Welcome to issue #17 of our ongoing newsletter series, From the First Row.
Thanks to Alanna Gregory and Geoff Harris 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 Emily Harburg from PairUp for presenting at Deals & Drinks this month, and to Chris Deutsch for introducing us! And thanks to our participants for bringing their energetic and thoughtful engagement to the discussion. 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 Pancea, a company that’s building a data-driven wellness and chronic pain management platform for employers. More to come soon!
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<aside> 🗓️ We periodically run an Early Stage Investing 101 **workshop prior to Deals & Drinks. Join us if you've never attended Deals & Drinks and/or would like a primer on the investor perspective and deal evaluation frameworks. This is a great opportunity for emerging investors and entrepreneurs raising capital for the first time. Our next workshop is on Tuesday, April 5th from 12 -1PM, register here.
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<aside> 🗣 Karin had a great time connecting with the new set of founders participating in Washington Technology Industry Association’s (WTIA) latest founder cohort as part of an Angel/Early Stage Investor panel. Karin and Yoko presented a Fundraising 101 workshop with the group to kick off the cohort, and we’re excited to see the content and resources we shared inform the questions they’re asking as they make their way through the WTIA’s programming.
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<aside> 🎤 Congratulations to the Apis Health Angels Conference for their inaugural session and to the winner, Karios Technologies! Karin took to the stage at the final conference to share some thoughts on the value of community and inspire a new set of investors as they embark on their angel journeys. Read about Karios and the other finalists here.
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<aside> 🤝 **1K Project Ukraine** - ****This critical reboot of the original 1k Project (co-founded by Minda in the early days of the pandemic) is focused on providing direct cash support to Ukrainian families and has already raised $3.5M towards supporting pre-screened families with $1k grants.
Work at a startup and want to do something to support Ukrainian families? Join the campaign to get 10k startups raising $10k each to support $1k grants to families.
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<aside> 💡 Minda participated as a mentor for the Techstars Filecoin accelerator in partnership with Protocol Labs. The inaugural cohort of 12 companies has a range of Web3 projects and companies that span digital NFT pets to personal blockchain hardware for your desktop.
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<aside> 🖼️ The Web3 Renaissance: A Golden Age for Content – A phenomenal essay that unpacks how web3 brings ownership back to creators by introducing digital scarcity, fan-driven investing opportunities, and content/platform ownership. Despite the abundance of noise in web3, Li Jin makes a compelling case for web3’s place in the unrealized creator economy dream by tracing the creator thread back to the internet’s origin.
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<aside> 📈 10 lessons from great businesses – By zooming out across a wide range of businesses, Mario Gabrielle distills 10 core patterns that drove their individual successes. He draws lessons from web3 natives like Terra to investment firms like Tiger and even scale-ups like Stripe. It’s a wonderful example in how core lessons exist no matter what domain you’re looking in. Give it a read for lessons on everything from building the right culture to positioning your product and truly thinking big!
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<aside> 🧵 A mega-thread on inflection points – Investors and founders seek generational businesses. But it’s hard to pinpoint what’s exponential versus hype. This thread equips you with the stats to laser in on the exponentially growing spaces that speak to you. It’s a long one, but packed with eye-popping data points that range from space to lab-grown meat. If anything, it’s an exciting reminder of just how much progress has been made: for example, the cost of mapping our genome has fallen 100000% and the max # of training parameters in AI scaled from 175M (GPT3) in 2020 to 1.75T (Wu Dao 2.0) already!
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<aside> 🧵 On NFTs and marketplaces – A fascinating thread on how NFT marketplaces will follow a similar pattern to today’s marketplaces. We’re in the “eBay era” of NFT marketplaces: there’s enormous value in simply aggregating supply and connecting it to demand. But it’s not durable. Instead, we should expect to see verticalization and curation emerge in NFT marketplaces too. They may not even look like marketplaces before long (take Instagram as an example, discovery ↔ transaction is one experience!)
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