Justin Gerrard

In a previous post, I mentioned that #VentureStudios enable their #founders to focus on testing their hypothesis and building and iterating on their product. But how do they do it? Through their #Platform, a game-changing function for ventures that includes: 🖨 Back-Office consists of HR for building talent pipelines, taking care of payroll, and administering benefits; IT to support critical tech infrastructure, including cybersecurity and collaboration tools; Legal helps form entities, navigate complex regulations and compliance issues, and optimize tax position for founders and investors; and Accounting maintains accurate reporting and empowers the ventures with insights into their financial status 💻 Shared Vendors. Bundling services provides ventures access to bulk pricing and cost-effective options for things like computers, cloud storage, and even outsourced professional services (like Legal or Accounting) 🏢 Facilities. Co-working spaces enable convenient collaboration and grant easy access to essential Studio resources, both of which help to foster an exciting culture of innovation 🚀 By providing these services across a portfolio of ventures (and to the Studio itself!), allows the costs to be amortized and avails top-notch support and favorable pricing to startups who would not otherwise have access to so much support so early in their journey.

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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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Some takeaways from my conversation with rebel games investor Bertrand Vernizeau of Game Seer Venture Partners: 1) Chasing billion dollar outcomes in games is incredibly challenging in the absence of a new platform driving massive audience growth. This presents a big challenge for mega funds with hundreds of millions to deploy. Funds writing smaller checks under flexible models that allow for faster payback via royalties with an equity kicker have an inherent advantage in the current market. 2) If the product cannot sell itself, marketing is not going to help. Marketing alone cannot create interest - it can only amplify something that is already there. 3) Traditional channels are mostly dead. From the start of development, you have to figure out how your game going to capture attention in the first five seconds of a TikTok clip, because that’s where a lot of your organic audience is going to come from. 4) Attention can be engineered - attributes such as the anticipation of movement combined with the constant delivery of pleasurable stimuli are powerful hooks to create engagement. 5) Team chemistry and a history of working together trumps individual pedigree: a superstar creator is an unreliable guide of future hit making potential, even more so than in other industries such as film and TV. This is because a lot of what makes a game great is the product of many disparate things coming together, not the singular vision of a designer.

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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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Would you rather have 1M new Instagram followers, or 100K new newsletter subscribers? You would have gotten some good perspectives on that question if you attended the Creator Economy NYC panel this week "Beyond the Feed: Empowering Creators to Own Their Audience". Thanks to panelists Brett Dashevsky, Kaya Yurieff, Jack Appleby and Preeya Goenka 🐝. Some interesting highlights: - Followers is fast becoming a meaningless metric, and are largely subject to the whims of the platforms. - The instability on the social platforms will continue to increase -- especially with AI saturating the space with content. - Capturing data about your audience is key. Offer something free or low cost to give you data points on top of email addresses. - Keep in mind how often and where your audience wants to see your content. You need to justify your invasiveness, and make the relationship a habit. - Focus on making really awesome content on a consistent basis. It is the best way to build and retain a following. - Creators should not use AI to just up the volume of content. Use it to increase the quality of your content, not the quantity. - You have to provide consistent value to get people to pay. Subscription fatigue is real. - Algorithms are not all bad. The further you are from an algorithm the harder your growth will be. Teachable is proud to be able to sponsor these sorts of IRL events that bring creators together. Happy that I happened to be in town from Boston to attend live! Looking forward to future events! #ContentStrategy #CreatorEconomy #AudienceBuilding #AIContent

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I’m excited to share that Motion has raised $30M in Series B funding, led by Inovia Capital with participation from Threshold Ventures as well as our existing investors Headline, Abstract Ventures and Sugar Capital. In recent years, as audience targeting on ad platforms became algorithm-based, growth leaders shifted their focus toward creative. Very quickly, creative became the biggest lever for success in paid social. Terms like “creative is the new targeting” were popularized across the industry and we entered a new era of digital advertising. In a sense, it’s a pivot back to the old-school advertising principles of the David Ogilvy era. Conducting customer research, storytelling, and craftsmanship are all essential once again. But while the principles are timeless, the digital world is a very different environment. The creative strategist is the modern-day Ogilvy. They know how to blend art and science to ship winning ads. They are as creative as they are analytical and they bridge the gap between media buyers and creative teams. They live by data but know how to move beyond the numbers and let creativity run. We believe the creative strategist is the most critical role in performance marketing today and will be even more so in the age of AI. Soon enough, AI will drive the cost of new creative production to near zero. Which means that the most valuable question teams need to answer is: what to create? We raised this capital to accelerate our product roadmap and to build the command center for creative strategists. Motion’s customers are the best-of-the-best in paid social, and creative strategy is at the core of their workflow. Our goal is to build the tools that creative strategists need to succeed their craft. Over the last 12 months, we've doubled our team to 50 people and we've grown ARR by 3x. The Motion team is on 🔥 and we're hiring across the board. We are fully remote and looking for the most talented people anywhere in the world. If that's you, please get in touch with me or Libby Moyer and tell us about your superpowers!!

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Doesn't appear to be anything nefarious here... Founders decide how to finance their business and are responsible for results. However, this does underscore the importance for founders to understand dilution. My article on the subject here: https://lnkd.in/ddWEMDhN

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As we dive into 2024, the Series A fundraising landscape is becoming increasingly daunting. Investment standards are soaring, and fewer startups are making the cut. Series A investors are finding many seed stage companies too premature. The median valuation jump from seed to Series A skyrocketed from $19.5 million in Q1 2022 to $28.7 million in Q1 2024. Investors now demand stronger revenue performance, targeting $2 million to $3 million in ARR, up from $1 million to $2 million. Alarmingly, only 12% of Q1 2022 seed startups secured Series A funding within two years, down from 31.8% in Q1 2020. #venture #earlystage #seedtoseriesa #seed #seriesa #inspireglobalventures https://lnkd.in/gW4bkcNy

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I'm listening to “Meta’s Earnings Call” right now and R&D investment into their Reality Labs division (VR & AR) reached $4.8bn in Q2. This means that despite the naysayers and “Meta’s year of efficiency” Zuckerberg’s investment into our industry has grown by 20% since 2023 and 49% since 2022. Mark Zuckerberg’s conviction is truly historic and it only “ups the ante” for companies like Apple, Sony, and Samsung to continue investing. The headsets that are being built right now are indeed the computing devices of the future. On the call, Mark said himself that the “Quest 3 sales are exceeding expectations” and that “in addition to gaming, people are increasingly taking advantage of the Quest’s capabilities as a general computing platform.“ While Meta pioneers the “platform,” here at Immerse we’ve made it our mission to prove the most compelling use case for VR: language learning. As of this month, our research partners published their 38th study, contributing to our growing body of evidence that learning in Immerse is empirically 3x-4x more effective than on your computer or mobile. With every passing month, I believe VR is the technological wave most poised for disruption. In order for the wave to crash though, it requires cutting-edge hardware to be paired with compelling software use cases that leverage VR’s affordances. When those two come together this wave will be unstoppable.

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Ep. 007 of The Feedback Loop is here! It's the first half of startup pitches from New York Tech Week, and from an almost-all-AI batch of companies. Joining me on this episode: returning fan-favorite, Jenny Fielding of Everywhere Ventures! For those not familiar, every week, a guest venture investor joins me to give granular and unfiltered feedback to founders on their storytelling and their concept. It's all about helping founders construct a better narrative for their move-forward -- because across fundraising, sales, recruiting, and company-building, it's the core narrative and pitch that can often hold startups back. And Jenny currently holds the tenure jacket as my guest co-host, with this being her 4th time on stage delivering quick insights and context you just can't find anywhere else. Massive shout-out to the founders featured: Matt Shenker building MatterMore, Karl White building Wroom, Trista V. building Nunchi, and Jeremy Da building Acrylic! Relevant links below.

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There is no perfect founder archetype. Every VC has a different ideal founder profile, shaped by a combination of their investment philosophy, sector focus, personal experiences, and the unique value they bring to the table. I gravitate towards founders with ✓ Deep technical knowledge ✓ Unwavering obsession with solving their chosen problem ✓ Strong academic backgrounds They might not be the best communicators or marketers, but I've found that these qualities can be learned and improved with the right guidance and support. I'm drawn to founders who possess these qualities because I know firsthand how challenging it can be to build a successful startup without them. While others may prioritize a founder's ability to communicate and sell a vision, I believe these skills can be developed with the right mentorship and resources. Every VC has its founder non-negotiables. We align with profiles that resonate with us because it maximizes our ability to propel them and their startup forward. Investors—what is your ideal founder persona? ―――――――― 💡Join tens of thousands of investors & founders: https://lnkd.in/gJMFHaZF 🎙️ Listen to B2BaCEO: https://lnkd.in/gNipmFNJ ➕ Follow me for more like this Ashu Garg

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𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐨 This past Monday, I had the incredible opportunity to demo and pitch Jammy to over 100 investors at NY #TechWeek AI Demo Day. Two weeks ago, thanks to Cindy Berman, I found out about the event and hesitated to sign up, doubting our product’s readiness. However, I saw it as a chance to push our limits. After a screening with Shriya Nevatia we were one of eight companies chosen, and I had to figure out how to demo our work-in-progress app and deliver an eight-minute pitch. I prepared thoroughly and felt confident. On the day, Dorothy Chang informed me I’d be the first presenter, which made me both nervous and excited. The pitch went well until the live demo. When showcasing Jammy’s ability to recommend post-session music, the integration failed despite my preparation. I still finished the presentation, landing the vision for Jammy and with congratulations and consolation from my peers: “live demos always break,” they said. It helped. Though I didn’t win the $50K prize, I secured a check from an angel investor, generated interest from several others, and met amazing founders in AI. The winning pitch went to the highly deserving CAPSULE, who is set to revolutionize contextual visual shopping search (like Shazam for shopping). Very cool. This experience highlighted the value of taking risks and the importance of failing forward. It also reminded me of the supportive NY Tech and entrepreneurial community. The journey can be lonely, and many dismiss community events and networking as distractions from the "real work." While that might sometimes be true, Monday night was a reminder that we’re not alone in this journey. We all want to see each other succeed in building the - extremely AI-infused - future we envision. On to the next challenge! And definitely check out these amazing companies & founders: Glist, Gülin Yilmaz (Posokhow), Path, Soar.com, Abood Hannoon, DeepLeads.ai, pre.dev, and In The Loop

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If you’re a founder building at the intersection of Games & AI, or just interested in what’s happening at the bleeding edge of the future in Silicon Valley, the new episode of /all chat is worth a listen.👇 Link in comments below. Hot takes from Patron portfolio founders Rick Ling of Rascal Games and Nico Christie of Altera with my partners Brian Cho and Jason Yeh! #games #ai #founders #seedfunding #startups

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I had a wonderful interview with Stephen Dypiangco, MFA, where we discussed Gamebeast's vision for the future of creators and data tools in the Roblox ecosystem. You can check it out here: https://lnkd.in/g-RJGNDS

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Team San Diego! I though you may find this as surprising as I did...we are not alone. Read this quick article from Jon Prentice's (Silicon Valley Bank) interview with with James Newell (Voyager Capital), published in GeekWire on Seattle's innovation ecosystem....they lament the SAME issues as we do in San Diego: * Lack of angel investors, (Especially, it calls out, given the local giant tech co's) * "We need low-conviction check writers." * Lack of "cachet associated with being an angel investor" - We have similar efforts (as described in the article) to drum up angel activity: NuFund Venture Group and, Interlock Capital (read the article and you'll see why the Interlock effort is tops as relates to "paying back into the ecosystem") Connect.org strives to 'connect' innovative companies with investors of all types (angel, VC, PE...) - just see "Innovation Day". Their Springboard program provides another great way for experienced entrepreneurs to give back through mentorship...as for the companies going through Springboard: "Ask for advice, and you often get $$" Your thoughts on the article or San Diego innovation ecosystem? https://lnkd.in/gfwq6mfq

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At most networking events… Business owners shake hands, exchange business cards, and go home. HumanX has a different approach. You’ll be paired together in 1:1 conversations with investors & AI startups. You’re not just adding people to your rolodex. Deals will be made.

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