Ada Yu

Seattle VC panels are not exactly known for being spicy, which is why my AMA with Brooke and Rolanda at AI House last night was so refreshing. We got into the questions founders are too embarrassed to ask out loud. How do VCs actually decide behind closed doors? What counts as traction when you have zero revenue? Is enterprise SaaS dead? Do Seattle founders actually have a shot against the Bay Area? A few takeaways that stood out: ✅ Associates can't get to yes without a partner sponsor — but partners often can't reach deals without associate diligence. Arm them with the facts to fight for you internally. ✅ Expect 50-70 investor conversations before a term sheet. Send your deck a day early but assume nobody read it 😎 ✅ Enterprise SaaS isn't dead, but it's shifting from seat-based to usage and outcome-based pricing. Large orgs still need governed software. ✅ Traction isn't just revenue. How excited are your customers? Would they advocate for you? Paying pilots with automatic, KPI-specific conversion > free trials, every time. ✅ Learning slope > starting background. The strongest founders they've backed adapted fast — not started perfect. Brooke and Rolanda WILL take a second meeting even if you whiff the first one! ✅ Seattle has fantastic enterprise buyers and founders with sales relationships into them. But the equity-vs-cash culture gap is real, and hiring against big tech is still hard. What made it different was how candid Brooke and Rolanda were about what actually happens after your pitch ends, aka the internal deal dynamics most founders never see. Shoutout to the room full of 100+ early-stage founders who went against the Seattle grain and asked hard questions live to the VCs. That energy is what makes AI House work. Huge thanks to Brooke B. (FUSE) and Rolanda Fu (Madrona) for keeping it real! More AMAs like this coming. Tag a founder who we should invite for the next one! #AIHouse (photo credit to Jonathan G. Blanco 🛠)

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In every product leadership role I’ve taken, my key to success was spending as much time on recruiting as I did on product. Great teams build great products. I believe building teams deserves the same craft and intentionality as building the product itself. And with AI giving teams unprecedented leverage, teams that hire top talent faster will emerge as the winners. Given how much I value recruiting, it’s fitting that Paraform was the first investment I led at Felicis. Paraform is an AI-enabled, recruiter-first marketplace that helps companies hire 3x faster and helps recruiters earn 3x - 5x more than traditional recruiting roles. Their marketplace and tools give elite recruiters more speed, leverage, and time dedicated to helping companies hire their hardest-to-fill roles. The traction to date speaks for itself. Companies like Palantir, Ramp, Rippling, Cursor, Windsurf, and Decagon all rely on Paraform to help them hire the best people. Some recruiters have already earned $1M on their platform, and Paraform’s pace is accelerating. I’m so excited to partner with John Kim, Jeffrey Li, and the entire Paraform team on building the future of recruiting. Read more about why we invested here: https://lnkd.in/g6zb8ZrY

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When Elena Verna and Whitney Menarcheck announced the first SheBuilds on Lovable buildathon back in September, I was immediately drawn to their mission. Nearly half of the builders at my in-person vibe coding events in Seattle are women (far more than you typically see at tech events), so I've seen first-hand the impact of creating an empowering, accessible community. Next Sunday (March 8), We Build With AI is supporting the SheBuilds movement with a free build session at Foundations in Capitol Hill from 10am–2pm for International Women's Day. To help you go from idea to working product, we'll have an all-star group of mentors that include SheBuilds alumni, professional software developers, and vibe coding experts like Sujata Sridharan, Vrinda Bhatia, Shilpa S., Sarah V., Craig Campbell, Maricar Helmer, and me. On top of that, attendees will receive free Lovable, Claude API, and Stripe credits to help them build and launch their product! All women and allies are invited to register at luma.com/seashebuilds Excited to see what Seattle builds on Sunday!

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GPU power is advancing so fast -- and companies are willing to spend so aggressively that they'll only rent the newest model GPUs -- that previous-gen GPUs are effectively worthless. That means data center economics don't work, because you can't recoup the cost of installing GPUs before they become un-rentable. https://lnkd.in/gagATgG2

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Pre-ACA, working in the emergency department in California often meant caring for those at their sickest. They'd delayed care as long as possible before meeting me and my colleagues in the emergency department as a last resort. Early-ACA, we were flooded with folks who finally had access to care, but no primary care or system to support them. Tbh, I was honored to work at the front door of medicine while also being exhausted. During-ACA: Patients were healthier when they presented. Still appropriately in the emergency department, but no longer suffering for multi-organ failure as a the initial presentation of illness. It's much easier to treat disease with this background. Now, with subsidies expiring, I'm talking to folks that are back to delaying or for-going healthcare all together. Having a front-row seat to the impact of policy is both heartbreaking and inspiring. I'm eager to lean more to the inspiration side -- please share any stories or impact you've observed with the current landscape or innovative ways to meet patients where they are in this environment.

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I took my second Waymo across Los Angeles last night, and the experience was largely excellent. From the smooth pickup to navigating the freeway (which is now supported here in LA!), the technology is undeniably impressive. However, the "last mile" wasn't quite perfect. I was dropped off on the left side of a two lane, one way street, directly in traffic rather than on the shoulder. Also, my destination was on the right. As I've written previously (https://lnkd.in/gHw7drrc), there is great promise in using technologies like AI in countless ways, from autonomous driving to talent measurement. However, my recent Waymo experience highlights two critical lessons: 1. Humans Must Own the Outcome: Whether you are a passenger in an autonomous vehicle or managing talent, you cannot delegate accountability to the machine. Technology is a powerful tool, but humans must own the final result. In hiring, as in transport, we must remain in the driver's seat to ensure the "drop off" (i.e. the final decision) is the right one. 2. The Feedback Loop is Non Negotiable: Without human feedback to these systems, technology will never improve. I made sure to provide feedback on my ride, and we must do the same in our talent systems. If we don’t provide constant, iterative feedback, we lose the opportunity to refine them into something better. Progress happens when human intuition meets technological scale. We provide the feedback; the tech provides the lift.

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Love it or hate it, being in the SF Bay Area is still one of the biggest hacks for First Builders to discover huge opportunities before anyone else. But what can you do if you’re not here? Cecilia for example moved here in 2001 and instantly joined Yahoo after feeling the palpable energy around early internet. And it’s been nonstop ever since as she later joined Amazon, Cruise, Replit, and her own breakout company GC AI. She credits a lot to the emerging tech density and optimism in the Bay Area. But she also mentions additional ways people can identify these opportunities early on: - Follow intuition around big waves - Follow your envy - Never lose curiosity - Watch the teen hackers - Talk to peers early and often (builds long term networks/insights)

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I was CPO at Blend before their $4 billion IPO. We rejected the “forward deployed engineer” Palantir model that everyone is copying now. Here’s why: Blend could have followed the forward-deployed engineer approach. Both our CEO and CTO were early Palantir. They'd seen it work. Instead, we built a SaaS product with core components. Move fast, iterate, use data to learn. Not custom code for every client. That Palantir model is having a resurgence. Now Sierra, Decagon, and others are hiring forward-deployed engineers. But it’s not the right approach for every company. It’s fundamentally the wrong answer for Assembled’s customers. Here's what we understand about support teams and why we’re not going the forward deployed route: Customer Support teams are used to getting no resources and no support. On the surface, you'd think they'd be excited about engineers building custom solutions. "Finally, someone's offering us developers!" The reality is support teams are terrified of getting help they can't afford to keep. Support teams are wary because they know the math. They don't have budget for expensive, scarce resources. At some point the shoe drops. The engineers disappear when priorities shift. And custom solutions break. Support is left holding the bag with something they can't maintain. They're resource-starved by design. The idea of a dependency on resources they can't control is terrifying. So instead, the goal should be to give support teams the ability to manage, change, and solve their own problems. Not dependencies on engineers they can't keep. Smart, competent people who teach them to do it themselves. Palantir wasn't even a product company for years. They were a custom development shop with reusable components. Show up, build something bespoke, maybe extract learnings. That's not scalable for any but the largest support teams who need sustainability. Forward-deployed engineers are the new shiny object. I wasn’t a fan of it at Blend. And I’m not a fan today either. What I see in the customer support space is that teams need empowerment, not dependency. I want the teams we work with to be able to say: "I love that you’re partnering with me. And I love that I can do this myself too." That's the difference between building a product and building a consulting practice.

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As I am coaching PMs, I often get the question on how I navigate alignment challenges between cross-functional partners. I spent many years at YouTube building products where safety and user value must coexist. Finding common ground when the stakes are high and opinions diverse felt draining but over time I’ve come to enjoy the process. There is both an art and science to aligning stakeholder. One of the key things I've learned is thinking of alignment at three levels - Problem, Principles, and Product. 1️⃣ Problem - Starting with the Right Question I can't tell you how many times I've been in a room where we've spent hours debating solutions only to realize we weren't even solving the same problem. I remember one particular project where our team had many meetings of increasingly tense discussion before someone finally asked, "Wait, what problem are we trying to solve here?" It was a weird question to ask and felt like we are going backwards. But in that moment we realized how misaligned we were on the problem itself. 2️⃣ Principles - Your North Star in Difficult Terrain Clear principles are non-negotiable, especially for products focused on Safety and Responsibility. They serve as guardrails when you hit those inevitable crossroads where all paths forward involve tough trade-offs. A good way to test whether the principles are written well is to see if they can help answer questions like "Do we delay launch to address this use case? Are we ok to miss the near term opportunity?" 3️⃣ Product - Where the Rubber Meets the Road This is where alignment gets really tested. In my experience, developing options is the secret weapon for driving alignment at the product level. I typically spend hours in 1-1’s trying to understand everyone's perspective before bringing the group together to review options. Something I learned listening to Lenny’s podcast with Ami Vora is that pushback often indicates the other person knows something you don't. So rather than getting defensive, try to approach disagreements as learning opportunities. In evaluating options, I've found that simple pros and cons lists don't help much. Every option will have pros and cons! Instead, I define a few key dimensions that matter based on our product principles and company priorities. Then I grade each option against these dimensions (e.g high/med/low impact). This approach leads to much richer trade-off discussions. It's very rare for one option to be "green" on all dimensions, and that's where the real alignment work happens - deciding what matters most to the company and what you're not willing to compromise on. 👉 Alignment isn't about getting everyone to agree with you. It's about creating a shared understanding of the problem, establishing clear principles, and facilitating informed decisions about the product. Thanks James Beser for coaching me on the art and science of driving Cross-Functional Alignment. Link to the detailed post in my comments.

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Most companies still treat product partnerships as “ship the integration, issue a press release & move on to the next.” Asher Mathew and I had a great convo with Erika Wool - who leads Product & Strategic Partnerships at industry-leader Stripe - about how to counteract that mindset and drive real ecosystem-driven growth. Here are a few insights from our convo 👇 🔹 1. Product partnerships should create businesses not just applications. Stripe builds products that literally cannot exist without partners: payment methods, banks, financial infrastructure, AI experiences, and more. If your partnerships don’t meaningfully shape how your product drives value, it’s not strategic. It’s a logo. 🔹 2. Launch is the starting line, not the finish line. Erika talked about the “care and feeding” after launch: SLAs, QBRs, joint roadmaps, new markets, new features, constant recalibration. If your integration degrades as products evolve from benign neglect, your partnership won't keep paying dividends. 🔹 3. The best partner leaders speak “product,” “strategy,” and “finance.” You must connect market trends, user data, and long-term economics into a story that executives (especially CFOs) can get behind. If you can’t articulate the financial arc of a partnership, you’re flying blind and you won't maintain internal support. 🔹 4. Saying “no” is a superpower. Partnerships generate endless opportunities. The leaders who win are the ones who stay focused and keep their product teams focused. 🔹 5. Internal bridges matter as much as the external ones. Engineering, product, sales, channel, CS, marketing: everyone touches the same partner for different reasons. The job isn’t to “own” the partner … it’s to prevent the org chart from being what the partner experiences and fracturing customer value. 🔹 6. AI is turning every company into a tech company and partnerships will only get more central. As Erika put it, we’ll need to watch not just the traditional tech ecosystem, but retail, airlines, healthcare, etc., because product partnerships are becoming the infrastructure beneath all modern business and consumer experiences. This conversation is one of the clearest explanations I’ve heard of what strategic product partnerships actually look like: messy, cross-functional, multidimensional, and essential now more than ever. If your company is trying to move from “we launched an integration and a press release” to “we built a business around an integrated ecosystem driving customer value,” check out the full convo with Erika here: https://lnkd.in/ewJgn32f (Also hat tip for Glen Roth for the intro to Erika after I read his interview of Erika in Glenn's newsletter - I've been a subscriber for 5 years - it's a must read if you are in partnerships 💰)

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Incredibly thoughtful post by Giuseppe Stuto on four high level and specific solutions to realizing our opportunity in Massachusetts tech. If you read one post this week, read his substack post from today. We are so happy to have Giuseppe Stuto support the Massachusetts AI Coalition w/ Offscript as a Founding member. He is putting in a next-level, monstrous amount of work for us that few outside of the group see on a day-to-day basis. Thank you! Thank you! Here's what resonated with me from his post: 1. Increase the risk appetite. "High level: More early-stage funds in Boston need to engage meaningfully earlier in the company-building lifecycle, with real dollars and faster decision-making. That means putting in more elbow grease as a VC to make it happen responsibly: mentoring founders before a deck exists, convening them with other ambitious builders, and building trust long before a formal process starts." Every time I speak to VC's on the west coast they say the same thing: "You guys would be far better off if you moved FAST on more FLEXIBLE terms." Yes to bigger checks, but an even bigger yes to speed and support. Take the pill. Take the medicine. Take the feedback. 2. Increase the storytelling: "If we want Boston to feel like a place where ambition is contagious, we need to do a better job telling our own stories." There's a reason we like to celebrate our successes at WHOOP so publically. And the reason because it not only helps WHOOP, but it helps motivate others to build, to dream big, to change industries. It motivates ME to continue to be in the arena. Every day. 3. Increase the CEO & Seasoned Founder support: "Those whose full-time job is to network—VCs, ecosystem builders, and platform teams—need to be far more intentional about getting these operators into rooms with founders. We all have LPs and advisors who represent the best of the best. We should be creative in bridging this gap and we should be pushing those of influence to do more." In 2026 we'll be hosting multiple events bringing the CEO's, Founders, and other heroes out to events to speak, talk, and hang. We also welcome anyone from the Valley, NYC, Austin, London, and any other part of the world that has strong leaders in AI interested in connecting with the talent and student population in Massachusetts. You bring me a name, we'll fill a room with the right mix of people. Open invite. 4. Increase the meetups: "We simply need more programming in Boston, full stop." Hundreds of events are popping up in #boston and #cambridge right now. Hundreds of high quality events. Meaningful events. With legit people. Get in the game. Get in the arena. Action drives information. More action is needed, and I'm so happy to have Giuseppe Stuto, Sophie Panarese, and the Offscript team leaning in so hard to the Massachusetts AI community driving action. Great work gang!

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Having spent the past 15+ years as a Product Designer in tech in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve seen the whole arc from joyous optimism in making products that change the world, to fearful pessimism from the threat of layoffs, ironically from being directly or indirectly involved in creating products that change the world… and now our livelihoods. I’m hearing from a number of former co-workers who are telling me how their working environment has changed drastically; more fear, more anxiety, feeling the pressure to work longer hours and produce more impact, all while compensation and benefits are being squeezed and the goalposts for promotion seems to keep moving. And yet, for all the skills and experience we’ve accumulated, it doesn’t increase career options and mobility; in reality, the workplace squeeze along with precious equity vesting schedules keep a lot of people feeling even more stuck than ever before. Layer on the threat of layoffs, and you’re now trapped in a gilded cage that keeps shrinking, and shrinking, and you’re running out of time and bandwidth to figure out what to do about it. What options do I have? What alternatives are out there? (Will those alternatives pay the same as what I currently make?) What time do I have to explore these alternatives? The truth is: there is time; either time you allocate now to be proactive about your explorations, or time that will be allocated for you when you’re not ready for it, for example, if you’re on the side of a layoff. I know from first-hand experience what that feels like, and I don’t wish that and the feelings that come with that on anyone. What I wish I had in those moments were the mindsets and methods from Designing Your Life; then I wouldn’t feel stuck to my seemingly “one best option”, even embrace these curveballs because I’ve prepared for multiple scenarios, all of which I could be taking baby steps to explore and gain clarity and confidence towards being layoff-proof. If you’re feeling stuck with no good options in sight, feeling like there’s no time to prepare or just want someone to think out loud with, type "OP" in the comments; we can chat over 3 short calls, and get you on a path towards clarity, confidence and coherence.

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For years, commerce systems quietly relied on humans as the execution layer. Humans reconciled inconsistent pricing, interpreted ambiguous policies and smoothed over failures between systems that didn’t quite agree. When execution shifts from humans to systems, commerce stops being forgiving. Ambiguity becomes a liability. Policies have to be executable, not just defensible. Ownership has to be explicit. Execution paths have to be deterministic. This is why the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) matters—but not in the way it’s often discussed. UCP isn’t a product, an API, or a shortcut to AI-driven shopping. It’s a reflection of a deeper shift: execution is moving away from interfaces and toward capabilities. Here's a study that looks at UCP from that structural angle: a. why AI interfaces alone can’t safely scale commerce b. why execution (not intelligence) is the real bottleneck c. what breaks inside organizations when humans stop being the glue and d. why protocols only matter once execution maturity exists It’s an attempt to reason about why a protocol like UCP had to exist now and what it exposes about how we have been building commerce systems for the last two decades. Sharing the piece here: https://lnkd.in/gybyffFG

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Founder observation after dozens of conversations in SF: Teams love to say “we’ll build it in-house.” What they underestimate is the experimentation cost. Invite flows, collaboration timing, and role sequencing need iteration, not one-time implementation. Velocity beats ownership more often than people admit.

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🧠 Food as Medicine Is Having a Moment. Product Leaders Should Take Note. At a recent Axios health summit, leaders from organizations like Instacart and Kaiser Permanente discussed a simple but powerful idea: Food IS medicine. And the healthcare system is finally paying attention. But here’s the gap: our health-tech infrastructure isn’t designed to capture, integrate, or act on nutrition data at scale. There’s no “EHR for food,” no standard APIs for groceries, and minimal context about how nutrition impacts outcomes across populations. As product leaders, we should be asking: 🔹 Where are the platforms that track clinical nutrition interventions? 🔹 How do we route food benefits the same way we do e-prescriptions? 🔹 Can we embed food access in care pathways the way we do diagnostics? The rise of food-as-medicine initiatives isn’t just a clinical or policy story - it’s a product opportunity! If we want to make digital health truly consumer-centered, nutrition has to move from the margins into the product roadmap. It’s time to treat food access, choice, and quality as core health data. And we need the platforms to match. What are your thoughts? Should nutrition be a core domain in digital health? Let us know below! #HealthTech #ProductLeadership #FoodAsMedicine #DigitalHealth #ProductStrategy #HealthcareInnovation #ProductManagement

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This is wild. We pay people thousands a month to use our products. They pay us nothing. Sounds backwards, right? Hear me out. Our most valuable product feedback has come from paying design partners - not from internal debates, roadmap docs, or following non-ICP user behavior. Before we had PMF, we made the classic startup mistake. We had a big shiny product vision, locked ourselves in a room, spent 6 months building. It was ambitious. It was polished. After all that work, we launched… and barely anyone used it. When we started building Seona, we flipped the model. The first version was just us sending emails manually telling users what SEO work we had done. No dashboard. No interface. Just outcomes. And what taught us the most wasn’t usage. It was feedback. Honest, detailed, specific feedback from users who were actually trying to get value out of what we shipped. Now, any time we build a new product, we bring in 6 to 8 design partners from day one. 1/ They validate our ideas 2/ They suffer through the early versions 3/ They tell us what makes sense and what doesn’t 4/ And they do it with skin in the game For this, we pay them. Some up to thousands per month. It might feel expensive at first, but it saves hundreds of hours of wasted engineering, aligns your roadmap with actual user need, and gets you early fans who are already bought in. Nearly every design partner we’ve worked with has ended up becoming a customer. Because we built something that solved their problem so precisely, it was a no-brainer. Paying for feedback is one of the best investments we’ve ever made.

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Only 1% of companies say their AI investments have reached maturity, yet 3x as many employees as their leaders realize are already using gen AI for a *third* or more of their work. [1] That stat says a lot. It captures the messy middle we’re in. Nearly every company is investing in AI, with 92% planning to increase their spend over the next 3 years. [1] Most haven’t seen real returns yet. But, many employees are far ahead of leadership in experimenting and applying AI to their work. This tracks with what I’ve seen firsthand while building Liminary and speaking to folks in a variety of job roles as part of user research. There’s real energy from the bottom-up: 51% of frontline employees, 78% of managers and 85% of leaders are regular users of AI at work. [2] Yet, only 36% feel properly trained, and 54% say they’d consider using unauthorized tools if their corporate ones are inadequate. [2] It’s not that employees aren’t ready. It’s that many companies haven’t set them up for success. To me, this is the biggest leadership opportunity in AI right now, paradoxically by empowering more bottom-up exploration. That means training, but also visible executive buy-in and frameworks for experimentation that don’t require rogue usage. The companies that will pull ahead aren’t necessarily the ones with the most advanced internal models. They’ll be the ones that empower their people to use AI well. Are you seeing the same dynamic in your org, where employees are clearly pushing for more, and waiting for leadership to catch up?

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We’ve been shifting toward an experimentation culture at Fairing. Our scale gives us feedback fast, so we can validate ideas and reach statistical significance quickly. Here’s a simple example: small design tweak, sizable measurable impact. These experiments are already shaping the UI updates we’ll roll out next quarter.

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