Giovanni Hobbins

How do we design funding mechanisms that are regenerative and built to last? In the latest Rehash episode, Sophia Dew from Celo Foundation joins me to talk about what blockchain enables for public goods funding, frameworks for designing regenerative onchain funding apps, and what it takes to build and maintain a layer 2 blockchain. Tune into our full conversation at the links below:

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Over the years, we at GFR Fund have solidified our investment thesis, which is that we invest in "emerging digitally native communities." These communities can be built around games, social media, and any consumer applications. Now, founders have many easy-to-use tools to build user communities, such as Discord, X/twitter, Instagram, etc, and we believe the founders should start building communities even before they launch a product. The communities can help founders: - reach PMF faster - acquire users cheaper - retain and engage users longer - build better UX/UI, and - hire early employees Below, you can see how RTFKT and Omeda Studios built the community and then worked with them to create a product the users really wanted. We would love to talk to the founders who think the community is essential in building a product!

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💰 Attn: Are you a founder or CEO prepping for fundraising? Or a GTM pro who works for one? You’ll want to check out our (2) new templates: 📚 Interactive fundraising deck: https://lnkd.in/eCECjnG5 📚 Executive summary: https://lnkd.in/e7SfggGf Even though AssetMule was designed to help GTM teams better engage prospects with interactive sales assets, we’ve started to see an influx of founders signing up to build their fundraising assets. And it makes total sense. Just like buyers, investors are overwhelmed with the amount of pitches coming their way and are harder to reach than ever before. Founders need new ways to rise above the noise and earn their attention. And that’s exactly what AssetMule is designed to do. Not only will these templates help you pull your core fundraising assets together in a fraction of the time & with less effort, but they’ll help you engage investors in a more meaningful way and book more pitch meetings. Check out Justin Dorfman's demo below & sign up for AssetMule to get started for free: https://lnkd.in/efkfwj7i #startups #ceos #founders #fundraising #saas

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Check out my recent post on why President Trump is the forcing function for us to solve the “Missing Middle” and catch the industrial Tsunami of onshoring coming to the US!

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Well-written and sourced article describing what's going in seed-stage venture market. At 9point8 Collective we tend to orbit the seed-stage (both ideating and developing companies to reach seed and helping post-seed companies refactor and scale in anticipation of A) and for many companies it's a critical inflection point which determines their long term success or failure. The main takeaways I was able to gather: 1️⃣ Many startups that raised seed rounds in 2021-2022 are struggling to secure Series A funding due to tighter market conditions and increased investor expectations. 2️⃣ Seed investors are becoming more cautious, leading to longer diligence processes and a preference for startups with strong traction or experienced founders. As a result, valuations have stayed relatively high even as deal flow reduces. 3️⃣ Startups are adopting various strategies to navigate this challenging environment, including cutting costs, raising bridge rounds or convertible notes, and M&A/acqui-hires. 4️⃣ Despite the challenges, there are opportunities for both startups and investors in this new landscape, particularly for those who can adapt to the changing market conditions. Investors are accumulating dry powder -- and with rates on the decline -- will be looking to deploy into companies with stronger fundamentals than their 2021-2022 counterparts.

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Exciting news! We just sent out the inaugural newsletter for Future Frontier Capital, our pre-seed venture fund backing frontier tech startups. As I hit "send," I realized how launching FFC parallels the path of the founders we support. Starting FFC has required the same passion, perseverance, and self-belief that drive entrepreneurs. Just like a startup, getting a VC fund off the ground demands relentless hustle—building the brand, perfecting the pitch, and networking tirelessly. There are constant challenges that test your resolve and endless hours of unglamorous work behind the scenes. And perhaps most daunting - the self-doubt, wondering if you're crazy for attempting something so bold. Pushing through that negative self-talk requires unshakable faith in your mission. Raising this VC fund reminds me of starting our IP strategy and patent analytics firm two decades ago. It’s a powerful reminder of the perseverance, creativity, and resilience needed to turn an ambitious idea into reality. This experience makes us more empathetic partners, ready to support the founders we back. Our work is just beginning, and this inaugural newsletter underscores our commitment to supporting frontier tech startups every step of the way. #startups #VentureCapital #EmergingManagers #Entrepreneurship #InnovationMindSet

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Our revamped newsletter, The Angle by Angular Ventures, officially launched today! We hope this new format will make it easier to read, share, and subscribe. Back to it, in this week's column, Gil Dibner covered the spirit of risk-taking that inspired Angular to venture into unusual spaces. While, of course, we invest in AI and SaaS, as of late, we have been investing in more and more contrarian spaces - from quantum, to spacetech, to energy, etc. in search of the supposedly impossible - the truly contrarian. Read the full column via the link.

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Wondering about the actual "how-to" to execute a great hiring plan for your startup? We've got you covered! Check out this Insights piece that we put together in collaboration with our friends over at Enduring Planet. Our team at Climate People has placed over 100 people into climate technology roles with dozens of Seed --> Series B/C startups. This insights piece reflects some of our learnings. If you're a startup looking for exceptional talent or help with your hiring process, reach out! Shout out to Natalie Lavery, Climate People's Marketing Lead for her contributions to this piece.

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Product for Engineers dropped another awesome post recently: How we decide what to build. It’s a beautiful building-in-public look at how PostHog goes about product development. There is so much to learn from this newsletter. I love it. https://lnkd.in/ewNBSpu4

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How does a venture capitalist pick winning startups? Ben Hemani of Bison Ventures joined us on the podcast this week to discuss the intersection of deep tech, biotechnology, and climate sustainability. Key insights: 1️⃣ Evaluating founders and teams in early-stage ventures is an art and a science. 2️⃣ How Ben and his team are navigating the current funding climate. 3️⃣ The powerful potential of cross-disciplinary approaches in tech and biotech. (Plus, why Ben and I both love a good platform company) This episode is packed with actionable advice for entrepreneurs and investors alike. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did! https://cstu.io/0be786 #VentureCapital #BiotechFunding #Biotechnology #StartupFunding #Podcast

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This is great. And for additional color on the valley of death or the gap to scale — download the Sightline FOAK Guide: https://lnkd.in/eV9Wh7s5

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I 💯agree with Oz Merchant on this topic. Some folks advise founders to pitch very selectively and 'pick your pitch' - you get one shot, choose it wisely? I'm 180 degrees opposite of that - be a promiscuous pitcher! - ABP - ALWAYS BE PITCHING. Because your pitch gets better with every no, take that feedback, learn, iterate. Right now it's taking 50-100 no's for Triangle co's to get funding, it's still tough out there, so get through the no's fast to get to a yes. Check out the event - also go see others pitch, it all helps you get better - pitching is like PMF - lots of iteration, tons of grinding to get through to the other side.

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Exciting News: Schematic is publicly available and we’ve raised $4.8M in seed funding! 🚀 I’m pumped to share that Schematic is now publicly available! We've also raised $4.8M in seed funding, led by MHS Capital with participation from NextView Ventures, Active Capital, Atlanta Ventures, and Ritual Capital—along with support from incredible founders of companies like CrowdStrike, LaunchDarkly, and Salesloft. A big thank you to our investors for believing in us, to our customers for guiding us, and to Benjamin Papillon, Jasdeep Garcha, Giovanni Hobbins, Vladyslav Len, Youssef Salah, Christopher Brady, Joseph Chrzan, Mohammed Almusaddar, and Markiian Simkiv for the opportunity to build this together. ➡️ Solving the last mile of pricing & packaging At every startup, one thing is certain: pricing and packaging will always change. Product and engineering teams shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time this happens. Most companies hard-code pricing and packaging into their applications, making it slow and painful to evolve as market demands shift. ➡️ What We’re Building We're building Schematic to transform pricing and packaging for B2B SaaS companies by getting product and engineering teams out of billing projects. With Schematic, B2B SaaS companies can change pricing & packaging without code changes or billing refactors. ➡️ How It Works With just a few lines of code, businesses can implement pricing and packaging into any application—end-to-end—from feature delivery through billing and customer experience. Quickly roll out new features and tie them to your pricing plans. Target specific plans to customers and adjust them without engineering support. Experiment, scale, and manage pricing & packaging operations: trials, plans, limits, entitlements, metering usage, handling exceptions, provisioning customers, & embedding front-end purchasing components —all without code changes. ➡️ Who we’re building for We’re building Schematic for B2B SaaS companies who want their pricing & packaging roadmaps to move in sync with their product roadmaps, without slowing down their engineering teams. Some key use cases our customers are already benefiting from: 🔹Outsourcing homegrown & hard-coded entitlement services. 🔹Programmatically managing feature access based on subscription plans. 🔹Metering usage and actually enforcing limits. 🔹Updating and managing plans, add-ons, bundling, and customer exceptions 🔹Delivering embeddable purchasing experiences (pricing tables, customer portals, upgrade/downgrade flows, etc). We’re still in the early innings, but the foundation is strong—we're already handling 500K entitlement flag evaluations every month. If you’re a founder or a product leader looking to avoid building what should be out-of-the-box (feature flags, entitlements, admin dashboards, customer portals), check out Schematic and let us know what you think.

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Prime Coalition has long taken a different tack to climate finance compared to its for-profit brethren. It makes the usual venture-style investments in startups through Azolla Ventures and also helps philanthropists direct their money to climate-related projects that it deems high impact. Trellis Climate follows the latter model with a focus on middle stages, where capital has grown scarce. #climatetech #climateVC #climatefinance

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Many people have asked that I share the keynote presentation from Coatue’s East Meets West conference from this past June. This gives a great perspective on both public and private markets and how we see the impact on investing. #coatue #venturecapital

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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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Unsolicited feedback is the biggest gift you can get as a founder. But here’s the trap many early-stage founders fall into: The moment someone shares feedback, they immediately jump into defense mode—justifying their thought process, decisions, or product vision. Here’s the truth: feedback, resistance, and even challenges are invaluable because they expose you to perspectives you may not have considered. The key isn’t to justify—it’s to listen, observe, and dig deeper. 👉 Here’s a perspective to think about: A friend recently shared how they felt humiliated after being insulted by a colleague in public. It’s a tough situation, no doubt. But it was also their first experience handling such a moment. If approached with the right mindset, this moment becomes a gift — a chance to learn and be better prepared next time. 👉 The same applies to feedback: Someone giving you feedback means they see potential—they care enough to want you to improve. But not everyone is articulate in their feedback delivery. Sometimes, frustration or disappointment is just a poorly communicated desire for something better. The best thing you can do? • Listen verbatim. Resist the urge to customize your response. • Stay curious. Ask questions. Understand the underlying decision-making process behind their feedback. • And most importantly, use their input as a tool for root cause analysis (RCA) rather than rushing to defend. I’m sharing this because I’ve made this mistake myself. As a founder, our natural instinct is to defend our work—it’s personal. But the sooner we let go of this mindset, the faster our offering can improve. So, here’s my advice: Feedback isn’t an attack; it’s an opportunity. Wishing all of us a lot of feedback this week ❤️ 😅 #Feedback #FoundersMindset #StartupLife #Growth #Curiosity

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Chat with Miles Clements about building Linear For me companies are like design problems: you have context, constraints & goals unique to you. Then you look for a solution that has a good fit to your unique problems. The company problem also evolve over times the solution Directly applying what others have done doesn’t work that well, yet there is lot emphasis on playbooks, pattern matching and playing copying what other companies are doing in industry. https://lnkd.in/ghxjJwYU

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