Joseph Rubin

AI memory is fundamental for conversational AI and AI agents. It is critical for building personalized experiences and improving reasoning. Check out Letta’s course to understand how to use AI memory to enhance the customization and quality of your AI app.

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The insane story of how Retool (YC W17) went from zero to a $3.2 billion company in just 5 years 👇 David Hsu founded Retool in 2017, 6 months after he graduated from Oxford. As an undergrad, he started Cashew, a Venmo competitor for the UK, where he first experienced the frustration of building internal tools and admin dashboards. This frustration would inspire Retool. David applied to the W17 batch of Y Combinator with the mission of improving the internal tools experience. He experimented with various ways to position Retool, but couldn't drum up much interest. Until... One day, David sent a cold email to a startup called Rappi, telling them Retool "helps companies build internal tools faster." Rappi's CTO replied within 15 mins to request a demo. David had finally landed on positioning that worked! He continued to refine this positioning over the next few months and continued to leverage cold outbound as a way to reach his ICP. 9 months later, Retool had already hit $500k in ARR. After a year of growing the business primarily via cold outbound, David decided Retool needed a scalable inbound strategy. Turns out, this was easier than he thought. After launching officially on Hacker News, Retool began to get 15-20 new company sign ups every day 📈 To keep these new customers happy, Retool spied on them. No, not literally. But the Retool team had a notification set up whenever an error happened and made it their mission to contact the customer and fix the error before they even knew they had it. This helped immensely in building trust and a strong user community, and these early product evangelists supercharged Retool's growth. From there, it's been product led growth and traditional enterprise sales. In July of 2022, Retool raised a $45M Series C led by @Sequoia at a $3.2 billion valuation. They're a major player in the growing dev tools market and are one of the most successful recent YC companies. Key learnings: 1. Early stage startups can focus on outbound as a GTM strategy until they have 100% product market fit. 2. Companies can find product market fit via sales. Retool analyzed the feedback they were getting from emails and used it to change not just their messaging, but their product features as well. 3. Be customer obsessed to the point that it's almost crazy. A community of product evangelists is one of the most valuable growth engines a company can have. Thank you for reading! Source for this post linked here: https://buff(.)ly/4f5Pwcl ____ Find this helpful? Follow Jake Johnson for daily startup insights ⚡

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For NY Tech Week we'll be demo-ing Substrate at the South Park Commons Science Faire on Thursday: https://lnkd.in/e5JwDKKX There are so many incubator-shaped things out there these days, but there's nothing quite like SPC. It's like a chill, small-batch, locally-sourced alternative to YC, where you can either hang out as a member forever - or choose the VC-funded adventure. The -1 to 0 phase [0] they talk about at SPC is real, and it made a real difference for us to have a home at SPC. It takes a lot to quit your job and do something new, especially when it isn't entirely clear what you're doing. (1) Do it – take the leap! and (2) consider joining SPC. Though the core vision has remained the same, many of the important turns in our squiggle at Substrate (including the graph framework) came from those early days at SPC. If you're here for tech week and can't catch us at SPC on Thursday, DM me if you want to meet up! [0] https://lnkd.in/e6KEMr9V

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Impactful Biz, Ops & Investment Roles at Early Startups & VCs: • Chief of Staff to Ex. Head of Product at Google • Founding GTM at the most YC product used by other YC companies in the past four years • Chief of Staff to a Partner at a Top-Tier VC Fund • Head of Platform of a NY State Backed Accelerator • Investment Associate at a Seed Stage Fund Investing in Category-Defining Companies • Partner at a Defense-Focused VC Fund • Chief Revenue Officer of a New Space Company in El Segundo • Venture Capital Analyst at a fund investing in overlooked geographies • Investment Associate at a Spirit-Focused Fund • Strategy & Ops Lead at a Company Focused on Helping Improve Autism • Senior Product Manager at a Company Focused on Building Shopify for Content Creators • Program Manager for a Space Security Company • Open-ended Investment Position at a Top-Tier Accelerator • Biz & Ops Lead for One of the Most Loved Digital Consumer Products 💸 All companies are well-funded and backed by top-tier investors. ⬇ You can find links to the roles above, plus many more, in the comments.

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I really enjoyed breaking in our new studio to sit down with Temporal Technologies Co-Founders Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev for the latest episode of Founded & Funded. Temporal was founded in 2019 based on an open-source microservices orchestration engine project but is the result of a more than decade-long partnership between the two co-founders that spanned their time working on different iterations of the same thing at AWS, Microsoft, and Uber. In this episode, Samar, Maxim, and I dive into the challenges of building an open-source ecosystem while also working on a commercial offering and scaling a successful company, how to navigate and adjust a product roadmap in an ever-changing world of AI and large language models, and how to successfully build an early startup team, navigate through a CEO transition, and bring on a startups first independent board member. It's a very compelling conversation and a must-listen for every builder out there. Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gymf9sES Find other platforms and the transcript on our website: https://lnkd.in/ggRtnKtM Be sure to subscribe to our channel for more deep dives into cutting-edge technologies and the minds behind them. Don't forget to like, comment, and share this conversation if you found it valuable!

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Summary: Lacey Hunter, founder of TechAid, went through the Newchip accelerator in 2022 and was blindsided when the organization filed for bankruptcy in May 2023. The bankruptcy court is auctioning off the warrants held by Newchip in over 1,000 startups, causing outrage and forcing some companies to shut down. Newchip had a tumultuous history, facing criticism for its CEO's leadership style and ultimately filing for Chapter 11 and 7. Key takeaways: Many startups paid thousands of dollars to go through the Newchip accelerator, giving the organization the right to buy shares in their company at a future date. Now, the bankruptcy court is auctioning off these warrants, causing distress and in some cases, leading to the closure of startups. Newchip's founder and CEO, Andrew Ryan, faced criticism for his leadership style and reportedly fired a manager in front of the entire company as a "test" of loyalty. The bankruptcy revealed that Newchip had missed keeping track of some companies that had exited or raised money, potentially causing the organization to miss out on millions of dollars in potential upside. Counter arguments: Newchip may argue that their bankruptcy was due to unforeseen circumstances and was not a #vc #startups #accelerators

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So many burnt out founders. But also: So many surplus elites. And also: A new paradigm for low-risk idea-stage innovation in founder/startup/community/vc formation. That's Slyk IO We level up together: https://lnkd.in/grEmV-R6

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🎬 Matt Damon and 🏈 Colin Kaepernick have invested in it, and so has 💰Andreessen Horowitz... Function Health's executive team has "engineered a first-of-its-kind approach that focuses on prevention and empowerment"—very much in line with what we aimed to achieve with Carebook when we started it over six years ago. Could they be the ones to fulfill their lead investors' prophecy (link at the bottom) and Dr. Eric Topol, MD's premonitions in his books "The Patient Will See You Now" and "Deep Medicine"? They have just secured a $50 million grant. Let's hope this is not another Theranos and that we are truly witnessing the rise of the next generation of direct-to-consumer health companies. These companies will be key players in the "transition from reactive to proactive" health care that the system—and we—desperately need. What do you think? Links: 📝 Investment round press release: https://lnkd.in/eUG87qkf 🔗 Andreessen Horowitz's prophecy: https://lnkd.in/eZATCf4f

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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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👀 Looking at our recent investments at Draper Associates, here’s what standout founders nailed, making our decision to invest much easier (and faster): 💥 Visionary Tech with a Bold Vision – These founders are not here for incremental wins; they’re reimagining what’s possible in across tech - biotech, robotics, aerospace, and beyond. Their vision is big and audacious, tackling complex problems that demand breakthrough solutions, others have not been willing to try. 👊 Clear Passion & Purpose – The drive in these founders is undeniable. They’re committed to their mission with a depth of purpose that shapes every choice. One founder, for example, took two years completely off to learn and meet everyone in longevity biotech. This level of grit and dedication is rare but essential for the most impactful founders. 🌟 Assembling All-Star Teams – They bring together top-tier talent from diverse disciplines: experienced business leaders with successful exits or industry experience at top companies, technical co-founders with deep expertise, often PhDs or industry pioneers, and even published authors. It’s a complementary team, unified by a shared vision. They make the: "Why this team?" obvious - at a glance. 💻 Data-Driven to the Core – These founders present data insights that show why their approach is unique, especially against a competitive field of companies. This data is delivered with clarity and they make the complex simple. Many are published in top journals, adding depth and credibility to their approach, and reinforcing that they know their tech inside out. ⚡️ Memorable, Clear Vision – They don’t just pitch; they make the future feel tangible, with a vision that’s both compelling and concise. If I can relay their pitch in under 30 seconds to my team, they’ve killed it. 📣 Transparent & Proactive Communication – The best founders don’t wait for questions. They come prepared, often with a comprehensive FAQ doc, give timely updates to our questions, and are candid about challenges. This level of openness builds trust and strengthens our partnership. 💸 Milestone-Driven Funding Strategy – Each funding stage aligns clearly with already achieved or upcoming achievable milestones. They’ve mapped out a roadmap that minimizes risk at every step, giving us confidence in their journey. 💰 Revenue Milestones Along the Way – Even if it'll take a decade to hit revenue on their big vision, these founders find revenue generation stops along the way to profitability. They share a trajectory that connects early wins to revenue, showing how every step is a building block toward their bigger vision. Overall, the best founders are incredibly thoughtful, prepared, and fantastic verbal / written communicators. #founders #startups #fundraising #VC

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Hot take on a lot of early-stage digital health companies out there: You're not a tech company. Most tech-enabled care companies I've seen over the past two years are only tech-enabled in the sense that they use telehealth as their delivery mechanism for care. There are exceptions to this, of course - companies who build computer vision and applied AI tools to better the doctor-patient experience, companies who build tooling around risk scoring and stratification to enable more personalized medicine, companies who build truly novel intakes to better route patients to the appropriate care, etc. These companies have real technology chops and, if they sell it right to the market, can get credit for this from investors. But if you're truly a telehealth provider, you need to realize now that the goal post has shifted dramatically from 2021 and you're going to be valued at maturity at something like 3x EBITDA. That's profit. Not revenue. Throw a revenue multiple out the window. That's not the world we live in if you're a virtual doctor's office. Think of how that impacts venture math. If you're raising a seed round at $15M post-money (or $12M pre-money), it means you'll have to generate something like $150-200M in annual EBITDA to be a fund returner for your seed investors. Maybe even more with dilution, since telehealth businesses are not traditionally capital efficient and will likely need to raise material additional capital to reach that scale. You need to be ridiculously profitable (probably on $800M-$1B in annual revenue since you're likely going to be a 40% gross margin business). Here's the good news: you can set yourself up well (and probably be a contrarian founder relative to your peers), by talking about EBITDA growth and how you can grow into a fund-returning outcome based on realistic mature market comps. This will stand out for the investors you're pitching, even at the early stage. This is how you can beat the malaise of the tech-enabled care market. Focus on the right metrics and the right type of growth. You don't have to have all the answers (no founder does), but you need to make sure the ship is headed in the right direction. A focus on profitability for "tech-enabled care" (*ahem* telehealth) businesses is a good first step.

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During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth + good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

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For those of you still doubting Artificial Intelligence....wake the f$%& up!!! Go walk around downtown San Francisco and maybe all of Google's Waymo driverless cars on the streets may be a wake up call for you. If you need more proof take a look at Y Combinator's current cohort of companies as well as all the AI and AI-Enabled companies in the MedTech Innovator current cohort of companies or the ones pitching at LSI and LSI Europe!

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The latest on YC valuations has been making headlines, so here's what I'm seeing as an early-stage fund manager investing at the pre-seed/seed. I’ve spoken to a couple dozen YC companies in the last year, all raising at $15M-$30M valuations regardless of traction or founder background – it could be a 20-year-old with a duct-taped MVP that pivoted eight times in the cohort. Compared to Techstars or other accelerators, that is 2x-6x higher than most valuations. Even for multi-time exited founders, the high bar is generally a $15M valuation regardless of product or traction. That said, YC companies could be considered de-risked due to the network effects of YC and historical data on YC producing ~10% of unicorns. Fundamentally, it makes sense if the valuation is higher because the expectations are that it’s less risky and the future outcome is bigger. There has to be a line drawn between what is fair and excessive. As an investor, I’m willing to pay a premium for opportunities that we believe can produce outsized returns regardless of the cost. Today, single-stage funds struggle to invest in YC companies because valuations are higher and therefore, the ownership is lower. For early-stage funds, without the ability to maintain future dilution, obtaining venture returns while consistently investing in YC companies is harder. The returns start reverting closer to public equities without the risk/reward matching typical venture returns.  For multi-stage funds, typically larger multi-hundred million to billion dollar funds, you can continue buying company ownership as your portfolio companies grow. A $1M-$3M pre-seed check is a drop in the bucket, so larger funds are less sensitive to valuations and look at YC investments as an option to fund a $10M+ check in the future. Whether YC is meant to create these dynamics or not, their newest model, a larger investment that carries an MFN, naturally incentivizes all the YC companies to take on investments at a higher valuation. In turn, this method coincidentally hinders emerging funds or single-stage funds from participating. Was this structured by design to pent-up deal flow for some of the tier 1s and maybe even LPs in the Bay Area? I guess you can index YC if you have a billion-dollar fund…..

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The VC funding model when everything works out fine... In real life: Only a few startups make it! So if you are considering going the VC route: Have a backup plan!

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I often feel like I'm missing out, seeing the high density of startups in NY and SF while being in Boston. But a direct consequence of these networks is the creation of echo chambers. I understand that certain technologies are exciting, but I don’t see much differentiation between the ideas. In particular, I’ve heard a mind-numbing number of startups working on agents, and they all sound essentially the same, with only minor variations. What separates the signal from the noise for me are founders who chose their idea because they have a truly unique angle, driven by their experience or a deep passion for that space. This is what distinguishes founders who are jumping on the bandwagon to pass time and cash in from those who actually have a chance at creating something with staying power. Venture capital needs to incentivize greater exploration of ideas. If you’re building for a problem that already has solutions, then you’re building for the past, not the future. Some may disagree with that sentiment, but my point is, if there are already solutions on the market, you need to be significantly better to gain adoption. And so if you're building to compete, you're not focused on defining the future of your technology. Your focus is shaped by what your competitors are doing. The issue with this scenario is that, right from the start, you're giving up one of the biggest advantages a startup has: the ability to execute on bold risks for great rewards for your vision of your startup. You're playing their game, not yours. I find it hard to digest incrementalism and strongly believe early stage venture needs to move away from convergences of ideas. Instead, it should incentivize expanding the surface area of exploration over idea space, which would maximize technological progress and is the best way to uncover outsized value. #startup #venture #investing #machinelearning #musing

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One contrarian view about GenAI and the source material LLMs are built from, is the idea that when we create and put something out into the world, we relinquish any idea of ownership. Before the web, anything we created: art, music, buildings, ideas, every word we uttered and object we formed could inspire new thought from anyone who experienced what we had to say. Picasso inspired a generation of artists, some of whom were quite obviously influenced by his work, others less so. Yet Picasso himself didn’t create his famed works from nothing; he was inspired by African masks during his early travels, and those masks were inspired by the environment the tribes called home, and so on. When a model pulls on the works of 100 artists to create something new, how much does that differ from me spending a day in the British Museum to then go home and paint based on all I’ve seen? Aside from the arguments about the concentration of power and profit, this is the core of it for me. My voice comes from the voices before me. LLMs aren’t that different. They’re an output of all of us when most of what we create is digital, in a way we are each outputs of all of our individual experience, digital or otherwise. I don’t trace every idea I have back to a source I can thank or pay back. Yet I no doubt profit from the creation of others.

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Hot take... YC S24 was the best YC batch i've seen. I break it down why here: https://lnkd.in/enNcbfRK YC is evolving, from in person demos days to new group partners... I cover how this shift is influencing investment strategies, the rise of sectors like batteries and space tech, and why traction—not hype—continues to be the ultimate indicator of value. Catch the full breakdown below.

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