Tom Wilde

I’ve spoken to over 2 dozen MDs at PE firms I can confidently say that the arb of figuring out how to implement Vertical AI at portfolio companies is very real right now It will fundamentally change underwriting for those who can do it predictably and unlock generational returns. Most are aware they need to act. Very few have.

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For all founders, especially tech founders, here are a few key insights on how to elevate your pitch. Definitely worth a read and some thought... Treeo VC https://lnkd.in/emM8RK_4

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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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🚨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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Trying something new this week - a studio industry roundup with my take on what matters. The studio model is no longer an experiment being run in a handful of places. It is infrastructure being built across geographies, sectors, and institutional types. 5️⃣ stories from the past seven days:  1️⃣ OSS Ventures hit a EUR 40M first close on a EUR 75M follow-on fund -- capital raised specifically to back the 30 companies their studio created since 2019. The "build then fund" lifecycle is maturing. B'More Venture Studio with a similar thesis: studio operations first, then dedicated capital to scale what's working.  2️⃣ Delta40 raised $20M from 54 investors across 13 countries to launch Africa's first integrated venture studio and fund. The LP base is almost entirely DFIs and foundations. Impact capital is discovering the studio model as a deployment vehicle, something I seeing across geographies (conversations with Michael Bob Starr and Damias McDonald this week alone) 3️⃣ Start Holdings launched Start.vc out of NYC and Barcelona after a $200M EV infrastructure exit. Another operator-turned-studio-founder. This is the pattern we see quite often in our work at 9point8 -- experienced operators like Jason Goldsmith who've built and exited deciding the studio model is how they want to build next.  4️⃣ UBC HATCH admitted 10 new deep-tech spinouts for Winter 2026 -- mostly climate tech. University venture builders are quietly becoming one of the fastest-growing segments. Follow Evan Allen and Jaimie Testai to keep track of its rapid evolution.  5️⃣ The INVEST Act is advancing through the Senate. If passed, it expands qualifying VC fund size from $10M to $50M and loosens general solicitation rules for accelerator and university events. For studio-funds -- and for folks in the The Venture Studio Forum community tracking policy -- this could be the most significant capital formation legislation since the JOBS Act. If this roundup format is useful, I'll keep it going. What other noteworthy news hit your desk this week, and what stood out to you?

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VC schedules, and thoughts on being a VC noob. -- VC schedules to know -- Most venture capital firms hold partner meetings on Mondays. This is typically when the investment committee votes on new investments and other key decisions. Savvy founders learn the exact timing and may need to provide additional data over the weekend to stay in motion. It is also well known that many venture capitalists observe a “European summer,” with August often being light or fully off. Similarly, the winter holidays reduce activity across much of December. That said, data from Carta shows a meaningful year-end push to close deals in December, followed by a flurry of activity in January. Founders should be cautious about kicking off fundraising during these slower periods. You do not want a raise to go stale and fall apart. VCs talk to each other, the industry is highly interconnected. -- I’m a mid career Noob! -- I am an “emerging manager,” effectively a new VC, less than three years in. In venture capital, the timeline is long. On my Linkedin you'll see I have two roles at Blitzscaling: Limited Partner means I put money into a fund, but have no decision making ability, and General Partner means I'm actively finding startups, bringing them to the partnership, and funding. As a General Partner, you are often considered an emerging manager for close to a decade, as it takes years for a fund to fully mature and establish a VC track record. Investing is a long game, but the upside can be extraordinary. Fortunately, I entered this role with a positive angel track record from my own bank account, which is often a good idea to have as a VC. When I learn a new VC concept or term, I’m an AI first, I’ll link to my post a few days ago in the comments, I totally live for constant growth and learning, if you’re not growing you’re dying. Fun fact: Many/most start their VC career in their 40s, as they need to have enough tech and biz cycles, a broad enough network, resources, and a platform to stand upon. As we end the year, I'm sharing more career thoughts, and productivity thoughts, rather than industry trends and market maps and frameworks and forecasts. I wrote all of this by hand myself, but used AI to edit some of it.

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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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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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BOSTON STARTUPS: TiE Boston is excited to share that applications are now open for the TiECON East 2025 Emerging Company Showcase & Awards.   TiE Boston seeks leading Seed-to-Series A-funded companies in AI, Life Sciences, and India-US ventures. - They do not have to be TiE-affiliated companies. - Companies do not have to be registered in the US, but need to address US market needs   Why should startups apply?   Selected startups get: 🔹 Investor Access: 1:1 meetings in an exclusive Investor Lounge 🔹 Stage Time: Pitch in front of 500+ investors, founders & ecosystem leaders 🔹 Stall/Table Space: Demo at the East Coast’s biggest entrepreneurship conference 🔹 Media Coverage: Potential coverage from our Media partners 🔹 Prize Money: Awards in 3 tracks with cash prizes, powered by Sunoh.ai 🔹 Alumni Access: Ongoing network of top founders, mentors & TiE Boston Angels Chris Sauer Alok Prasad Sunil Bhatia Mike Grandinetti Veera Anantha Joseph Falcão Thomas Arul Vipin Mayar Raman Sud Adam Carter Siddharth Kundalkar Judah Phillips Sara Fraim John Sviokla Michael Davis   Application Deadline: August 27, 2025 TiECON East 2025 is Sep 26, first day of Boston AI Week #BostonAIweek

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LLMs. LRMs. Autonomous agents. Prompt frameworks. Copilots. Gemini. OpenAI. Claude. “AI features” your vendor just launched. Cool. But none of that can actually run a nonprofit fundraising program. Not LLMs. Not autonomous agents. Not even with OpenClaw or another agent TBD wired into your stack. Because those systems generate language and automate workflows. They do not produce statistically validated predictions. And fundraising decisions require exactly that. They cannot reliably: • predict who will give • forecast campaign revenue before you spend • suppress mail without destroying net revenue • detect churn before donors lapse • calibrate probabilities on donor data • validate lift with holdout testing • orchestrate next-best actions across channels They can write the appeal. They cannot decide who should receive it. And that decision layer — targeting, suppression, channel selection, ask amount, revenue forecasting — is where millions of dollars in net fundraising performance actually live. Right now a lot of nonprofit “AI strategies” look like this: LLMs • agents • some automation Which basically equals: AI copywriting. What’s missing is predictive donor intelligence. That’s the layer between your donor file and your campaign decisions. We wrote a white paper explaining the gap because the confusion right now is massive. https://lnkd.in/eFzwNMQr Curious how many people in nonprofit tech disagree with this. #AI #FundraisingStrategy #PredictiveAI #NonprofitTech #DonorIntelligence

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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. To keep pace with an increasingly hostile near peer environment, we need the complete resource stack: political, capital, technological. This is a great addition.

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The Headline family is experiencing incredible momentum, and today our portfolio company DeepIP is announcing a $25M Series B, bringing total funding to $40M.  This is the kind of company that doesn’t just add AI to a workflow, but it sets the standard for an entire category. The momentum speaks for itself: 1️⃣ 10x ARR growth in < 18 months 2️⃣ Trusted by 400+ law firms and leading corporate IP teams globally 3️⃣ 2M+ chats on the DeepIP platform We’ve had the chance to back FX (Francois-Xavier) L. and Edouard D., leading their Seed round with Headline. Watching them take on a problem as complex and high-stakes as patent work has been genuinely impressive. And working with them has been an absolute pleasure: these 2 are coupling very high ambition and humility. Tech built in Europe, but opening the US office very early and FX starting a life in NYC with his family with 0 hesitation in order to build a global category leader in the IP industry. What convinced me early is still what stands out today: patent teams don’t need another standalone AI tool. They need something that fits the way the work actually happens: documents, long-running matters, multiple stakeholders, and zero room for sloppy context handoffs. Big congrats to the whole DeepIP team + Korelya Capital, Balderton & Serena Proud that we’re doubling down at Headline and continuing the support for what’s next!

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Leaders from the Massachusetts AI Coalition are working with their teams to drive impact across the Commonwealth. Here's a quick update for those interested in following along. - Beacon Taskforce: A Founder Starter Pack is being assembled from the feedback of 30+ founders. Consistent themes are present (fast/flexible capital, free work space, GPU credits, connections to founders/operators), making consistent solutions testable. Excited for the first Founder Starter Pack to go live in early H1. - Tavern Taskforce: Tomorrow's event is ON. Excited for Luke Winston-Almanzar, Co-Founder & CEO of Reservoir, Ryan Jacobs, Co-Founder & CEO of Agency Robotics, and Shilpi Gupta, Founder & CEO of her company will be speaking on the "Industrial AI Builders Panel." - Banners Taskforce: Heads down. Cranking away. Working on a launch of our first big initiative on April 1st. Remember folks: The weather in New England is a feature, not a bug. 😉

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"So what exactly is a venture studio?" I'm not sure how many times I've had this conversation over the last few years. At least a few times / week. For aspiring venture builder - especially those in institutional settings, 'getting' the model - and understanding how it differs from others - is critical. So, we're starting at the beginning. On March 19, I'm sitting down with Matthew Burris for the first session of the The Venture Studio Forum's University Track Speaker Series. Matt is widely credited for helping to define the venture studio asset class - he co-authored the Venture Studio Index and built the Three-Role Framework that the industry uses to classify studios. He's spent more time researching what makes a studio a studio than anyone I know. If you're at a university, research institution, or economic development org trying to figure out whether a venture studio makes sense for you, this is where to start. Note, this event kicks off a five part-series we're running through the VSF, all focused on helping institutions understand and evaluate the model. Here's the full program: Mar 19: What Is a Venture Studio? Apr 16: University Studio Examples May 21: Funding Mechanisms Jun 18: Finding & Working with Studios Jul 16: Sourcing & Evaluating Founder Talent Registration link in the comments!

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🚀 Small Teams, Big Exits: The latest data from CB Insights shows that in Q1 2025, tech companies acquired for $100M+ had a median headcount of just 100 employees. This underscores a shift toward leaner operations and capital efficiency in the tech industry. Notably, the valuation per employee in these deals has been rising, reflecting the high value placed on compact, innovative teams. This trend challenges the traditional notion that bigger teams equate to higher valuations.​ https://lnkd.in/g7zf-fir How do you see this influencing startup strategies and investor priorities in the coming years?​ #TechMergers #LeanStartups #Innovation

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Claude Cowork is scaling rapidly as the first credible example of bringing agentic workflows to knowledge workers. For example, Mr. Weinberg (from our digital agency client expert call) believes that Claude Cowork has bridged a critical gap between developer-focused agentic tools and chatbots that most knowledge workers use. Software engineers have already seen material productivity gains through terminal-based agentic loops for over a year while knowledge workers' daily interactions with agents have mostly revolved around chat-bot like interfaces. Cowork extends this capability to non-technical knowledge workers through an application interface that integrates with Excel and standard business tools. Cowork use cases include: bookkeepers classifying credit card transactions, HR teams assembling tax reports and tracking PTOs, and the CFO accelerating project-specific DCF analysis. Marketing use cases appear to be the most prominent at digital agency clients; for example, clients are integrating with Klaviyo and automating whole reporting pipelines.

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Thanks Ryan Lawler for covering our raise. “Investors are clamoring for new ways to acquire pre-IPO shares as high-growth startups stay private longer… Augment focuses on high-demand, late-stage names like OpenAI, SpaceX, xAI, Databricks and Canva, but has roughly 300 private companies on its platform… ‘You can go from seeing an offering to owning the shares in five minutes,’ Moldvai says.” Read the full Axios article here: https://lnkd.in/gn-K8-h7

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To make enterprise agents work reliably, what do you need? semantic contracts, explicit rules? Both, but it’s only half the picture. The other half is the layer that runs enterprises but rarely shows up cleanly or coherently in systems of record: decision traces. These are the exceptions, overrides, precedents, and cross-system context that live in Slack threads, deal-desk conversations, escalation calls, and, most often, in people’s heads. You can’t reliably reconstruct them from your CRM or ERP. Rules tell an agent what should happen in general (“use official ARR for reporting”), but they fall apart on edge cases (“a VP approves a discount on a Zoom call”) where the action is logged but the reasoning is lost. When that happens, agents don’t know what they’re allowed to do next, or why. Systems-of-agents startups have a structural advantage because, when they sit in the execution path, they can see what inputs were gathered, what policy was evaluated, what exception route was invoked, who approved, and what state was written. If you persist and link those traces, you get what my partners Jaya and Ashu call a “context graph”: a living, queryable record of decision traces that links decision events to the why behind them. Our bet is that context graphs will power a new generation of startups and become the core asset behind the next trillion-dollar platforms, especially in workflows where “the AI decided” is not an acceptable answer.

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A venture capitalist recently asked a simple, provocative question: “What problem are you dying to solve?” The question prompted me to reflect. It pushed me past systems and architectures and into the heart of the matter. One realization stood out. The internet was designed for file sharing, and streaming was added later. It moves bits quickly and cheaply, better than any system in history, but it has never understood who it is serving or why. As the world shifts toward human-to-agent and agent-to-agent interactions, that missing intelligence at the network layer is becoming the fundamental limitation. At the same time, compute has evolved faster than the network. Intelligence now runs across cloud, edge, device, metro, and core, wherever latency and cost allow. And yet the network underneath has no way to interpret this new reality. It can move intelligence, but it cannot understand identity, context, or intent. So what problem am I dying to solve? A world where intelligent systems understand us, act on our behalf, move freely wherever they are needed, and safeguard digital identity, improving life at home, at play, and at work. Consider a simple example from the near future. Your AI agent coordinates with your doctor’s AI to analyze imaging results. Some of the computation needs to happen at the edge for privacy, some in the cloud for processing power, and the results must return in real time. But the network only sees anonymous packet flows between random endpoints. It cannot verify these are trusted agents acting with your authority, cannot route based on the meaning of the interaction, and has no concept that one path preserves privacy while another exposes it. If this resonates, I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts.

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