemed clear that the venture market was bifurcating - you either needed to be a large multi-stage fund with the ability to lead rounds from Series A to pre-IPO, or you needed to go early and specialize at the pre-seed and seed rounds. The emerging manager ecosystem seemed to coalesce around the latter, and we were no different at Patron as we strived to build a leading seed-focused firm investing in the future of consumer. We were fortunate to have a handful of peers who were one fund ahead of us, managers like Rick Zullo at Equal Ventures and Nico Wittenborn at Adjacent were two of note who were generous with time and insights as we were first getting started. It was also clear that there was a market forming around the idea of organizing the emerging manager ecosystem and creating a stronger bridge connecting new managers with LPs interested in investing in them. I was glad to join my peers the last few weeks at 2 incredible events focusing precisely on this part of the venture world - the EMC Summit organized by the Equal Ventures team, and the RAISE Global Summit. The EMC Summit continues to be one of my favorite industry events I make time to attend each year in New York. It is the real life event built around an amazing online community which lives in Slack and has connected me with 100+ fellow founding GPs of emerging firms. It is the best opportunity to reconnect with peers and to share experiences, learnings, and ideas with people who are going through very similar experiences. It's also a great way to hear from and connect into larger institutional LPs who have been somewhat active in investing in emerging managers in recent years. That said, we haven't ever met any Patron institutional LPs there so my focus has always been spending time with my peers. This was the first time we've been accepted to participate in the RAISE Global Summit, and I had the privilege to share Patron's story with the attendees of the conference. Unlike the EMC Summit which feels more centered on the emerging managers themselves, Raise feels much more focused on being an LP centric event, with the aim of helping a broad array of LPs ranging from large institutions to individual family office investors learn about new managers. Given that we had recently raised and announced our Fund 2, it was nice to focus more on sharing about how positioning and focus as a firm, and less on actually trying to fundraise. We hope to continue to be an active part of the emerging manager community and ecosystem. We've certainly learned a lot in the last 3 years and hope that we can start to share more of these learnings as fund founders.

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#interestingdata 🤔 GenAI is now the largest category in cloud/SaaS venture capital investing in Europe + Israel according to Accel‘s Euroscape. 😮 TBH it is surprising that it is not more dominant. See source in comments. #AI #saas #cloud #venturecapital #europe

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Very interesting presentation! A middle box that tracks all the flows, including TCP timestamps, is quite useful to see what’s happening end to end, from the user devices and user WiFi through your network and to the other side.

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