Stratsi Kulinski

Have a story to tell... Use Narratize AI Co-Authoring platform to tell your stories in an impactful manner. Katie Trauth Taylor, PhD and the entire team is committed to helping you in becoming amazing storytellers. Check out their impressive work at https://lnkd.in/gnNYHSSX Start telling your stories with Narratize AI as your co-author. #generativeai #storytelling #innovation #aicoauthoring #innovators #researchers #impactstories #startups #problemsolvers #AI #AIStartup

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I found this article interesting, as we all prepare for the second Trump presidency and are trying to figure out how this affects us in our private and professional lives. The key is to also understand that in a democratic country, it's the right of the people to choose who represents them and this time the people have clearly spoken in support of Trump and his MAGA movement. Congratulations President Trump and I hope the next 4 years are prosperous and happy for everyone in the country. What a Trump Victory Means for Tech https://lnkd.in/g8TmpurH

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Summary: Defense tech startups have raised almost $3 billion in funding so far in 2024, surpassing the previous record of $2.6 billion in 2022. The increase in funding is driven by a few large rounds and the growth of the European defense tech scene. Key takeaways: Defense tech funding has reached a new high in 2024, surpassing the previous record from 2022. The increase in funding is driven by a few large rounds, including a $1.5 billion Series F raised by weapons manufacturer Anduril. The European defense tech scene has also seen significant growth, with large rounds raised by companies like Helsing and an increase in new venture firms. Counter arguments: Some may argue that the increase in funding for defense tech startups is concerning, as it suggests a growing need for new technologies in the face of an increasingly dangerous world. Others may argue that this trend could lead to a proliferation of companies focused on developing weapons and surveillance tech, rather than addressing underlying issues that contribute to global conflicts. #defensetech #startups #venturecapital #fundraising

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I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be speaking at the "Delivering on the Innovation Promise of Startups" session at the GAIN Summit on Thursday, September 9th! https://lnkd.in/dTrfc-vg During this facilitated discussion, I’ll be joining fellow founders and CEOs to dive into how startups are driving AI innovation. We’ll explore how our agility, adaptability, and collaboration with research institutions are enabling us to develop cutting-edge AI technologies and bridge the gap between academia and industry. If you’re attending the summit, I’d love to connect! Let’s discuss how we can continue pushing the boundaries of AI together. #GAIN2024 #Retailtech #AIforRetail #RetailPerformance #DataDrivenInsights #EmployeeEngagement #Sthrive

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Excited to announce that Unusual Ventures is leading GovSignals' $5.5M Seed Round! GovSignals is transforming government contracting by launching the first AI platform that fully automates 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗶𝗱𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗻 𝗴𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘀. We’re thrilled to lead their $5.5M seed round at Unusual Ventures as they revolutionize the government procurement space! Congrats to the exceptional GovSignals team - Derek, Ethan, Jeremy, and Conner bring deep technical and execution expertise in government, government contracting, and AI from Palantir, Amazon, the DIA, DOE, Stanford, Harvard, and more! To learn more about GovSignals, check out the press coverage below 👇

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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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One of my favorite things is to have a conversation with builders & founders about the personal experience and complexity of working to bring new deep tech to the point where it makes a real difference in our world. So looking forward to this!

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Not all of the investments that Kindred Capital VC makes can be a 13 year sourcing process.... but... this is one of those very fortunate moments in which a relationship that started over a decade ago in the Bay Area where the brilliant A-H. Hleileh and I overlapped has now turned into an incredibly exciting opportunity for Kindred to lead his and Ron Holifield's first institutional round at Civic Marketplace. We believe: 1. Local government procurement is one of the most underserved areas in technology today, and has failed to keep pace with the private sector. They deserve better. 2. This is a huge opportunity, with US local governments spending alone amounting to over $1.5 trillion in annual spend, which is only going in one direction... 3. As the brilliant Kip Harkness shared with me in our diligence phase, "this industry moves at the speed of trust." And this is a unique founding team with A-H. Hleileh and Ron Holifield at the helm who bring together two critical ingredients: 1) decades of trust-building within this domain, and 2) a team who can build beautiful and scalable technology platforms. Onwards!! 🚀

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This is quite a piece on accusations of unethical pay-to-play within the #cyber #VC ecosystem. -Guaranteed first-year sales for portfolio companies -Formal loyalty program for CISOs -Points awarded within the program for CISO commitment level to portfolio companies (meetings, PoCs, product purchases) -Share of GP fees for CISOs in the loyalty program https://lnkd.in/gDta7Gp7

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Indiegraf is such a great example of what it looks like to invest with a broad ownership lens. We're really proud of this investment in our Ownership Fund. Thinking with an ownership lens means finding all the different ways to broaden access to ownership. This means employee ownership and home ownership, but it also means organizations and platforms that make it easier for people to start their own businesses. That's what Indiegraf does: they make it easier for local journalists to start their own news organizations in a way that's resilient and sustainable. Home Hardware is another example - an owner-owned co-operative that makes owning the local hardware store possible in an age of Amazon and big box retailers. Bookshop.org is another great example that lets independent bookstores in the US compete with Amazon. These are the types of companies that we need to support if we're going to wrestle the economy away from the gatekeepers and the consolidators. Congrats Erin Millar and team!

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A must-read today from Dan Meyer. On the first pass you may read it purely as a critique of Andrej Karpathy's latest edtech venture. It is that. But look a bit longer and you will see a set of values that all educators would all do well to consider as we build tools for our students. 1️⃣ Add more verbs than “watch” and “read.” Learning requires student engagement, and passive activities can only do so much. Active learning is much more powerful. 2️⃣ Make thinking matter. Students need specific feedback not only on whether their answer is right or wrong, but whether their thinking is right or wrong and why. 3️⃣ Add people. Learning happens in community and the real challenge is to help the 95% who are not equipped to teach themselves to learn effectively. Learning from and with others matters. 4️⃣ Create connections between people. The number of connections is a goldilocks problem. From a network theory perspective, you want each node to have a sufficient but not overwhelming number of edges connected to it. If you care about education and particularly about the role of technology within it, Dan is essential reading. In addition to following him here, you should also subscribe to his newsletter.

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New from Belle L.: Chip giant AMD and hedge fund LuminArx Capital raised $333 million for a growth financing round for cloud startup Vultr a sign of the hot demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure. https://lnkd.in/eucwq-kS

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Financial update from Arbe (#nasdaq: ARBE), an MS-IR LLC client, announcing the pricing of a public offering of up to $49 Million, with $15 million upfront and up to an additional $34 million of aggregate gross proceeds upon the exercise in full for cash of long-term and milestone-linked warrants. Canaccord Genuity Group Inc. is acting as the sole bookrunner for the offering. ROTH Capital Partners is acting as the co-manager for the offering. For further details, click the link in the first comment. Kobi Marenko Karine Pinto-Flomenboim Shlomit Hacohen #ArbeRobotics #4DImagingRadar #Innovation #Technology #Transportation  #PerceptionRadar #PublicOffering #InvestmentNews

The 'sugar daddy effect' is evident in the success of Google's venture investments, according to Aswath, prof. at NYU's Stern School of Business https://lnkd.in/eGpuV6yq Damodaran pointed out that Google benefited from investing beyond its comfort zone in startups such as Uber, Airbnb, and Slack early in their lifecycle. But, like a good sugar daddy, Alphabet (Google's parent) has provided the cash and left Google Ventures (now known as GV) to be more independent (CapitalG and Gradient, its other CVC units, are probably more closely aligned) with Fortune's excellent profile of David Krane stressing its ability to make independent decisions and focus on financial returns, rather than strategic alignment. https://lnkd.in/em5WagM2 However, with $10bn invested - $1bn a year through the peak financial bubble era of the pandemic years and an average of 50 new portfolio companies every year since 2020 - it's good Ruth as CFO has given GV a 300-year time horizon to return the cash. By comparison, however, with its international competitors, Alphabet is still remarkably cautious - Tencent has been doing $5-10bn per year in its CVC unit for 15 years while SoftBank has equally invested tens of billions in venture. To see the world, register for the GCV Keystone benchmarking and update our annual survey of ~500 CVCs: https://lnkd.in/eZV3rpAv

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Trump or Kamala. Does your audience really care about your political standing? As the presidential elections inch closer, I am sure the thought of sharing your political standing on a social platform has crossed your mind. Cameron L., founder and strategic communications consultant at First Principles, weighs in on how (and if) you or your company should go about it. Join this mildly controversial conversation and share your take on the topic in the comments below.

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Asia can show the West how to integrate tech with societal needs "E. Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang are co-authors of "Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy." Weyl is founder of the RadicalxChange Foundation and the Plurality Institute. Tang was the first Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan. Slow economic growth. Inflation. Geopolitical decline. Disinformation and polarization. So many of the West's leading problems are partly traceable to the fraying relationship between technology and society. Concerns seem to be contradictory, with some arguing for technological acceleration and others suggesting technology has become reckless and destructive. Yet if we look on these events from the remove of Asia, the maladies seem like symptoms of the same underlying problem: the alienation between the people and cultures developing technology in the West today from the societies they serve. This alienation helps fuel both the regulatory backlash against technology and the lackluster investment in tech development by Western governments, as well as the irresponsible and antisocial ways many technologies are developed today. One of the authors of this piece grew up and spent most of his career within the segment of Western culture that overwhelmingly develops the world's technologies. It's a culture that revolves around a small number of coastal, cosmopolitan geographies (Silicon Valley, the Puget Sound, Boston, New York, London) and is grounded in a radical secularism and scientism, dominated by young, white, globalist, nerdy men and pervaded by a mix of libertarian and technocratic ideologies that venerate technologists as the rugged heroes and/or planners of the future. This forms a sharp contrast to the societies these technologists supposedly serve. Even in the West, and especially globally, most people are far more distributed, religious, nationalistic, rainbow colored, female and grounded in more traditional political attachments than the aforementioned cohort. Most people on Earth consider religion important to their lives, half are women, less than a fifth are white, less than 1% live near one of the tech hubs, and while nerdiness is a bit harder to define precisely, it is likely the most minority trait of all these. On the other hand, the group from which most tech leaders are drawn constitutes probably less than 1% of the population of the West and 0.1% of the global population. Furthermore, as recent reporting by journalists such as Linda Kinstler and Meghan O'Gieblyn highlights -- and as the "closeting" of Christians in the popular television series Silicon Valley dramatizes -- the dominant atmosphere of the tech world is to suppresses traditional religiosity, often resulting in technologists themselves holding their worldviews close to their chests."

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Participating in Cohort 14 of the VC Lab has been an energizing experience so far. I am learning so much about the ins and outs of being an emerging fund manager and how to succeed in this space. Today they hosted a panel for Women in VC that provided some real world advice from some fantastic panelists. The curriculum is rigorous for sure, but rewarding. If you are curious about why this is such an exciting area check out this article. #venturecapital #vc #investing https://lnkd.in/gMMM_mwp

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