Tony Xu

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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Origins is a good podcast series for us venture nerds to dig into. This one featuring Wesley Chan in convo with Elizabeth "Beezer" Clarkson + Nicholas Chirls had the following 3 takeaways for me: 1/ For the great founders, Steve Jobs, Page + Brin etc., it is not a as much about priving someone wrong so much as proving you are right! "Larry and Sergey never felt they had to go fight the man, even though a lot of people doubted them at the beginning. They felt they had to go change the world, right? And like prove themselves that there was something better if Google existed than if it didn't, right?" 2/ Timing / why now is an important aspect to their evaluation process. Wesley: “we ask the question, why now? Or why does this make sense now? Why not start it at 10 years from now? And usually, the founders who understand why now, they thought about their whole lives or like, no, this is the one moment in time. They have a really wonderful answer for it, which is these are the things, these are the tailwinds that are blowing." This resonated with me, because in my writings on PMF, the first part of PMF is getting 'the pick' or problem space right, and one of the three elements of 'the pick' is why now (others are founder problem fit or why you) and large attackable market). Increasingly I am incorporating 'why now' into my evaluation process of startup pitches as well. 3/ Doesnt believe in platform; says the best founders dont need recruiting help. Wesley: “A lot of people mistake Venture Capital for being some sort of tuition check for like training and helping founder learn on the job, and while we're willing to help them learn, in fact, we provide a lot of help with coaching, especially through our coach and founders network, but the best founders don't need their VCs to do the work for them.”

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5 Habits of Visionary Leaders Eric Lam I am a venture innovator who helps entrepreneurs scale for exit. I wrote the book 📘📙The Fast Founder: from Startup to Exit in 36 Months 📕📗, that made AmazonSG’s #1 Bestseller (Small Business) in 2 weeks and Kinokuniya Bestseller in 5 weeks. #visonaries #leadership #leaders #innovation #breakthroughs #habits

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I love YC Demo Day season. It’s an insane concentration of driven founders building something they deeply believe in at the frontier of tech. I know it's more trendy for VCs to complain about YC. But I believe Garry Tan when he says 5-10% of companies become worth a billion dollars. Maven’s hit rate from YC is even higher: 16% have had $B+ exits, and we’re trending toward a 40% graduation rate from Seed to Unicorn with investments we’ve made alongside YC. Since Maven’s founding in 2013, we’ve funded 12 YC startups out of the 66 companies we’ve invested in. Here are a few: Cruise: acquired by GM for $1B+ Embark: $4B SPAC, acquired by Applied Intuition Chariot: acquired by Ford before Series A May Mobility: raised $300M+ in follow on funding, including from Toyota Carrot Fertility: raised $100M+ in follow on funding, including from CRV and USVP Daybreak Health: Series A from Lightspeed, Series B from USV Moment Robotics: acquired by Cruise founder Kyle Vogt’s new company, The Bot Co (Maven is an investor) Our strategy differs from other YC investors. Many funds build a YC “index fund”, investing in many startups per batch. It’s not a bad move. But we focus on concentration, meeting all the companies in our thesis area and investing in one or two. Gratefully, I think every company from the list above can point to Maven as one of their most trusted partners that made a difference: intros to customers, closing follow-on funding from top VCs, connecting key hires, and offering genuine care and advice in both the best and toughest of moments. What are we looking for in a YC investment? 1) Team - a technical product team with startup DNA and hustle that can achieve a bold vision. Brilliant, determined founders no one would bet against who are ambitious enough to build an iconic company. 2) Vision worth fighting for - what are you bringing into the world that is worth all the time, effort and money required for success? Why aren’t existing solutions good enough? Are we proud to help bring this idea to the world? 3) Massive market - because of the valuation premium YC demands, even a $B outcome may not return today’s average Seed fund. Honestly, that math sucks. In order to pay the premium, we have to believe that if we’re right, we’ll be wildly successful. 4) Consumer trend - Maven invests in tech companies addressing emerging consumer trends. Even if some investments are B2B or B2B2C, they are always grounded in a consumer insight: autonomous vehicles in 2014, fertility care in 2017, mental health in 2020. Today, we’re looking at consumer applications of AI and frontier consumer health. Many successful companies we fund are outside of YC as well – like Zoom, Hello Heart, Epic!, Class, Wildtype. So we match YC’s Unicorn % across the rest of our portfolio, too 💪 YC founders in consumer tech and digital health: if you want to build an iconic company that delivers a positive impact for millions of consumers - I can’t wait to talk to you!

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Imagine you’re meeting a VC today and pitching your company. Now, also imagine the VC goes home tonight and tells his or her spouse about the meeting with you. How do you think the VC would (or should) describe your product to the spouse? Remember, this is for someone who doesn’t have any context, and probably doesn’t have time to listen the whole story. If you can think of a story version that's plain and simple -- how you want the VC to describe your product to the spouse -- perhaps that version should be your pitch in the first place?

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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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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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As a Techstars mentor, venture partner at Pioneer Fund, and YC founder, I have access to thousands of high-growth companies with exceptionally talented operators. The best companies I know are all: - hiring less full-time, US-based talent - hiring more remote-first talent overseas - leveraging offshore talent as well as AI to increase efficiency And the results are staggering. I’m biased, but companies like Spotify, HubSpot, and Automattic use Arc daily to meet highly vetted, English-speaking candidates globally at ~50% of the salary you’d give someone in the US to do the same work. Not only that, but in a world of efficiency, hiring remotely can be faster than hiring for in-office roles as well. Are you operating your business like a founder of the future? Or will someone in Techstars, YC, and similar communities eat your lunch when you’re forcing your employees to #returntooffice because you think it’s a competitive advantage (when it’s not)? Comment below with your thoughts… And repost if you agree. Finally, follow me Weiting Liu for more posts like this on hiring remotely.

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Meta Q2 Earnings are out, here are our highlights: 📈 Community Metrics: We continue to see strong engagement across our apps, and estimate that more than 3.27 billion people use at least one of our apps each day. 🧵Threads: Threads is about to hit 200 million monthly actives. We're making steady progress towards building another major social app. We're seeing deeper engagement and are quite pleased with the trajectory here. 🔵 Facebook: We’re seeing good year-over-year growth across Facebook, and are particularly pleased with the progress we’re making with young adults. 📷 Instagram: Reels engagement continues to grow as we make ongoing enhancements to our recommendations systems. More than half of recommendations in the US come from original posts. ❇ WhatsApp now serves more than 100 million monthly actives in the US. 💰 Maximizing ad performance: Our Advantage+ suite of solutions continue to unlock performance gains. A study conducted this year showed that when advertisers adopted Advantage+ Shopping campaigns, they saw a 22% increase in return on ad spend. For example, we introduced Flexible Format to Advantage+ Shopping, which allows advertisers to upload multiple images and videos in a single ad that we can select from and automatically determine which format to serve, in order to yield the best performance. We have also now expanded the list of conversions businesses can optimize for using Advantage+ Shopping to now include an additional 10 conversion types, including objectives like “add to cart”. 🤖 Improving ad delivery: We’re improving ad delivery by adopting more sophisticated modeling techniques made possible by AI advancements, including our Meta Lattice ad ranking architecture, which continued to provide ad performance and efficiency gains in the second quarter. 🎨 Customizing ad creative: We’ve seen promising early results since introducing our first generative AI ad features – image expansion, background generation, and text generation — with more than one million advertisers using at least one of these solutions in the past month. In May, we began rolling out full image generation capabilities into Advantage+ creative, and we’re already seeing improved performance from advertisers using the tool. 💬 Making business messaging more efficient: We expect AI will help businesses communicate with customers more efficiently through messaging. We’re starting by testing the ability for businesses to use AI in their chats with customers to help sell their goods and services and generate leads. While we are in the early stages, we continue to expand the number of advertisers we’re testing with and have seen good advances in the quality of responses since we began using Llama 3 last quarter.

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📰 Solo VCs are rising in popularity once again. This means only one General Partner is leading the firm, versus multiples. 💔 Why? There are GP breakups going on all around us after partnerships have been tested by the market for years now. The bar to co-found a venture firm with a partner is very high. Those GPs that thought they might graft another one on in the short term to share the load are stopping in their tracks to deeply consider those implications. 🌱 Many are opting to bring in more junior talent and grow them into Partner roles instead. It’ll take time and capital to be able to do that as the firm grows. Talked to 3 diff GPs about this at dinner last night and we’re all leaning toward that approach in our short and long term planning. 💡 FYI - this is just an observation of the moment we’re in. There are plenty of firms thriving with full partnerships as well as solo GPs. But it’s worth calling out that new partnerships are particularly risky right now, especially if the partners haven’t worked with each other for a long time.

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Spoke to Techstars (SF & Oakland) yesterday on building a growth machine. 13 takeaways to get to PMF & scale faster -   1. Growth is optional: Post-PMF, growth is hard, but the roadmap is simple (and mostly in your control).   2. Even the best startups get punched in the face (and often): But they find ways to not get demoralized, will things into existence, and take bad news well.   3. Sustainable growth is about scale AND unit-economics: You need both.   4. It’s easy to fake growth: Total Actives is a vanity metric. Understand the health of its inputs i.e. New, Resurrected, and Retained. The same concept applies to revenue, MRR, etc.   5. Marketing’s purpose Pre- and Post-PMF are different: When Pre, only spend to bring enough people back to validate PMF; when Post, go for scale.   6. A strong marketing mix has Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion: They’re all a hedge with unique pros and cons i.e., time to results, cost, effort, defensibility, etc.   7. You don’t need a Growth Team: The whole company is the Growth Team.   8. There’s 4-stages of growth: Know where you’re at b/c it’ll tell you where to focus, and focus is the lifeblood of a startup.   9. There’s various frameworks to hypothesize models for growth: AARRR, Growth Loops, The PLG Flywheel, and Network Effects are my favorite.   10. ICE is a great way to prioritize (Impact, Confidence, and Ease). Nothing easier than being busy in a startup, but it means nothing. Be effective.   11. Build great process to get through The Growth Flywheel fast: More tests > more learnings > better tests > higher success rates > faster path to growth.   12. When you find things that work, double down: Finding winners takes time; don’t take them for granted.   13. Make time to think and play offense: "Time to think” is 100% in your control; you have no excuse; when in doubt, do less.

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It was great hearing from Tony Xu, 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 & 𝗖𝗘𝗢 𝗼𝗳 DoorDash, speak at our weekly YC dinner. Here are my main takeaways: 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁: Tony shared a story where one of the restaurants they were onboarding was short-staffed because the salad chef didn't show up. He personally stepped in as the salad chef for the day, going above and beyond to help. This act built a lot of trust with the restaurant. 𝗡𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁/𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲: It was surprising to hear that Tony and his team still do deliveries personally at least once a quarter. They believe in staying connected with the customer experience. Check it out - https://lnkd.in/dan3RNXx 𝗖𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗱𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗸𝗲𝘆: With four founders, they made sure each person had a specific area of responsibility. This clear division helped avoid disagreements and allowed each founder to execute their role effectively. 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿-𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗳𝗶𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗿𝘂𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹: Tony believes one reason for their success is that the founders deeply cared about solving the problem, which resulted in a great founder-market fit. #YC #entrepreneur #startups #founderlessons

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At Forum we look at thousands of deals each year across our Accelerator and Pre-Seed funds but only end up investing in a little over 1% of those startups.  As an early stage VC, I am in the business of saying no to nearly every startup I meet, and while there is nuanced rationale for many of the startups I pass on, a vast majority of businesses that don’t meet the qualification to get funded typically fall into one of two buckets. ▪ First time founders have a tendency to go out to market too early to raise pre-seed capital ▪   I’m sure most founders have heard some iteration of this from VCs that ultimately pass on their business.  In some cases it's a blanket excuse covering up for other pass reasons- perhaps a VC doesn’t believe in a team or isn’t bullish on the market opportunity - but in many cases founders simply haven't proven enough to the market to warrant an investment. I meet many teams with an articulate vision for the product that they want to build, but they either haven't performed enough customer discovery to prove demand for their initial wedge product, or need to raise pre-seed capital to build out an MVP.  In those cases, pre-seed investors are unwilling to underwrite those risks.  To be default fundable, teams need to be able to keep costs low, perform extensive customer discovery, and ship some version of an early product - pilots and early paid customers are key. A huge piece of this is having founding engineering talent on the team. ▪Not every startup is a venture opportunity ▪ By definition, a venture backed business is solving a problem within a market opportunity so massive and so desperately needed, that its growth rate is off the charts.   It spreads like a weed, absorbing almost unlimited amounts of capital to fulfill demand within its customer base.   Each year there are maybe 20 companies launched that ultimately have venture scale outcomes. The bar to reach this rarified air is unfathomably high and the reality is the vast majority of founders simply aren’t building for opportunities that have the potential to be one of these generational companies. Many startup founders view VC as the only viable option for capitalizing their business, but not every great business is a venture business, and most successful founders never take VC dollars.  In order to reach an IPO/acquisition large enough to generate venture returns, a startup needs a credible path to $100s of millions in revenue. This is the standard by which early stage opportunities are evaluated. The flip side to this, and I share this feedback often with founders I meet that are building interesting business in non venture markets, if you are able to scale to $10- $20M in revenue that can be a massively successful outcome for a founder.  There are investors who focus on these type outcomes, namely lower middle market PE shops, and the typical path to those deals is a bootstrapped business or a friends/family capital raise.

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第3弾は、Y CombinatorのWebサイトで「Healthcare」で分類されている、メンタルヘルス×モニタリング（1社）、企業の医療費削減（1社）、在宅介護支援（1社）、カップル向けAI恋愛アプリ（1社）について、スタートアップについてそれぞれまとめました。ぜひnoteをご覧ください。 ブログ記事はこちら（Here is the blog post）↓ https://lnkd.in/gT-RcVVJ *Although the articles are in Japanese, please feel free to contact me in English if you are interested in the content. I would like to introduce companies from the Y Combinator Winter 2024 Batch. Part 3 summarizes each of the startups categorized under "Healthcare": One in Mental health x monitoring, One in Reducing corporate healthcare costs, one in Home care support, and one in AI relationship app for couples.

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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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Big announcement below! 👇 Let's talk about the current state of GP-LP affairs: 🤯Emerging VC managers have absolutely exploded over the past 5 years. 📈 At the same time, more and more data has surfaced that shows that emerging VC firms tend to outperform larger, established firms. 🤔 All of this has made it intriguing but tough for LPs to know where to direct their attention. 🛍 GPs frequently meet LPs at conferences who are window shopping but not committed to the asset class or emerging managers. 🧾 And both crews get overwhelmed by transactional convos. So Sydney Paige Thomas and I created Abundance. Abundance is a private, nomination-based retreat for active LPs and top emerging GPs to form new experiences together and build lasting relationships. Why Abundance? Abundance is knowing that there is more than enough for more than one to succeed. And a single win within a community is a win for the community itself. The journey of an emerging VC manager from 1st close to final close or Fund 1 to Fund 2 is (1) communal and (2) requires an abundant mindset. LPs look for structure and confidence to feel comfortable investing in early VC firms. Yet many of the feeds we scroll and conferences we attend reinforce inherent power dynamics and transactional thinking, which allows scarcity mindset to creep in for emerging GPs. Some of the best events I’ve attended have been intentionally non-transactional, e.g. Camp Hustle, Recast Summit, and other GPs’ AGMs. The fundraising success stories we see usually involve a community (usually of other GPs & LPs) coming together to support and open doors for the emerging GP. We designed Abundance to be an immersive gathering that fosters these connections. Starting tonight, ~100 GPs and LPs are descending upon Seattle for the inaugural Abundance retreat. This has been under wraps for months and I can’t wait to see it come to life! Thanks in advance to our awesome sponsors who were the earliest believers in this vision: Sydecar, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Gunderson Dettmer, & Zelda Ventures. And shoutout to my dad Ed Illig for logo design & Halle Kaplan-Allen being the first sponsor to say yes 🤩 Presented by The Council Capital & Symphonic Capital.

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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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