Happy New Year! Welcome to issue #16 of our ongoing newsletter series, From the First Row.
Thanks to Carter Rabasa and Raj Malhotra for sending some startups our way this month.
Look here for First Row firm updates and the startup ecosystem news that catches our attention. Feedback and ideas welcome.
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<aside> 📚 Thank you to Johnny Wolff from HomeRoom for presenting at Deals & Drinks this month. We wish him good luck as he continues through the Y Combinator accelerator. And thank you to all who participated as our 'investor' audience. Sign up here to be included on the invite list moving forward, and access our Deals & Drinks info page **here.**
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<aside> 📣 First Row made an investment in a company that’s building AI solutions that assist with the creative process for musicians. More to come soon!
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<aside> 👓 Minda and Yoko presented our Fundraising 101 workshop for angels and founders as part of the OKGN Angel Summit’s programming.
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<aside> 🔑 Minda presented “Startup Milestone Development” to a group of assembled founders and funders for the Seattle Angel Conference. With so much ambiguity, startups should approach setting company milestones as an iterative process before building a project plan. Meaningful, strategic milestones can align investors, entrepreneurs, and teams around increasing the value of the company in the near term which can focus leadership direction and distribute problem solving.
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<aside> 🍎 Minda participated as an entrepreneurial coach and pitch competition judge for “Entrepreneurs In Training” (EITs) in the Defy Ventures event held in Seattle on February 26. The non-profit program serves incarcerated men who are in the first year of transition from prision into the community. The EITs work on their leadership, business plans, and networking skills during this seven month program that meets each week. Good entrepreneurs are truly everywhere, and it was remarkable to witness their excitement around their plans.
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<aside> 🎡 The Flywheel Investment Conference is accepting applications from early stage Washington state companies who are looking for funding. Companies can apply to compete for a $200,000+ investment award, a seed stage investment award, $50,000 relocation offer, and a $5,000 cash prize during the conference held May 18- 19 in downtown Wenatchee, WA. It’s free to apply to compete at the Flywheel Investment Conference, with a deadline to submit by March 12, 2022. Hop in here to apply!
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<aside> 🚢 The Deployment Age – History is replete with lessons, and this is a timeless essay delineating how to think about innovation. By looking at the past 240 years, Jerry Neumann highlights how innovation comes in waves: surges of technological development are typically followed by quieter periods of adoption and iteration. He uses Carlota Perez’s theory to categorize these waves in two phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase. A long read, but it’s fascinating to see the patterns across the four greatest technological surges in our history – worth the time for investors and founders alike, especially with how 2022 has kicked off!
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<aside> 📈 Go-to-Market in web3 – While we all get excited about cool new technologies, it’s easy to overlook how they may impact go-to-market (GTM) motions. In this post, a16z’s Maggie Hsu does a fantastic job of highlighting how GTM strategies change with web3’s community and ownership-heavy characteristics. But this shouldn’t only apply to web3. As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate, it’s always worth revisiting your GTM building blocks – what needs to be inverted? What could be done easier? What no longer needs to be done?
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<aside> 🧵 Digital revolutions are always non-obvious – With the historical theme of our first article, here’s a short thread on how non-obvious every stage of the digital revolution was! An especially important reminder for all the founders out there – if people are kicking and screaming about what you’re building, take it as encouragement 😉
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<aside> 📢 The 20VC: Scott Belsky on all things product – A masterclass on product management and design from Scott Belsky, the CPO of Adobe. Scott covers a range of topics including the three primary questions to assess product design, the importance of defaults, and how to continuously think through the “first mile experience” of your product. Worth a listen for every builder and investor out there!
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Trends:
We’ve framed our funding news to match our evolved pillars: Software Power Tools, Data Interconnectivity, and Creator-Controlled Media. This month, we're exploring crypto analytics, data science power tools, and social commerce infrastructure! Let's dive in: