Hugh Hunter

Are you in town for Generative AI World 2024 in Boston? Say hi at Woodstock - AI Woodstock, that is. Link below #ai #genai

4

We gathered dozens of operators from the MGMT Boston Operators Club and local founders alongside the 186 Ventures team this October to discuss the evolution of our dear software markets, the status of some predictions for 2024 (all looking good!), and what’s on deck for next year. General Partner Giuseppe Stuto led us through the following predictions for 2025 to share with you all.. ↕ We will see more vertical AI applications manifest themselves within the Enterprise in a similar ways that SaaS moved from horizontal to vertical use cases 🔔 We will see services business models more common and software budget purchasing models less common - SaaS may even be given away for cheap/free as a “way in” ⚖ Capital efficiency, on a relative basis, will almost be required to create enduring & compounding defensible enterprise value. Details like procurement cycle lengths and creativity with non-dilutive financing, like leveraging revenue based financing tools for example, will all matter 💡 Specific to AI, premiums will be placed on applications that can actually get “reasoning” right. All purpose LLMs still have a ways to go and there are multiple approaches with the “jury still out” on how to get context and reasoning right. Infrastructure solutions that use general purpose or customizable knowledge graphs to help application developers get to 100% (enterprise acceptable accuracy) will emerge OR savvy application developers will fill the gaps themselves. We will likely see both, depending upon the specific case! Thank you Giuseppe, Julian, and Sophie for a great discussion and evening!

59

4 Comments

Talk to Buildstash and Robbie Cargill if you want to manage your game or app binaries.

9

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

25

4 Comments

📈 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

4

We are in for a renaissance in non-software businesses. AI is making these businesses (and mine) so much more efficient and so much faster, that gross margins are going up while teamwork improves. From the Teammate AI podcast with Dan Sullivan.

5

"Monetization must be a first-class citizen in your product from Day 1 & if you're not thinking about entitlements early on, you're not setting yourself up for success." -- Justin Gagnon Justin leads growth engineering at Calendly, which means he's built & evolved monetization in the context of both hyper-growth & scale. We sat down last week for a conversation about feature management, monetization, and the services needed to deliver flexible pricing & packaging at scale. Some of the topics we covered: 1️⃣ Why monetization is so complex in B2B SaaS 2️⃣ The role of entitlements 3️⃣ Paying down bad product decisions vs. bad monetization decisions 4️⃣ How Justin & team built monetization infrastructure at Calendly 5️⃣ The tech & commercial debt that comes when monetization is a last-class citizen If you're a product & engineering leader, I highly recommend this episode with Justin. Schematic has learned much from him over the last year and so very excited to share the full episode (link in the comments).

17

1 Comment

https://lnkd.in/emYdB7iD Was saddened to hear of the passing of Michael Cline. Michael was an extrodinary thinker who focused on client value proposition relentlessly and had a touch and skill to build ideas into companies. I met Michael at Exult. He was co-founder of the pioneer in the HR bpo space. Michael drilled into me the client value prop and differentiation which is part of my fabric. Michael also had the ability to be a coach and mentor and was hungry to learn. Michael also had the skill I have learned is rare which is to balance investor interests with that of the management team. And never forgot people make the difference. Jim Madden Exult co-founder let me know of Michael’s passing and commented that he spent a day with Michael last month and thought Michael was happy and content with life. That took me back some 40 years ago to when my Mom died. I too thought she was in a good spot. She had battled her demons of depression for years and in the end it was too much. Of the many things she taught me one was “ kevin you will never know or understand how I feel cause you don’t have want I have “ #mentalhealth So my lessons and reminders for me; 1. You never know what someone else is going through. So listen with both ears and ask how are you really doing ? 2. If you need help please please speak up. Many of us willing to listen and we all have different struggles and don’t compare your insides with other peoples outsides. 3. We can never invest too much in mental health and have too many resources available that is our obligation as employers. However in the end it is a personal journey and people have to decide for themselves what help works for them and to accept it. 4. Accountability and understanding are often viewed as opposites. But we need them both and all about balance. I will miss you Michael Cline. Blessed to have known you and thank you for all you taught me. Mom I miss you today and everyday. Thank you for what you taught me.

150

20 Comments

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!!

23

3 Comments

I really enjoyed this podcast from Indie VC and Linear's Cofounder Karri Saarinen: https://buff.ly/47Ay117 Main takeaways: * Build your company the way you want to build it. This is "founder mode." * You don't have to grow fast in venture. You can think long term and build a sustainable business. * You can focus on product quality over growth. There's a craftsmanship and a love of quality that can really shine through if you do. * Remote work can work. Design deliberately though. * Build a great product and users will tell other users about how great it is

2

🎙️ Excited to share my recent appearance on the meez podcast! Had a fantastic time with Joshua Sharkey discussing how Starfish is helping small businesses understand and reduce their costs, and ultimately boost their profits. Check it out to learn more about our journey and tons of insights! #SmallBusiness #Entrepreneurship #CostManagement #Podcast

26

1 Comment

In recent-ish news, voice cloning is still easy. 🥧 That’s both fascinating and a bit unsettling. Dive into the implications here: 👉 https://tcrn.ch/3A95QdA #VoiceCloning #DigitalIdentity #AIChallenges #Security #Deepfakes

7

AUM up over 400% this year. This $5 billion isn't our money, of course. It's our clients. Amidst so many options, we're grateful to investors choosing to entrust us to manage it and work every day to earn that trust — and have for seven years. Bitwise is 85 people now. It's an incredible group. Why do we all chose to work in this space, vs somewhere else [that's easier]? We believe Bitcoin & public blockchains are one of the most important contributions to humanity underway now. New apolitical monetary assets. Incorruptible applications. Permissionless platforms. We think these things are important — on a historic scale — and will make the 21st century better than the last. We're motivated to help more people understand, to help clients safely participate in the opportunity, and to be a good actor supporting the ecosystem developing into its potential. We're proud and grateful for the trust this $5 billion milestone represents. It enables us to contribute more. We've never been more focused and excited about the work ahead. Thank you again to our clients, partners, and friends. Cheers to what's to come —

236

24 Comments

I couldn't be more excited to have Luis Berruga — Managing Partner at LBS Capital & former CEO of Global X — joining Bitwise as an advisor. Very few have accomplished what Luis has. Luis helped build a large firm from scratch in the 21st century. At Global X, Luis served as CEO for several years, scaling from $8B to over $40B AUM. They pioneered a new category of investment opportunities: thematic. And they had to do the work of helping investors build understanding that new category. At Bitwise, we're attempting to do much of the same, now with Bitcoin & crypto. We want Bitwise to be a firm investors can rely on for decades. As we cross $5B in AUM, grateful to have him advising us.

10

3 Comments

It’s rare to find someone who has gone through a decade scaling developer workflows in a single company. I sat down with Kent Wills recently discussing the evolution of developer platforms at Yelp and dove into their ownership architecture. Listen to full episode on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Youtube: https://lnkd.in/g722icVw Some key takeaways: 1️⃣ Yelp transitioned from a monolithic codebase to a service-oriented architecture that improved code ownership and productivity. 2️⃣ Yelp has internally built most of the tooling circled around ownership to handle tech debt and track vulnerabilities. 3️⃣ Yokyo Drift is an internal tool to support migrations across the organization Pre-commit is an internal tool (now open source) to help standardize the coding practices 4️⃣ AI-powered coding assistance has the potential to further enhance productivity and reduce repetitive work. #developerproductivity #ownership

25

1 Comment

Dan Primack had some pointed criticism for #VC yesterday in his Axios Pro Rata newsletter (a daily must read IMO 😤). In short, the model doesn't work if it can't produce exits for LPs. Don't blame public markets (which are at all-time highs) for the lack of liquidity either. 📈 💸 Instead, this is a "liquidity drought of your making" where "...swinging for the fences on every pitch, rather than taking the single or double that's available" is the only way out when you invest at "sky high valuations." 😰 "A whopping 37% of "unicorns" are being held for at least nine years by VC funds, including 13% that are past the 12-year mark." 😳 ⌛ Is he right? Is VC at a dire inflection point? Or is Primack prematurely hitting the panic button? 🚨 https://lnkd.in/dts92pXr

2

“The vast majority of failure modes are attempting to polish something that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.” Linear has been releasing a cool video series on quality and I think today’s chat with Jeff Weinstein was my favorite. I pulled out snippets, all of which make me question certain aspects of Inari (YC S23), for working on the right problems, interpreting demand signals, and how to identify burning problems. 1️⃣ On whether the problem you’re working on is worth working on: “If there’s a problem that’s big enough that they’re going to block their whole day to solve - that gets me excited. How do we find problems that are big enough that you'd cancel the rest of your day to solve? If you can find one of those problems then it’s worth devoting huge amounts of energy to solving it. This is a Stripe example but imagine lots of people from Switzerland are visiting your site to buy your product and none of them can checkout. Well you might actually cancel the rest of your day. “Oh my goodness, we ran this campaign and we can't accept the money from all these new Swiss customers.” Clear my schedule!" 2️⃣ On interpreting demand signals for your product: “It wasn’t until a year later I realized how much I missed the message. While our app was down, customers weren’t screaming. They weren’t flipping tables over saying we need this service back. We got a couple emails and a text message from a friend that it’s down. One of the strongest moments I should have realized that we weren't solving a burning enough pain was if something is actually critical, the second it’s down, you will drive to the service and bang on the door and say that we need this back up.” 3️⃣ On working with customers directly + identifying problems: “It’s getting in the doc with a customer directly and writing out “hey if we had the API work like X, Y, and Z with these kinds of responses - would that work? And the customer immediately commenting saying “nope it wouldn’t work - I need it exactly like 1, 2, and 3”. This is in comparison to doing 10 months of work, a big product launch, then going to the customer and the customer is kinda scratching their head saying “I wish you had asked me earlier…” “Usually if you’re working on something that’s not burning for that audience, it’s inorganic because the problem isn’t big enough that it’s pulling you. You’re pushing your solution. You’re pitching and it’s exhausting to pitch since it doesn’t feel natural. When I find myself switching to “hey wouldn’t it be great if we did X, Y, and Z” and the customers is like “not really”, I’m like "oh shoot I’m pitching again" when I should just be listening.” “You can usually get a sense of when you’re building something and if it’s going to resonate and solve their problem. It’s little things like how quickly they email you back. When you schedule the meeting for 30 and instead they want it to for 60. They text you late at night with ideas. Or they want to join your team.”

11

1 Comment

Our industry has a reputation for making last-minute changes due to new regulations. Historically, adjustments like adding an unsubscribe button, ensuring texts are sent only to those who opted in, and making sure TCPA text was placed on the offer were straightforward fixes. However, the new 1-to-1 consent ruling is different, and it brings significant challenges that we must address NOW. Here are some topics I believe need to discussed and considered: 𝗥𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗼𝘀𝘁𝘀: Lead generators are already operating on thin margins to meet client KPIs. Any cost increase due to the new regulations could trigger a domino effect across the industry. 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵/𝗗𝗲𝘃 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸: Compliance isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. Significant front-end development and major workflow changes will be required to handle dynamic consent properly. 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗣𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀: Can your systems handle pings, dupe checks, and send back required data points to lead suppliers? These capabilities are crucial for dynamic consent. 𝗨𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘀: Lead contracts and purchase orders need updates to reflect changes in lead pricing, returns, and handling of failed posts. If a lead supplier's post fails, who bears the cost? 𝗧𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴: When and how will you test everything? Identifying what converts best and uncovering unforeseen issues is critical. 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆: What exactly does 1-to-1 consent compliance look like? Is E-SIGN required? Are predictive dialers omitted from the new regulations? We need clear answers -- I am hearing vastly different opinions. CMS is requiring 1-to-1 consent rules for this year’s AEP, and we have until the end of January to align our strategies. Delaying action will lead to chaos and potential lawsuits, jeopardizing Q1. I've spoken with many friends and clients in the industry, and the consensus is clear: the lack of current action is alarming. We need to act NOW, collaborate, and get on the same page. Jennine Rexon is calling for an industry open "online meeting of the minds" in September and this is exactly what we need -- more open communication! I am looking forward to this and any discussions related to these topics. What are your thoughts? Let's talk! #compliance #leadgeneration #fcc #1to1consent #communication #letstalk

51

11 Comments