Jordan Pasternak

Big things on the horizon, we are motivated and blessed to be at the dawn of a new age for the internet. Read more about our journey below or listen to the podcast: https://lnkd.in/eJeNhvVa

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NY friends! Please come see me at Tech Day on my panel discussing the future of the NY tech ecosystem and what I hope to bring to it!

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⛳ Emerging fund managers pulse check. PitchBook tracks over 10,000 funds that are raising money, with 45% being emerging fund managers (defined as firms with less than 3 funds). Despite a dip in available capital—down to 16% from the pre-pandemic 23%—these managers are finding creative ways to stay competitive, like partnering with larger firms. 💼 Joanna Drake (founder turned investor) shared how "wildly different" it is raising a fund versus for a startup. One key datapoint she shared on the fund side was how little feedback you get along the way (and the years you can wait for it). The “long-winded and challenging process to raise capital” inspired Drake and Ben Black to create RAISE Global, a community for emerging fund managers and the “forward-thinking LPs” who back them. (A decade later, several hundred emerging managers with AUM under $200m are on the platform) They've found the newest emerging managers are more diverse and geographically dispersed than Silicon valley, and more were able to crack the ceiling and raise larger $100m funds (although this is still a small % of the market, requiring partnership with larger funds at the late stage). ▶ And not a hugely surprising datapoint: A lot of action is in the sub $49 million range, where roughly 50% of emerging managers are raising. Theresa Sorrentino Hajer, Head of U.S. venture capital research at Cambridge Associates warns that past success isn't actually a strong indicator on it's own to assess emerging managers. We've had a valuation reset. And newer managers with investments during the 2019-2021 "party days", need to build relevant track record and play to their strengths. A lot of emerging managers are specializing (70% who applied for Raise had a thematic focus), and betting on getting in as early as possible in the startup's lifecycle (Raise: 31% at accelerator/ pre-seed stages, and 47% at seed stage). “Emerging managers have to compete on a different dimension,” Nick Moran from New Stack Ventures. You're no longer just dealing with capital. Emerging VC's need to be as innovative and nimble as the startups they invest in, having a unique thesis and insights. They also play a role at the top of the deal-flow funnel: helping larger firms find promising companies, so finding a thesis, sector or philosophy aligned partner at a larger firm is helpful. Onwards! #EmergingManager #Startups #VC

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Trigger warning. UK founders to VCs: "you (generally) suck". I was taken aback by the intensity of comments made during an exit fireside chat organised by our friends at ARGO, Jeff and Aneesh. Room full of founders, we're talking about the importance of starting exit planning very early (say 3 years+ prior to exit) and the message is: "I would never feel comfortable bringing this topic up to my board, I just would not trust them to handle any of it well". Ensued a discussion about Tier II board vs. Tier III boards, how much VC boards suck, how VC's just do not know how to interact with founders and how a number of key topics are best actively avoided. Nods across the room. The Tier I Board, the kind of place where you could actually bring up strategic topics like, you know, "who might actually want to buy us some day and how do we start building the right kind of relationships today" seemed to be a sort of faraway land, as if sitting with the Knights of the Round Table or the Jedi High Council would actually be easier to achieve. Damn. So we can say all we want about founder-friendly blah blah but if this is still the prevalent reality for UK and European founders, what the heck are we doing and when do we start the topic of "being a great board member" seriously? We need to collectively get out shit together and start training investors to be better board members.

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Wonderful article about Emily Knight and the whole The Engine Accelerator team on the amazing work their doing changing the world with #ToughTech!

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Updated overview of a few of our active searches @ Coastal Recruiting All opportunities are full-time with Seed, Series A, or Series B VC backed companies - looking for those that want to build and scale. NY Ops: - Head of ML - Seed (Raising Series A) - Massive growth $2m arr -> $10m arr this year - 1st ML hire - ton of autonomy - Gen AI - $250k(flex) + strong equity - 3x full-stack - Series A (a16z) - HealthTech - $1m arr -> $4m arr this year - $180k - $220k + strong equity - Incredible founders - meaningful work - BE (Data + MLops) - Seed - "Deploying AI to eliminate the trillion dollar waste in healthcare admin work" - $200k - $250k + strong equity - Early engineer - bootstrapped Prop trading firm - $10m profit year 1 - $400k+ TC - Early Engineer - Seed (OpenAI backed) - $200k + strong equity - AI Infra SF Ops: - AI Eng/ Infra/ Platform / BE / Fullstack - Hiring across the board - Series A (Sequoia) - $200k - $300k + equity - AI for Eng - Incredible team and founders - Sr. FS - Series A - Web3 - $200k + equity - Team/Founders w/ previous exits - Product Lead - Series B ($60m) - Gen AI - $220k+ Strong equity LA Ops: - Sr. FS - Seed (raising series A) - AI - Core team of startup veterans - $200k+ equity - Beautiful office in Venice Beach Remote: - Principal Eng - Series A - AI Security - $250k - $300k + equity - AI BE - Seed/Series A (Open AI backed) - AI Productivity - $200k+ equity If interested in learning more - shoot me a message here or feel free to reach out to anyone you are connected with at Coastal. 🌊

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A great The Angel Nest Podcast episode recorded yesterday with Thomas Wisniewski of newark venture partners! Really insightful conversation around trends in Seed stage investing, how metrics matter in communicating traction, and important aspects of financial modeling for early stage startups. Many thanks for your time Tom and thanks David Hemenway as always for hosting. Look out for the release of the episode soon! #angelinvesting #seedstage #startups #financialmodeling #venturecapital #startups

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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!

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Appreciative of Tim De Chant's article on Crosscut Ventures' evolution. We've (Rick Smith and Brett Brewer) been building #SoCalTech for 16+ years and have naturally been drawn to the techno-manufacturing revolution of #ElSegundo driving innovation in #FrontierTech. Portfolio companies like Umbra, Aalo Atomics, Proteus Space, Carbon Ridge, Airloom Energy and many others yet to be announced have the potential to transform energy, advanced manufacturing, space and defense to push global decarbonization, secure America's borders and drive the continued commercialization of space. https://lnkd.in/gmy-Srgn #longLA #DeepTech #ClimateTech #SocalTech #Hawthorne #ElSegundo #Torrance #venturecapital #nuclearenergy #aerospace #defense #advancedmanufacturing

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Congratulations to Roland Reynolds and the team at Industry Ventures on the raise of its latest $900M hybrid fund (split three ways, 40% backing VC funds, 40% directly investing in promising Series B startups from their existing partnerships, and 20% acquiring stakes in emerging investment firms from other LPs looking to exit). Read more from Marina Temkin, CFA at TechCrunch below. #VC #venturecapital #fundraising #startups #investing #news #technews #startupnews

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Are you thinking of dipping your toes into the world for of investment? The Investor Track at Startup Boston Week is created for folks who are thinking of: 🔹 Becoming an angel investor 🔹 Landing a role at a VC firm 🔹 Starting a corporate venture arm September 9th - 13th, you'll dive into content that breaks down: ✨How to navigate capital sourcing ✨Strategies for investment ✨Evaluating startups ✨What investor due diligence looks like ✨Corporate venture 101 ✨Balancing traditional and ESG investment strategies ✨Impact investing Learn more about the content that Anum Valliani is creating at #SBW2024 right here: https://lnkd.in/ePZnin3N #startups #Boston #investor

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Excited to share that my article, Defending Your Pro-Rata Rights: How VCs and Angels Can Monetize Growth Rounds and Avoid Leaving Millions on the Table, has been posted by Last Money In Media. Big thanks to Zachary Ginsburg and Alex Pattis (Calm Ventures) for partnering on this piece and allowing me to breakdown how early investors can maximize their positions in high-growth companies. Whether it’s syndication, raising opportunity funds, or partnering with growth funds, there are so many strategies to defend your pro-rata rights and capitalize on your winners. Shoutout to my team at Alpha Partners for pushing forward this conversation and highlighting how we help investors realize more upside. If you have access to growth rounds and want to capture additional upside on your best deals, shoot me a note! https://lnkd.in/ebQXPKx5 #venturecapital #proratarights #growthinvesting #vcinsights

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DeepCast shipped a number of really cool new features recently in advance of a broad outreach push to podcast listeners. One new feature is our new Daily DeepDigest tool that sends you a concise daily email including any new episodes from the trailing 24 hours from any podcasts you Subscribe to (on DeepCast). Think daily podcast cliff notes or podcast news ticker tape, with a hint of Morning Brew various brews or PitchBook News—it's increasing information throughput when you're pressed for time. And this feature is rapidly evolving to distill other key extractions from shows you're already interested in, but also exposing you to other shows you might be unfamiliar with that also have nuggets to share—and thus increasing your aperture yet still conscious of your time. Want to go deeper on any given episode? Click the episode detail and you're off to an episode on DeepCast, where you can subsequently read a longer form distillation of that episode or go straight to the source and listen to the episode. (And podcaster friends, these pages are definitely increasing indexing and thus Google entry points to your shows!) I'm loving this feature as a user, personally. Can't wait to see what others think! #BuildingInPublic #Podcasts #AllTheWorldsInformation #HowYouWantIt

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🚀 Calling all fundraising Boston Metro B2B tech startups! 🚀 Are you currently fundraising and ready to pitch in front of Boston's top angel investors and early-stage fund managers? On November 19th, Venture Lane | Startup Hub is hosting our exclusive Pitch Night 👉 - a rare opportunity for Boston Metro’s early-stage B2B tech founders to present their investor pitch live and connect directly with key decision-makers in the local investment community. We’re on a mission to showcase the next wave of standout B2B tech companies from Boston. If you're ready to elevate your fundraising efforts and make meaningful connections, don't miss this opportunity. ⏰ Apply by October 22nd to secure your spot! 📲 Find the application link in the comments below. #B2BTech #Startups #Fundraising #BostonStartups #PitchNight #VentureLaneStudio

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