Dries Buytaert

📈 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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🚨 Attention early-stage founders raising – excited to spread the word about open applications for PEERLESS 2025! Led by AlleyCorp and Management Leadership for Tomorrow, curated programming will culminate in 5 founders pitching at Google's NYC headquarters in April, where one winner will receive a $1M investment from AlleyCorp. This isn't only about creating a more equitable tech ecosystem, it's about backing the next generation of exceptional founders who are uniquely positioned to shape the future. Applications opened on October 15th and close on December 6th 2024. While they welcome all early-stage founders with exceptional ideas, AlleyCorp is encouraging applications from startups that: ✅ Have raised less than $2M ✅ Are technologically innovative ✅ Have a strong go-to-market advantage ✅ Have identified a large market opportunity ✅ Are led by Black, Latine, Native American, or female founders All applicants will be invited to various ecosystem events with top founders and VCs. Learn more and start your application at www.peerlesspitch.com. 💯 👏Desiree Almodovar + #alleycorp

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It turns out, the Long Island Sound IS water. For these and other insights, check out this post about our seed funding round. 😬 #startups #fundraising #newyork

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Insightful look into bioplatform strategy, and what it takes to raise a Series A from my partner, Omri Amirav-Drory: https://lnkd.in/dFv7GbF6

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💯 agree with this viewpoint Today there are hundreds of products in every vertical that should really be features not products 🤯 Who actually enjoys having 20+ software applications to run a business? I’ve yet to meet a degenerate who does 😂 Building a compound startup or true system of record is not for the faint hearted. Everything is harder. Navigating through the complexity and the breadth vs depth conundrum is agonising 🛣️ 🧟‍♂️ But if you can stick the course and execute on this strategy successfully to build the ‘one stop shop for X’ both the customer and the software provider get incredible rewards 🏆🏆 #compound #startup

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Someone broke down the estimated costs of a $15 Sweetgreen salad. We need these cost graphics for digital health to help future founders. Especially for tech enabled cos, the greatest cost is labor. Much of the "value created" is in curation and matching, which means the gross margins are reliant on labor arbitrage. Pay someone $X, but get paid $X+Y% per visit. The challenge with healthcare is that you often have to pick one of two business models: 1. specialized, low volume, high cost, low gross margin % 2. generalized, high volume, low cost, high gross margin % I'd argue founders should focus on gross dollars over the lifetime of the customer (like Jeff Bezos said) instead of gross margin %'s, but we'll leave that for another time. The challenge is that many tech enabled digital health cos have high cost of goods sold (labor) and moderately high product, design, and engineering budgets. We must build differentiated solutions for patients, clinicians, and clients to be out incumbents, however, we're realizing that companies are ultimately valued on the discounted value of future cash flows. And the high SG&A costs at most organizations might be inbalanced to the unit economics of the business. I'm not sure the math pencils out for everyone unfortunately. But I'm just a guy on the internet, would love to hear the thoughts from those smarter than I (you!). Comment below. --- p.s. I have no idea the accuracy of the graphic and not an investor in Sweetgreen. Cheers. Credit: David Crowther

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One of the things we see quite often at Grit Capital Partners, is a newly minted CEO. We see a big difference in the transition to CEO based upon the historical lane the CEO is coming from. There are different new muscles if you are coming from Product, Engineering, Finance, etc. In this article, we go deep on the CRO to CEO transition, which includes some thoughts from Rosie O'Meara, a particularly fine example of someone who has made the transition quite well. What were your biggest transition moments? https://lnkd.in/eEB-K2ZU

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Today I announced that Maelle Gavet, Techstars CEO, will be leaving the company at the end of the month for health reasons and that I have returned as CEO. Over the past three and a half years, we have accomplished a great deal under Maëlle’s leadership. The company has made 2,000+ startup investments. In 2023, 469 Techstars portfolio companies raised a total of over $2.4B, with 322 of them raising rounds of $1M or more. Applications to our programs doubled between 2022 and 2023 while our quality filter has remained as high as ever – an average of just 3% of those applicants were accepted onto our programs. We continue to rate highly with entrepreneurs in our programs, who in 2023 scored Techstars a nine out of 10 for providing business value. All of that while the diversity of our founders rose to 25% female founders and 36% black and brown founders (in 2023).    I want to thank Maëlle for pouring her passion, blood, sweat and tears into Techstars. I feel fortunate to have worked so closely with her. She built a great team, made many tough decisions, and bravely enacted complex changes that were sorely needed. But now Maëlle must focus on her health. I know I speak for everyone at Techstars when I say that we wish her strength and courage as she addresses what's ahead. https://lnkd.in/gNxHZsAk While I am excited to be back as CEO of Techstars, I was never far away. I was the first employee and have been an employee here continuously since then. I was the first Managing Director of our first and at the time, only, accelerator (Boulder) in the early years. In total, I have served as CEO or co-CEO for thirteen of the seventeen years that Techstars has existed and have been on the Board since the company’s inception. Reach out if you have any questions, but in the meantime, I will continue to focus on making Techstars even better for founders!

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To all the new or #expecting #parents, Ubenwa Health has developed a unique #AI-powered app designed for those who are still learning how to intuit their infant’s emotions. Through listening/studying to various different baby cries, #NanniAI is here to help you distinguish between their wants and needs, and which decisions is the most likely to soothing them in the meantime. Yes, it is named "Nanni," and yes it is AI powered — however it’s not intended to replace parents, it’s more of a #supplement to help support and encourage good #parenting skills. Nanni AI is the culmination of years of research and data collection in Nigeria, Montreal, Canada and Brazil, which was used to train an algorithm that sorts "thousands and thousands" of cries and tries to categorize your baby's needs accurately. The developer mentioned earlier, Ubenwa Health raised a $2.5 million pre seed financing round led by AI-focused funds. What do you think of this app? If you are a parent, would you consider using Nanni AI?

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When Laura Tocmacov and I started working on the impactIA Foundation in 2017, I was looking forward to years of playing with cool technology. I certainly wasn't expecting that mental health and diversity would become central topics! But artificial intelligence works like a magnifying glass, amplifying the best and worst of our society. To build a fulfilling future for all, we need to address some big issues in our workplaces now. For many men in the tech world - and I'm one of them - gender diversity is a solved problem. OK, not quite solved, but close enough. It's going in the right direction. Surely it will sort itself out in a few years? And we believe this despite the fact that we see very few female candidates for our open technical positions, and those candidates often lack the years of experience we need. So we don't recruit them. We're under pressure, you understand, so we have to optimise for short-term results. At the end of the day, we like to think that our customers just want their problems solved, they don't care about the gender of the developers. But they should, and so should we. Take a look at yesterday's Guardian article https://lnkd.in/eSqsR6bX « Women's health tech 'less likely' to get funding if woman is on founding team ». It reads like something from a crazy parallel universe with nuggets like « women advocating for women’s rights are seen as being emotional, upset and angry rather than businesspeople maximising profits » « Men [...] get more funding if they use the same words, perhaps because investors see it as self-interested advocacy, and so proof of their economic acuity. » Is this insane society acceptable to us or should we be actively changing it? Before you answer and throw our male privilege out the window, there might actually be an upside for us all. Studies show that diversity improves the performance of our teams https://lnkd.in/eKkvNDNC. How annoying. Maybe it's time to take a long, hard look at the way we build our teams and optimise for a timescale that's further than our noses? And, Swiss tech companies, if you're looking for examples of how to do this, I suggest you look outside our microcosm. Take Cembra, for example, voted "Worst Place to Mansplain 2024" (yes, I have first-hand experience). The AI project teams there are gloriously gender diverse and at the top of the game. So please, let's spare ourselves the embarrassment of being beaten on our home turf by ... banks and start rethinking the way we build our organisations!

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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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Check out our curated list of #New York funded startups, featuring key insights like HQ locations, founded years, and investor info. https://lnkd.in/dbw7pUqq #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #investmentbanking

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Hot off the pre-print server – an important publication authored by the Atropos Health team exploring the performance of LLMs in answering real-world clinical questions. LLMs excel at summarizing and contextualizing existing literature, but cannot generate de novo medical evidence today. The results of the study highlight performance gains attributable to injecting novel, relevant, and up-to-date medical evidence into LLM-powered clinical decision support systems. Brigham Hyde Nigam Shah Saurabh Gombar Read the study here: https://lnkd.in/ecuU25Pq

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Impactful Biz, Ops & Investment Roles at Early Startups & VCs: • Chief of Staff to Ex. Head of Product at Google • Founding GTM at the most YC product used by other YC companies in the past four years • Chief of Staff to a Partner at a Top-Tier VC Fund • Head of Platform of a NY State Backed Accelerator • Investment Associate at a Seed Stage Fund Investing in Category-Defining Companies • Partner at a Defense-Focused VC Fund • Chief Revenue Officer of a New Space Company in El Segundo • Venture Capital Analyst at a fund investing in overlooked geographies • Investment Associate at a Spirit-Focused Fund • Strategy & Ops Lead at a Company Focused on Helping Improve Autism • Senior Product Manager at a Company Focused on Building Shopify for Content Creators • Program Manager for a Space Security Company • Open-ended Investment Position at a Top-Tier Accelerator • Biz & Ops Lead for One of the Most Loved Digital Consumer Products 💸 All companies are well-funded and backed by top-tier investors. ⬇ You can find links to the roles above, plus many more, in the comments.

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After the first deep dive discussion w/ founders I often hear a comment "I wish I had heard about this alternative [to all-in must-become-a-unicorn] way to build a startup earlier as I have wasted years in pursuing the wrong thing". Our mission is that no founder would ever need to say that again as it is such a waste. Us preaching the gospel 1:1 just doesn't scale, hence we use mass media to multiply our efforts - that's how Gorillacast came to be. The 1st episode is out, featuring yours truly. "How can you know what food you like unless you taste everything" said a chef. How can founders make informed choices about the best strategy for them to follow unless they know of all alternatives? This might not be of interest to you but pls spread the word so that the founders who should hear it can find it. I have a dream!

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Big day for the Rails Foundation: 1Password is the first new Core member to join the board since we launched. Looking forward to working with Jason Meller on the board. You might be thinking: 1Password? Rails? YES. 1Password recently acquired Kolide, a Rails app, and integrated it into the core of its XAM. With today’s world of remote work (and the apps we rely on at work) combined with the ever-increasing threat of data breaches and bad actors, this Rails app now handles “thousands of web requests per second, authorizes millions of authentication attempts, processes billions of asynchronous jobs each month, and consistently delivers four nines of annual uptime for customers”. Not bad for a Rails app, ey?

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You can manage uncertainty in a way that creates a fulfilling and enriching developer experience. My friend Patrick Sheridan, CEO of Modus Create, dropped this nugget of wisdom on the Technocratic podcast. The episode is posted at https://lnkd.in/eVzKR-qw You can also sign up for the podcast and the newsletter at https://lnkd.in/gqygAfzy In the meantime, enjoy this clip. #softwaredevelopment #business #ModusCreate

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