Alden Do Rosario

📈 Curious about the startup scene in Massachusetts? Explore our detailed funding list featuring startup names, HQ locations, and investor info. Perfect for investors and entrepreneurs alike! Check it out: https://lnkd.in/dAp3xj-Q #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #managementconsulting

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Have you heard of #CapVC? It’s an application platform designed specifically for the use of #VC firms. Essentially, it’s a robust #AI-powered tool made to simplify the daily operations of managing a #fund. Isn’t that something, a VC funded start-up designed to help improve the productivity of VC funding! According to this article from TechCrunch, Cap VC is looking to become much more than just an ‘operating system’ — the company aims to be a simplified and extremely efficient way to run a VC firm: reducing digital clutter by turning PDF files, income statements and balance sheets into readable data, automating company suggestions based on the context of a VC’s portfolio, and more. Cap VC is currently developing native apps on Mac and Windows, alongside releasing an API so that developers can build on top of their foundations. So, are any of my fellow VCs interested in using this software? If not Cap VC, is there any interest for similar software to be created down the line? Are there downsides to using a third-party application like this? I want to know what you all think.

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AdAttributionKit: Unpacking Apple’s new ad attribution framework AAK unifies Apple’s various advertising attribution frameworks under a single umbrella product name and extends SKAdNetwork in meaningful ways, including with support for re-engagement and alternative app marketplaces. These are substantive improvements. But impediments to adoption remain: IP-based attribution is still widely viewed as a suitable alternative to Apple’s native iOS attribution framework, meaning that platform tools like Conversion APIs will take adoption priority.

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The podcast is back! Listen to my latest episode with Gene Millman, most recently the CEO of REcolorado, as we discuss the nuts and bolts of MLSs, if they are still relevant in 2024, consolidation, reinvention, how to run an MLS like a business, why disruptors need MLSs, their top threat, the biggest tech pain point, and the critical importance of agility.

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Local News publishers stand out as a potential beneficiary of this new web economy. Local audiences tend to navigate directly to local news websites and that direct navigation could insulate the local media property from such dramatic changes in search and social. Advertisers should recognize the value of Local Media's authentic and engaged audiences. Vertical publishers need to start building syndication to Local Media partners to reach those authentic and engaged audiences also! Distributed Media Lab is here to help!! Local Media Association

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Packed house for #ATSL24 and a great discussion between Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk and our own Ciarán O'Kane of FPC and ExchangeWire. The discussion touched on the lack of VC participation in AdTech (despite being a $1 Trillion addressable market). “Generalist VCs avoided AdTech because it’s complex. They often don’t understand why they’d win or lose”. This summed up exactly why FirstPartyCapital exists. A $1T+ complex sector needs specialists to fund innovation, provide deeper DD, illuminating context, access to networks and relevant portfolio support. Over time we hope this provides a stronger signal to generalist VCs and PEs. Look out for Rich Ashton Jack Tunney Alex Powell Mike Follett Mark Giblin Dan Jones Rafael Michelucci Ed French Shane Shevlin Lumen Research LightBox TV Contxt Media Bedrock Platform Exiber Pixels AI

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Don't let your CRO strategies fall short! If your CRO efforts aren't delivering results, you might be overlooking a critical element: qualitative research. Quantitative data shows you what users are doing, but qualitative insights: ✅ Uncover user motivations & pain points ✅ Identifies root causes of behavior ✅ Guides impactful optimizations Start combining qualitative research techniques (user interviews + usability testing) with your analytics data. It allows you to deeply understand your audience, prioritize high-impact changes, and create user-centric, conversion-driving experiences. How will you implement qualitative research to drive real results?

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And my second investment at defy is in 🐶 zeroETL puppies 🐶... I mean PuppyGraph, which is all the beauty of a graph database, none of the data migration or continuous upkeep of a graph database. Sounds like magic? So are puppies 🐶 . Puppygraph is NOT a graph or a database. It is graph analytics engine that answers graph questions on your existing data warehouses, whether that is a Databricks datalake, Google BigQuery or postgres. Compared to SQL, it's faster, handles way more complexity, scales and has almost no upkeep. How did I get to conviction? 1. Tailwinds - 🌊 Lakehouses 🌊 have helped enterprises put all their data in one place, enabling Puppygraph to unlock insights previously unavailable. - 📚 LLMs! 📚AI and RAG cannot easily traverse fragmented data. Puppygraph's Graph RAG unlocks insights with their Knowledge Graph and spoonfeeds to the LLMs. 2. 👯 Team 👯 We have graph experts from Google, LinkedIn, Databricks, Tigergraph, and Instacart who are uniquely able to build this solution. 3. 💸 Customers 💸 . My alma mater Coinbase is a proud user. The feedback from my former colleagues was off the charts! A blockchain is very much a graph database and Puppygraph tracks down fraudulent transactions that go through mixers and helps identify patterns. Huge congrats to Weimo Liu Danfeng Xu Lei Huang Zhenni Wu Gary Hagmueller, defy.vc is proud to be an investor!!

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In a startup's early days, founders often skip detailed compensation planning, instead choosing round numbers and moving on. This is an admirable sentiment. But over the long term, founder compensation design can matter a lot to the company, so it's worth taking some time to think this through. Here are some benchmarks and suggestions for founder compensation across: 1. Salary 2. Equity Split 3. Vesting https://lnkd.in/gcDXehXx

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How do you do messaging for multiple ICPs? What do you do when one of these scenarios applies? · Expanding from one ICP to two (or more) · Needing to talk to several ICPs at once · Messaging when you're a multi-product company · Writing home page copy for multiple audiences Anthony Pierri 🎸and I are gonna talk about it for 60mis, and discuss what makes sense when. We'll share our overall thinking about the matter, but will mostly focus on audience Q&A. Come join us next Wed (June 12) to discuss this topic. Bring your questions. Free event. Registration link in the comments.

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Congratulations to Roland Reynolds and the team at Industry Ventures on the raise of its latest $900M hybrid fund (split three ways, 40% backing VC funds, 40% directly investing in promising Series B startups from their existing partnerships, and 20% acquiring stakes in emerging investment firms from other LPs looking to exit). Read more from Marina Temkin, CFA at TechCrunch below. #VC #venturecapital #fundraising #startups #investing #news #technews #startupnews

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Excited about some upcoming product updates coming to Thunder.vc next week (stay tuned), so I thought I'd spotlight one of our existing ones before we go live. So here's a little data from the platform this week, where we track investor velocity. Quick definition: Investor velocity is a simple calculation of how many new investments a firm made during a specific time period. In our case, we calculated it quarterly and the Q2 2024 number includes the 6.8k+ investors currently on our platform. The higher the number, the more net new investments a firm is making. Most deals get done in Q1 & Q3 of the year, but we’ve seen things trend up in Q2 this year. Also noted that pre-seed deals are in decline while Series C are on the rise. Stay tuned for the Q3 analysis at the end of this month. Check out more stats here: https://app.thunder.vc/ #investors #startups #VC

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Pt 2 of Federal GTM series....I made a free tool last night https://lnkd.in/ew2fTmyC In this video I'll show you how to find the exact email addresses and phone numbers of the people in the government who are buying what you sell. Let me know what you think and what you want to see next.

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Back in 1997, The New York Times highlighted a “Roundtable in Multimedia” attended by senior media executives. They lamented that apart from a few exceptions like pornography websites and Amazon, no one had cracked the code for a viable 'interactive' media business model. Fast forward to 2024, and Fable has launched Showrunner, a revolutionary platform known as the “Netflix of AI" , which allows users to create their own TV shows with just a few prompts. 📺✨ The way we create and consume content has evolved dramatically. But what does "interactive media" really mean today? We break it down, exploring how it intersects with massive shifts in technology, culture, and new media. And how with a growing "Swipe before Type" generation, there is now an ingrained expectation of interactivity in all digital experiences. We dive into the future of interactive media and gaming and see where we're headed next! Link in comments. #InteractiveMedia #Gaming #AI #TechRevolution #ContentCreation #NewMedia

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Menlo Ventures released a great AI landscape survey...three powerful trends: 🚀 1. AI Agents Are Leading the Charge: Shift toward agentic architectures is clear—automation is moving beyond isolated tasks to AI agents capable of orchestrating complex workflows. 🏦 2. Incumbents Beware: Fast Followers Win with AI: When startups deliver superior, AI-powered experiences, customers are quick to switch. It’s no longer about loyalty; it’s about delivering unmatched value. 💼 3. The AI Talent Crisis is Real: The competition for AI/ML talent is heating up, with salaries expected to double or triple. Building great AI solutions isn’t just about technology—it’s about assembling the right team. 📊 Additional Highlights: - Enterprise AI spending reached $13.8B, growing 6x YoY. - 47% of solutions are now developed in-house, marking a shift from reliance on vendors (down from 80%). - Price isn’t an issue. Only 1% of enterprise leaders cited cost as a concern when selecting an AI solution. Enterprises are prioritizing results over cost. The lesson? AI leaders need to think boldly: build transformative solutions, assemble top-tier talent, and never underestimate the speed at which disruption can occur. Great report Tim Tully and Derek Xiao. #AI #GenerativeAI #Innovation #EnterpriseAI #MenloVentures #Base64

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🏛 PredictAP, Inc. is an AI-powered invoice capture platform to codify tribal knowledge and modernize software tooling in a traditionally “offline” real estate industry 🏛 It's W5 / Q4 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got PredictAP, a team building the product they wished they had reconciling invoices, tax IDs, and payment flows to help real estate managers better allocate resources and capture efficiencies. Founder & CEO David Stifter worked for Colony Capital for almost 20 years and is an accountant by background (having studied locally at BU). He became an in house real estate technology leader and led a major ERP integration to Yardi, the industry standard real estate accounting software. His career was advancing. The migration went smoothly. Then Chrissa, who was a key player in Colony Capital’s AP process, retired (with her institutional knowledge). Colony ($43B in assets) moved a lot of money around and had an internal system that helped them reconcile payments, approvals, and invoicing through a complex ownership structure. Accounting rules vary depending on whether a property in their portfolio was a multi-family asset or an industrial asset. AP isn’t glamorous, but you can imagine the complexity as it relates to cash flows, invoicing, tracking, etc. So when Chrissa retired, poof! A lot of context went missing. David & his team built an internal “invoice coding system” tool and, a couple years later, David bought out the rights to the internal tool with his partner Russell Franks to build a proper technical infrastructure and see if this tool could help real estate managers more broadly. A year later the product was ready, and PredictAP hit the market running in 2021 to solve a very specific pain point: properly coding multi-line real estate invoices. So real estate teams can spend more time in the facility and less time manually updating spreadsheets and reconciling data. Today they have 80+ customers and can show clear 4-5x ROI on the time savings, let alone the resiliency they are building. The platform processes nearly 3M invoices annually, demonstrating its scalability. In November of 2023 they closed their $8M Series A and are on track to grow from six figures to mid seven figures of ARR in 2024. They expect to close the year at over 100% revenue growth and have seen existing customer revenue growth grow by 25%. With a team of ~20 employees, PredictAP is positioned at the intersection of real estate, accounting, and AI technology as a crucial player in the real estate accounting technology stack. Operators to Know (Locally): -Greg Achenbach, VP of Product -Kristina D., Software Engineer -Ethan Neidhart, Software Engineer -Ali Noel, Director of GTM Enablement -Tony Scalese, VP of Customer Success -Emma D Whitman, MPH, Product Manager If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you in the weeks ahead!

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Building early stage startup momentum? Make sure your speed-to-help is measured in minutes. In today’s environment, you can’t wait days for help. You have to get unstuck fast. With timely advice, execution quickens. Thats the power of a safe-space community that’s built on ‘giving’. It’s our foundational value. You should give what we are building a try.  Zero risk.   DM me to learn more. We’re happy to tee up a call. Happy Wednesday, ya’ll. ———— Please consider ♻️ with founders in your network. As early stage founders, we at times, are a problem away from sinking or propelling forward.

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