Operator Collective 🔆

No one does it alone, and Operator Collective is designed to bring people together who know how to succeed and want to help each other. Hear from a few of our founders to get a feel for what's it like to be a part of OpCo, and the magic that can happen when we put the Collective Venture Model to work ⬇️ Caitlin Colgrove, Co-Founder & CTO, Hex Melanie Fellay 🐙, CEO & Co-Founder, Spekit 🐙  Deon Nicholas, CEO & Co-Founder, Forethought  Shannon Goggin, CEO & Co-Founder, Noyo  Pouyan Salehi, CEO & Co-Founder, Scratchpad 🎥 https://lnkd.in/gfjT4wtb #CollectiveVenture #VentureCapital

My mission as Operator Collective 🔆's Founder in Residence is to give founders real, practical opportunities to get rich feedback from potential customers. Everyone wins when startups build stuff that solves real problems. To that end, in partnership with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, I'm heading up Operator Collective's first-ever Technical Product Showcase on Feb 12 at the Ironclad offices in SF! If you're making products for technology teams to use, please apply! 8 startup teams will have the chance to share their products and technology with some of the very best technical leaders in the business. This half-day, invite-only event includes deep dives into every product, off-the-record honest feedback, and the ability to connect and build meaningful business relationships. I am thrilled to be joined by Abby Kearns (CTO, Alembic), Ann Funai (CIO, Vice President Business Platform Transformation, IBM), Claire Hough (Chief Product & Technology Officer, Getlabs), Elissa Murphy (SVP, Cisco), Pratima Arora (Chief Product & Technology Officer, Chainalysis), and more as we meet with the most innovative startups building for technology teams. Applying to participate is easy! Applications from startups hoping to participate are due on January 10. Let me know if you have any questions and see you in San Francisco! Apply here: https://lnkd.in/gUJJpvKc

Startup founders who sell to technical buyers  – we’re inviting you to apply to our first Technical Product Showcase on Feb 12, 2025 in SF.

After nearly 7 years in strategic finance at NVIDIA, Simona J. left earlier this year to join photonic computing company Lightmatter as Chief Financial Officer. In our Operator Spotlight, Simona lays out the lessons she learned during NVIDIA's meteoric rise, the not-to-be-missed opportunity Lightmatter presented, and why her the transition from giant company to Series D startup was less jarring than expected. "NVIDIA and Lightmatter share the same ethos of brilliant minds pushing the limits of physics to advance technology. It’s incredibly inspiring and energizing to work beside them. Of course, start-ups carry orders of magnitudes more risk. As CFO, you feel that more viscerally than others. But this audacious drive for creation is the magic of Silicon Valley." 🔥

🎧 I had a great conversation with Brian T. O'Neill last week on his podcast, as a preview of a discussion I'm hosting with The Data Product Leadership Community (DPLC) later this month. I first became aware of Brian's work a few years back when I was in grad school and we were both published in a collection of essays called "97 Things About Ethics Everyone in Data Science Should Know" (mine was very earnest, his was cool and funny). When he started the DPLC, I was delighted to join as a founding member to share my experience as an "accidental" data product leader and learn from others who had gotten there more intentionally. Since then, it's been such a pleasure to get to know the thoughtful and talented people of the DPLC. Looking forward to continuing the conversations with all of those who are passionate about data products! cc: Andy Sutton, Duncan Milne, Irina Vaiciuviene, Jon Cooke, Jonathan Cairns-Terry, Katy Pusch, Lin Classon, Marcelo Vilela, Marnix van de Stolpe, Nadiem von Heydebrand, Nick Zervoudis, Nicole Reitz, Omar Khawaja, Rebecca Slater, Robert Lacis, Sheila Torrico, Stephen McCullough, Will Scarbrough, Will Sullivan

"Generative AI’s so-called hallucinations are a major factor in holding back enterprise deployments, as is the impossibility of explaining how an LLM arrives at its conclusions." Wayne Chang lays out his bold vision for Reasoner and how they're tackling one of AI's biggest challenges - how to achieve human-level reasoning in workflows that demand unwavering accuracy and reliability - in this deep dive from David Meyer at Fortune. https://lnkd.in/dps6R7XH

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser is... simply one of the best. In our latest Operator Spotlight, Jeanne breaks down her incredible trajectory at Stripe, from joining the sales team when it had about 10 people and growing it to more than 400 with a non-traditional approach, to her move from sales to running global partnerships and corporate strategy as Chief Business Officer. Here’s a masterclass from Jeanne on avoiding “roadmap schizophrenia” and selling functionality that engineers don't want to build, the “platinum rule” of managing direct reports, and how answering countless Gmail support tickets unlocked a key insight on the value of understanding your product and customers better than anyone. 

Every day, tens of millions of Mac developers depend on #Homebrew to install and update the tools they need to do their jobs. It's become the de facto gateway to the developer toolkit on macOS. But there's a catch. While developers love Homebrew's simplicity for personal use, enterprise IT and security teams face a constant struggle managing and securing it across thousands of corporate laptops. Enter Workbrew, the startup bridging this critical gap between developer productivity and enterprise security - today out of beta and generally available! More from OpCo Partner Haley Daiber Brannan and Co-Founder and CEO John Britton below, and see the $5M funding announcement in TechCrunch in the comments. Congratulations to John, Mike McQuaid, Vanessa Gennarelli and the whole team at Workbrew! Proud to be on this journey with you + Heavybit & Essence Venture Capital

78% of employees are bringing their own AI tools to work. It’s no surprise then that shadow AI is the # 1 cybersecurity concern among security professionals. Today, SurePath AI announced its $5.2M seed round to tackle this challenge head-on by addressing the governance gaps to securely adopt GenAI across the enterprise. More about SurePath in our interview with OpCo Partner Haley Daiber Brannan and SurePath Co-Founder and CEO Casey Bleeker - congratulations to Casey, Randy Birdsall and the entire team! 🔆

We brought together two OpCo portfolio founders for a candid conversation about what it takes to build an AI-native company. They’re at different stages of their company-building journeys - Kieran Snyder (Co-Founder, Chief Scientist Emeritus, and former CEO of Textio) has been building with AI for nearly a decade, and Jerry Zhou (Co-Founder and CEO of Supio) is fresh off raising a $25M Series A - so there was a lot to unpack. One thing they have in common? Telling it like it is. Here are their spiciest takes and most valuable insights. Special thanks to our friends at Bonfire Ventures 🔥, Ascend, and Fenwick & West!