Welcome to issue #21 of our ongoing newsletter series, From the First Row.

Thanks to Ed Wilson and Taylor Black 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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First Row Partners | Highlights

<aside> 🛠️ Our portfolio companies are hiring! Please let us know if you you or anyone in your network is interested in these opportunities:

• Snippyly is hiring founding engineers and a founding developer advocate
• Prisms VR is hiring for many roles, from technical through customer experience
• Aquifer is hiring an animator, Unity developer, and customer success 3D producer
• Lyric Studio / Wave AI is hiring across marketing and engineering
• Impacked is hiring a software engineer </aside>

<aside> 📚 Minda & Yoko led a week of programming to kick off the Jones & Foster Accelerator at the University of Washington’s Burke Center for Entrepreneurship. We covered topics about company building in different ways: from your investor narrative, to customer empathy, team, pitch deck, financial models and capitalization path. Thank you to all of our speakers (Anthony Bontrager, Shauna Casey, David Zager, Kathleen Baxley, Austin Brovick, Akhila Tadinada, Caitlin Morse, Elizabeth Scallon, Jens Molbak) for sharing your expertise and thank you to this year’s cohort for bringing your focus and energy! We can’t wait to see what you’ll accomplish through the program.

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<aside> 🥳 August also included some social events here in Seattle including a Women in VC Happy Hour hosted by the CEO of Lighter Capital, Melissa Widner. Fuse Ventures also hosted a fun Lake Union cruise for the investor community and it was the perfect sunny day to be out on the water. Finally, Find Ventures, a non-profit grant maker and resource for entrepreneurs in Washington state.

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<aside> 🔍 Minda led a workshop for Seattle Angel Conference in July on Navigating the Due Diligence process. This workshop is part of the learning series hosted by SAC ahead of their company applications deadline on August 23, 2022. Both Minda and Yoko were fund managers for Seattle Angel Conference, and love the energy and excitement that comes with each new round of investors!

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First Row Partners | What we've been reading

<aside> 📖 The Good Thing about Hard Things – Post-crash investments can garner the greatest returns, but how do you adjust your investment theses? Drivers of previous waves are rarely dominant forces in future ones. Packy McCormick outlines why it’s important to delve into the “hardness” of a startup – as building software becomes more accessible, differentiation increasingly lies in solving the gnarliest problems in the world. This doesn’t just mean Deep Tech! There are plenty of software opportunities that remain untapped. Worth a read to equip you with more critical eyes as you evaluate what you’re building or investing in!

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<aside> 🖥️ When Tailwinds Vanish – John Luttig warns against incrementalism in the day and age where exponential tailwinds taper off. As the software industry matures and traditional tailwinds diminish, software startups will need to focus more on GTM and operations than they used to. Think big and play in growing markets, not ones where you’re chasing shrinking market share from competitors!

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<aside> 🧵 Observations on the new data stack – Both Databricks and Snowflake held user conferences last month. While they were packed with announcements, this thread summarizes some of the key, higher-level observations. Now that the dbt + Snowflake + Databricks data stack has crossed a chasm, we’re increasingly seeing the “data stream” centralizing and accelerating. Cack has an interesting proposal: now that transactional and analytical data can exist together, will ETL/ELT only retain the T (transform) and we move into a world of Store/Transform/Query (STQ)?

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<aside> 🔊 Designing Investment Products with Jess Lee – In one of our favorite episodes to date, Jess Lee (partner at Sequoia) walks through her product journey at Google Maps, how she’s “productizing capital” at Sequoia, what we can learn from Comiccon and Burning Man about community, and how she’s tackling the systemic bias that’s causing the lack of funds flowing to female founders. An eyeopening and entertaining listen!

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Venture Funding News | The Big Picture

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 a tool replacing excel, a new database service, and a blockchain observability platform! Let's dive in: