Linda Tong

Rolling into another day of the Primary Summit. Hit me up if we should connect onsite. Kudos to the Primary Ventures team so far, as yesterday’s Pre-Seed Summit was on point. Mar Hershenson, Benjamin Sun, Chris Douvos, Zach Weinberg, and Graham Pingree all dropping helpful nuggets for fund managers. Some paraphrased highlights: - Chris Douvos (AHOY Capital) - Most fund decks are terrible. Start with your people (not your strategy) and know you have about 6 slides of his attention. - Zach Weinberg (Curie.Bio ) - beleives SF’s AI talent is a significant advantage over NY, wouldn’t build AI in NY. Also questions if VC exits can keep up with VC expansion (generally hilarious and smart Twitter follow) - Mar Hershenson (Pear VC) - VC is so much more competitive now. It’s not enough to be an ex-founder with a great network and domain expertise. Have a better “why you are different” or do something else! - Benjamin Sun (Primary Venture Partners)- still sees arbitrage in going long NY venture (vs. SF). Do the work to keep various influential networking nodes aware of what you’re doing and how you think.

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Looking forward to discussing how changing demographics and culture norms are affecting investment opportunities in longevity, health and well-being at The Care Summit today Alongside Cake Ventures' Monique Woodard, Ziegler's Dan Hermann, Oak HC/FT's Billy Deitch and JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s Jennifer Edwards, we’ll dive into the trends shaping how we are investing in the space: - Last year marked one of the most significant social and economic moments in modern times: The number of older adults—those aged 50 and over- surpassed the number of children under the age of 15 for the first time. - In 2020 the 50 plus population contributed $45 trillion to global GDP, or 34% of the total. That equates to about 3x the revenue of the world’s 100 highest- earning companies in 2020. - The U.S. population grew by 24.5 million from 2010 to 2022, and Hispanics accounted for 53% of this increase – a greater share than any other racial or ethnic group. - Women around the world and across all ages drive 64% of consumer spending

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Hey folks, I think you might be aware that what we're building at DeepCast includes a podcast discovery and exploration platform for listeners at www.deepcast.fm. We also recently unveiled www.deepcast.pro -- a promotions, marketing, and monetization platform for podcasters (and folks like networks and agencies who support them). "You make the shows, let us help you with what comes after." Shows claimed and processed via DeepCast Pro are also published for listener consumption on DeepCast. High value all around! If you're a podcaster, claim your show at www.deepcast.pro to get started. Free speaker-labeled transcripts for all your episodes as well as generated insights for each (key takeaways, quotes, topic & keyword sets, summaries, and more) plus many more features—and growing daily! We're shipping fast over here! (Thanks to Rachel Perez Hosna Qasmei Kim Burgaard Benjamin Moon Rachel Magana Hari Ramachandran!)

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Last week I locked up Privy's Engineering and Design teams in a barn near Cape Cod. (Don't worry, they're free now). It was all in the name of our first In-person Hack Week—a week where we pause all regular work to focus on experimentation and learning with one rule: Learn something worth sharing every day. This time it was all about AI. So I got the coffee brewing and a full kegerator and they dove in. Our biggest learning? While AI makes hard things easy, it also makes basic tasks surprisingly difficult. If you've ever tried generating an image with specific text, you know what I mean. But you can't truly grasp these limitations until you've tested the tech yourself. Hence, hack week. When someone discovers something interesting, they can instantly grab 3 other team members, get around a laptop, and build it. Here's what else we've learned: → Daily demos were great for breaking down product visions into bite-sized projects. Details reveal themselves as you build. Typically, your assumptions from the morning are thrown out by lunchtime. → It’s hard to see how companies without an “AI Native” approach will survive, given the exponential productivity gains internally and for customers. Fittingly, we were just a mile from New Bedford—the 19th-century whaling capital, known as the “city that lit the world”—a reminder that nothing lasts forever. But this is less about new tech and more of a history lesson. Most companies talk about AI, but few have truly “burned the boats” and are going all-in. And I admire that courage—it reminds me of the courage of the whaling expedition sailors! It’s easier to go all-in on AI when there’s not a foundation to change. That’s why over 80% of the last Y Combinator batch described themselves as “AI companies.” But what if you’re more like New Bedford, built on a world where you were the only option? Enter kerosene. Invented in the 1850s, thanks to a perfect storm of events like the massive railroad expansion, it became the preferred choice for lighting cities and towns. What if kerosene followed the same path as AI Today? Kerosene was introduced and within 2 years, it was 98% cheaper and exponentially more powerful. That’s exactly what’s happening with AI. Taking a week off with your Engineering team might seem costly, but isn’t taking a week off to think, reflect, and tinker, the least expensive initiative on your roadmap today? Do you not think AI will play a 10x or 100x larger role in the coming years? And aren’t those “AI First” YC companies likely your competition soon? AI is having its Cambrian explosion moment. As with every hype cycle, there will be a peak of inflated expectations and a trough of disillusionment. But the last thing I want is to sit on the sidelines and miss the journey. I want to get deep in the details, because the better we understand both the power and limitations of AI, the more we can delight our merchants.

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If anyone is in North County San Diego, on Thursday May 2nd, we will be hosting a tech entrepreneur and investor meet up at 5:30pm. We’ll have a couple speakers, one of which is a fin-tech start-up raising a round, followed up by a presentation on the state of the stock & crypto market. We host these events quarterly and usually get a lot of founders and investors to attend. If anyone is interested, please message me and I can send you the details. LaunchPad San Diego #startups #startupincubator #entrepreneur #investing #crypto #meetup

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Shout-out to founders. Shout-out to the teams and individuals that commit to and push founder-led businesses forward. Building something meaningful is hard. Sometimes you have to play a role that does not come naturally because that’s what the business requires at the moment in time. Other times you have to make decisions that come with uncertainty and the best you can do is just figure it out…quickly. We’ve built RevBoss for 10 years, but we are in the process of re-building it for the 3rd time because that is what is required of us to deliver value to our clients. Will it be hard? Yes. Will it come with a bunch of bumps and bruises? Yes.   Will everything be okay at the end of the day? Absolutely. RevBoss exists to grow B2B founder-led businesses. I’m gearing up to talk with Adam Robinson, CEO of a founder-led business, RB2B, who also is in the business of helping B2B businesses grow. Join us on Aug 13th as we’ll be chatting about growth at founder-led companies and how to build a growth engine that works: https://lnkd.in/eVyJQjpC PS - excited to share our RevBoss journey more publicly, so feel free to follow along if you're interested.

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Downturn? What downturn? Innovation is on a tear! Check out the impressive 175% growth of the Stealth Startup employees over the last two years (you know who you are 🤫 ).

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Thinking about expanding your startup internationally? Join me and Grant Evans at Stripe for our online event on October 10, 9:00 a.m.–9:30 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m.–12:30 p.m. ET to hear how Rippling and other startups are navigating global growth! Topics to include (1) signals that could indicate timing is now, (2) the Rippling "second mover advantage" in SaaS markets and how that impacted the global strategy, (3) R&D spend and when to pursue the really hard/complex international product roadmap, and (4) what NOT to do when launching an international office! Here's a peak at my answer for #4: A. Isolate the international office, in terms of strategy, hiring and connectivity back to the mothership.  B. Tell the office to do things on their own: hire your own leader to run things and figure out that market basically alone, don’t bother us (at HQ) with too many requests/questions. C. If you want you can copy/paste our playbooks for your market. Just know we want fast results with little room for flexibility. D. Oh yeah, lastly, we aren't going to seed your office with any culture carriers, you are going to build culture all on your own. ^^^ We did the opposite of all these things. 😊 🚀 🌍 Register here: https://lnkd.in/gX-QSgDY

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If you're a SaaS, CPG, or e-commerce business collecting revenue in every state you need to worry about sales taxes now 😫 . Every state has slightly different rules too! I just made an investment in the space to solve this problem, read below 👇 I'm excited to announce a new investment that's targeting that problem. Zamp is announcing it's series A, they work with over 400 companies already (a mix of CPG, SaaS and E-commerce). If you're looking for a solution to the complicated situation of collecting sales taxes for your business, look no further.

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👉 Building up a new podcast is *already* been an enlightening experience. Have had a chance to chat with some amazing folks, got some incredible feedback, and have a ton of ideas for how this series will proceed. I will say, the most exciting part of my recent podcast, "Building Products with Generative AI", is that there is a narrative that is building throughout each episode. I'm not going to reveal what that is just yet, but if you watch each episode, you'll start to notice a solid pattern!

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Very excited to introduce PMF Method Retreat, our new 4-day intensive experience for super early B2B founders. When we shared our framework for finding product-market fit and opened up applications for PMF Method this spring, we were blown away by the response. After getting thousands of applications for just a handful of spots and bringing together a spectacular group of technical founders (coming from companies like Stripe, Vanta and Retool), we started to think about how to make the next cohort even better. We heard from many founders who were eager to join but couldn't commit to a months-long experience — or make the temporary move out to San Francisco — so we’re experimenting with the format. Same tactical sessions. Same targeted, hands-on support from Todd Jackson and the entire team. Still doesn't cost you any equity. But you don’t have to be SF-based for this one, and it’s refactored into a 4-day retreat that accelerates your progress — while quickly getting you back to building. If you're just getting started exploring a B2B opportunity, please don't overthink it, just apply. Deadline is 9/23, but the earlier the better.

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Employee terminations: they're a topic no one wants to discuss but that every company has to navigate. Thankfully, Melanie Naranjo and wonderful Ethena advisor (& Gusto's former People Leader) Jess Yuen are tackling this tricky topic for the next Ethena webinar. Register if you want to learn more about these topics: How to pressure test whether or not termination is the right course of action Best practices for communicating termination decisions How to minimize risk and choose the best course of action when things get tricky Critical pitfalls to avoid

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Work at a natural pace. In Cal Newport's new book "Slow Productivity" he walks through 3 components to accomplishment without burnout. 1. Do fewer things 2. Work at a natural pace  3. Obsess over quality Working at a natural pace is an area I'm focused on as I transition to whatever is next in my career. Most of my career's natural pace was driven by anxiety, coffee, HIIT workouts and more caffeine - which I'm pretty sure isn't what he means. In my late 40's though, that just doesn't work anymore. Nor do I want it to. It's a tricky philosophy though because if you're in the startup world I don't know how you build something meaningful and work at a natural pace. I've never seen it happen. It appears this is a philosophy that needs to be applied to a specific time and place vs. everyone, everywhere. Anway, I don't have the answers, I'm just exploring different questions. What I do know is working at a natural place seems to be more appropriate for where I am today. 

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We use Circle for our community at Exit Five, and Matthew Carnevale has become a Circle power user (he runs our community). They did this awesome write about how to grow a community with insights from Matt and Exit Five sprinkled in. • How to use your community as an audience growth multiplier • 5 systematic community growth strategies • Why you should treat your community like a product, and • Best practices for growing your community https://lnkd.in/e9vs32NQ

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Yesterday, my team at Vareto announced the first-ever multiplayer modeling platform for Finance. 😍 Now that I can finally speak publicly about what we've been working on, the first thing I want to share is a screenshot from a live multiplayer session we did internally at the company. One of the interesting things about building enterprise software as a startup is that we're still too small to *need* our own product. So instead of doing what our customers do--expense budgeting, headcount planning, etc.--we use Vareto's multiplayer modeling to forecast fun things like total pet spend. Yep, that's right. We had 40 people go into a Vareto model and enter in bottom-up inputs for how much they expect to spend on their cats and dogs this year. 😂 While this isn't very useful--especially since many people entered in clearly exaggerated numbers--sessions like this helped prove that our new 2.0 platform can handle even "extreme" usage situations. (In reality, even if some enterprise customers have thousands of users in Vareto, only a handful are ever likely to be in the same model page at the same exact time given granular data permissions.) You can see more useful, realistic ways that finance and business teams can use Vareto multiplayer here: https://lnkd.in/gV9gqKwz

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Pioneer Square Labs is hiring a New Ventures Lead. It's one of the best roles in Seattle and you should ping me if you're interested. PSL is a magical place. In 2 years I had the pleasure of supporting unbelievable CEOs while they turned nascent, fragile ideas into the next class of How-Did-This-Not-Exist-Before companies. To name drop: Scott Case at Recurrent, Devin Miller/Bassam Saliba at SecureSave, Clara Siegel at Dance Church and Cris Eugster/Michael Leggett at Ever.green. In a word, this is role for people who love building momentum, from laughably minute wins (someone clicked on our site!) to bet-the-company decisions (fundraising/business modeling/management team hiring). Not a role for someone who wants to be a aloof advisor. It's a chance to be a do-er for several startup management teams in a short span. Also, you'll work with T. A. McCann, Julie Sandler, Greg Gottesman, Geoff Entress, David Zager, Palvi Mehta (et. al) which is, in a word, gold.

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Episode 038 of The Feedback Loop! Back at it with guest venture investor Ihar Mahaniok of Geek Ventures, helping me ask the right questions and deliver excellent feedback to a batch of ambitious early stage founders. Shout out to ya, Ihar! And we get to hear from Ammon Brown building an AI-powered personal/professional CRM, Marc H. Weiner building an AI-powered logging + observability platform, and Josh Casares building an AI-powered benefits broker. It's AI all the way down, baby! Go founders, go!

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Did you know that 68% of small businesses report having cash flow problems, and many small businesses rely on the owner's personal funds to stay afloat? Relay exists to solve this and the best part is it's actually working! Which makes this announcement even sweeter: We raised a USD $32.2 million Series B round. What does this mean? - More spend management tools to improve financial visibility - More products to give small business owners flexibility - More integrations to streamline operations - And ultimately more businesses making better and smarter financial decisions Exciting times ahead! PS We're hiring: https://lnkd.in/gMT2mN25

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