Mike Xu

I’m thrilled to be announcing that Notion Capital is leading the $15m Series A investment in Cogna today. In the industry, we like to think that software has been eating the world. But when you look at the data a better description would be more of a nibble. Depending on what source you look at the software industry represents between 5-8% of global GDP. Contrast that with the services industry that represents between 60-70% of GDP and worth around $25 trillion on a global basis. Most services have been out of reach for the software industry. They have either been too complex or too specialized for off the shelf software to access in any economically viable way. But that’s beginnning to change with GenAI leading to the emergence of ‘service as a software.’ Cogna is at the forefront of this opportunity - building precision software at scale and delivering huge productivity gains for traditional industries. We know Ben Peters & Lars Mennen well having backed their previous company Five AI that was acquired by Bosch in 2022. And we’re very excited to be backing them again together with Hoxton Ventures & Chalfen Ventures Read my full blog post on why we invested here. Radu Bozga Ben Peters Lars Mennen Bryan G. Mike Chalfen Hussein Kanji Kirsten Connell https://lnkd.in/eh8mhcJb

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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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Ever since we launched SHAKTI, every quarter we write a letter to our LPs = Each letter includes an update on the portfolios, the GP's (our) view on the zeitgeist, an interview with a portfolio CEO and an interview with a TITAN = So far, we have 16 such letters = it's been on our "to do" list to share these publicly (i am lazy) = then Google comes along to save lazy people like me (thank you NotebookLLM) = here's a 10 min podcast summarizing our journey since Dec/2020 with the 16 LP letters as source = if you wanted to know what we are about, this is a pretty good place to start = https://lnkd.in/db7K2TrT cc SHAKTI

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Insightful breakdown from my great Partner Omri Amirav-Drory on the simple factors that really separate the top 1% of investors from the rest, and how more operators should become investors! https://lnkd.in/gEiZdT2h

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This week the San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Standard both featured stories about the turnaround at OpenTable. For anyone who enjoys going to the hottest restaurants, you know that OpenTable hasn't been relevant for a long time now. Upstarts like Resy, previously Reserve, and Tock cherry-picked all of the best restaurants in each city. If a restaurant was on OpenTable, it meant that they weren't good enough to make it on one of those other discerning platforms. A Michelin-star chef wouldn't be caught dead using OpenTable. But that has changed. Because of the dynamic leadership of Debby Soo, Amy Wei and Susan Lee, a trio of Asian American C-suite female executives, OpenTable is finally relevant again after a decade of obsolescence in the food scene. Through initiatives like the OpenTable Icons and partnerships with Visa to create the Visa Dining Collection, their team has enticed the hottest restaurants to reconsider. When I go to book a reservation at the hottest restaurants in San Francisco like Saison or State Bird Provisions or Four Kings (the hottest table in SF), I have to book with OpenTable. If you know these women like I do, you've seen them hustling and traveling all around the country non-stop to meet with these top chefs and build the trust required to win them over. I was tired just seeing Debby's travel schedule and itinerary, even running into her at JFK one morning and having an impromptu breakfast with her. These women were relentless in their pursuit of making OpenTable THE destination for dining and it is paying off. They are generating shareholder value for Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG). The work is not done yet, but clearly I'm not the only one who has noticed the shift, and I'm glad that the media is recognizing them for their efforts. Congrats to these three hard-working women for moving mountains. How an unexpected power player in restaurant reservations has wooed top Bay Area chefs (The San Francisco Chronicle) https://lnkd.in/dbrx-8pC The hottest restaurants in SF are moving over to … OpenTable? (The San Francisco Standard) https://lnkd.in/dAmWShae

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The (Healthcare) Ground Beneath Our Feet… This year it is likely that over $10 billion will be invested in the digital health sector – a robust amount, no doubt, but inconsequential when compared to the amount of capital tied up in healthcare real estate assets, which is estimated to be $1.2 trillion by Jones Lang Lasalle. Of that amount, approximately $790 billion is in the hospital sector while the remaining $490 billion is in medical office assets. It is estimated that there are 48.6k facilities with 3.4 billion square feet of healthcare real estate, 42% of which are owned by REITs and another 33% held by other private investment vehicles. Much of the digital health investment is meant to make the physical healthcare infrastructure more productive: greater operating efficiencies, greater patient throughput, more relevant personalized care models with better outcomes. As the healthcare system is being pushed to be more distributed to lower cost sites of care, accelerated now by the rapid proliferation of automation and AI capabilities, the potential impact on healthcare infrastructure assets will be profound. Thoughts on what that might look like... https://lnkd.in/eTfAdUbS #digitalhealth Flare Capital Partners

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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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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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Exciting news for startups! California accounts for about 50% of all venture investments. The not-so-secret reason is that non-competes are illegal in California, so engineers at FAANGs can build competitors without fear. Today, the US Federal Trade Commission declared non-compete agreements illegal nationwide. This means that engineers at big tech companies can now leave and build their own companies without fear of violating a non-competes (legacy agreements for executives are still enforceable - talk to your lawyer), this is a step in the right direction for fostering innovation and competition across the country. A variety of big-business groups have vowed to sue to bring non-competes back, but at least for now, they're gone! #startups #innovation #competition #noncompete Official Announcement: https://lnkd.in/gRXUpgDy Impending lawsuit: https://lnkd.in/gqSiVuTd

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Insightful look into bioplatform strategy, and what it takes to raise a Series A from my partner, Omri Amirav-Drory: https://lnkd.in/dFv7GbF6

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Over the years, we at GFR Fund have solidified our investment thesis, which is that we invest in "emerging digitally native communities." These communities can be built around games, social media, and any consumer applications. Now, founders have many easy-to-use tools to build user communities, such as Discord, X/twitter, Instagram, etc, and we believe the founders should start building communities even before they launch a product. The communities can help founders: - reach PMF faster - acquire users cheaper - retain and engage users longer - build better UX/UI, and - hire early employees Below, you can see how RTFKT and Omeda Studios built the community and then worked with them to create a product the users really wanted. We would love to talk to the founders who think the community is essential in building a product!

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The Stoke Space team in Seattle has built a rocket company faster than many people can build software. Morgan Beller breaks down how this is helping them capture a huge opportunity: https://lnkd.in/gc5jv2-c 

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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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https://lnkd.in/guKyDZsf "And then you’d say, why is it that so called lack of focus strategy seems to be working for Amazon? And I think the fundamental underlying principle that he’s guiding his whole discussion of strategy is, he’s changed the rules of strategy. So the old rules of strategy were, the way you gained competitive advantage is by being better or cheaper. So if I am selling you a car, my car is better of cheaper. But the inherent assumption in that strategy statement is, I’m selling one product to one customer. And what Amazon is basically arguing is, the digital economy is all about connection. We have got to connect products and connect customers." "So connecting products, here the idea is, I can sell you, this is a classic razor and blade strategy. I can sell you a razor cheap in order to make money on the blade. So I can sell you Kindle cheap in order to make money on the ebooks. Now, at some level you might say, hey, razor and blade have been around forever. What’s so unique today? I think unique today is razor could be in one industry and blades could be in completely different industrys. So for example, if you look at Amazon’s portfolio of businesses, you sort of say, not only Amazon is an e-commerce player, but also is making movies and TV shows, its own studio. Well, why does it make sense for an e-commerce player, an online retailer to compete with Hollywood. Well, Walmart doesn’t make movies. Macy’s doesn’t make movies? So why does it make sense for Amazon to make movies?" And I think once you dig into it, the answer becomes clear that the purpose of the movies is to keep and gain the Prime customers. Two day free shipping is fine, but if you ask me to pay $99 or $119 for two day free shipping, I might start doing the math in my head, and say, OK, how many packages do I expect to get next year? And is the Prime membership worth it or not? But once you throw in, in addition to the two-day free shipping, you throw in some TV shows and movies that are uniquely found only on Amazon, I can’t do this math. And why is Prime customers important to Amazon? Because Prime customers are more loyal. They buy three or four times more than the non-Prime customers, and they’re also less price sensitive. And in fact, Jeff Bezos has said publicly that every time we win a Golden Globe Award for one of our shows, we sell more shoes."

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I used to spend 2-3 hours daily on clinic notes, skeptical of AI scribe technology. However, I've been impressed with RevMaxx, a generative AI company transforming clinical note creation by listening to physician-patient conversations and automatically generating comprehensive notes. This platform accurately captures crucial ICD-10 codes, saving valuable time ⏰. 👉 Why This Matters: - **Reducing Physician Burnout:** Administrative tasks are a significant contributor to physician burnout. Innovations like RevMaxx alleviate this burden effectively. #HealthcareInnovation #AI #PhysicianBurnout #MedicalDocumentation #HealthTech #RevMaxx

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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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Exciting news! We just sent out the inaugural newsletter for Future Frontier Capital, our pre-seed venture fund backing frontier tech startups. As I hit "send," I realized how launching FFC parallels the path of the founders we support. Starting FFC has required the same passion, perseverance, and self-belief that drive entrepreneurs. Just like a startup, getting a VC fund off the ground demands relentless hustle—building the brand, perfecting the pitch, and networking tirelessly. There are constant challenges that test your resolve and endless hours of unglamorous work behind the scenes. And perhaps most daunting - the self-doubt, wondering if you're crazy for attempting something so bold. Pushing through that negative self-talk requires unshakable faith in your mission. Raising this VC fund reminds me of starting our IP strategy and patent analytics firm two decades ago. It’s a powerful reminder of the perseverance, creativity, and resilience needed to turn an ambitious idea into reality. This experience makes us more empathetic partners, ready to support the founders we back. Our work is just beginning, and this inaugural newsletter underscores our commitment to supporting frontier tech startups every step of the way. #startups #VentureCapital #EmergingManagers #Entrepreneurship #InnovationMindSet

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Everyone loves an underdog. I find this story a delight, it's inspiring and a reminder to have & express #gratitude for the people that have given me much needed shots along the way. It's about Wesley Chan a.k.a VC unicorn (and decacorn) spotter, and his (less talked about) personal story. 💪 Learning #Fortitude: Raised by a hard-working immigrant family taught him to recognize nuances and be #adaptable. His parents split and he was raised by his mother. He worked three jobs in high school - parking lot attendant, a waiter and a dishwasher in a lab at the California Institute of Technology. He got the lab dishwashing job via a Craigslist ad. Ellen Rothenberg, the famed gene biologist was the manager of the lab, and she asked him to read a book on biology. He didn't want to get fired, so read it. He barely took high school biology, but Ellen saw something in him and promoted him to lab bench. Soon enough he was part of a group that discovered a protocol for changing stem cells into red blood cells, and Ellen asked if Chan had thought about college. She called the admissions office and he got into MIT (Harvard said no), bad grades and all. He talks with vulnerability about being an outsider in the business, specifically being part of the tiny LGBTQ+ community in venture capital, trying to build deal flow and the difficulties faced when you don't fit into the country club mold. That's one of the reasons he started FPV Ventures two years ago, with Pegah Ebrahimi. They both have unconventional backgrounds, and with that, bring a unique investing style. He focuses on backing founders with grit and non-traditional backgrounds. “Our founders happen to be underrepresented minorities or women, and the really fascinating theme that I keep hearing is that they feel people misunderstand them,” Chan said. “We find founders who have the drive to succeed and have this amazing combination of humility and success. They also make sure that all their people are taken care of.” 🔁 Christine Hall TechCrunch #VentureCapital #Entrepreneurship #Startup #unicorn #underdog

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Today, GTMfund’s is excited to announce to launch of Operator, its first incubated company. Max Altschuler (founder of GTMfund) teamed up with co-founder Adam M. (design engineer and 0-1 builder) and co-founder Mark Kosoglow (Outreach employee #1 and former SVP of Global Sales) to create Operator.ai alongside an insanely talented team Pleasant Middelhof, Jeremy Jonas, Carl Gunderson. We've entered a period called “The Great Ignore”. Spam and irrelevant, poorly-automated outbound campaigns are running rampant.   Operator gives you an easy-to-use Growth Engineer that allows you to build and enrich lists with accurate data, and run experiments and queries using AI to generate highly targeted outreach.    Check out their website to get updates, early access, and see how they are taking the world back to 2 touches meant to attract buyers into conversations that convert, instead of 20 touches meant to make sure you hit your activity number: https://www.operator.ai/

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