Nat Friedman

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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Anna Murray Jessica Murray and I had a great conversation about what it's like to work at a startup. Check it out if you want to hear firsthand stories of highs and lows, rewards and pitfalls of life building and scaling an early stage venture. #startuplife #womenintech

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Many assumed that the industry would be well on its way to AGI or superintelligence before AI model builders’ efforts to take advantage of scaling laws might hit a wall. Recent headlines are chipping away at that assumption. One question I've been getting in my inbox: is this the era of diminishing returns for AI? We don't think so. Even if an avalanche of new clusters and synthetic data fail to deliver significantly better model performance, there are good reasons to believe that AI is still going to become orders of magnitude more powerful in the coming years — powering a new generation of startups and ultimately productivity growth and positive benefits for mankind. In fact, with agents and reasoning just beginning to scale and thousands of industry-specific models coming online, it's about to get really exciting. Read our latest blog post on the topic: https://lnkd.in/gFhniNX8

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I really like this PMF Framework from Sequoia. https://lnkd.in/gT2nWttx

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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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AI is reshaping how enterprise software delivers—and prices—value. Companies like Zendesk, Intercom, and Forethought are shifting to outcome-based pricing, charging only when AI autonomously resolves issues. I've been investing in AI for over a decade. The shift to outcome-based pricing in enterprise software is a seismic change. As I told Jon Victor at The Information, software companies now face a critical decision: Does a company decide to change business models at the expense of losing revenue? It's a necessary risk. With cheap access to LLMs, businesses can build their own enterprise apps. Adapt or die. Why this pricing shift matters: → Vendor success ties directly to customer outcomes → Short-term revenue risks enable long-term market expansion → Industry faces widespread pressure to demonstrate measurable value Pitching AI-powered automation software as a clear cost-reduction tool could ultimately lead to greater revenue for vendors. This is because customers may view AI solutions as fundamentally different from traditional enterprise apps, whose business value is often harder to quantify directly. It's a huge market expansion opportunity. Vendors that nail outcome-based pricing could see massive growth as AI transforms enterprise operations. Those that don't? 😬🫣 How do you see this impacting sectors beyond customer support? Leave a comment. And if you're building in this space, send me a message.

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Scaling Investor Outreach: How We're Using AI to Personalize VC Fundraising at Scale As a General Partner at Vibe Capital, I'm always looking for innovative ways to connect with potential investors and grow our fund. Recently, I developed an AI-driven system that's revolutionizing our approach to investor outreach. (Tentative name: Vibey) I'd like to share how we're using cutting-edge technology to build stronger relationships in the VC world. Our challenge was clear: how do we personalize communication with hundreds of potential Limited Partners (LPs) while maintaining efficiency? The solution came in the form of a three-part automated pipeline: 1. Smart Contact Categorization: First, I created a script that taps into the power of AI (specifically, the Claude model) to analyze our vast network of contacts. It combs through our email history, categorizing each contact as a potential LP, a referral source, or other. This crucial step allows us to focus our efforts where they matter most. 2. AI-Powered Personalized Emails: Next, I developed a system that generates highly personalized emails for each potential LP. These aren't your typical templated messages. Our AI crafts unique emails that reference recent interactions, highlight Vibe Capital's latest portfolio successes, and even extend invitations to exclusive events in San Francisco. It's personalization at a scale that would be impossible to achieve manually. 3. Streamlined Email Delivery: Finally, I automated the sending process. This script handles the technical aspects of delivering emails via Gmail's API, carefully managing rate limits and potential errors. It ensures our personalized messages reach investors' inboxes efficiently and reliably. The results are...TBD. We just sent out the emails today! That said, we're now able to reach out to a much larger pool of potential investors with messages that feel personal and relevant. It's allowing us to build and maintain investor relationships more effectively than ever before, which is crucial as we approach our next fund close in Q3 2024. But beyond the immediate benefits, this project represents something bigger. It's about embracing technology to enhance the human touch in our relationships. We're using AI to create more meaningful connections, to start real conversations. As we continue to refine this system, I'm excited about its potential to reshape how we approach investor relations in the VC world. It's a perfect example of how AI can be a powerful tool in building the relationships that drive our industry forward. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this approach. How do you see AI shaping the future of VC and investor relations? #VentureCapital #AI #InvestorRelations #Innovation #TechInnovation #Fundraising #AIinVC #InvestmentStrategy #DigitalTransformation #VCInsights #FutureOfInvesting #PersonalizedOutreach #InvestorEngagement #AIApplications # #ScalableSolutions #InvestmentTech #NextGenVC #Vibecap

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I like this idea of "technical taste". It gets into where software engineering is as much creative art as it is science. Four great takeaways (IMHO) for software devs in this era in particular: 1. Aspiring engineers should cultivate a sense of curiosity, experiment with different tools and technologies, and embrace a mindset of continuous learning. 2. AI has the potential to streamline processes and enhance productivity for engineers, but it may also lead to disruptions in traditional software development workflows. 3. Developing technical taste and judgment is essential for making informed decisions about which technologies and approaches to pursue. 4. Collaboration and open-mindedness are key to leveraging the full potential of AI and staying ahead of technological advancements. I also really liked these two quotes from Sam Schillace: 1. "The right time to do something is when you have that feeling in the pit of your stomach that's like, 'oh, this is a great idea and it's going to suck to build because nothing's ready yet.'" 2. "Technical taste is like, 'how well have you consolidated that set of experiences and heuristics into judgment that you can apply accurately when you see new things?'" 3. "It may be the case that very small teams can do very large projects, or like we were talking about before, it may be the case we're just going to get really ambitious about what we try to do with the same size of teams, which is kind of where I would put my money." Great job on continuing to put out great episodes, Brett Berson and team First Round Capital! #ai #engineering #softwaredevelopment

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It's been just over 3 years since we announced Patron and our Fund 1. A lot has changed in both the startup ecosystem as well as the venture capital ecosystem in that time. 2021 was a year that saw an explosion of companies raising venture capital funding, and a record number of new venture capital firms raising initial funds. Even then it seemed clear that the venture market was bifurcating - you either needed to be a large multi-stage fund with the ability to lead rounds from Series A to pre-IPO, or you needed to go early and specialize at the pre-seed and seed rounds. The emerging manager ecosystem seemed to coalesce around the latter, and we were no different at Patron as we strived to build a leading seed-focused firm investing in the future of consumer. We were fortunate to have a handful of peers who were one fund ahead of us, managers like Rick Zullo at Equal Ventures and Nico Wittenborn at Adjacent were two of note who were generous with time and insights as we were first getting started. It was also clear that there was a market forming around the idea of organizing the emerging manager ecosystem and creating a stronger bridge connecting new managers with LPs interested in investing in them. I was glad to join my peers the last few weeks at 2 incredible events focusing precisely on this part of the venture world - the EMC Summit organized by the Equal Ventures team, and the RAISE Global Summit. The EMC Summit continues to be one of my favorite industry events I make time to attend each year in New York. It is the real life event built around an amazing online community which lives in Slack and has connected me with 100+ fellow founding GPs of emerging firms. It is the best opportunity to reconnect with peers and to share experiences, learnings, and ideas with people who are going through very similar experiences. It's also a great way to hear from and connect into larger institutional LPs who have been somewhat active in investing in emerging managers in recent years. That said, we haven't ever met any Patron institutional LPs there so my focus has always been spending time with my peers. This was the first time we've been accepted to participate in the RAISE Global Summit, and I had the privilege to share Patron's story with the attendees of the conference. Unlike the EMC Summit which feels more centered on the emerging managers themselves, Raise feels much more focused on being an LP centric event, with the aim of helping a broad array of LPs ranging from large institutions to individual family office investors learn about new managers. Given that we had recently raised and announced our Fund 2, it was nice to focus more on sharing about how positioning and focus as a firm, and less on actually trying to fundraise. We hope to continue to be an active part of the emerging manager community and ecosystem. We've certainly learned a lot in the last 3 years and hope that we can start to share more of these learnings as fund founders.

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In November, we released a new product for SaaS companies called Census Embedded – it lets you embed our 200+ integrations directly into your application with a world-class API. We made our battle-tested connectors accessible to any developer. Since then we've helped companies like S&P Global, Metronome & Labelbox add these integrations to ingest/export billions of records. Today, we're making it easier than ever to implement with Embeddable Components. If the v1 was like Stripe's API, this launch is Stripe Checkout/Elements. Developing integrations is challenging because each API has varying requirements – different required fields, nuanced sequences of API calls, weird combos of CRUD operations, and more. We've spent years perfecting the transfer of data between 30+ data sources and 200+ destinations. We’ve solved scalability, reliability, observability, and UI quirks too! We’ve developed a sync and data mapping UI that accounts for the quirks in all 6,000+ combinations of those sources and destinations. Embeddable Components save you the hassle of reinventing the wheel in your own app. Offer your end users full customization of their data synchronization into and out of your app (or thoughtfully constrain those options).

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What a week this has been for innovative companies in Seattle (first Smartsheet and now OctoAI). Today NVIDIA made public the news that they have acquired Madrona portfolio company OctoAI. Partnering with the founders since Day 1 (ok Day -1) has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. Luis Ceze, Jared Roesch, Tianqi Chen, Jason Knight, Thierry Moreau and Carlos Guestrin were all involved in the research and insights that helped create the TVM open source technology at the University of Washington computer science school and then the creation of OctoAI back in 2019 to drive commercial impact with this technology. From sorting out the terms of the original "pre-seed" round over a bottle of Caymus Vineyards wine to helping Amazon Web Services (AWS) understand the dynamics around the open source movement in Applied AI to learning our way in to product-market fit with the BEST inference optimization service available (OctoAI can help customers find their optimal fit of performance, customization, and cost), OctoAI has been the best! The company has helped set the table for AI-driven innovation for the years ahead and they will be a perfect compliment to the many capabilities at Nvidia. Luis, his leadership team, the board (including Carlos Guestrin Lip-Bu Tan and Mike Dauber) and so many "friends of OctoAI" know what a motivated, talented and authentic group of people are associated with this company. It is inspiring to see an acquisition at a total deal value of over $250 million in this highly dynamic and fast-moving phase of AI disruption. It is even more exciting to anticipate what will be possible with innovations powered by AI models and related technologies in the years ahead. Madrona has been investing in Applied AI for over a decade and we truly believe that we are just getting started! One of the hardest judgement calls as an investor and board member is to assess the benefits and risks of selling a company at a key inflection point in the journey. Nvidia made a compelling case that the impact for the OctoAI team and technology would be maximized within the market leader for AI infrastructure. I will be rooting every day that they all maximize this impact in the months and years ahead!

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Worth reading: Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you. So, so good - peppered with gem quotes and observations- chuckle. https://lnkd.in/gZBKtU4X Thanks to Eric Brooke for sharing.

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Just shipped this week's Diaspora.nz podcast with Paul Copplestone, founder & CEO at Supabase. We talk about: ⚡️why open source is an unfair advantage — as a product development strategy, supercharging recruiting, and helping build customer community. ⚡️how they are building the end-to-end tech stack for AI startups — seeing many customers grow into the millions of users in just weeks, growing to be one of the most tagged products by makers on Product Hunt + most redeemed Y Combinator “perks.” ⚡️raising $116M, and scaling to ~80 people in 30+ countries over the past 4.5 years, operating as a distributed + asynchronous team. ⚡️building three startups over nearly a decade living in South East Asia. Subscribe + listen links in comments below👇 Subscribe at diaspora.nz for weekly episodes 🎧👈

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chpter. , founded by Tesh Mbaabu and his friends, raised $1.2 million pre-seed last week in a round that was led by former investors in their previous startup, MarketForce. I saw a comment from X, saying that the product that chpter. has out there so far, has so many problems, that it is basically a waiting list with a poorly-designed landing page. Which is true. I went to see the live site myself and the observation was not far off. HOWEVER. I think a lot of people who have never built startups don't really know how startups work. I lead a team of talented individuals building Mentorlst and I have picked up a few lessons. First, chpter. raised pre-seed funding, which means at this point, investors were looking at four things: the team, the idea, the total addressable market (TAM) and the go-to-market strategy. And looking at chpter. , it nails down these four perfectly, except one, which I will explain. The team, led by Tesh Mbaabu has experience running a busy startup operating in many markets, and this experience cannot be substituted for anything else. It is also the reason why even after WeWork failed after allegations of financial misappropriation, Adam Neumann, the CEO and founder, still managed to raise money from investors for his subsequent ideas. It doesn't matter whether a founder fails in his first or nth startup, as long as he has the experience of building products, managing teams and raising funds. Investors value the experience and network above everything else. Second, the TAM. chpter. is building a product to enable e-commerce businesses to automate customer relationship management at its basic. Social/e-commerce is the new zone of commerce and the African market is untapped. I don't know whether customers really need a chpter. like product vs what they are already using such as WhatsApp Business, but it remains to be seen. This is why I have doubts with the product, but products can always grow and even pivot. The market they are after is there, the only challenge is to grab a share of that market from social media giants and existing players. Third is GTM. I won't comment much on this but this is what a lot of founders struggle with, given that many founders confuse GTM strategy with marketing. GTM is the whole strategy of taking a new product to market and driving demand for it, and marketing is just part of it. I haven't seen much activity from chpter. in the socials, and I am hoping that the funding they have acquired will boost their GTM efforts in the coming months. One last thing: When investors give you money, they don't deposit that money in your account and give you a debit card to spend it. Such funding always come with conditions that must be met, which includes figures and milestones you have to hit before you unlock more levels of that funding. It is the same way the IMF works. This is why startups sometimes die shortly after raising funding, because they failed to meet these conditions. #mentorlst

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In this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with notable X personality Trung Phan about the evolving social media landscape, and how to tame the mayhem and pandemonium of X. https://lnkd.in/dVHMzbui

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Instacart is a market leader when it comes to leveraging AI tools to boost productivity at work. I had an amazing conversation with JJ Zhuang, Instacart’s Chief Architect, who has shepherded over 50 AI-driven initiatives to market across the org. We explored what catapulted Instacart to the forefront of AI integration, supporting radically diverse use cases across various functional areas. One striking insight (echoed by Ethan Mollick and others elsewhere) is that you often don't need specialized tools for specialized work. Frontier models like GPT-4 can seamlessly adapt to a wide range of functions and use cases. They're not just for engineers; they're incredibly versatile tools used by marketing, comms, and legal teams. From generating code to proofreading and ideation, GPT-4 empowers every department to leverage AI for enhanced productivity and innovation. By integrating LLM’s like GPT-4 into their workflows, teams can streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and unlock bandwidth for new creative possibilities. How can you harness the power of AI in your own work to boost productivity? Share your thoughts below 👇 Want to hear more insights from JJ? Check out the full podcast episode by clicking the link in the comments.

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Vishal Sachdev highlights the strategic integration of open source and proprietary tech in architecting tech stacks, developer ecosystems and resulting business models. The world class companies effectively balance value commoditization in open source and value capture in proprietary tech. This is the strategic challenge for companies operating in #blockchain and #AI. I believe those who operate at the intersection of blockchain *and* AI stand to win this strategic battle...

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This is what I mean when I say AI x DEEPTECH A revolution is coming. Upending entire swaths of our economy that have been previously ignored. Nearly $10 Trillion of our GDP rebuilt with AI and software.

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