Filip Kozera

🌟 Check out this article from Tech Times: "Breakthrough Startup Landbase Helps Entrepreneurs Reclaim Their Day Through Intelligent Automation" 🌟 As someone who started their journey in the family business, I’ve experienced the challenges that entrepreneurs face firsthand. After my family’s furniture store closed during the Great Recession due to lack of access to capital and technology, I realized how crucial innovation is for success. Now, with Landbase, we’re on a mission to simplify sales and marketing through intelligent automation. Our platform allows entrepreneurs to reclaim their time and focus on what truly matters: strategic decision-making and building meaningful relationships. 💼✨ Let’s transform the way businesses approach their go-to-market strategies together! ✨ https://lnkd.in/g6KrXQcA

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I had an absolute blast with Michel Gagnon and the Stun and Awe crew - THANKS again for having me... Sneak peek of the substance below: > Micro SaaS companies can be just as safe and stable as larger businesses, offering lower valuations and less competition from institutional players. > Founder-product fit is crucial, as founders solving their own problems often create useful products with great retention. > Founder burnout can be a buying signal, indicating a solid business with a founder ready to move on. > The first 90 days post-acquisition should focus on visibility, documentation, transition, and validating diligence assumptions before pursuing growth. > Building transparently and maintaining open communication with users post-acquisition helps preserve the human element and avoid the pitfall of going silent. > Simplicity equals mastery - if it takes a complex explanation to justify an acquisition, you probably don't fully understand the business. > Establishing reasonable incremental growth goals based on baseline performance (systems over goals) is more effective than setting arbitrary targets. > Fostering a culture of care and respect enables honest feedback and allows teams to move faster through a shared commitment to truth-seeking.

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Synthflow AI recently raised a chunky seed round of $7.4M. Their pitch is that their no-code platform makes it easier than ever for SMEs (which usually have low tech capabilities) to deploy voice agents for a multitude of use cases. And they do have a pretty good flow builder. At Hooman Labs, we too are striving to make voice agents as simple as possible to deploy. But we believe that while self serve is important to enable users to play around with voice agents, it is more critical to build a suite of plug and play agents (including necessary integrations) which don't need a lot of tinkering by the user. To do this, a voice agent provider needs to go deep into a vertical and understand the workflows of their user, end to end. We're doing this for e-commerce and building agents which solve calling needs of brands across the life cycle of the customer, from pre-sales to post. Some of the use cases we're working on are consultative selling, delivery updates, abandoned cart conversion, return requests and warranty claims. If you run an e-commerce brand and are looking to automate your calling function, would love to talk to you and understand how we can help. Tarun Rathore #voiceai #conversationalcommerce #ecommerce

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An interesting article below, that demonstrates out how San Diego is punching above its weight.  And how Connect's strategy and execution over time, contintues to be central to that success. The article describes the current state of the market in Seattle.  (And i love Seattle.) It's a market that we tend to track with relative to venture fundings.  They used to kick our butts, we outraised them each of the last three years.  This despite the fact they have 3x as many funds there, and 9x the amount of resident capital there. (per pitchbook) Some key takeaways:  * They continue to compare themselves to SIlicon Valley. Instead, we leverage our proximity. *They whine there's not enough local investors (see note above - they have more than us). We bring over 200 VCs to SD annually! * They say founders are not connected with one another. We bring CEOs together regularly, in a variety of ways - private dinners and through our Springboard program. * They say they need to elevate their image on a national & international stage. Why we created and continue to build Five.Ten.Thirty (aka Inno Day).  * And the last paragraph - they need to concentrate on making their region a great place to live. Our mantra: "It's about Better, not Bigger." (See XEO, TL Fund). THANK YOU FOR ALL OF YOUR SUPPORT. WE ARE ON A MISSION TOGETHER!!!  (Comments, whining, suggestions on SD always welcome.) https://lnkd.in/g6Rq_f2Y

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Nice overview of how we're using data to inform how we invest in early-stage founders. We'll be announcing more this summer but we're seeing some really interesting early data. https://lnkd.in/exU_Juf5

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As public software companies got hammered over the last week, David Peterson explores what that means in our latest edition of The Angle. Are we witnessing the end of software? Where did all the growth go? Software isn’t dead, but it’s evolving. And building great companies is no longer about riding the wave of the cloud and building products that are a bit better than the incumbent. Founders who want to build great public companies need ideas that break the mold. And we’re excited to partner with such founders. To read David’s column and explore other exciting tech news, please access and subscribe to our newsletter using the links in the comments. 

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What is cap table debt & how does it hurt startup founders? Cap tables need to reflect all current and potential shareholders (which includes investors who signed a SAFE or convertible note). Because of the complexity of vesting schedules, repurchase rights, options vs. shares, the variable nature of ownership calculations with convertible instruments, etc., the simple spreadsheets used by most founders are woefully inadequate. We dive deep into the topic of cap table debt and show why founders need to stop using spreadsheets to track your startup cap table in our webinar on "Best Practices with Founder Equity and Cap Tables". You can watch a replay of this webinar here: https://lnkd.in/giHWZkWS

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2025 will be all about Physical AI. BrightAI is putting it to work to fix America’s pipes, power poles, and sewer drains, which are crumbling under the pressure of climate change. With 250,000 sensors deployed on infrastructure across the company, they are collecting data from the physical world to help blue-collar industries be proactive and spot infrastructure flaws before they become disasters. After bootstrapping to $80M in revenue, the company is just now taking on VC dollars to grow its Stateful OS platform. Full story on the platform launch https://lnkd.in/dccWfh7x CC: Alex Hawkinson Nancy Li Smith Erin Dudley Nick Kim

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🚀🚀 We are excited to announce the integration of Langtrace with AWS Bedrock. If you are building AI apps on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Bedrock, all it takes is just 2 lines of code to setup tracing for your AI applications so you can gain deep visibility and insights. Also, you can host Langtrace on AWS in less than 10minutes because Langtrace is fully open source.

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This last week on X / in the news: 🌊 Poolside's funding announcement of $500M (product in private beta with some enterprises). 💸 OpenAI announced its $6.6B fundraise on the same day as Poolside. 🚫 OpenAI asked investors not to fund competitors. 🚪 More execs leave OpenAI. 🔥 Vercel firing shots at Cloudflare for being a CDN while being a CDN itself. 💰 Artisan AI raised $11M and 11x AI announced a $50M raise. 🎙️ OpenAI announced real-time speech API at $9/hour for a one-way stream. 🖼️ OpenAI Canvas rolling out to users, similar to Anthropic's Claude Artifacts. 🤝 Palmer Luckey and Boz made up 🫶. 🛰️ SpaceX made contact with the stranded ISS astronauts to bring them home. 📸 BlackForestLabs released Flux 1.1, the best model for prompt-adhering photorealistic images of people. 🌪️ Hurricane Milton, Cat 5, causes major panic in Florida.

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A couple of weeks ago OpenAI rolled-out the Realtime API in public beta, letting developers create snappy, speech-to-speech experiences with the GPT-4o model. The Realtime API delivers two clever technologies: low latency, which is essential for smooth speech-to-speech interactions, and a Voice Activity Detection (VAD) model that knows just when to jump in: farewell to the antiquated request-response model. This means building high-quality speech experiences has never been easier. In healthcare, AI assistants will not only be quicker on the draw but also sound more natural, thanks to native speech-to-speech interaction that cuts out the clunky speech-to-text step. Of course, that doesn't mean we should use them for everything... (I regularly share my thoughts on AI advancements and their transformative potential in healthcare on Nabla's newsletter, Healthcare Hoagie: https://lnkd.in/ebXjVvi2 )

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Exploring Deep Tech? Let Tensor Ventures be your guide. Dear Business Owners, Are you ready to board the deep tech train, or will you risk being left behind? We are entering a transformative era where automation becomes the norm, and breakthroughs in quantum computing, techbio, AI, and advanced materials give rise to entirely new industries. At Tensor Ventures, we believe it’s no longer enough to invest reactively. One of the most impactful strategies is through Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) partnerships with VCs. This collaboration combines corporate scale with venture agility, unlocking new markets and driving innovation at an unprecedented pace. Let’s partner and build the future together. https://lnkd.in/eYsuQwm6

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Early-stage VCs tend to view startups as grand narratives. Later-stage funds view startups as spreadsheets–ratios and metrics. Both are right (but incomplete). Companies need both story and spreadsheet to build a great and enduring franchise.

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🚀 Why Should Founders Join a Venture Studio? This article dives into the benefits of joining a venture studio, explaining how it can provide founders with resources, expertise, and a greater chance of success. For those looking to accelerate growth and maximize their chances of success, a venture studio offers unique advantages. At Zenith Venture Studio, we’ve seen how founders can focus more on innovation and product development while leveraging the studio’s resources and industry expertise to gain a competitive edge. Want to learn more? Read the full article here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gV7ht8Jw What other advantages do you think venture studios provide for founders? Let’s discuss! #VentureStudio #Founders #B2BAISaaS #Innovation #Startups

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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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if you want to learn about how we built the company and what makes it unique, https://lnkd.in/eQS2VRKf is a really really well written article about us by Bill Kerr - better than what I have managed to put together so far!

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Increasingly we see a lot of fundraising news "leaked" before the fundraising is done. This week there's a $300M at $2B+ story on Physical Intelligence as well as a $500M at $8B+ story about Perplexity AI. Earlier this year we heard rumors around OpenAI's raise and Figure AI's raise. What's going on here? Why all the leaking? As a founder, I try to understand which way the winds are blowing in the fundraising landscape. We've never leaked or had our fundraising details leaked, so I've been curious how it happens and why. Aren't fundraising deals fragile and this adds risk? In practice, usually these are being leaked by someone friendly with the company that is fundraising. Most of the time though, they're leaked after the company has a strong enough hand to get the fundraising deal done. Looks really bad if it leaks and then the fundraising doesn't get done. But the idea is to drum up more investor interest and to force investors who might be on the sideline to jump in by creating a little extra FOMO. Investors understand this game, so rather than a sign of weakness ("wow, that deal's gone on so long that it must be all just rumors"), leaking the fundraise details can be seen as a sign of strength ("wow, they must be pretty confident to put that out there"). The fact that investors are excited about the robotics space and the fusion of AI and robotics is terrific news I think for those of us active in this space. I happen to believe a) everyone knows how important the foundation models for robotics will be and we're going to see multiple models emerge like we have with LLMs b) the winning companies will have a vertically integrated robotics story direct to customers. This is why I think companies like Perplexity AI and Glean are extremely interesting and companies with more academic and less commercial roots like Character AI or Covariant have folded and been acqui-hired. Time will tell how the robotics foundation models space plays out. Our own work on foundation models has revealed both a lot of potential and some significant bottlenecks [links in the comments]. We track everyone and we hear lots of claims, but so far haven't seen an approach that busts through the bottlenecks and nothing that seems protectable or defensible when NVIDIA, Google, Amazon, Meta, Hugging Face, OpenAI are also all investing here. Good luck to PI as they work to close this round! Hopefully this article helps push the deal over the line with the terms they want! https://lnkd.in/dpp24QcY

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There's consensus emerging among VCs that #LLMs will make software companies look more like services businesses because software will own a task end-to-end instead of merely enabling a human to work on a task faster. I've seen this from partners at NFX, Foundation Capital, and OpenView. The shorthand they like for this "LLMs enable service as a software." I'm betting the company (ATLAS) that they're wrong. I'm trying to work with GTM/PLG teams instead of replacing them, not because I'm particularly precious about displacing jobs but because LLMs just aren't good enough to do their jobs and that won't change anytime soon. LLM optimists point to LLM's effectiveness in domains like coding, prospecting, and SEO content gen, but the wins here are limited and will be short-lived. Coding is unlike any other domain in that the content (code) generated by LLMs can often be unambiguously verified as correct. The code either runs or it doesn't. It's a mistake to generalize from the coding domain. The effectiveness of LLM-powered SEO content gen and prospecting, moreover, is primarily a function of the competitiveness of the space in which these solutions operate. Once the competition shows up, no one is going to care about 80th percentile performance on cold outreach or SEO content. Humans will be back in the game. E.g., Dave Rigotti banned ChatGPT for content gen at Inflection.io this week. I already use "better than ChatGPT" as a filter for content I want to write. LLM optimists often think that there's a clear path to making these models much better. There isn't. Pay less attention to people who have a financial interest in having you believe otherwise. Don't take my word for it either. I'm just incentivized in the opposite direction. Gary Marcus is too, but he's worth paying attention to.

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