Izra Izrailov

💼 Ready to take your startup to the next level? Explore our extensive list of 220 #VCfirms in New York! Get all the details you need to connect with potential investors. Dive in: https://lnkd.in/d_mb-2n9 #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #managementconsulting

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🎨 📺 Sharon Roth is a Product & Design leader who’s built her career in the lab, across different modalities, to bring more creative product experiences to life 📺 🎨 It's W3 / Q3 / 2024 and this week in our MGMT Boston up & coming operator series we’ve got Sharon who serves as the Senior Director of Product Management at Quantified.ai, the AI-driven flight simulator for sellers. The app feels as real as your next video call, scales across teams, programs, and companies, and ramps reps 42% faster. Sharon is leading Quantified AI’s Product & Design team after previous roles in Product leadership at Tamr & Honor Education. She’s excited to be back working in an Enterprise focused company, leading Design alongside Product, focused on strategic & execution based discipline. ❓Questions Are Your Roadmap ❓ It’s popular to encourage new hires to ask a lot of questions. But it’s always a good time to ask questions! When a member of your team comes to you and says “we really need to build X feature”, they’re coming to you for good reason. Dig into the why to understand how often the issue comes up, when it happens in a customer conversation, and why they’re asking for it in the first place. Is there an even better way to build a solution? Also, people are always excited about getting to a solution. By delaying the solution discussion to first get everyone to agree on the problem, you can coordinate a better response. Sharon has been in rooms where stakeholders can’t agree on the problem they’re trying to solve, which can sometimes be even more painful! By asking better questions and articulating the underlying issues thoroughly, they can work together as an organization to chart a better path forward. 3 Career Insights / Learnings 🙋‍♀️ Seek New Challenges - “Trying new things is how you learn and grow. At a startup, there are so many opportunities to try new things. As startups evolve, you need to embrace all that’s going to happen and make it a positive thing. Otherwise don’t go to a startup!” 🤝 Act with Integrity - “Do your best, show your work. But also treat others with respect and kindness while doing it. How you treat people and how you show up every day will impact your work environment. You’re responsible for the energy you bring to the room, so be authentic and try to inject some positivity. It will help you build the type of network you want to have too” 🗣 Invest in Communication Skills - “It helps you ask questions well, advocate for yourself, have your ideas be heard. It also helps others understand your impact. It takes continuous practice to do well.” If you’d like to learn more about Sharon’s career, the full post is linked in the comments. Go ahead and sign up for the newsletter to see the operator learnings we bring you in the weeks ahead too, will ya? #bostontech #operators

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In my 4+ years in the dYdX ecosystem, I’ve consistently admired the team's ability to innovate on emerging technologies and scale billion+ (and in one case, trillion+) dollar products—while strategically sunsetting old versions to focus on 10x larger opportunities. Solo - L1 Spot & Margin Trading: https://lnkd.in/e36dudcx L1 Perps: https://lnkd.in/eUUQPQrt V3 - L2 Perps: https://lnkd.in/eWudVbW7 “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”—and this requires a strong product vision and technical prowess to embrace tech that improves exponentially. The dYdX Chain, launched 1 year ago, has already generated $250B in volume, $50M in USDC protocol fees distributed to stakers and validators, and onboarded 20K traders. Still not the biggest exchange yet, but it's getting there. And if anything, it's a major step toward achieving the goal of democratizing access to financial opportunities. dYdX Unlimited launched this week which unlocked the next stage of growth with Instant Market Listings, Megavault, an affiliate program, and much more. All code is fully open-sourced and run by 60 independent validators, running the network in a permissionless manner.

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This San Franciscan has landed in the Big Apple for #NYTechWeek! Here’s why it was important to me to be out here this week and I view NYC as a sister city. ((scroll down for 2 events The Council is hosting today!)) 🏭🏥 Reminder: The Council Fund invests at Pre-seed in Software’s Third Act, the transformation of the essential economy. Our investments span healthcare and industrial sectors like manufacturing, logistics, construction. 🐂 I’m eternally bullish on NY & SF and hate how many pit the two cities against each other. The reality is that a lot of capital and talent flow back and forth between the cities. They need each other to thrive! 🗽🌁 Cities like NY & SF attract young and mid-career talent because of their population density, transient nature, beauty, and reputations as cities where someone new on the scene can make a name for themselves. For the areas we invest in, I’m *specifically* excited about NY because of: 🏗️ Closer proximity to industrial hubs which are scattered across the Midwest / Rust Belt 🏛️ Closer proximity to DC where a lot of regulation around VC, startups, healthcare, onshoring initiatives, and industrial sectors takes place 💰 Many of the large financial institutions that are backing hard tech focused funds and major healthcare initiatives are also headquartered here in NYC 🎯 We’ve got several startups here who are hitting it out of the park, like Dirac and Siena. This has further validated my belief in this ecosystem to support young companies! Today we are kicking off with 2 events on Day 1 of #NYTechWeek 👉 AI Demo Day: The Council, Next Wave NYC, Lynx Collective, Flybridge will host 8 founders and 200+ investors and founders for a pitch competition this evening! Luma: https://lnkd.in/gbdYiJMw 🔜 Can still join the waitlist! Small & Big VCs in Hard Tech: The Council joined General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Iron Prairie Ventures, AlleyCorp, House Of Ventures, Steel Atlas for 2 back to back panels on industrial innovation & collaboration across the capital stack Luma: https://lnkd.in/gj6D4-Au ⏰ Event has passed

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From branding to remote work, discover how a $18B founder navigates growth, culture, and operations for sustained success 👇 Logan Bartlett (Managing Director at Redpoint) interviews Vlad Tenev (Co-Founder at Robinhood) to provide valuable insights on branding, culture, operations, and maintaining a long-term perspective in “Ep 105: Vlad Tenev (CEO, Robinhood): The Meme Stock Crisis, The Future of Crypto, and AI Opportunities in Finance”. Check out the key insights in the attached presentation 👇 ───── 👉 Follow me, Alexander Small, for tactics and strategies for building startups from industry-leading Founders, Operators and Investors

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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!!

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#SiliconValley Venture Capital Contacts. Explore a robust list of 200+ VC firms and 1,800+ professionals (partners and principals), complete with 1,500 email addresses for your outreach needs. https://payhip.com/b/eUIyc #startup #startups #vc #venturecapital #investmentbanking #privateequity #managementconsulting #b2b #founders #entrepreneurs

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Sharing some insights/trends we are seeing in the first half of 2024: - The majority of startups HQ’d in NYC & SF founded in the last two years are hiring most if not all of their employees in the office (at least 3 days a week) - Less than 5% of those are mandating 5 days a week in office. - Most top candidates are optimizing for hybrid with remote up to 3 days a week - Compensation across the board for early-stage startups has remained relatively flat since 2023 - For startups located outside of core major tech hubs, there is more openness and even preference for remote to tap into broader markets and compete for top talent The overview is that local talent and teams are making a comeback and salaries are not rising as drastically as they have in the past 5 years. Make sure to choose your next move based on fit, impact, passion, upside, growth, and not purely on comp. #startups #venture #VC #seed #Engineering #Hiring

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Ezra Klein opens his podcast, with AI Expert, Ethan Mollick, with an all too relatable preamble: “I consistently sort of wander up to the A.I., ask it a question, find myself somewhat impressed or unimpressed at the answer. But it doesn’t stick for me. And I think that failure matters. I think getting good at working with A.I. is going to be an important skill in the next few years.” In the next hour, Klein and Mollick go back and forth with some of the most insightful and practical AI guidance I’ve heard.  For example: Ethan Mollick: "A.I. is built like a tool. It’s software…But because of how it’s built, because of how it’s constructed, it is much more like working with a person than working with a tool. In fact, there’s some early evidence that programmers are the worst people at using A.I. because it doesn’t work like software. It doesn’t do the things you would expect a tool to do. Tools shouldn’t occasionally give you the wrong answer, shouldn’t give you different answers every time, shouldn’t insult you or try to convince you they love you. And I find that teachers, managers, even parents, editors, are often better at using these systems, because they’re used to treating this as a person.” See comments below for some of my other favorite sound bites. I definitely encourage everyone to listen. https://lnkd.in/gjmHCEvq

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It’s time to share what Luis Costa Laveron and I have been up to -- too many exciting things happening not too. The last three months have been a roller coaster ride going through Techstars NYC. We’ve gotten the chance to meet and work alongside some incredible founders and mentors of the Techstars network. To our MD, KJ Singh, thanks for taking a chance on us and always challenging us to do more. To Christine Lu Hong, thanks for always being there to support us. And to the team (Samuel Navon Vera Benkoil Jonathan David Grace Jolas) thanks for your hard work in making these last 3 months possible. Some highlights: - We got to meet and work with a group of 24 highly driven and inspiring people in the heart of New York City - We went through a big pivot, from serving Latin American businesses to serving e-commerce merchants in the US - We launched our new product and landing page - We’re live with design partners generating a combined monthly GMV of $2,122,330. We are in a very interesting point in time where we are at the edge of a change in how people interact with the internet. Up until now, websites have been static. In contrast, social media feeds are hyper-personalized – no two are the same. At the same time, we are witnessing a dramatic shift towards mobile commerce. On average, 65% of shoppers visiting our design partners’ stores are on mobile. This trend makes sense when you realize that most e-commerce traffic is driven by paid media (Meta and TikTok), where users are primarily on their phones. Combining the shift to mobile commerce and advancements in AI, we see the exciting opportunity to enable e-commerce sites to create a mobile first personalized shopping experience for each shopper that visits their site. Why should every shopper’s e-commerce experience be the same when no two Instagram / TikTok feeds are? If you want to see a demo, grab coffee or catch up, feel free to reach out, always down to connect. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to build. A shoutout to the best mentors/advisors: Dane Atkinson Manoj Jonna Lalit Kapoor Erica Ruzhinsky Rafael Barroso Bobby Lincoln Albara H. And the best group of founders: Ahmed El Naggar Mai El Naggar Jason Kulatunga Jeewan Singh Juan Areces AadilMehdi Sanchawala Ayman Talkani Isha Sharma Tej Lunani Matt Sink Sydney Bennett Nael Cavazos Sadiq E. Arum-Jugu Galadima Mimi Gendreau Kigawa Varun Annadi Hector Terrero Silas Adedoyin

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this is amazing news for the entire ecosystem - Y Combinator might be the most significant and successful capital allocator in the world. It's a bold move that should come as no surprise, and creates that much more competitiveness in #preseed VC. . With how successful VC accelerated startups raise in the era of AI, it's no surprise that YC can raise a $2 billion fund. if ~1.5% of startups reach unicorn valuations in AI, and if they own and approx. average of 2.5% of diluted equity for each of these companies, they could on paper be able to return tail-end 10 companies each year with a 75-125X RoI. Their current intake is 400 startups 2x a year batch, and they’ll spread it across 4 batches and increase throughput 25% to 1000 startups each year. They will need to deploy $500 million a year to fund solely the initial $500,000 check to their startups. For such ambitious capital deployment, they could develop a well-oiled strategy to sell secondaries in the meat of their startups. They'll need well-executed secondaries pipeline to liquidate, even assisting the series B & C investment rounds in facilitating equity liquidity. Could be value moving up the chain for investors and #startups in the pie, if the role of Y Combinator financing ratchets up their presence across the ecosystem, network of strong companies participating in their seed-round raising springboards at stable seed valuations in the $15 million Post Money range, which is probably the healthiest valuation for many practical entrepreneurs in their trajectories. It's all a bit bubblish, but it's never been more democratized to create such tech, innovation, and value across all products and markets.

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👉 Howdy LinkedIn! Tomorrow, on "Building Products with Generative AI" - I will be hosting 🚘 Nitin Kartik at 11:30AM CST/12:30 PM EST! We're going to be digging into the intersection of Product Marketing & Generative AI, as well as other topics that will branch from Nitin's experience in the space. I'm excited for another interesting episode with a great thought leader in the space - we hope to see you join for tomorrow's episode! #GenerativeAI #AI #ProductMarketing

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Thrilled to announce our team at Andreessen Horowitz is leading the Series A in HappyRobot! (CC Olivia Moore, Seema Amble) Happyrobot is reinventing communication for logistics - starting with AI phone agents that can handle load updates, check calls, negotiations, and more. Freight is a massive market, which today runs on calls, faxes, and emails. AI can handle this back-and-forth at much lower cost than humans and with 24/7 uptime, enabling brokers and carriers to pick up every call. This unlocks better margins, and frees up employee time to build deeper relationships. Over the last year, Happyrobot has completed more than 1M calls for some of the largest players in freight. Customers use Happyrobot to trigger custom workflows during and after each call, connected to their data systems...and, even transfer to a live human if needed. The last gen of freight software cos got it wrong by trying to disrupt the broker. We (+ the HappyRobot team!) believe brokers are the experts, and the right approach is empowering them. We're excited to partner with logistics leaders on this round - including Ryder System, Inc. Ventures, Andrew Berberick, Tobenna Arodiogbu, Jin Shieh, Jett McCandless, Dan Lewis, and George Ezenna - and work with angel investors Carles Reina, Bram Sugarman, Christopher Coleman, Nicholas Hinrichsen, Andrew Berman, and Gokul Rajaram. We're joining Y Combinator and @Array Ventures who led Happyrobot's seed round. We couldn't be more excited to work with co-founders Pablo Palafox, Javi Palafox, and Luis Paarup as they build software to solve big problems for freight. They're growing quickly - and hiring engineers! Read more about the company and our investment here: https://lnkd.in/g4ZdHnGb

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Summary: J2 Ventures, a firm led by U.S. military veterans, has raised a $150 million second fund to invest in startups whose products serve both civilians and the U.S. Department of Defense. The firm focuses on companies with technologies that benefit the health and well-being of military personnel. Key takeaways: J2's latest fund is more than double their debut fund, despite the struggles of many other emerging VC firms to raise second funds. The firm does not position itself as a defense tech investor and instead focuses on technologies that support the health and well-being of military personnel, historically adopted by the Department of Defense before civilians. J2's investments include healthcare, cybersecurity, and advanced computing startups, and its limited partners include JPMorgan and New Mexico State Investment Council. Counter arguments: Some may argue that J2's focus on companies serving both civilians and the Department of Defense could create conflicts of interest, as the two groups may have different priorities and needs. Some may view J2's investments in healthcare as too narrow of a focus, limiting potential growth opportunities in other industries.

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Explore our #NewYork VC contact list, featuring 220+ venture capital firms, over 1,600 VC professionals (including partners and principals), and 1,350 email addresses. Link to purchase https://payhip.com/b/DwY7F #startup #startups #vc #venturecapital #investmentbanking #privateequity #managementconsulting #b2b #founders #entrepreneurs

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Btw, one more thing this week… As you probably have heard by now, we’ve raised $130 million in a mix of primary and secondary funding, increasing our valuation to $3 billion. A short story on how this round came to happen: By the end of 2023, we were receiving strong interest from investors about fundraising, but we were deflecting those conversations since we had a solid cash position and were quickly moving towards profitability. This meant that we had no immediate need for the cash, as it would be sitting in the bank without being invested or spent. Around the same time, given the current economic environment, we started thinking about providing some liquidity to our team, enabling them to sell some of their Sword shares. This was especially important considering the high interest rate environment and the day-to-day challenges resulting from it. So, we decided to redirect those investor conversations from Sword fundraising to brokering a deal between new and existing investors and the team members who wanted to sell their shares. This resulted in a $100 million transaction where hundreds of Sword team members were able to benefit from this opportunity. Since we set this secondary round at $100 million and it was oversubscribed (i.e., there was more investor interest than we could accommodate), we decided to leverage that interest and raise a small primary round just to update our 2021 valuation to a higher, and honestly more credible, 2024 valuation. Of course, all of this seems simple and straightforward, but as anyone who has done even a single fundraising round knows, there are countless minor and major details to manage to get this done. All in all, this is a great outcome for our team. A direct result of their incredible work, dedication, and talent. Still only 5% done though.

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Instacart is a market leader when it comes to leveraging AI tools to boost productivity at work. I had an amazing conversation with JJ Zhuang, Instacart’s Chief Architect, who has shepherded over 50 AI-driven initiatives to market across the org. We explored what catapulted Instacart to the forefront of AI integration, supporting radically diverse use cases across various functional areas. One striking insight (echoed by Ethan Mollick and others elsewhere) is that you often don't need specialized tools for specialized work. Frontier models like GPT-4 can seamlessly adapt to a wide range of functions and use cases. They're not just for engineers; they're incredibly versatile tools used by marketing, comms, and legal teams. From generating code to proofreading and ideation, GPT-4 empowers every department to leverage AI for enhanced productivity and innovation. By integrating LLM’s like GPT-4 into their workflows, teams can streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and unlock bandwidth for new creative possibilities. How can you harness the power of AI in your own work to boost productivity? Share your thoughts below 👇 Want to hear more insights from JJ? Check out the full podcast episode by clicking the link in the comments.

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