Doug McCracken

I think this is right Danny; to add true value in an LLM-ubiquitous economy, you have to build products that leverage LLM functionality but go far beyond for (increasinly narrow) use-cases. We are building a highly flexible tech-stack that leverages multiple LLMs (and can easily hot-swap) in a way that demonstrates compelling content now but is componentized for the future.

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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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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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Pie is LIVE in San Francisco. This is not a city that is dumb to new startups. There is e large and growing graveyard of companies and apps that have tried to solve the problem of making friends IRL. Having worked on this for five years, here is why we think Pie is right on time: 1. Our Pie Creator Fund is creating a gig economy of people building IRL communities. Loving people is one thing. Being able to afford the time and treasure to bring them together is another. Apply here: piecreatorfund.com 2. Most Pie plans are free. The internet is littered with paid opportunities to buy tickets. But what if you don't know what to expect? What if you don't know what is worth paying for? Believe in free: getpie.app (and click San Francisco). 3. We have secrets about the future. Not all of them are in our product yet. We hope that you give us a shot and maybe later we can tell you our secrets. Maybe you don't have to figure out who to hang out with, maybe we can do that for you.

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Packed house for #ATSL24 and a great discussion between Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk and our own Ciarán O'Kane of FPC and ExchangeWire. The discussion touched on the lack of VC participation in AdTech (despite being a $1 Trillion addressable market). “Generalist VCs avoided AdTech because it’s complex. They often don’t understand why they’d win or lose”. This summed up exactly why FirstPartyCapital exists. A $1T+ complex sector needs specialists to fund innovation, provide deeper DD, illuminating context, access to networks and relevant portfolio support. Over time we hope this provides a stronger signal to generalist VCs and PEs. Look out for Rich Ashton Jack Tunney Alex Powell Mike Follett Mark Giblin Dan Jones Rafael Michelucci Ed French Shane Shevlin Lumen Research LightBox TV Contxt Media Bedrock Platform Exiber Pixels AI

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Understanding AppLovin In the latest episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I present a long-form analysis of AppLovin's business and its significant recent growth. But understanding AppLovin the company is fundamentally predicated on understanding the market in which it operates, mobile games advertising, and the direct response digital advertising landscape more broadly. And so the podcast is structured in three parts: - Understanding direct response advertising - Understanding mobile gaming advertising - Understanding AppLovin’s growth Link below.

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A not very obvious aspect about fundraising: it's seasonal. From second-half of June to first-half of September: Investors are more in the grab-the-towel-and-flip-flops mindset. From late Nov to early January: You'll find them skiing in St. Moritz/Tahoe. If you're speaking with European investors, those periods get even more acute. Fundraising is about generating a sense of competition. During those dates, they will be focused on closing operations they already had in the pipeline, and less open to kickoff new dealflow. Therefore, it would be harder to generate that sense of competition for you. Keep that in mind for your planning. #entrepreneurship #fundraising #venturecapital #startup

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The State of Game Studio Financing In this week's newsletter I dive into how VC funding for game studios works at each stage (seed, Series A, Series B), what VCs tend to look for, and brainstorm where the markets might be going. Studio financing is particularly hard in this environment because of the J-curve, the amount of capital required to get the game to market, test product-market fit, and return capital. There are also less moats to the software than before, as consumers are rife with great optionality. There's a few common pitfalls to avoid when fundraising that I go into: - Make sure your pitch is ambitious and differentiated - Make sure the team has high product velocity and capacity to ship - Make sure you yourself have deep insights on the space And there's a few ideas I have for solving some of the challenges: - Jumbo seed deals with more dilution - Combo VC / publisher deals - Faster and leaner GTM - Pulling up revenue generation https://lnkd.in/grk_H2pB If you're a game studio founder or investor, I hope this is one POV that's helpful for you as you navigate this environment.

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VENTURE STUDIO’S BUILD AND LAUNCH COMPANIES, DEMANDING A DYNAMIC STAFFING MODEL, AND RIGOROUS PLANNING CYCLE. The Nobody Studios venture studio operates in a way no one’s had the guts to try before. We solve problems creatively, accept risk, and experiment incessantly to drive progress. Our culture is built around testing, learning, and continually evolving in connection with the crowd. This is our engine for creating impactful companies with unprecedented speed and efficiency. The studio consists of a team of proven and experienced entrepreneurs who together drive progress at speed and with conviction. This is where true innovation shines. And the way we scale is to integrate category experts and leaders to carry the torch, always supported by the studio team. Interested in becoming a Nobody? Let's chat! #venturestudio #hiring

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Reflecting on ~ 3 years as founding lead seed investor in Parallel Studios, W4 Games, OpenBB, Cal.com, Inc., Hoppscotch and NocoDB … we invested pre-revenue and pre-product and pre-launch, when the founders were the only employees — today, these startups now serve tens of millions of users, generate tens of millions in ARR and employ < 150 people to create this value from zero when OSS Capital invested at incorporation. It has been so humbling to see these incredible founders tackle very different market segments (gaming, infrastructure, scheduling, APIs, finance and productivity)… out of investing in many dozens of founders over the years, these founders have taught me so much about the power of believing in mission driven motivation — nothing else matters. Serve the mission, be obsessed with your mission and everything else will fall into place. Thank you for believing in me and my mission, Sascha Darius Mojtahedi, Juan Linietsky, Didier Rodrigues Lopes, Peer Richelsen, Bailey Pumfleet, Liyas Thomas, Naveen R. 🙇🏻‍♂️

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"We start with Vellum and end with Vellum." - Max Bryan, VP of Technology and Design at Rentgrata A piece of advice I got from a fellow founder in the early days of Vellum was to understand what people do right before using vellum, and right after using vellum --> and build product to make that whole journey easier. I'm so excited to share that Ben Margolit, Max and their team at Rentgrata built their game changing real estate chatbot Ari using our platform end-to-end. Property management companies can now gain insights into resident satisfaction using Ari instead of having to dig through reams of text. Using Vellum throughout their entire AI development lifecycle - experimentation, evaluation to production monitoring, Rentgrata achieved 100% accuracy, accelerated their development timeline by 50%, and enabled their customers to make data-driven decisions to boost resident happiness. In one powerful example, Rentgrata's insights helped a company avoid a costly $300k window renovation and instead allocate funds more effectively based on the true resident priorities. We're proud to partner with leaders like Max, Ben and the Rentgrata team to bring AI to the proptech industry. Excited to see how Ari continues to revolutionize the renter and property manager experience! Read more about Rentgrata's test-driven journey from prototype to production here: https://lnkd.in/dzcCSA58

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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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To celebrate Cal.com, Inc.'s newest launch on @ProductHunt today, I sat with Peer Richelsen to discuss how building Platform and Atoms is a full-circle moment + more 🚀 In this ep, we covered:  ✊🏻 Open vs. Closed and why OSS will win 💡 The importance of IP in a post-AI world 🔥 How premium products can be built using OSS 🤑 How to approach enterprise sales as a 1x founder 🙏🏼 The impact of Y Combinator on Peer as a founder PS: I'm a tiny investor in Cal.com and a big believer in Peer and the team! If you are into OSS, support the launch here: https://lnkd.in/e_CaE_KQ Links to the ep 👇🏼 🔗 Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eBUv5E9q 🔗 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/epngcvFU ❤️ Sponsor Corner ❤️ Big shoutout to acquire.com for making this episode happen! Acquire is the best online marketplace (I can vouch for this) to buy/sell startups, and I know many founders who have sold their businesses there. If you're looking to wind down your business and cash in some of your founder chips, check them out - https://lnkd.in/gM5VZBFC Andrew Gazdecki and the team are always on the hunt to find ways to help more founders through Acquire 🫡 Lastly, if you are a listener and have been enjoying the episodes, please take a minute to drop your rating on the podcast: https://lnkd.in/eaaw-tJk I appreciate you for giving your attention and time 🙏🏼

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This weeks Mojito newsletter hits--especially these 2 points, which is how we're thinking about Moxies - If Roblox is a sandbox for brands and Gen Z, onchain metaverses enable users to take those personalized brands assets (i.e., avatars) with them, anywhere. - If AI and web3 are key tools for the future of brands, don't build them in a vacuum; cohesively implement them into your tech stack Do any of these resonate with you & what you're building/working on?

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📰🚀 We're super excited to double-down on toddle in a $4.3 million Seed with our friends at PSV, Lifeline Ventures, and fantastic angles including Typeform co-founder David Okuniev. You can read a great overview in TechCrunch, but we love how this team isn't just creating a product, they're creating a new movement around how complex web apps are developed. As Inventure's Kevin Lösch put it, "The barriers to complex app creation are gone, and it empowers individuals, small groups, and large corporations to innovate and compete on a level playing field. It’s a democratization of innovation. It accelerates the pace of technology, unlocks new growth, and fundamentally reshapes who participates in the tech revolution, especially when selling work and not software." Toddle is the best way to bring something new into the world. Sign up today to see what you're missing: https://toddle.dev/

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Been thinking about this a lot recently: the J-curve for gaming investments. Takes more capital and more time to launch a game compared to a consumer app or LLM-wrapper. This is more similar to biotech or hardtech investing but with less moats (no patents, no capex, Tencent/Netease might fast follow you). A few ideas to ease the curve: - Move faster with AI-enabled production (sfx, vfx, code, 2d assets, video) - Bootstrap to more before raising - Earlier liquidity through pre-sales (kickstarter or NFTs) - Go after high-leverage, multiplayer genres - Playtest earlier to get to retention earlier What else?

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A not very obvious aspect about fundraising: it's seasonal. 👇 From second-half of June to first-half of September: Investors are more in the grab-the-towel-and-flip-flops mindset. From late Nov to early January: You'll find them skiing in St. Moritz/Tahoe. If you're speaking with European investors, those periods get even more acute. Fundraising is about generating a sense of competition. During those dates, they will be focused on closing operations they already had in the pipeline, and less open to kickoff new dealflow. Therefore, it would be harder to generate that sense of competition for you. Keep that in mind for your planning. #entrepreneurship #fundraising #venturecapital #startup

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One of the most interesting things to come out of of crypto - where the exchange of rewards is so fluid, and fraud is so rampant - is the creation of systems to define which users are real / not bots, and actually generating value. Airlines, hotels, and coffee shops have been in the loyalty business forever... but not with this kind of global reach or velocity. Everyone is already an influencer - but only some are big enough to get marketing contracts. Crypto is showing that anyone can get paid to help build or grow a product. https://lnkd.in/g_wci5tU

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