Jacqueline Barrett

One of the things we see quite often at Grit Capital Partners, is a newly minted CEO. We see a big difference in the transition to CEO based upon the historical lane the CEO is coming from. There are different new muscles if you are coming from Product, Engineering, Finance, etc. In this article, we go deep on the CRO to CEO transition, which includes some thoughts from Rosie O'Meara, a particularly fine example of someone who has made the transition quite well. What were your biggest transition moments? https://lnkd.in/eEB-K2ZU

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Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

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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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Big announcement below! 👇 Let's talk about the current state of GP-LP affairs: 🤯Emerging VC managers have absolutely exploded over the past 5 years. 📈 At the same time, more and more data has surfaced that shows that emerging VC firms tend to outperform larger, established firms. 🤔 All of this has made it intriguing but tough for LPs to know where to direct their attention. 🛍 GPs frequently meet LPs at conferences who are window shopping but not committed to the asset class or emerging managers. 🧾 And both crews get overwhelmed by transactional convos. So Sydney Paige Thomas and I created Abundance. Abundance is a private, nomination-based retreat for active LPs and top emerging GPs to form new experiences together and build lasting relationships. Why Abundance? Abundance is knowing that there is more than enough for more than one to succeed. And a single win within a community is a win for the community itself. The journey of an emerging VC manager from 1st close to final close or Fund 1 to Fund 2 is (1) communal and (2) requires an abundant mindset. LPs look for structure and confidence to feel comfortable investing in early VC firms. Yet many of the feeds we scroll and conferences we attend reinforce inherent power dynamics and transactional thinking, which allows scarcity mindset to creep in for emerging GPs. Some of the best events I’ve attended have been intentionally non-transactional, e.g. Camp Hustle, Recast Summit, and other GPs’ AGMs. The fundraising success stories we see usually involve a community (usually of other GPs & LPs) coming together to support and open doors for the emerging GP. We designed Abundance to be an immersive gathering that fosters these connections. Starting tonight, ~100 GPs and LPs are descending upon Seattle for the inaugural Abundance retreat. This has been under wraps for months and I can’t wait to see it come to life! Thanks in advance to our awesome sponsors who were the earliest believers in this vision: Sydecar, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Gunderson Dettmer, & Zelda Ventures. And shoutout to my dad Ed Illig for logo design & Halle Kaplan-Allen being the first sponsor to say yes 🤩 Presented by The Council Capital & Symphonic Capital.

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Thanks for another informative post, Daniel. Urgent Action Needed: Please add your your name to this letter before 5pm ET Today! 🔗https://lnkd.in/grrzAeWG With the dramatic decline in funding to Black founders and outright racist-sexist attacks on Black women funders in the recent Supreme Court Fearless Fund decision, I join you in urging signature of The Center for American Entrepreneurship & Engine | Advocacy & Foundation’s letter urging US Congress to pass: The Community Development Investment Tax Credit Act to boost investment in Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs). "The legislation would create a new tax credit for private sector investors that make equity or equity equivalent investments in, or that provide long-term patient capital (i.e., loans with a minimum term of at least 10 years) to CDFIs." Expanding American Entrepreneurship Act: "The legislation would raise the cap on funds organized under a 2018 sub-category of section 3(c)(1) of the Investment Company Act of 1940 from $10 million to $50 million, and double the number of permitted investors from 250 to 500. Together, these changes will enable emerging fundmanagers to raise larger funds." Time to move from being shell shocked to concerted community action that truly advances equitable capital access for all US Americans. Black Philanthropy Month The WISE Fund

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Impactful Biz, Ops & Investment Roles at Early Startups & VCs: • Chief of Staff to Ex. Head of Product at Google • Founding GTM at the most YC product used by other YC companies in the past four years • Chief of Staff to a Partner at a Top-Tier VC Fund • Head of Platform of a NY State Backed Accelerator • Investment Associate at a Seed Stage Fund Investing in Category-Defining Companies • Partner at a Defense-Focused VC Fund • Chief Revenue Officer of a New Space Company in El Segundo • Venture Capital Analyst at a fund investing in overlooked geographies • Investment Associate at a Spirit-Focused Fund • Strategy & Ops Lead at a Company Focused on Helping Improve Autism • Senior Product Manager at a Company Focused on Building Shopify for Content Creators • Program Manager for a Space Security Company • Open-ended Investment Position at a Top-Tier Accelerator • Biz & Ops Lead for One of the Most Loved Digital Consumer Products 💸 All companies are well-funded and backed by top-tier investors. ⬇ You can find links to the roles above, plus many more, in the comments.

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Annual Planning Sucks as Jiaona Zhang (JZ) and squad of CXOs captured in the article from First Round Capital. That's why CandorIQ to help make it suck less: 🙏 Drive collab between #CHRO #COO #CFOs 🔠 Bake in your company strategy & pay philosophies 📊 See operational, financial & people metrics in one place

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At Asset Class we’re working with Palantir Technologies and Salesforce to combine Agentic solutions with deep learning Co-Pilot solutions to meet the emerging need for AI enablement in the Alternatives / Private Capital Space. The key when evaluating what to AI enable is clearly to avoid AI enablement of tasks or activities that benefit little, or may even be made more cumbersome or time consuming with AI. Right now we are working through every single job / task that takes place (and many that don’t) inside the walls of #VentureCapital #PrivateEquity #CRE #PrivateCredit and determining where the real value of AI enablement lies. We’re excited to bring the first wave of AI to our clients and will share some exciting announcements soon!

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In the past, I've talked about re-founders: leaders who understand and value the foundational elements of the organization they didn't start but now lead, and who keep the mission and culture on track. Like founders, they seek new risks to reap new rewards for the organization, versus settle for incremental gains. Part of being a re-founder is bringing on an executive team with the same mentality. Today, Sean White, the CEO of Inflection AI, has brought on Vibhu Mittal as CTO, Ted Shelton as COO and Ian McCarthy as CPO. With a re-founder like Sean at the helm—and Vibhu, Ted and Ian joining him—I am as confident in Inflection AI as ever in its quest to find powerful and new ways to embed emotional AI in business bots. More on all this below: https://lnkd.in/gG6sn-NX

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We sat in a 30-minute senior product strategy review, discussing plans, metrics, and projections—but not once did anyone mention our customers. Shashi looked over at me and whispered, "There’s more work to be done." I was Shashi's Chief of Staff at Google and I was partnering with him on an ambitious program to transform the culture of a multi-thousand person team to be truly customer-centric. In all large & wildly successful corporations, efforts to drive up efficiency are justly rewarded. But the focus on efficiency can introduce distance between the employees building the products and their customers. Customers are real people with messy, complicated and sometimes contradictory needs. Shashi understood that and never shied away from it. Great leaders have a way of making the complex simple. They anchor their teams with clear, memorable ideas that can be shared and celebrated. The best part? A real change in culture will outlast any leader’s tenure. Congratulations on an incredible run at Google and thanks for the many lessons Shashi!

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Apply now to get a coveted spot for the Venture Lane B2B Pitch Night Event! 🚀 🥇 On November 19th, Venture Lane | Startup Hub is hosting our exclusive Pitch Night 👉 - a rare opportunity for Boston's B2B tech founders to tune their pitch and get in front of awesome mentors, investors, and industry leaders. ⏰ Apply by November 1st to secure your spot! 📲 Find the application link in the comments below. #B2BTech #Startups #Fundraising #BostonStartups #PitchNight #VentureLaneStudio

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Looks like the job market may be on the upswing (based on anecdotal info I'm getting from my product leader network). 🤞 Yesterday, one of the VP product leaders in my network shared with me that he had 2 competing job offers and accepted the offer with a PE-backed company that had better business fundamentals (stronger margins, customer retention, unit economics) but less sexy on the surface than the unicorn VC-backed company with an all-star team (based on unicorn logos) that raised a bunch during peak-ZIRP but had to go through rounds of layoffs with eroding morale. Would you have made the same decision that my friend did choosing the less sexy business with stronger business fundamentals? (Why or why not? Discuss!) I also shared with him the blog post that I had written about Unit Economics when I was in venture capital and he encouraged me to share this more broadly. The link to the post which is now on Substack is in the comments. 👇 ----------------------------------------- Also, this is a good time to share that I've moved all my past writing (previously on Medium, etc) to my new "Beyond Leadership" Substack. I'll be sharing more long-form blog posts here from time to time. I'll be writing about leadership and what's beyond leadership, culture-building, startup life, fractional life, building a dream career, networking & community building and more. Please do subscribe if interested: https://lnkd.in/geApUfD2

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Since early 2021, VC quarterly exit values have plummeted to $50B or below, a stark contrast to the six consecutive quarters of $100B+ exits before then. With IPOs dwindling and M&A activity slow, the future of venture industry exits appears uncertain. Will we see a surge in private venture-backed company acquisitions? This could be a crucial and innovative strategy to boost VC exits. Increased private acquisitions might offer a much-needed lifeline, providing a creative solution to the current exit drought in the venture capital market. #venturecapital #inspireglobalventures

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Just read SignalFire's 'State of Talent' report after listening to Heather Doshay's interview with Kelli Dragovich and Nolan Church on their podcast(links in comment). The report is super interesting and confirms two things I'm seeing firsthand: ➡ The NYC Tech scene is growing like crazy. This year it feels like every week is Tech Week. ➡ Building your AI strategy around hiring AI experts isn't going to fly. The talent pool for AI experts is tiny and concentrated in companies working on AI models, not applications. What we see with startups building their AI features using Outropy: ➡ Most companies can't find engineers with AI experience. ➡ Finding someone with AI ⦿and⦿ product engineering experience is almost impossible. ➡ The few with a dedicated AI expert team have more demand for AI features than the team can execute—millions of incremental revenue are waiting for AI teams to have time to look at them. ⦿The only way you will make AI development work for application-layer startups is to enable your product teams to build AI features without blockers.⦿ Obviously, I'd love to talk about how Outropy can help (phil at outropy dot ai), but if you are in this situation and absolutely must build and operate the complexity of AI pipelines in-house, my suggestion is to rethink the role of your AI team. You need to shape them as a platform/enabler team and not have them build features. This obviously brings a whole set of issues, including how hard it is to manage products for platform teams and ensure that their backlog is driven by product/business roadmap rather than just technical improvements. There's some good literature on this from Manuel Pais (Team Topologies) 🇺🇦 🇵🇸' work on Team Topologies; I can't recommend it enough—I make their book mandatory for all managers/directors working with me.

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Women's access to financial products that *they* want is central to some work that we have been doing over the last two years. One step in this direction was to continually reach out to and engage with the network of people and organisations who're curious about and/or working in this space because we didn't want to reinvent the wheel as well as help others avoid that too. So (in addition to a whole host of things), we started a newsletter series and continue to publish one every 3-4 months or so. Trisha Ghoshal drives this in her usual gentle giant ways. Today, this newsletter reaches more than 800 people. It is opened by 2 in 5 people against the industry standard of 2 in 10. While the current gender gap in the access to and adoption of financial services is massive, I am stoked knowing that folks out there are thinking about women's financial inclusion. If you are building women centric financial products or want to partner in this pursuit, let's chat.

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📈 It's not 100% clear where the economy is headed, but given how busy this summer has been for Cervin Ventures and other investors I talk to, there is momentum building in early-stage B2B tech (and yes, beyond just the AI app companies). Read more about the state of the market in Cervin's Q2 recap -- as well as some recent updates from portfolio companies such as Catch+Release, LaunchDarkly and Anvilogic.

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Not all of the investments that Kindred Capital VC makes can be a 13 year sourcing process.... but... this is one of those very fortunate moments in which a relationship that started over a decade ago in the Bay Area where the brilliant A-H. Hleileh and I overlapped has now turned into an incredibly exciting opportunity for Kindred to lead his and Ron Holifield's first institutional round at Civic Marketplace. We believe: 1. Local government procurement is one of the most underserved areas in technology today, and has failed to keep pace with the private sector. They deserve better. 2. This is a huge opportunity, with US local governments spending alone amounting to over $1.5 trillion in annual spend, which is only going in one direction... 3. As the brilliant Kip Harkness shared with me in our diligence phase, "this industry moves at the speed of trust." And this is a unique founding team with A-H. Hleileh and Ron Holifield at the helm who bring together two critical ingredients: 1) decades of trust-building within this domain, and 2) a team who can build beautiful and scalable technology platforms. Onwards!! 🚀

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When selecting the variable that an #earnout or contingent seller note ought to be based on, I regularly encourage #searchers to optimize around the variable that they find to be most worrisome in their investment thesis: For (an obvious) example: If your primary concern is whether the company can hit it's revenue growth targets, base any form of contingent consideration on future revenue growth. If your primary concern however is customer concentration, you can create a 3-year earn-out that will be paid in 3 equal annual instalments, so long as the dollar amount of revenue from [Largest Customer XYZ] does not dip below its value in the most recent fiscal year. If your primary concern is customer churn, base your contingent consideration on gross logo retention staying above an agreed upon target. If your primary concern is rising input costs, base your contingent consideration around gross profit or gross margin Though this likely sounds very obvious (I hope that it does), most #searchers nonetheless still base their contingent consideration only on revenue or EBITDA because that's what they've seen others do. What these folks might fail to realize is that in structuring earn-outs or contingent seller notes, you're limited only by your imagination and what is reasonably acceptable to both parties. So don't be afraid to flex those creative muscles. More on earn-outs below, for those who may be interested: https://lnkd.in/gZZw9-Zh

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