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Ashley Mayer reposted thisAshley Mayer reposted thisWe are back with another episode of The Learning Corner by Precursor Ventures, our weekly podcast where Mia and I discuss the articles that caught our team's attention. We spent the bulk of this week's episode discussing a post by Ashley Mayer at Coalition titled "We Need Better Stories About The Future" as it was something that felt really resonant with both of us. In addition to being a fantastic investor, Ashley is a very seasoned comms professional who has a real knack for putting her finger on whatever the zeitgeist is and when and why it might be shifting. There is a real disconnect between how both the hyperscalers and startups describe the future they are ushering in and how people outside of tech's inner circle feel about what that future means for them. It's a good reminder that many of the best narratives center the customer, not the company, as the hero in the story. As someone who has seen his share of dystopian billboards in SF, I really think Ashley is on to something with her post. We pivoted to spend some time riffing on Pavel Prata's post about the rise of the value-add LP. It gave me the chance to reflect on some of the things I've learned from my time on the Screendoor IC and on what GPs value in their LPs; value is always in the eyes of the recipient. We closed by touching on a post by Jenny Fielding around the return of high-resolution financing, where valuation caps change frequently as companies hit milestones and look to get a valuation bump at each point. Based on what I'm seeing in the market, it is 100% back. As always, links to the articles and the episode below!
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Ashley Mayer shared thisHere's my #1 piece of comms advice for early stage founders: make someone or something else the hero of your story.
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Ashley Mayer shared thisLately, I’ve been thinking about two things that matter deeply to me: 1) How shitty our industry’s narrative is right now outside of tech (especially around AI), and how we might begin to fix it. 2) How hard it is for startups to break through the noise in this moment when it’s not just capital that’s concentrated in the biggest players, but also attention. I believe tech’s primary narrative objective is to give people reasons to root for the future, and by that measure, we are failing miserably. And it’s increasingly obvious that our biggest players (public and private) will NOT be the ones to take on this mission. They’ve already boxed themselves in with a narrative crafted for very different objectives (namely, justifying and funding massive capex). Startups have multiple structural advantages over incumbents and hyperscalers when it comes to storytelling in this moment—if they choose to use them. I do my best to outline what they are. I would love to hear what you think! Also - this is my first Substack essay. While I’m not committing to a weekly newsletter, I do intend to write more often, so please subscribe to SAFE Space (heh) if you feel so inspired (this will always be free). https://lnkd.in/euCvBNDV
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Ashley Mayer shared thisSome delayed ~professional news~ 1) Coalition has an amazing office in Soho that we share with our friends at Springbank and Reach Capital. It's frankly far nicer than we deserve at this early/scrappy stage and I'm grateful! 2) We've been hosting monthly breakfasts with startup founders/investors/operators and guest speakers who are "tech adjacent." The goal is to pull us all out of our bubble a bit with different perspectives. Message me or Elana Berkowitz if you want to be on the invite list. OR if you have a speaker idea!!
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Ashley Mayer reposted thisAshley Mayer reposted thisInspired by International Women’s Day, we reflected on the different narratives—and heroes—for women in tech over the past few decades. From Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In to the rise (and fall) of the Girl Boss to…whatever this moment is? And while there's no shortage of wildly impressive women leaders in our industry right now, we’ve noticed they’re staying quiet, relative to their male peers. On an individual level, the risk of visibility might not seem worth the reward. But the consequences on an ecosystem level are pretty devastating. There are exceptions, of course! And you don't need to have a huge public profile to have influence. Let us know who you find inspiring in the comments. 🎙️ Helen Min and Ashley Mayer
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Ashley Mayer shared thisIt was such a treat to have Cecilia Stallsmith join the chat this week. We worked together during some particularly fun/crazy years at Box, and I’ve loved following her career ever since. One of our recurring Great Chat topics is the transition between operating roles and portfolio life (working across multiple projects/companies) when it comes to your startup career. Ceci joined Lovable as head of marketing six months ago, after nearly six years running a successful GTM consultancy. She’s part of a larger trend of talented people leaving consulting, venture, etc for the wild ride of hyper-growth AI startups, so we asked her to come on the pod and tell us all about it. This is a fun and radically candid discussion on trusting your gut and following joy (shout-out to Alysa Liu), intentionally “stepping off” the career ladder, and even the surprising realities of parental leave when you’re employed elsewhere versus your own boss. Helen Min and I are both pretty obsessed with her comment on stewardship in the clip below. Thank you, Ceci! Episode links below.
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Ashley Mayer shared thisAt a time when so much of the conversation in the startup world is about automating and replacing human labor, it’s extra heartening to see a company succeed by putting people at the center. Jeremy Gurewitz, Sara Sargent and team are building something incredibly special at Solace: pairing patients with expert advocates to help them navigate the US healthcare system and achieve better health outcomes. Huge congrats to the team on the fresh $130M Series C led by IVP. I challenge you to find another startup building with this level of speed, heart and impact. And on a much lighter note: our first Coalition unicorn. 🦄 Lindsay Ullman Toyin Ajayi Jaclyn Rice Nelson
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Ashley Mayer reposted thisAshley Mayer reposted thisWe’re officially back for another year of Great Chat! Huge thanks to Mercury, radically different banking loved by 300K+ entrepreneurs (and this pod), for being such great partners. On our first episode back, we cover a lot of ground: the peptide craze, what Brex’s exit means for fintech, the Moltbook explosion, why vibe coding is the new 996, and whether building in public is no longer the go-to playbook for startups. We recorded right before Anthropic’s epic Super Bowl ad reveal, so tune in next week for hot takes on ads in AI, and ads about ads in AI (and what we think about OpenAI’s response). 🎙️ Angela Du, Helen Min, Mac Bohannon & Ashley Mayer
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Ashley Mayer reposted thisAshley Mayer reposted thisWhat happens when one of tech's sharpest communicators crosses over to the investment side? Ashley Mayer, co-founder and GP at Coalition, made the leap from leading comms at some of the most talked-about startups to backing them, and The Katies were dying to know what she's learned sitting in both seats. Honestly, there is a lot of messy reality in startup storytelling... so we unpacked it all, including why the "chief storyteller" title usually falls on founders whether they want it or not, and how the tech industry's current anti-hero moment is forcing communicators to completely rethink their playbooks. Get the scoop on: 🔥 The VC perspective flip - Sitting on the investor side completely changed her understanding of what communications actually delivers for businesses 🎭 The anti-hero era explained - Why tech's moral complexity moment requires a totally different communications approach than the "change the world" narrative from 5 years ago 🛡️ Psychological safety for founders - Founders need a safe space to explore their company's story before they can tell it publicly 📊 Active operators vs. traditional VCs - How Coalition's model of actual operators creates different (and better) support for portfolio companies 🧭 Navigating narrative shifts - Practical advice on adapting your messaging to the current zeitgeist without abandoning your core values Thank you so much Ashley for joining us!!! Katie Boysen Katie Dufficy
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Ashley Mayer reacted on thisAshley Mayer reacted on thisLast Thursday was a powerful reminder of why we built PearX the way we did. We reviewed ~2,500 teams. We chose 13. That’s not an accident, it’s intentional. PearX is designed to stay small, focused, and deeply committed to each founder we back. We’re not trying to maximize volume. We’re trying to maximize outcomes. And it’s working. 83% of the last Batch X companies have gone on to raise institutional rounds led by top-tier VCs. These aren’t hype-driven rounds. They’re real, conviction-backed financings. No noise. Just fundamentals, execution, and great founders. Quietly, PearX is becoming one of the strongest pre-seed portfolios in venture. Proud of the founders. Excited for what’s ahead. Pear VC 🍐
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Ashley Mayer reacted on thisAshley Mayer reacted on thisWhat a week at Adonis. 💫 Our CEO, Akash Magoon, sat down with AlleyWatch last week to share more on our product, growth, and the vision behind our latest funding round. Read the full interview here ➡️ https://lnkd.in/e3VqkgNf To top it off, seeing our Series C featured in Times Square was a surreal moment. Appreciate the recognition, Nasdaq! Excited to carry this momentum into the week ahead. 🚀
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Ashley Mayer reacted on thisAshley Mayer reacted on thisEarlier this month, Inc. Magazine issued its annual Female Founders 500 list—"The Trailblazing Women Daring to Defy The Odds"!—and we're thrilled to celebrate the founders in the GingerBread Capital portfolio in this year's cohort: Iman Abuzeid, co-founder & CEO of Incredible Health Leah Del Percio, TEP and Tara Faquir - MBA, co-founders, Trustate Kate Ryder, founder & CEO, Maven Clinic Ahryun Moon, co-founder & CEO, GoodTime Jen Zeszut, CEO, GOODLES Esther Hallam, founder & CEO, Nara Organics Adrianne Nickerson and Elaine Purcell, co-founders, Oula Jarah Euston, co-founder & CEO, WorkWhile Emily Hosie, founder & CEO, REBEL Congratulations to all the founders on this year's list, who are beating the odds and making women's history every day of the year! https://lnkd.in/d_2CzDy #womenshistorymonth #femalefounders #femaleunicorns #womeninvestinginwomen #womeninvc
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Ashley Mayer reacted on thisAshley Mayer reacted on thisI'm excited to share that my long-time friend Jesse Rose and I are building a new company together and we're part of a16z speedrun latest cohort (shout out sr006!). Jesse was most recently Cofounder at Berry Street where he built the business from $0 to Series B in under 2.5 years. He’s a beast and couldn’t think of a better partner for what we’re building. Since leaving Weight Watchers where I was VP of Product leading their $1B ARR consumer business, I’ve been exploring what type of company I wanted to build next. The consumer healthcare experience is an absolute hellscape so that’s what we’re tackling :) The company is still in stealth with beta customers, but I'm incredibly grateful to a16z speedrun, Opal Ventures, Steven Gutentag, Demetri Karagas, Andrew Parker, Pierre Valade, Nicolae Rusan, and others that took a bet on us before we even had a deck. If you want to learn more about what we’re building before the formal announcement, shoot me a DM or email. Happy to share more. Here we go! Appreciate you joining us for the ride Andrew Chen Joshua Lu Andrew Lee Jonathan Lai Kenan Saleh Troy Kirwin Macy Mills Lester Chen Jordan Carver Jordan Carver Jordan Mazer Bella Nazzari Tom Hammer Marcus Segal
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Ashley Mayer reacted on thisAshley Mayer reacted on thisWe are back with another episode of The Learning Corner by Precursor Ventures, our weekly podcast where Mia and I discuss the articles that caught our team's attention. We spent the bulk of this week's episode discussing a post by Ashley Mayer at Coalition titled "We Need Better Stories About The Future" as it was something that felt really resonant with both of us. In addition to being a fantastic investor, Ashley is a very seasoned comms professional who has a real knack for putting her finger on whatever the zeitgeist is and when and why it might be shifting. There is a real disconnect between how both the hyperscalers and startups describe the future they are ushering in and how people outside of tech's inner circle feel about what that future means for them. It's a good reminder that many of the best narratives center the customer, not the company, as the hero in the story. As someone who has seen his share of dystopian billboards in SF, I really think Ashley is on to something with her post. We pivoted to spend some time riffing on Pavel Prata's post about the rise of the value-add LP. It gave me the chance to reflect on some of the things I've learned from my time on the Screendoor IC and on what GPs value in their LPs; value is always in the eyes of the recipient. We closed by touching on a post by Jenny Fielding around the return of high-resolution financing, where valuation caps change frequently as companies hit milestones and look to get a valuation bump at each point. Based on what I'm seeing in the market, it is 100% back. As always, links to the articles and the episode below!
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Daniel Dart
Rock Yard Ventures • 10K followers
🚨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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Kal Amin
7K followers
I’m thrilled to officially announce our $3M seed investment in Propel People, a company we built inside the 1848 Ventures studio to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing the #construction industry today: the skilled #labor shortage. For small and medium-sized contractors, hiring isn't just a challenge. It's the number one threat to their growth, profitability, and safety. With 94% of contractors struggling to find qualified workers, it’s clear that traditional hiring methods aren't built for the trades. That’s why we built Propel People. It’s a mobile-first, AI-powered hiring platform designed for how construction actually works: in the field. By leveraging smart candidate ranking, instant #SMS-based screening, and a fully #bilingual interface, Propel helps contractors build great crews faster and more efficiently. I’m also thrilled to formally announce that industry veteran Dexter Bachelder is at the helm as CEO. Having worked with Dexter and the team over the last few months, we've already seen the impact of his leadership. His 25 years of experience scaling construction tech companies will be instrumental as Propel People enters this initial stage of growth. This investment reinforces our core thesis at 1848 Ventures: building AI-native companies that solve fundamental pain points for the #SMBs that form the backbone of our economy. A huge congratulations to Dexter and the entire Propel People team on this milestone. We are incredibly proud to partner with you to support the people who build our world. Read the full announcement below. #constructiontech #venturecapital #seedfunding #ai #skilledtrades #smb
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Katie Griff
Red Cell Partners • 4K followers
AI doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does need to work for society’s most critical industries. From healthcare to defense, current solutions lack the deep knowledge to solve organizations’ highly complex use cases. Enter Trase, led by Grant Verstandig, Baskar Sridharan, and Joe Laws. Trase is combining industry-leading tech with deep domain expertise to deliver autonomous, end-to-end, turnkey agents designed to drive real ROI across highly regulated sectors, with compliance, trust, and security guiding their every move. Today, Trase launched out of stealth with $10.5 million in pre-seed funding from Red Cell Partners and VIPC | Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation. Learn how we’re enabling last-mile AI adoption across various enterprises, starting with healthcare, energy, and national security: https://lnkd.in/egJYdNKz
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PYMNTS
116K followers
Plaid's CEO just said the next five years will look completely different than the last five, but somehow that's not even this week's biggest plot twist. This week, we're breaking down the moves that matter: 💡 Plaid CEO Zach Perret tells Karen Webster the company is evolving from data connectivity to becoming "the analytics platform for financial services" while betting big on agentic AI. https://hubs.ly/Q03v4JdD0 📉 Main Street businesses are struggling hard, growing at just two-thirds the rate of larger companies as restaurants and retail get hammered by cautious consumer spending. https://hubs.ly/Q03v4H_C0 🛡️ Block's Brian Boates reveals how Cash App prevented $2 billion in P2P fraud since 2020 using machine learning models that warn users about only 1.5% of payments. https://hubs.ly/Q03v4GPm0 ⚖️ A federal judge rules Anthropic can train AI with books without permission under fair use, dealing a major blow to authors seeking copyright protections. https://hubs.ly/Q03v4G-d0 🏦 Mastercard opens its account-to-account instant payments sandbox to UK banks, letting them test new services without breaking critical infrastructure. https://hubs.ly/Q03v4H1Q0 💰 Fiserv launches its own stablecoin FIUSD on Solana, joining the rush of traditional finance companies entering the digital asset space. https://hubs.ly/Q03v4G-f0 Big question of the week: If AI companies can legally train on copyrighted content, what does that mean for every creative industry's future? Thanks for tuning in, we'll see you next week.
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Mary Glaz
Mission Space • 9K followers
Lower launch costs, dual-use tech validated by government demand, and faster exit timelines mean generalist VCs now have a real entry point. With $4.5B invested across 48 companies this year, venture funding in space is scaling beyond rockets into applications, infrastructure, and defense. Space is colliding with climate tech, AI, and resource plays. FireSat’s wildfire monitoring constellation, Planet Labs’ collaboration with Anthropic, and Interlune’s helium-3 vision show that the next wave of space investment is not about launch but about applications with terrestrial impact. Historically, space investments took decades to return capital. Now, IPOs like Voyager and Karman Space & Defense, plus the prospect of strategic acquisitions, make the sector investable within standard VC fund timelines. This is critical for bringing more generalist investors into the market. Let's build!
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Renew Venture Capital®
2K followers
At Renew VC, we believe strong companies are built by founders who stay close to the problem—and even closer to their users. In this clip from Founded on Purpose, Yana Welinder shares the product philosophy that guided Kraftful from early traction through acquisition by Amplitude. The throughline: - Build what users love - Let real signals — not noise — drive decisions - Stay grounded in product craft as you scale A thoughtful watch for software founders building with intention. 🎧 Full episode: https://lnkd.in/eEJvpVpD
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Medha Agarwal
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I’m thrilled to announce defy.vc’s investment in Birches Health as part of their $20M combined Seed and Series A funding round, alongside incredible partners like AlleyCorp, General Catalyst, Will Ventures, and others. As someone deeply passionate about backing companies that tackle important problems for our society, I couldn’t be more excited about what Birches is building—a national virtual clinic dedicated to treating gambling addiction and related behavioral disorders like gaming, sex, porn, and internet addictions. What excites me most is Birches’ innovative health assurance model: proactive, accessible, and affordable care that’s evidence-based and delivered right at home. With the explosion of legal sports betting—think nearly $1.5 billion wagered on this year’s Super Bowl alone—we’re staring down a looming public health emergency. Traditional options like hotlines or generic therapy fall short for this high-acuity issue, but Birches changes that by offering specialized therapy from trained clinicians, multimodal treatment, and peer support, all covered by major insurers like United Healthcare, Cigna, Aetna, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. It’s available in all 50 states, breaking down geographical and financial barriers that have left so many without help. The impact is already profound: 96% of patients report an improved quality of life, and 94% give Birches a 5/5 rating. By partnering with state governments, payors, and policymakers, Birches is pushing gambling addiction into the spotlight of behavioral health conversations, where it’s been neglected for too long—often leading to shame, worsened outcomes, and higher suicidality risks. This funding will supercharge their growth: expanding the provider network, boosting clinical excellence, scaling infrastructure, and deepening insurance and state partnerships to meet surging demand. Very excited to partner with Elliott Rapaport and the entire Birches team! See more about our POV in the blog post linked in the comments. #GamblingAddiction #BehavioralHealth #HealthTech #VentureCapital #Innovation
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Earnest Sweat
Stresswood • 17K followers
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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Gabrielle Rancourt
Rancourt Consulting LLC • 1K followers
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mHUB
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Early-stage fundraising can feel opaque—especially at the pre-seed stage. In a recent mHUB classroom session, founders heard from Tina Hrabak, Head of Platform at LongJump Ventures, on how pre-seed investors evaluate early-stage companies and what signals matter most before revenue. The session focused less on pitch tactics and more on understanding how investors assess risk, progress, and momentum—offering founders a clearer framework for approaching fundraising as a process rather than a verdict. Read the full recap for key takeaways for founders preparing for pre-seed fundraising: https://hubs.la/Q042bmz90 #Startups #Founders #PreSeed #Fundraising #VentureCapital #mHUB #VC
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Layer
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Jeff Immelt
New Enterprise Associates… • 566K followers
Dayna Grayson is a leading VC who has “sat in every chair” at a young age. She founded Construct Capital with Rachel Holt, an early leader at Uber. Together, they are tackling the digitization of industry. Dayna will discuss macro trends, what it takes to be a founder, and the potential for AI. She is one of the few who have successfully blended a career of operations and investing. Check out our discussion at: https://lnkd.in/eYBUGjbW #leadershipdevelopment
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9 Comments -
Cecily Mak
Wisdom Ventures • 4K followers
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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Abhijith Preman & Co. LLP Chartered Accountants
10K followers
ESOPs are a retention tool that most startups design too loosely at the start. Vesting schedules, cliff periods, exercise prices, pool size relative to the cap table each of these decisions has downstream implications for hiring, fundraising, and eventual exits. Founders who build their ESOP policy before they need it rarely have to undo a bad one mid-round. The best time to get the structure right is before the first grant goes out. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gKcsbPNM #ESOPStructuring #StartupEquity #EmployeeStock #AbhijithPremanAndCo #APCALLP
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Gratitude Railroad
4K followers
Worth a read: Stacy Brown-Philpot, Founder and Managing Partner of Cherryrock Capital - which we invested in through our inclusive capital strategy - sat down with TechCrunch for a great conversation on venture, building through today’s market, and what’s next for Cherryrock. Check it out here:
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Martyn Eeles
Clarma Capital • 12K followers
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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Lakshmi Shankar
Together • 3K followers
Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs
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Jeff Becker
Antler • 30K followers
Seed VC isn’t just in a downturn—it’s facing extinction unless it evolves fast. Great read from Rob Go & David Beisel at NextView Ventures... - YC and mega-funds now dominate the early-stage landscape, squeezing out traditional seed investors - Power law thinking has gone mainstream—everyone’s chasing trillion-dollar outliers - AI isn’t helping seed VCs—it’s raising the stakes, crowding the field, and disrupting VC itself - The middle of the market has collapsed, and excess profits are gone - Hope isn’t a strategy—seed needs a new model, now Link here... https://lnkd.in/ek2MZGhm And if you like this topic, I wrote a piece on venture bifurcating into inception funds and mega funds here: https://lnkd.in/eJz5DmX6 #ai #venturecapital #vc
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Leah R. Taylor
Cast Influence • 4K followers
Apollo's COO Matt Curl on why pure AI automation can actually hurt sales effectiveness: "When teams eliminated phone calls and relied solely on automated outbound, we saw sales skills deteriorate. Why? New reps weren't truly learning the product. They'd show up to demos flat-footed because AI had handled everything up to that point." There's no shortcut to product mastery. The most successful brands still maintain strong SDR teams who: ☎️ Make their own calls 🙋♀️ Handle objections in real-time 👩🏫 Master product knowledge through direct customer interaction While AI is transformative, it should augment human capabilities, not replace the fundamental learning that comes from direct customer engagement. True sales excellence requires hands-on experience. You can automate processes, but you can't automate expertise. Thanks for the interview Michael Levy
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