John Baust’s Post

Where did all the angel investors go? Angel investor participation has apparently been dropping in venture deals for years. Data from PitchBook/NVCA shows deal and dollar amounts declining below. What do we think is driving it? Thought 1: More SPVs showing less individual angel $ but its likely still the same. Thought 2: Instiutionalized (lead by a VC fund) pre-seed rounds are more normal now. Thought 3: More early-stage funds with angels moving to LP? Share your thoughts below. 👇 h/t Jackie DiMonte for sharing originally 🙌

Today we launched Day.ai and announced our $4M seed round led by Sequoia Capital. You can catch the details below, but the short story is this: We’re Reimagining CRM for the AI Age. Christopher O'Donnell and I never met when we overlapped at HubSpot, but we worked closely together at Thrive Global.  I quickly learned that Christopher has an intuition for data and numbers that very few people I’ve worked with do. I knew we could make a gen AI company work because we had worked seamlessly on complex data problems together before. A CRM is fundamentally a data product, but with gen AI, the way we understand data is dramatically shifting. We’re making a CRM that reflects how people actually interact with their customers. This is not a small undertaking! I recently told Erik Munson that it’s like taking 2d data and making it 4d. The result is a better experience for our users that more intuitively connects them to their customers.   If you’re as excited about this future as we are – sign up for early access. We’re building hand in hand with our early customers and we’re shipping fast.

Wow here I am a second day in a row. I haven't talked much about it, but believe it or not, I have been learning a lot about AI over the last year. I have nothing to say about the over-commercialization of Generative AI in the SaaS space. I have been working to understand the models needed to secure AI companies using commercial "off-the-shelf" systems. What I have learned is this: - Having a sparkle emoji does not give you AI credibility - Chatbots are a novelty that exposes us to changing technology, not something that provides long-term value. - The Ethics of AI, AI use, and Information protections are being pushed beyond theory into a brick wall at 100 miles per hour. - The foundational principles of Information Security and Assurance are the best place to start before writing a code. So here is a team doing it right: making it happen, taking the time to learn, and growing into a space full of sparkle emojis. If you are going to do AI, do it right. Check out Day.ai and learn how AI can help you be productive, work hard to keep your information safe, and choose Security and Privacy by Design Principles. Congrats to Christopher, Michael, Gwen, and a supermassive shoutout to Erik Munson, who is doing good work building a modern infrastructure for AI use and for taking the time to help me learn more about how AI works.

It's a Hubspot killer It's a Fathom killer It's a Notion killer ...and the #datacapture is built in. THIS is the #apptofollow & try out!

What do current VC market conditions mean for founders' raising experiences? We explored this topic using insights from PitchBook, Silicon Valley Bank, CB Insights... We cover: 1. Runway lengths 2. Projected Series A activity and valuations 3. Outlook for companies raising down rounds 4. Revenue growth 5. Evolving investor groups ... and more! Read it below: https://lnkd.in/ebummTDG

today we launched Day.ai and announced our $4M seed round led by Sequoia. i’m pumped to talk more about how we’re building Day.ai, but for today i’ll stick why we decided to build it in the first place. we’re on a mission to reimagine CRM for the AI age. i’ve worked on multiple CRM products in my career, and the fundamental frustration for me was always the same: customers found all of it hard to use, and there was absolutely nothing i could do about it. as somebody who loves great software, that drove me mad. we’ve forced folks trying to run their business to learn how to become database administrators, schema modelers, and data quality experts. it was the best we could do with the technology we had. LLMs opened a window of opportunity to actually solve that problem *for real*. instead of teaching people to build a database from their conversations, then query the database to build whatever output they actually want, we can skip the steps in the middle entirely. i believe productivity software has a special power to unlock great things for humanity when done right. in my view CRM is productivity software that has a huge real-world impact on commerce and how people make a living that ripples out to all of us. can’t wait to see how big of a dent we can make in the problem for the people we serve. sign up for early access if you want to build with us. we jam on new ideas with our early customers and ship every day.

- Why don’t angel investors ever get lost? 👼🚶♂️💼 - Because they always know where the exits are! 🚪💸👼✨⬅️ #AngelInvestorHumor #ExitStrategy #InvestingJokes #FundingFun #InvestorVibes #KnowTheExits

VCs: What is your immediate gut reaction when you see posts like this? Meme posts making fun of VCs show up in my feed every day. Whenever I see one, I go to the comments to see if any VCs have responded, but they almost never do. Is that because you think these posts refer to other VCs but not you? Do you take them personally or laugh them off? It's interesting that I never see VCs posting memes about delusional founders (also, let's be honest, great subjects for parody)--probably because doing so could make it harder to get into deals, but I'm just guessing. Anyone want to weigh in on this? https://lnkd.in/gNNDEUTj

What does it actually take to close a fundraise Seed round from VC’s?(1) confidence in your opportunity (2) liking the investor a lot If those two things are true, you’ll subconsciously make all the right decisions to close your capital. 

One very annoying thing as an angel investor is when VC outreach happens to your portfolio companies. Very often unexperienced founders get kind of excited, inform shareholder and at the very end founders sometimes don't believe that VC outreach is 99,99% irrelevant. #fckbessemer, #fckinsightventures, #fckbatteryventures