Charlie Wehan

Seattle's startup scene is growing, but it’s clear we have some work to do. That was a main takeaway from our panel discussion last week featuring venture capitalists from top-tier firms including Brentt Baltimore of Greycroft, Victoria Treyger of Felicis, and Sunil Nagaraj of Ubiquity Ventures, moderated by Kirby Winfield. Their goal: analyze Seattle's startup landscape from an outsider’s perspective with active Seattle investments. They see a city rich in technical talent but with several missing pieces. Go-to-market strategies often lag behind technical capabilities; capital is available, but frequently from outside the region; and stronger community cohesion is needed to bridge incumbent tech leaders with founder types. I transcribed and edited our panel last week "Valley VCs 💗 Seattle Startups." https://lnkd.in/ggchXW4B

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Angelina Ly founder of fireflyslime and a University of Washington Bothell alum shared how she launched one of the top selling slime companies! 🎇 Time Management is Key: Doing it all on your own is possible if you use your time wisely. Tools like Google Calendar can help streamline responsibilities and keep you on track. consistent work ethic makes a difference. 🎇 Embrace E-Commerce Opportunities: Starting a business through e-commerce is possible. Platforms like Shopify are user-friendly and perfect for taking the first step into an online business. 🎇 Passion Drives Success: Your hobbies and passions can become a thriving business. Age or experience isn't a barrier and in fact can be an advantage. 🎇 Small Ideas Can Become Big: Whether it’s a simple idea or an accidental discovery, with experimentation and social media marketing, your business can grow organically.

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More than 100 talented Seattle-area individuals have already applied to Co-founder Connect and thousands more have visited the landing page less than a week since launch, reinforcing our thesis that Seattle is ready for a digital hub bringing together both technical and business-minded people to launch new ventures. We’ve been getting flooded with interest from engineers, operertors, and even former C-suite execs about what this is and what it could be. Others have volunteered to help build the platform. It’s so inspiring! If you’re in Seattle looking for a co-founder, check out our intake form (linked in comments). We’re moving quickly to onboard folks onto a platform to meet a potential match. My former editor Taylor Soper wrote an awesome article about what makes a good co-founder, featuring insights from attendees at Founders Bash. He also mentions Co-founder Connect! :-)

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The Stoke Space team in Seattle has built a rocket company faster than many people can build software. Morgan Beller breaks down how this is helping them capture a huge opportunity: https://lnkd.in/gc5jv2-c 

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👀 Looking at our recent investments at Draper Associates, here’s what standout founders nailed, making our decision to invest much easier (and faster): 💥 Visionary Tech with a Bold Vision – These founders are not here for incremental wins; they’re reimagining what’s possible in across tech - biotech, robotics, aerospace, and beyond. Their vision is big and audacious, tackling complex problems that demand breakthrough solutions, others have not been willing to try. 👊 Clear Passion & Purpose – The drive in these founders is undeniable. They’re committed to their mission with a depth of purpose that shapes every choice. One founder, for example, took two years completely off to learn and meet everyone in longevity biotech. This level of grit and dedication is rare but essential for the most impactful founders. 🌟 Assembling All-Star Teams – They bring together top-tier talent from diverse disciplines: experienced business leaders with successful exits or industry experience at top companies, technical co-founders with deep expertise, often PhDs or industry pioneers, and even published authors. It’s a complementary team, unified by a shared vision. They make the: "Why this team?" obvious - at a glance. 💻 Data-Driven to the Core – These founders present data insights that show why their approach is unique, especially against a competitive field of companies. This data is delivered with clarity and they make the complex simple. Many are published in top journals, adding depth and credibility to their approach, and reinforcing that they know their tech inside out. ⚡️ Memorable, Clear Vision – They don’t just pitch; they make the future feel tangible, with a vision that’s both compelling and concise. If I can relay their pitch in under 30 seconds to my team, they’ve killed it. 📣 Transparent & Proactive Communication – The best founders don’t wait for questions. They come prepared, often with a comprehensive FAQ doc, give timely updates to our questions, and are candid about challenges. This level of openness builds trust and strengthens our partnership. 💸 Milestone-Driven Funding Strategy – Each funding stage aligns clearly with already achieved or upcoming achievable milestones. They’ve mapped out a roadmap that minimizes risk at every step, giving us confidence in their journey. 💰 Revenue Milestones Along the Way – Even if it'll take a decade to hit revenue on their big vision, these founders find revenue generation stops along the way to profitability. They share a trajectory that connects early wins to revenue, showing how every step is a building block toward their bigger vision. Overall, the best founders are incredibly thoughtful, prepared, and fantastic verbal / written communicators. #founders #startups #fundraising #VC

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The newest issue of The Pragmatic Engineer found a surprise uptick in eng hiring in the typically slow summer season - I'm curious to see how the macro environment impacts this uptick as we head into the fall, but I remain hopeful. I asked Gemini to give me the tldr of the article to share with my team (sorry, Gergely Orosz) and found it missed one of the most interesting pieces of the article. Gemini's highlights - Unexpected surge: Tech recruitment has seen an unusual spike in June and July, contrary to typical trends. Increased demand: Startups, especially AI-focused ones, are driving the hiring uptick. Global phenomenon: This trend isn't just limited to the US; Europe is also experiencing increased recruitment activity. Reasons for hiring: Companies are backfilling positions, investing in growth due to improved financials, and responding to increased VC funding. Challenges remain: While the job market is improving, finding qualified candidates and offering competitive compensation remains difficult for many companies. What I found most interesting - The nature of the backfills: the article finds that a lot of new headcount are actually backfills of folks that were "over-slashed" during rounds of layoffs. Not entirely surprising with the "trim the fat" and "rebuild lean" mentality, but interesting nonetheless. Either way, the uptick is encouraging (and don't always rely on Gemini's tldrs). #hiring #startups #VCbacked #softwareengineering

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I designed Peak OS for venture-backed companies after working with hundreds of them over the past 20 years. VC-backed teams are different, period. They need an operating system designed specifically for them. You can read about why (and get a step by step instruction manual to get started with Peak OS) in my bestselling book, Peak Teams. Check it out on Amazon and Audible. #venturebacked #vcbacked #venturecapital #leadership #ceo #founder #operatingsystem #peakOS

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Want to know what the California Air Resources Board had to say about #ACFR implementation last night? Cloverleaf AI monitors these hearings distills insights, so your team can stay focused on doing their job. Reach out for a free customized summary! #cleanfleet #Advancedcleanfleet #Fleetelectrification #EVfleet #Hydrogenfleet

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We're super excited to announce our new $40m fund, Humba Ventures II! Our singular focus is backing early-stage founders building ambitious deep tech and American Dynamism companies. After running Humba Ventures for three years, we continue to believe that building and investing in advanced technologies and critical sectors is more important than ever. Companies can have a huge impact while benefiting from incredible funding and recruiting opportunities. This wasn’t the case a decade ago, when most deep tech founders came from academia, and few VCs were willing to back them. Today, founders and early hires are spinning out from companies like SpaceX and Palantir, and VCs have their checkbooks ready. There's also been a misconception that deep tech is very capital intensive. That may have been true 10+ years ago but the costs of fundamental technologies like gene sequencing and sensors have plummeted, allowing talented teams to accomplish A LOT with a typical seed round. We're excited to double down on these teams with our $40m fund. We've already been fortunate enough to partner with companies like Mytra, Antares, and Northwood, and we're eager to meet other ambitious teams. If that's you, reach out to me and Anna-Sofia Lesiv! https://lnkd.in/eW-RUsi9

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I’m thrilled to be announcing that Notion Capital is leading the $15m Series A investment in Cogna today. In the industry, we like to think that software has been eating the world. But when you look at the data a better description would be more of a nibble. Depending on what source you look at the software industry represents between 5-8% of global GDP. Contrast that with the services industry that represents between 60-70% of GDP and worth around $25 trillion on a global basis. Most services have been out of reach for the software industry. They have either been too complex or too specialized for off the shelf software to access in any economically viable way. But that’s beginnning to change with GenAI leading to the emergence of ‘service as a software.’ Cogna is at the forefront of this opportunity - building precision software at scale and delivering huge productivity gains for traditional industries. We know Ben Peters & Lars Mennen well having backed their previous company Five AI that was acquired by Bosch in 2022. And we’re very excited to be backing them again together with Hoxton Ventures & Chalfen Ventures Read my full blog post on why we invested here. Radu Bozga Ben Peters Lars Mennen Bryan G. Mike Chalfen Hussein Kanji Kirsten Connell https://lnkd.in/eh8mhcJb

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While living #NYC I had a roommate that went through Techstars Boulder. He told me Techstars ran a test once to determine if the speed at which founders replied to emails had any correlation to the success of the startup overall. Results: Yes! Founders who were quicker on email appeared to have a higher correlation of success. This was a small study of only a few cohorts in their program I believe, but it makes sense. The quicker you reply, the quicker things get in motion. I've searched hard for this data but have never found it. Anyone ever come across a study like this? #startups #venturecapital

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Summary: Lacey Hunter, founder of TechAid, went through the Newchip accelerator in 2022 and was blindsided when the organization filed for bankruptcy in May 2023. The bankruptcy court is auctioning off the warrants held by Newchip in over 1,000 startups, causing outrage and forcing some companies to shut down. Newchip had a tumultuous history, facing criticism for its CEO's leadership style and ultimately filing for Chapter 11 and 7. Key takeaways: Many startups paid thousands of dollars to go through the Newchip accelerator, giving the organization the right to buy shares in their company at a future date. Now, the bankruptcy court is auctioning off these warrants, causing distress and in some cases, leading to the closure of startups. Newchip's founder and CEO, Andrew Ryan, faced criticism for his leadership style and reportedly fired a manager in front of the entire company as a "test" of loyalty. The bankruptcy revealed that Newchip had missed keeping track of some companies that had exited or raised money, potentially causing the organization to miss out on millions of dollars in potential upside. Counter arguments: Newchip may argue that their bankruptcy was due to unforeseen circumstances and was not a #vc #startups #accelerators

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What do bio and health applications mean for the next wave of AI -- specifically about compute? (I'm talking to you NVDA longs!) LifeX Ventures is hosting a super roundtable with some serious techbio leaders tomorrow along with Analog Century Management's Val Zlatev -- come hear Thomas Clozel Sean McClain Chetan Patel at 11am ET For the survey results based on asking 100 techbio CTOs and CEOs, join the call. Here, my own speculations after wrapping up the report: -- Amazon needs to have a GPU program on warp drive right now -- Nvidia needs to have a data center / cloud business in the works -- Edge AI chips are about to be everywhere -- in your watch, car, sneakers, thermostats, gene sequencers, spectroscopes -- All this compute needs way more data: expect a boom in sensors of all types -- Remember human genome moonshot that sequenced one person once? Now you can sequence your every cell one by one. Expect that for protein folding (AlphaFold was that moonshot) and other simulation uses, a full "twin" model of you, cell by cell -- Google has no angle here -- worse chips, worse cloud, worse models, worse phones / edge devices -- Specialty silicon for unique use-cases, lower-power, lower-memory are surely coming fast - like back in the day for mobile phones when Qualcomm, Broadcomm, Infineon, Mediatek, etc duked it out.

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Ariyan Kabir at EON sharing a great origin story and how he and his cofounder Brual Shah created GrayMatter Robotics and the impact they have had in this trillion dollar industry of surface treatments. Some great insights. - customers love the RaaS model because they are not tied to one solution for years to come but can access the latest and greatest technology - in selecting customers to sign, make sure to get commitment and alignment across the organization rather than just with the management. One takeaway for me, there is a lot of value robots can add in trillion dollars industries which are way more specialized than humanoid robots.

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Breaking down our latest newsletter section by section, starting with our expanded focus in Deep Tech: --- We have built expertise in the robotics sector, and will continue to double (and triple) down on investing in this category, but we have been increasingly finding that robotics is naturally steering us into two exploding adjacent areas: Aerospace, and Advanced Manufacturing (which we define as industrials, semiconductors, materials science, and energy production). Stepping back, this expansion makes perfect sense. Robotics is an inherently horizontal platform - meaning it can be applied productively across multiple industries. This quality, paired with the fact that robotics has long shown the highest TRLs of any deep tech technology, makes it a kind of “gateway” to other sectors in the hard sciences. Now with the recent breakthroughs in AI for robotics, growing semiconductor demand, and the resurgence of aerospace and defense tech, we are seeing a dramatic uptake of robotics and relevant technologies in both advanced manufacturing and aerospace. As an added bonus of the expansion, many of the founder (and funder) networks across these landscapes have natural overlaps and linkages. For AlleyCorp Deep Tech this means that we can be extremely helpful, knowledgeable, and engaged across all three sectors right away, and continue to be the best-in-class investing team across these categories.  --- More in our newsletter: https://lnkd.in/ewiTuYq6

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At $10M in annual revenues, we transitioned from doers to thinkers at Grasshopper. This enabled my co-founder and me to leave Grasshopper, and focus on other ventures, the day it was acquired. The management team stayed on and seamlessly continued to run the business. I think of it as our biggest achievement. A common challenge many startups encounter: Growth outpacing the management team's capabilities Company culture, structure, and strategy doesn’t evolve with the business. Founders continue to micromanage everything. Just like the early days. They get stuck in the weeds (daily operations) and lose sight of the broader vision. The solution: Adapt as your business grows. Transition towards becoming thinkers than doers. Delegate tasks. Empower your employees. Set expectations. Track performance. But don't micromanage. A business that doesn’t run without you isn’t an attractive M&A opportunity for buyers. #entrepreneurship #venturecapital #startup #mergers #acquisitions Serial Entrepreneur & Investor Helping Startups Become Unstoppable – David Hauser

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Two weeks ago I spent 3 days with brilliant human beings discussing the state of AI investment with other angel syndicate leads, angel investors and VCs at Hustle Fund's #camphustle in Los Gatos. It was brilliant. Truly awesome to learn so much from insanely accomplished investors. But was so clear to me again is that the US and the UK are two countries divided by separate languages of ambition. Aspiration and ambition underlined by the cluster effect of successful exits, incredible talent and venture capital driven by operators and founders rather than accountants. But one reason why the US often trumps (pun not intended) the UK is they learn from failure. Run a startup that didn't reach the dizzying heights of venture-scale returns? Learn, reset and go again. What they certainly do not do is look at failure with glee and an "I told you so" attitude. Which is what I sense when I read most of the narrative around the failure of Cazoo. Alex Chesterman swung and missed. The business was flawed, unit economics didn't add up and in reality - there was very little innovation outside the vertical alignment of a well-understood business. But when we look down upon what he tried to do and 💩 💩 it all we're doing is making it harder for someone else to be equally as ambitious. Focus on what went wrong. Focus on the fundamental underlying business models that drive efficient use of capital and the push for profitability. But let's celebrate people shooting their shot and not celebrate the failures.

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