Adil Syed

🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg

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Two weeks ago on Swimming with Allocators, we sat down with David Clark, CIO at VenCap, to talk about what decades of venture data can teach allocators. One takeaway that stood out: discounts don’t matter as much as people think in venture secondaries. Because venture is such a power-law asset class, outcomes are driven by exposure to a few massive winners. Whether a stake is bought at a small discount, or even a premium, often matters far less than the quality of the underlying company and its upside. Great conversation on venture returns, manager selection, and the nuances of how allocators should think about secondary investments. 👇 Link in the comments.

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Proud to support Esusu as it enters its next phase of growth with a new $50M Series C fundraise! Wemimo Abbey, Samir Goel and team continue to lead the industry in credit building and economic mobility for millions of renters nationwide. Esusu (Founder Institute San Francisco portfolio company) is setting a new standard for combining economic and societal impact. By helping renters get credit (literally) for paying their rent on time, they are increasing financial access and empowering more people to become homeowners - in fact, they have already empowered over $30BN in new mortgages from renters across their system. I'm especially excited about how they plan to leverage their massive dataset to create even more impact. By making rental payment data a more prominent feature in mortgage underwriting, Esusu will be able to increase the number of people that can buy homes and build generational wealth. This is a truly inspiring company 🙌 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/guUKsGtY

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Thrilled to announce our investment in CtrlB! Privilege partnering with founders like Adarsh, who are deeply obsessed with the problem they’re solving - a true force of nature. CtrlB is redefining enterprise observability, building a next-gen telemetry engine that makes search up to 10x faster and 90% cheaper. In an era where enterprises generate terabytes of data every day, CtrlB is closing the gap with a fundamentally new approach to ingesting, indexing, and querying petabyte-scale data - enabling teams to gain real-time visibility without trade-offs between cost and speed. #funding #startups

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Founders are often optimistic about growth. Sometimes, that confidence leads to funding ideas that don't fully pan out. Royalty-based growth capital is structured to limit downside risk compared to traditional venture-backed paths. Vik Thapar of Cypress Growth Capital explains that, even if outcomes fall short of early expectations, founders often still exit with meaningful results because they retain the majority of ownership. 🎙️ Tune into the Private Equity Value Creation Podcast: https://lnkd.in/gxkEsH3Z 👇🏽 Find Us Here https://lnkd.in/gTdPMk8P #privateequity #privateequitypodcast #privateequityvaluecreation

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There’s a lot of conversation about how AI is concentrating capital. That’s real. But I’m also seeing how it’s expanding what small teams can build. At ThriveLink, AI has allowed us to move faster, reach more patients, and build technology that helps families navigate systems that were never designed to be easy. We’ve been able to do with a small amount of capital what used to require entire teams and millions in funding. The tools are changing. The mission isn’t. Thankful to the Los Angeles Business Journal and Plug In Ventures for highlighting the changing venture landscape and what founders like myself are navigating right now.

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Growth at all costs is out. Strategic expansion is in. One stat from our new report that says it all: By $100M ARR, 67% of growth comes from expansion, not net-new customers. We’re seeing a mindset shift among top-performing founders. They’re prioritizing customer success early, building in product-led growth loops, and measuring how they grow, not just how fast. Full analysis and benchmarks here: https://lnkd.in/gZruurYs #AI #SaaS #CustomerSuccess #BeyondBenchmarks

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Pumped to double down on the overlooked software founders who have their head down delivering the future in their industries—especially those tired of choosing between bootstrapping or taking excessive VC $$ with boom or boost expectations. Onward!

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Big milestone for Firmable. We’ve raised $14m Series A led by Airtree. Sales has moved through a few big waves: intuition-led, CRM-led, data-led. We’re now entering the next one – intelligence-led sales. The opportunity isn’t just better data. It’s turning that data into clear direction and action, without adding more work for sales teams. That’s what we’re building at Firmable: a foundation of trusted external data, layered with intelligence that helps sellers know who to focus on and when. Led by Airtree, this round supports our expansion across Asia and into the US – and accelerates the build-out of AI agents that take the admin work off sales teams so they can focus on what they do best. Proud of the team, grateful to our customers and investors. We’re just getting started. Read the exclusive in the AFR. https://lnkd.in/gr66uknb Leigh Jasper | Tara Salmon | Karthik Venkatasubramanian| Chester Thompson| Chath Widanapathirana

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A few weeks back, I watched Maggie Hott, GTM leader at OpenAI, confidently navigate her first board meeting at Unify. Having worked with her through Emergence Capital's Operator in Residence (OIR) program, seeing her immediately contribute valuable insights made me think about how most board members receive virtually no training for this critical role. At Emergence, we've built our firm around developing board excellence. We grow all our partners from within and have established a culture of mentorship focused on board service. Junior investors aren't thrown into the deep end—we pair them with senior GPs to observe effective board dynamics firsthand. My initial experience was at DroneDeploy alongside my partner Kevin Spain, where I got great mentorship before taking on independent board responsibilities. We extend this methodology to our OIR program, where operators learn how to be effective board members. Based on my experience mentoring directors, here are the fundamental principles I share with first-timers for how board members can best support founders: 1. Reframe the purpose: Problem-solving, not reporting If your board meeting is primarily reporting, you're wasting your management team's time. Information sharing should happen asynchronously, with board members engaging with materials before the meeting. This enables the live session to leverage collective intelligence on critical challenges. This rarely happens because many directors overextend themselves across too many boards—another reason we maintain a disciplined investment pace. 2. Master the Socratic approach The most valuable contribution often comes through thoughtful questions rather than declarative statements. Your objective is to enhance the decision-making capability of management. I enter each meeting with 1-3 specific areas where I know I can add value, focusing questions on these topics. 3. Follow-through separates professionals from amateurs Diligently document your commitments, establish clear action items, and execute them. It's crazy how just doing this proactively makes a board member stand out. 4. Understand your unique contribution to the board ecosystem A high-functioning board resembles a great basketball team—you need complementary skills, not redundant ones. In every meeting, I stay conscious of my distinct value relative to others in the room, whether that's SaaS expertise, AI knowledge, or a particular relationship dynamic with the CEO. I calibrate my role based on needs—sometimes assertively addressing areas where others have less experience, other times asking probing questions where fellow members have deeper expertise. -- To my knowledge, Emergence is the only VC firm with a formalized program dedicated to board excellence. It's an investment that yields returns where they matter most—in bending the odds of success for our founders. Founders, I'm curious: What board member behaviors have you found most valuable?

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So happy to see Openlayer announce its Series A and share the incredible work they’re doing to help accelerate their enterprise customers’ development of AI systems - without exposing them to revenue and reputational risk. Check below to see more details.

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Three years ago, we launched Wisdom Ventures with a clear intention to support founders building at the intersection of well-being, human connection, and transformative tech. Since then, we’ve made 37 investments from our oversubscribed "minimum viable" $10M Fund I, backing early-stage companies in physical and mental wellbeing, women’s health, ethical AI, and human connection-centered innovation. We’ve always known we are on to something—what we didn’t expect was how quickly the data would back it up. Recent industry benchmarks show that most 2022-vintage emerging funds are experiencing the usual J-curve dip. In contrast, Wisdom Ventures is showing strong early performance: 📈 Net IRR (internal rate of return): >10% 📊 MOIC (multiple on invested capital): ~2x* ⏰ Median investment age: 18 months 💥 ....and # of our companies have a diverse founder by gender, race, or sexual orientation: 75% As we get ready to make our 38th and final investment out of Fund I and start deploying out of our significantly larger Fund II (first close May 1st), we’re filled with gratitude—for our founders, our LPs, our early supporters, our early believers, and this growing movement toward a more conscious, connected future, fueled by innovation from the ❤️ *Based on most current reports **Not in photo: Our fantastic operating partner, Zoe Rogers #WisdomVentures #ImpactInvesting #ConsciousTech #Wellbeing #AIForGood #FutureOfWork #VentureCapital

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At Vibe Capital, we believe we're at a major inflection point. For the last 40 years, the highest-leverage work was in manipulating bits. That era is maturing into a utility. The new frontier is the physical world, and the race to program it has begun. In my latest Dave's Quick Hits newsletter, I map out the three fundamental stacks for rebuilding reality: 1. The Biological Path: Using AI to turn evolution into an engineering discipline, creating new materials and medicines at an incredible speed. 2. The Mechanical Path: Deploying AI-directed robots and self-replicating factories to trigger a new industrial explosion. 3. The Cybernetic Path: Building the final API to the brain, merging human cognition directly with our biological and mechanical creations. The generational alpha won't come from funding the next app, but from financing the means of physical creation. You can read the full analysis and the investment theses for each path here. https://lnkd.in/gAXNDaZF #FrontierTech #VentureCapital #Investing #DeepTech #AI #Manufacturing #Biotech #vibecap #vibecapital

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HealthVC x Lusha: Unlocking Smarter Fundraising and Sales Workflows We’re thrilled to announce our newest partnership: HealthVC has teamed up with Lusha to bring next-gen data and prospecting tools to founders, fund managers, and operators across our community. Lusha recently launched a powerful suite of AI-powered features that redefine how go-to-market teams research, prospect, and convert. Now those capabilities are coming to HealthVC Pro subscribers. ✨ With this partnership, you’ll be able to: Surface real-time, accurate, and compliant B2B contact data Use AI Prospecting Chat to instantly uncover new investor or customer leads Tap into CRM-triggered recommendations to stay one step ahead Turn insight into action with Sales Streaming, Lusha’s smarter, connected selling framework. But Lusha’s superpower isn’t just the AI; it’s that the AI sits on top of best-in-class data. That means every signal, every recommendation, and every lead is not just fast, it’s trustworthy. At HealthVC, we’re building more than a newsletter; we’re building the operating system for venture, and this partnership helps our members move faster, pitch smarter, and close better. Available now to all HealthVC subscribers, link in comments.

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From the beginning, we believed Lumana was building much more than a smarter surveillance tool. Lumana's platform reflects the next evolution in video intelligence — physical AI. This approach enables systems to go beyond basic detection capabilities to understanding context, infer intent, and deliver real-time insights that improve safety and operations at scale. Further, we decided to take the longer and more difficult direction of building a whole new generation and fully featured Video Management System (VMS). With the company’s $40M Series A, led by our friend Peter Wagner from Wing Venture Capital and our seed partners from SCAPITALVC, we’re doubling down on a platform that’s already proving its value in the real world. We are serving now close to ten thousands enterprise cameras in production! Founders like Sagi Ben Moshe bring a rare mix of vision and execution to the table. From our earliest conversations as an EIR at Norwest, it was clear that Lumana had the potential to reshape how organizations use video. Congratulations to the team on this well-deserved milestone. https://lnkd.in/gwHdaGPZ

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Great conversations at our WillowTree Ventures dinner with leaders across fintech and AI. A few themes stood out strongly: enterprises are leaning into AI for real efficiency gains, product and engineering orgs still set the agenda, and the whitespace in “boring” industries is wider than most people assume. It’s clear that the next breakout companies in AI for financial services won’t come from the obvious places. Thanks to everyone who joined - excited to keep working alongside founders building in these non-obvious, high-impact wedges.

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If you know... A 10x engineer Who loves the speed and intellectual challenge of early stage but also Wants job stability and Equity diversification then This is the one job that checks all of their boxes

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