Kane Hsieh

Let's finally get rid off the "VC alphabet song" and redo the system to become more founder friendly. "The benchmarks set by funding stages are often arbitrary and not necessarily aligned with the actual development needs of individual startups." #vc #venturecapital #founder #fundraising #startups #fundingstages #funding #fundingrounds #pitchbook

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A SAFE and convertible note had a baby and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati was the midwife- out popped the D-SAFE! 👶🏽🎉 A new #climatetech funding instrument was announced by Elemental Excelerator last week. One of the company’s main goals is to support smaller, up and coming companies during the awkward “Scale Gap” phase between #VC funding and natural growth. It’s called the #DSAFE (Development Simple Agreement for Future Equity) and it aims to aid the process by giving companies a small amount of cash to overcome initial risks and expenses during the developmental stages of a product launch or company. How does it work? D-SAFE has a redemption clause meaning companies can choose to have their payments offered as a loan or convert to equity at the investor’s discretion. Funders and companies will have clear communication and expectations about where the money is going and how it will be applied to either the company or the projects at hand. Financiers and companies will work together with more #transparency, and that’s a great boon for #startups and VC alike. As of this month, Elemental has already invested using D-SAFE in eight different companies, including Dimensional Energy and Origen — both companies investing in innovative and out-of-the-box solutions to environmental issues! Seems like a win-win on the surface. What do you all think about the D-SAFE? Alfredo Coppola Momoka Ueda Tim Wagner Stephen D. Torres Olya Irzak Natsuho Toyama Noriya Tarutani Shin Ogawa

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Interesting concept to rename rounds by milestones. But "Series Client Expansion Extension" just doesn't have the same ring to it 😋 . Maybe we can start incorporating it into a descriptor to add context, "Series Seed Extension: client expansion." #startups #venturecapital

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I am beyond excited to unveil Rerail I, which is a labor of love and a vehicle for making my life’s passion a reality. Rerail I, is an angel fund, backed and supported by founders and operators. I invest $200-500k checks at pre-seed/seed into founders looking to utilize fintech as a strategic advantage, with a skew to Europe, but globally! Focused on people & networks I have always been people first. I have cultivated one of the deeper networks of founders and operators in Fintech (& beyond), which become an extension of my team to the founders I back. The power of being collaborative I only realised the power of being collaborative, when I started angel investing back in 2020. I was captured by the transparent, trusted conversations I could have with founders, and the collaboration with the rest of the investors, many of which I have grown up with. I formalized that with the first fund I co-founded, Cocoa, and look forward to amplify that further with Rerail Everything is Fintech  I believe that fintech is a horizontal, not a vertical; the support function of any market. From climate to healthcare and logistics, fintech supports every market. Fintech can also be a revenue model (e.g. vertical SaaS, marketplaces), a target customer, or just a business component. Rerail seeks to invest in founders that can utilize fintech not in fintech companies only With quality talent density at its highest, technological waves like AI, there’s never been a better time to start Rerail. To any entrepreneur out there starting something new where you think Rerail could be a fit, do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected] Can’t wait for the journey ahead 💥 🚀 -> https://rerail.vc -> https://lnkd.in/dn2uSfg7 P.S. A big thank you to Romain Dillet for the awesome TechCrunch coverage!

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What do bio and health applications mean for the next wave of AI -- specifically about compute? (I'm talking to you NVDA longs!) LifeX Ventures is hosting a super roundtable with some serious techbio leaders tomorrow along with Analog Century Management's Val Zlatev -- come hear Thomas Clozel Sean McClain Chetan Patel at 11am ET For the survey results based on asking 100 techbio CTOs and CEOs, join the call. Here, my own speculations after wrapping up the report: -- Amazon needs to have a GPU program on warp drive right now -- Nvidia needs to have a data center / cloud business in the works -- Edge AI chips are about to be everywhere -- in your watch, car, sneakers, thermostats, gene sequencers, spectroscopes -- All this compute needs way more data: expect a boom in sensors of all types -- Remember human genome moonshot that sequenced one person once? Now you can sequence your every cell one by one. Expect that for protein folding (AlphaFold was that moonshot) and other simulation uses, a full "twin" model of you, cell by cell -- Google has no angle here -- worse chips, worse cloud, worse models, worse phones / edge devices -- Specialty silicon for unique use-cases, lower-power, lower-memory are surely coming fast - like back in the day for mobile phones when Qualcomm, Broadcomm, Infineon, Mediatek, etc duked it out.

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Go Gaurav Sharma and Capitalize! If you have a 401k from a previously employer, check out Capitalize.

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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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I’m excited to share this one! Redactive has raised a $11.5M seed round -- their mission is to become the trusted GenAI engineer for enterprise teams. Blackbird co-led this round alongside Felicis with participation from Atlassian Ventures and Zapier. Andrew, Alexander and Lucas are working to solve an urgent problem hidden in plain sight – empowering GenAI applications to meet their promise of "magic" in an enterprise setting. GenAI applications are only as useful as the data that they have access to, and for most enterprises, the most valuable data is sensitive and permissioned. We all want a chatbot (“ChatGPT for…”) at work that can search the data that we share in private Slack conversations or store in private folders on Sharepoint but first, we need to trust that our data will be kept safe – from prying eyes and accidental disclosure to others in the organisation who should not see it. Redactive keeps your sensitive data safe, giving developers the trust to connect it to GenAI applications and build products that you will love. Here's to the next decade. https://lnkd.in/gPuEAFvW

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DayOne cohort #6 is shaping up. 5 teams already committed to participate 🚀 From agriculture to biotech to platform build outs. The founders look 👍🏼&💪🏽 We have interviews scheduled for this week, so if you are thinking of applying, act quickly! Anyone out there that knows of founders that are starting their journey, please also reach out to #genesisventures 👊🏼 It's never too late and the application is simple. 💡Revamping the structure to have even more hands-on and face to face. Applications Close-October 6th,2024. 6th Cohort Begins-November 4th,2024 #dayone #startup #greektech #founders

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RethinkX's recent publication on The Rise of Human Robots and The Future of Work is quite interesting. Tony Seba and his team including Adam Dorr and Bradd Libby, do an excellent job dissecting the emerging humanoid robot technology market. Here's a brief summary, with a more in-depth summary from Cern Basher, CFA, an expert on the future financial impacts of humanoid robots, linked in the comments below: The rise of humanoid robots is poised to disrupt human labor across industries, much like how automobiles disrupted horses. This convergence of technologies creating a "labor engine" will enable robots to eventually perform virtually any task better and cheaper than humans. Initially, robots will complement human workers by taking on simpler tasks. However, their capabilities will rapidly improve until they can do almost anything humans can by the 2040s. This disruption represents both a massive opportunity and challenge for society. As the marginal cost of robotic labor approaches zero, we can expect sweeping deflationary pressures and quality improvements across the economy. Labor supply will explode, uncoupled from population growth, giving nations with robust robotics industries a strategic advantage. While creating prosperity, this transition will destabilize conventional economics and the social contract around work. Thoughtful policymaking will be critical to avoid catastrophic unemployment or stifling innovation through misguided protectionism. Ultimately, humanoid robotics could lead to superabundance and liberation from labor. But achieving this will require rethinking economics, embracing the disruption responsibly, and prioritizing policies that protect people over obsolete jobs and industries. https://lnkd.in/gjNDVQe4 #humanoids #robotics #futurefrontier

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Our revamped newsletter, The Angle by Angular Ventures, officially launched today! We hope this new format will make it easier to read, share, and subscribe. Back to it, in this week's column, Gil Dibner covered the spirit of risk-taking that inspired Angular to venture into unusual spaces. While, of course, we invest in AI and SaaS, as of late, we have been investing in more and more contrarian spaces - from quantum, to spacetech, to energy, etc. in search of the supposedly impossible - the truly contrarian. Read the full column via the link.

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I was having a chat with my colleagues the other day about our portfolio (we've got a pretty diverse founder group - it's something we actively monitor and are proud of) and general founder dermographics across VC backed companies. One big discussion point that came about - entirely organically with 'tech bros' as an inspiration - was regarding the age of founders across our portfolio (again, we have a great mix) and more generally across lifesciences/healthcare and tech and whether there was a difference in how well they were performing and their success. So.....me being me....I thought i'd do a bit of reading. As an FYI, this topic came up several year ago pre-COVID (I recall a Wharton report as particularly stand-out-ish) and from memory, the general consensus was that 35 - 45 year olds tended to 'perform' better as entrepreneurs. Has it changed over recent times, especially given the COVID driven digital switch? Here's a snippet of what I found (there are unsurprisingly quite a lot of articles...): 👉 A comprehensive study from FounderJar found that a 40-year-old founder is 2.1 times more likely to succeed than a 25-year-old, with the average age of successful founders at 41.5 years. Even more impressive, the average age of those who exit with an IPO or acquisition is 46.5. You can check out the full article here: https://lnkd.in/eGc_3MRB 👉 Business Initiative reports that 50-year-old entrepreneurs are nearly twice as likely to succeed compared to 30-year-olds, apparently due to their experience, financial stability, and developed networks. More on this here: https://lnkd.in/eGawmZmi 👉 And finally, The article from The Conversation challenges the common belief that young people are the most radical innovators, revealing that individuals over 50 are often the more transformative entrepreneurs. The research highlighted in the article indicates that older entrepreneurs possess greater experience, industry knowledge, and networks, which allow them to take a more innovative approach to problem-solving. Link: https://lnkd.in/erjpWRWD Thoughts welcome... #Entrepreneurship #StartupSuccess #ExperienceMatters #AgeIsJustANumber #EarlyStageInvesting

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🔥 Thrilled to see Hydrolix crushing it with a $35M Series B! 🔥 Data is the new oil, but too much gets discarded due to prohibitive storage costs. Hydrolix cracks this with its streaming #datalake platform that leverages object storage, decoupled compute, indexing, & compression. As Marty Kagan puts it: 'We’re cheaper than cold storage and faster than hot storage' Hydrolix’s streaming data lake platform is a game-changer for #AI, #observability, & #security workloads. 💥 Real-time query performance at terabyte scale 💰75%+ savings on log mgmt & 4x more data retained  ☁️ Stateless & containerized for seamless scaling with Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, Google Cloud GCS, Microsoft Azure Blob 💡 Had the early conviction (first investor) that data is key to unlocking AI & enterprise workloads. It's proving right. Huge thanks to Marty Kagan Hasan Alayli for letting me early on their journey to build an impessive company 🙏 Super pumped to have awesome Aaron Perman at S3 Ventures leading this round along with other strong existing investors - Nava Ventures (Manish Patel) Wing Venture Capital (Peter Wagner) Oregon Venture Fund (Matt Compton Scott Grout) and others 💪 Onwards! 🚀🚀🚀 #cloud #data #ai #ml #llm #largelanguagemodels #analytics #security #loganalytics #datalake #datawarehouse https://lnkd.in/g5i6afP5

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Venture studio vs accelerator vs incubator vs… I always get confused by the differences and never find it completely obvious the offerings of each of these entities when visiting company websites. And I know many others out there are confused as well… so I just had to share this awesome breakdown. Setting up partnerships with venture studios (and the other entities mentioned here) is something I’m trying to do with dovetail biopartners. Intimately understanding the value of data, what can be done with it, and how to make smart, insight driven decisions to de-risk as much as possible is a big part of what we do. If this intrigues you, let’s chat. 🧠🤝 (One day, maybe a VS will be a separate arm of the company!)

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Super helpful article and accompanying doc with a #Startup #Equity Calculator to determine the equity for early hires, thanks to Pear VC head of talent Matt Birnbaum! Thanks for sharing Pejman Nozad! 🙏🏼 You can read more here How to structure startup equity for early hires: https://lnkd.in/ggmpT5-Y Google Doc: https://lnkd.in/gjsvths6

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Lesson for first time founders. "As much as they want to be your friends, the fund comes first (as it should)." As hard as it sounds the VC business evolves around a fight for survival first and being friends as a distant second. #openvc #investmentmanagers #assetmanagers #fundmanagers #venturecapital #assetallocation #limitedpartners #returnoninvestment #pitchdeck #fundraising #vc #vcrelationships

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WE DID IT! After 2 years of pushing through the biggest downturn in VC in decades, Matthew Stotts 🌐 and I made it to the finish line with Fund I! We couldn't have done this without One Small Planet (Will Peterffy and Jack Wielebinski 🙏), Regen Network and Regen Foundation (Austin Wade Smith Gregory Landua and Will Szal), and a dozen other family offices and angels who believed that we can build a nature-positive economy utilizing our eye for software and our history as founders from day 1 A shout out goes to all of our founders (only four announced today, but watch this space - there are multitudes!) who trusted us enough to give us a spot on their cap table for this 10-15 year journey. This is the best job in the world, and it's because we get to work with people like you who have weird ideas in the best possible way. Using Bitcoin as anchor base load to decarbonize residential housing in America's most expensive energy market? Make every complex supply chain legible to machines so we can find and eliminate deforestation in commodity supply chains? Build deeply liquid environmental asset markets to price ecosystem services, on a blockchain, that no one needs to know is a blockchain? I'm so excited to get to work on this stuff for the next 10-15 years minimum, and to see what we can accelerate with our tiny fund in the next 5-6 years as we approach 2030 Onward! https://lnkd.in/gy3B-DFe

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Here are the Top 10 SaaS funding rounds of the past week (Seed to A) Starting at number 1... 🥇 Emergence, $97.2mm Seed 🤯 Emergence is developing an AI "agent-based" system that automates tasks typically performed by knowledge workers. Founded by Satya Nitta. 💸 Investors: Learn 🔗 https://bit.ly/3XSitTA 🟠🟠🟠 🥈 Formic, $27.4mm Series A Formic enables manufacturers to scale faster by making it easy to deploy robotic automations, like packing and palletizing. Founded by Misa Ilkhechi and Saman Farid. 💸 Investors: Blackhorn Ventures, FJ Labs, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/3XGzEYr 🟠🟠🟠 🥉 normai, $27mm Series A Norm Ai is automating compliance processes, making them more efficient, cost-effective, and accurate via (you guessed it) AI. Founded by John Nay. 💸 Investors: Coatue, Bain Capital Ventures, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/4ckpNft 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 4. ORA, $20mm Series A Ora is a blockchain project incorporating AI into dapps. Founded by Kartin Wong. 💸 Investors: Polychain Labs, HF0, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/3zpW7Ph 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 5. Payabli, $20mm Series A Payabli builds the infrastructure that allows companies, specifically software companies, to embed and facilitate payments through APIs. Founded by Joseph Elias Phillips and William Corbera. 💸 Investors: QED Investors, Bling Capital, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/4bwkGHE 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 6. Sift, $17.5mm Series A Sift develops tools to accelerate the development and ensure the reliability of complex machines (think Spacecrafts). Founded by Austin Spiegel and Karthik Gollapudi. 💸 Investors: GV (Google Ventures) 🔗 https://bit.ly/3L7zlyk 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 7. Ario, $16mm Seed Ario is an AI-powered assistant for parents that helps with daily tasks, from meal planning to scheduling playdates. Founded by Sumit Agarwal. 💸 Investors: Wing Venture Capital, Floodgate, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/4eEjeG9 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 8. MagicSchool AI, $15mm Series A MagicSchool provides lesson-planning solutions for teachers to fight burnout. Founded by Adeel Khan. 💸 Investors: Bain Capital Ventures, Adobe Ventures and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/3RQt5Pn 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 9. AuthZed, $12mm Series A Authzed makes it easier for developers to build permissions in their applications. Founded by Jacob Moshenko and Jimmy Zelinskie. 💸 Investors: General Catalyst, Work-Bench, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/4bqkh9B 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 10. SLUSHY.com, $10.2mm Seed SLUSHY is a creator monetization platform. Founded by David Gross and Fred Sprivock. 💸 Investors: Mantis Venture Capital, Jon Oringer, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/4eN9Boi ⚫⚫⚫ I'm Gyan, Head of Community at Venture House. I create tools, guides, and other free resources for Junior VCs and founders. If you found this helpful, check out the Venture House website for more 👇 https://venturehouse.xyz/ #startups #venturecapital #funding #saas

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Learn a bit more about our DNA and how we operate at Acurio Ventures from Kate Cornell

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