Brian Ma

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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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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We believe in extreme vetting of our founders. You can't build a unicorn if you spend time on silly stuff, like seeing family and friends. Grow up, and focus on investor returns. #vc #startups #investment

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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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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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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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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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Despite the headwinds many software companies (even public ones) are facing today, there are still those that are delivering great results. Check out how the top decile companies in our Beyond Benchmarks survey are performing. And don't forget to review the full report for many more insights on the state of private software businesses.

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Huge opportunity

Fundraising founders, don’t be too hard on yourself—it’s a tough fundraising environment, and that’s no secret. But remember to keep raising your standards because the bar for VC funding is getting higher, and you’ve got to meet it. As the venture capital landscape tightens, competition for dollars is fiercer than ever. At Startup Ignition Ventures, we’re seeing this shift firsthand, every day more and more apparent. In 2021 and 2022, many startups could secure VC checks despite being loosely thrown together and rough around the edges. Fast forward to 2024, and those same startups wouldn’t make the cut. That's not a knock on yesterday's startups as much as it is a contrast to today’s fundraising environment being completely different. Today, the founders getting funded are buttoned-up, detail-oriented, and operating at a much higher level. Everything has to be top-notch to catch a VC’s attention. Why the change? The number of active investors has dropped by 38% from 2022 to 2024 (PitchBook), meaning fewer deals are being made. VC funding is also down over 30% year-over-year (GlobalData). This means the standard has tightened, and startups must rise well above the average “2022 or 2023 fundability status” to secure 2024 investment. Startups now need to show exceptional business models, traction, products, and teams to stand out in a shrinking pool of opportunities. The landscape may be tough, but it’s also ripe for startups that prove they’re exceptional. Now is the time to build, to gear up, and then be ready for further opportunity as the market begins to turn. Which I personally think is around the corner in 2025.

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Big rounds are back. VC Funding is flowing. In April, there were 28 fundraising rounds announced with >$10M in funding. We've seen private market (pre-launch) deals valued >$3B recently. Private Markets are hot. Public Market comps (FDVs) are hot. But who will buy our multi-billion dollar bags? Deal Flow Digest April w/: - Recap of largest web3 funding rounds - Airtable with ALL the data - Hackathons & Demo Days - VC Fundraises Read more here: https://lnkd.in/g7V4KrAj

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The state of venture capital is wild right now. We are witnessing a surge of innovation across the spectrum: - Funds merging - VC doing PE - PE doing VC - Secondary funds - Buyout funds - Spin-out funds - Debt funds - Continuation funds - Infrastructure funds - GP turnover - Hard Tech surging - Family Office uptick

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I recently sat down with a group of Forum Ventures founders about to go out to fundraise and the topic of SAFE rounds came up. The context focused on the pros/cons of raising a priced vs a SAFE round and the conversation notably shifted toward the dilution implications of a SAFE round. Founders are keenly aware of the top line dilution of any funding round - ie selling 20% of their startup for $3M at a $15M cap - but very few fully grasp the implications of doing a SAFE round vs a priced round. The universal standard for institutional VC investors is a post money SAFE. This document essentially outlines ownership that an investor will have in a startup just prior to the execution of a priced round. Most importantly though, it is structured so that an investor in that SAFE will not be diluted by subsequent SAFE's that are issued. This is where founder education around the implications of this structure are not fully appreciated. In a situation where a founder continues to stack subsequent SAFEs, they don't actually convert until the first priced round and the net dilution they are taking is actually more than they realize. Here is a practical example - take a situation where a founder has already sold 15% of their business on a post money SAFE in a pre-seed round, and is now choosing to sell another 20% in a seed round. If the founder opts to raise this money on SAFEs, the dilution of that additional 20% will come entirely from common equity holders- meaning they will now own 65%. If SAFE holders were also diluted by that round, as they would be in a priced round, the founder would own 68%. This dynamic becomes more dramatic the more capital a founder raises on SAFEs. Note - this is a high level example and does not include an option pool carve out or other round nuances. Almost universally, when a founder raises their first priced round, there is some degree of sticker shock at the outright dilution on their cap table, particularly when options pools are factored in. This pain is even more acute when a founder has raised a fair amount of capital on SAFEs along the way. There are certainly benefits to raising SAFE round, mainly cash in hand 6-8 weeks faster and not having to decide on board seats too early, but I encourage all of our founders to run through cap table modeling and correctly account for the implications of SAFE rounds before they make fundraising decisions.

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Once you’re in it, you’re in it. #Startup #founders don’t just take financial risk - they invest years of their lives. For many, it’s absolutely worth it. To me, the first task is the most important one: to define your target and make absolutely sure it’s one worth that level of investment.

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Founders, what would you want to hear from a VC who loves your idea but is at capacity? It's a good problem to have, but right now at Developer Capital we have a full pipeline to diligence of incredible Founders and innovative ideas. Deal memos take him, talking to customers takes him, helping existing Portco's takes time. Time is our gating factor. But we keep meeting with Founders who's ideas we think are worth doing the work on. My current approach is to meet with these founders, but be transparent about our backlog. If they dont hear back from us for a couple weeks they shouldnt freak out. Is this the right approach? What would you want to hear from the VC in that spot? #VentureCapital #Founders #Startups #VCAdvice #Entrepreneurship #InvestorInsights #StartupJourney #Funding #Transparency #DeveloperCapital

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ICYMI I did what I think is a pretty useful super deep-dive on "Getting VC Funded in 2024" here: What it really takes to raise venture capital today, in 2024 - Stress in System - Why Everyone Seems to be Chasing AI - Where the Decacorns Are - Databricks and Canva - What a "Fund Returner" is in Venture Capital - How a $2B and a $100m VC Fund Make Money - What a Top Decile Startup Looks Like and Much More!! https://lnkd.in/gQWEGrGD

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