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Seattle, Washington, United States
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T. A. McCann shared thisHey entrepreneurs, you need to get your AI tools in order!Hey entrepreneurs, you need to get your AI tools in order!
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T. A. McCann shared thisLove the Seahawks and we should all be an even bigger part of them! Let's band together to be owners! Fun to see the Arrived team behind the initiative!T. A. McCann shared thisIt’s time for fans to own a piece of their favorite teams, starting with the Seattle Seahawks. Most people don’t know this, but 2 years ago the NFL voted to allow private equity ownership in the league for the first time, capped at 10% in any given team. David & Ben of Acquired said it best on CNBC yesterday, this “has set off this complete change in how the dynamics of ownership of NFL teams work with about half the teams now pursuing sales of minority stakes to both family offices and private equity firms and valuations have gone up 60% in 3 years, the average NFL is now worth almost $7 Billion.” Arrived is bringing it to the fans. Learn more and add your interest here: https://lnkd.in/gfwmEkSg This is a fan-led effort to explore whether Seahawks fans could have a seat at the ownership table. #GoHawks
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T. A. McCann shared thisI’m having fun reading this and help to shape it too. Early days but well worth it!T. A. McCann shared thishttps://nerdy.vc A new experiment from PSL! We’re launching a newsletter where we curate the top AI research papers every week and write up what they mean for the venture market. If you’re a VC or work in startups check it out!
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T. A. McCann shared thisIf you're a dev and in Seattle, come by next week and hang out. Claude is pretty amazing and we're going to see a bit of what's coming next...T. A. McCann shared this🚀 We’re excited to kick off the new year by partnering with Anthropic and Lucas Dickey to host the Claude Code Meetup in Seattle on January 15. Expect a casual night of lightning talks, live demos, and great conversations with others building with Claude. 🔹 Space is limited — RSVP now: https://luma.com/diibx7su #ClaudeCode #Meetup #Builders #SeattleTech
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T. A. McCann shared thisI'm really enjoying the Raisor's Edge podcast/YouTube channel from my friend Ben Elowitz. Two especially good episodes from Dan Shapiro and David Shim from Read.ai. Special shout-out to my partner Julie Sandler for her engagement on Read. If you are a founder and want some tips and inspiration around fundraising, I recommend a watch/listen - https://lnkd.in/gaFFUnGv and https://lnkd.in/gC4fV_sz
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T. A. McCann shared thisIt's December. A good time to reflect on the last year, plan for 2026, and consider your "next best job". Here are some tips and tactics that can help you get there!
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T. A. McCann shared thisNobody likes being in the hospital, and everyone wants to get out on time. Casera aims to dramatically improve hospital operations with an initial focus on "length of stay". It's exciting to be partnering with Neeraj Singh Bhavani and Aleksandr Levin to bring Casera to life as another Pioneer Square Labs spinout. Read the full story here - https://lnkd.in/gdBWtxaCSeattle startup Casera emerges from PSL to help hospital managers clear bottlenecks with help from AISeattle startup Casera emerges from PSL to help hospital managers clear bottlenecks with help from AI
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T. A. McCann shared thisI'm looking forward to https://slush.org/ this week in Helsinki and spreading the Pioneer Square Labs message across the Nordics. We'll also be showcasing new features in https://www.getlev.co/ (your AI co-founder) to bring even more velocity to early-stage founders! If your're there and want to connect, message me and we can find time.
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T. A. McCann shared thisGreat post about one of our new Pioneer Square Labs companies, Lev—your AI co-founder. We've put 10 years of PSL experiments and learnings into a product to help more founders succeed, faster. https://trylev.co/ https://lnkd.in/gtPNdpxDSeattle studio PSL encodes its playbook into Lev, an AI co-founder that helps turn ideas into companiesSeattle studio PSL encodes its playbook into Lev, an AI co-founder that helps turn ideas into companies
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T. A. McCann liked thisT. A. McCann liked thisToday, we’re excited to launch Prospecting in Clarify. It’s dope. Here’s why: Currently, your prospecting motion probably looks like this: Find leads here. Enrich there. Sequence somewhere else. Then pray your CRM syncs. We brought all of that into Clarify with Lead Finder and Campaigns — two features that collapse your entire prospecting motion into one place. Now, you can prospect like this: 🔍 Describe your ideal customer. Lead Finder builds an enriched list instantly and you can import it directly into your CRM. ✉️ Launch personalized email campaigns in a click. Or let Rep, your AI sales agent, write them for you. ⚡ Replies become deals. Fields get filled. Your CRM stays current on autopilot. Now your autonomous CRM helps you generate business, not just track it. Try it free → clarify.ai/prospecting Incredibly proud of the team 🚀
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T. A. McCann liked thisT. A. McCann liked thisThe most epic 13 minute AI rant I've heard in 2026. My parent's heard this when I was playing it in the car and thought Jason M. Lemkin went OFF like Stephen A. Smith does on first take. "We want folks that are genuinely AI fluent. It's pretty simple. Now you know, maybe last year we called them prompt engineers, right? That used to be a job. I don't know if you remember that actually used to be the hottest job on planet earth. Now no one needs a prompt engineer because it's pretty easy to prompt all these tools. That job died. Okay. Um and now we need go-to-market engineers. Um I think that job's going to die. We need—everyone needs so many forward deployed engineers. Like you can't hire enough forward deployed engineers. But uh you know um but Palantir just announced in whatever their their big their big event—they've gotten their deployment times down over 90% with forward deployed engineers. So that may become—so the this wave of disruption for the titles and the specificity, it's also exhaustingly accelerating. But it's really simple. You meet anyone for any role—sales, marketing, engineering, product, QA—they're they're either they're either they can't keep all of the ways they use AI to accelerate their job from spewing out of their mouth, or they're staring at you. It's there's nowhere in the middle. Like, and the person that comes in and says—it's it's it sounds Captain Obvious—but like, you know, you just had the whatever from Lovable, the the marketing head that was super popular on the show, right? She's just spewing AI-native insights into Lovable, right? It's not that complicated. You hire her, Elena Verna, or whatever it is. You just hire her. It doesn't matter whether she's still in college or a junior or a senior or a middler, a left or right. And honestly, if you interview people, I would say of all even of the best startups I've invested in, maybe 30% of the management team meets this standard at best. 30%. Maybe less. And of the interviews I do in general, it's single-digit percents... It's just and in in that sense, it's the same as ever. Like you either lower the bar in hiring or you hire someone that's actually great. And someone that's actually great is so far ahead of you in how to apply to to employ the efficiencies of AI in their role, your jaw falls on the table. The difference is we used to need warm bodies. That's what's changing. We used to need warm bodies to answer the call, to do QA, to do code review, to to get the blue pixel to go from the upper left to the lower right. You laugh, but you need you literally needed to brute force this with humans. With AI, every day that goes by, the AI—you do not need brute force human beings on your team. And that's another reason they're shrinking. Why are all these new companies so efficient? They're just not brute forcing things with humans. They're just not. They're choosing not to." *** Full Source + Credit: Harry Stebbings podcast, 20VC
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T. A. McCann liked thisT. A. McCann liked thisSpending lots of time with Claude Code in the last months (+ OpenClaw more recently) has made it abundantly clear to me that every piece of SaaS hugely benefits from being infused with AI. All not new, this has become clear soon after the ChatGPT moment... but it's become a lot more tangible to me recently. Pretty much everything needs to be reimagined from the ground up. Here's a quick (Claude generated) summary. Only looking at the past, recent past, and near-term future here. Not even mentioning the mid/long-term, in which AI agents will do the majority of the actual work.
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T. A. McCann liked thisT. A. McCann liked this🇻🇳 We leave for Vietnam in 3 days and I still need to pack, so naturally I spent my morning building a mobile app for our trip. In 72 hours, my partner Kelly and I are jumping on a plane to Hanoi to meet our friends for 11 days across Vietnam. We're going to a lot of places in that time: Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Hoi An, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh City, so there is a ton of logistics to pull together for everything we are doing. Also, trip planning is one of those things that ends up scattered across 15 email threads, 3 different booking apps, text messages, and a PDF you can't find when you actually need it, especially when wifi is spotty. So I did what any reasonable person does: I built a small offline PWA to keep it all in one place. It lives on my iPhone home screen, so I can open it and get: - The full itinerary, all 11 days, - with every confirmation number, - phone number, - booking reference, - and map link baked in. Tap to call a hotel. Tap to open the address in Maps. It even works in airplane mode. I built the whole thing in 1 hour with Claude Code. I described what I wanted, fed it our booking confirmation PDFs and emails, screenshots from Steller, and texts from WhatsApp where we were coordinating with hotels in Vietnam. Claude handled the HTML, CSS, service worker, and all the itinerary data. I mostly just made decisions. When I was happy with it, I deployed it to Netlify. Just dragging the folder from my desktop on the website and it was ready in 2 mins, completely for free. Once it's cached on your phone after the first load, you never need signal again. Perfect for navigating a foreign country. If you're going on a trip soon, give it a try or send them to me and I'll make you one.
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T. A. McCann liked thisT. A. McCann liked thisWe just announced the first 18 advisors for Startup Day 2026's Advisory Room. These are the people you'd normally spend weeks trying to get a coffee meeting with. At Startup Day, you book a 1:1 session and sit down with them. Here's who's in the room so far: Kirby Winfield (Ascend) Ken Horenstein (Pack Ventures) Rand Fishkin (SparkToro, Alertmouse) Craig Sherman (Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati) Robert Pease (Cascade Seed Fund) Joe Wallin (Carney Badley Spellman, PS) Leslie Feinzaig (Graham & Walker) T. A. McCann (Pioneer Square Labs) Tim Porter (Madrona) Marty Collins (M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund) Aviel Ginzburg (Founders Co-op) Timothy Chen (Essence Venture Capital) Bryan Hale (Anthos Capital) Todd Hooper (Acequia Capital) Boaz Ashkenazy (Redapt, Inc.) Evan Poncelet (Dreamward Group) Dave Parker (Author, EO, WTIA, 6x founder) Matt Shobe (4x Founder, DHS, Google) Fundraising, product strategy, legal, growth. Whatever you're working through, there's someone in this room who's been there and can give you personalized advice. Early ticket buyers get priority access when booking opens on April 30. Early bird tickets are $195 until March 13. #StartupDay2026 #Seattle
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T. A. McCann liked thisT. A. McCann liked thisLet’s move to the future, where designers are prototyping in code and shipping to production. I gave this talk at Pioneer Square Labs last week, In the Arena, a try stuff approach to prototyping and shipping in code. I walk through what my design workflow looks like most days: Granola - record meetings, recall details, shape scope v0 by Vercel - prototype rapidly, visualize what’s in my head Figma - refine the prototype, build a lightweight UI kit (grids, typography, variables, components, etc.) Cursor - build from a plan, stay consistent with the design system via Figma MCP Slides in comments 🙂
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T. A. McCann liked thisT. A. McCann liked this“Since last November, 100% of my code has been written by Claude Code. I have not manually edited a single line, shipping 10 to 30 PRs per day.” Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, ships 20-30 pull requests per day. Major code changes, not typo fixes. He runs five parallel AI instances, each on a separate branch. Compare that to a traditional engineer : 3 PRs per week. Cherny isn’t 10% more productive. He’s 30x more productive. That productivity gap compounds at the company level. Anthropic generates ~$5 million per employee. Cursor, $3.3 million. Midjourney, $2 million. Traditional SaaS considers $200-300k strong. A 10-20x difference. One explanation : communication overhead. The math follows Metcalfe’s Law. Each new team member adds n-1 new connections. Coordination drag doesn’t grow linearly. It explodes. Now consider what AI does to this equation. A traditional 150-person organization runs four layers deep. The org chart creates 11,175 potential communication channels. Meetings multiply. Alignment decays. An AI-enabled team producing equivalent output might need 30 people. Communication channels drop to 435. A 96% reduction. This is one reason AI-native startups are pulling ahead, and why building AI companies feels fun. The advantage comes from organizational structure. Fewer humans, fewer channels, faster iteration, compounding speed. R&D adopts this fastest. AI writes the code. Human communication becomes the bottleneck. The span of control debate shifts from “how many people can one manager oversee?” to “how many AI agents can one human orchestrate?” Small teams have always paid less coordination tax. AI cuts it further.
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Daniel Dart
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Will Richards
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Steve Vassallo
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Jeff Becker
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JT Benton
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Max Ruderman
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Ride the fractious horse 🐎 Had a blast talking with Harrison Chase from LangChain the other day to a great group of founders, builders and investors about building agentic systems. One learning I shared: our team builds effective agentic systems by spending way more time doing than speculating. 🏇 In other words, we "ride the fractious horse": New models drop daily. New frameworks emerge constantly. Best practices get declared and discarded overnight. By the time you survey the landscape and theorized about how today's reasoning models can serve your system, both the landscape and capabilities have shifted. So we write playbooks instead of adopting them. The only way to develop those playbooks? Build and experiment at the fastest possible rate. ✈️ Wilbur Wright laid a great analogy back in 1901: He'd just realized that existing "standard" measurements of lift and drag were wrong, and that solving flight meant spending serious time actually trying to fly (previous "pilots" had logged minutes, at most, of cumulative airtime across all experiments). From his Chicago speech (this guy was such a clear writer btw): "There are two ways of learning how to ride a fractious horse: one is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast awhile, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks." "The latter system is the safest; but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders." As for planes: "It is very much the same in learning to ride a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial." We're not inventing flight, but constantly evolving LLMs and probabilistic workflows won't behave as you hope on first contact. If you want to figure out how to build effective products around those fractious beasts, get on the horse (keyboard) and start riding.
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Paula Goldman
The GPU Trade • 11K followers
Skilled labor is the bottleneck in industrial ops. Elevāt's platform basically tries to “productize the expert” using machine signals + docs + prior fixes. Now they have $12M to scale. Congrats to them. In industrial AI, the tech is usually the easy part....adoption is the battle. Curious what you think is the real gating factor: -- trust (techs believe it’s right and won’t get them hurt), -- workflow integration (it fits into CMMS/ticketing/parts + works offline/on-device), OR -- incentives (the field team is rewarded for using it vs “just fixing it their way”). Which one kills deployments most often in your experience?
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Matias Zorrilla
Harpoon • 3K followers
Harpoon Ventures + Black Flag is teaming up with Microsoft for Startups to provide founders with access to up to $250,000 in Azure credits, empowering builders to scale faster, train models more efficiently, and access world-class AI infrastructure. What’s included: ⚡Up to $250K in Azure credits (usable across Azure OpenAI, Grok 3, Llama 4, and more) 💻On-demand GPU VMs for model training and fine-tuning 🧠Access to GitHub Enterprise + Microsoft 365 Business Premium 🤝Dedicated Microsoft technical + GTM support This partnership is designed to give deep-tech and dual-use founders the tools and resources they need to win. Because when they win, we all win. 🏴☠️
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Jason Scharf
Early Stage Investor • 9K followers
🧬 This week’s Austin Bio & Health Roundup has funding, recognition, regional momentum, & new PitchBook healthtech data giving us a peek under the hood of the sector. 🧬 💰 Funding & Capital Signals Hello Patient, a conversational AI platform for clinics, closed a $22.5M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners and included participation from Austin-based 8VC, who also joined their seed round. You need to check out their announcement video. Alex is in top form! 🚀 Launches, Expansions, Milestones, and Wins A second piece of Hello Patient news. They launched their platform into veterinary practices as well. 📊 Data PitchBook published an Emerging Tech Research report on Healthtech VC Trends. In 1H 2025, healthtech startups raised $8B, putting it on pace to beat 2023 and 2024 and possibly 2022. Exits are at $4.9B, suggesting this could be the highest year since 2021. Top 5 subsectors over the last 12 months: • Telehealth: $3.2B over 174 deals • EHRs & Clinical Information and Analytics: $2.2B over 76 deals • Care Management: $2.2B over 113 deals • Operations: $1.7B over 84 deals • Analytics: $1.4B over 104 deals 🏆 Recognition Phantom Neuro featured in "25 Healthcare Devices I Fell in Love With" on David Shulkin’s blog. Shulkin is the former U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs. 🤠 Texas Bio Triangle Houston: The Rice Biotech Launch Pad announced another investment, this time from Houston-based Carnrite Ventures. Houston funding Houston! What’s Next? 🤠 🚀 🦾 🧬
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Jim Hickman
Suncoast Ventures • 10K followers
Yesterday we explored the "Medical Orchestrator" thesis — AI expanding what physicians can do, not replacing what only humans can do. Today, CHCF and CalMatters bring us a ground-level proof point: Akido Labs using Scope AI in homeless encampments, with 5,000+ patients seen in LA and Kern counties since 2023. The clinical efficiency gains are measurable. The harder challenge — orchestrating across the MCP, the shelter, the CBO, the ED — is where the real implementation work lives. Stella Tran frames it well: access potential is real, and guardrails around consent, bias, and transparency are non-negotiable. Both things are true simultaneously. This is what building the system looks like. Start with the willing, scale to the system. #CalAIM #HealthcareAI #OrchestrationOverDigitization #Possibilists
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Aike Ho
ACME Capital • 5K followers
What drew us to Arya Health wasn’t just the technology, but the clarity of purpose behind it. Kunal and Arunram are solving one of the hardest and least glamorous problems in healthcare: the broken labor operations that keep post-acute care running. This is a $500B+ market, nearly 10% of U.S. healthcare spend, yet most of it still depends on manual coordination. Every day, agencies are juggling thousands of nurses, last-minute shift cancellations, credential expirations, and payroll calculations across dozens of systems. The administrative burden is crushing, and it’s only getting worse as the population ages and demand for home-based care accelerates. Arya has built AI agents that act as a true digital workforce for healthcare operations - autonomously handling scheduling, onboarding, compliance tracking, and payroll. Their scheduling agent alone manages complex variables like patient needs, clinical fit, distance, and bonus pay, continuously rebalancing assignments in real time. The early traction has been remarkable. Customers whom we talked to consistently describe Arya as transformational - “what they’ve always dreamed of” and a product that will “forever change the industry.” Agencies are already seeing utilization rise from roughly 60% to over 80%, driving significant improvements in coverage, patient outcomes, and operating margins. What stands out most about Kunal and Arun is how deeply they care about the people behind these operations. They spend time in the field with schedulers, caregivers, and agency leaders - the unsung heroes who hold the healthcare system together - and they build with empathy and urgency. That care shows up in the product and in every customer relationship. At ACME Capital, we believe the most impactful AI companies will rebuild critical industries from the inside out. Nurses, home health aides, and post-acute caregivers are the backbone of our healthcare system, and often the backbone of their communities. Arya Health is giving them the modern infrastructure they deserve. Congratulations to Kunal, Arun, and the entire Arya team on your oversubscribed $18.2M Series A. We’re proud to lead this round and partner with you as you reimagine how care gets delivered across homes and communities.
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