Welcome to issue #24 of our ongoing newsletter series, From the First Row.

Thanks to Joan Palmiter Bajorek for sending some startups our way this month. That said, no intros are required - any startup can share their pitch here.

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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:

• Aquifer is hiring a 3-D animator, Unity developer, and a senior character artist.
• Impacked is hiring a software engineer
• Lyric Studio / Wave AI is hiring across marketing and engineering
• mpathic is hiring for roles in data science, product marketing, technical writing, and engineering.
• Prisms VR is hiring for many roles, from technical through customer experience
• Snippyly is hiring founding engineers and a founding developer advocate </aside>

<aside> 📚 Thank you to Siddharth Gupta from Granular.ai for presenting at Deals & Drinks this month! 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> 💬 Our next workshop, Investor Conversation Guide, will be on Dec 6 from 2 - 3:15pm PT. Have you ever wondered why investors ask certain questions? We’ll take the “common questions investors ask” lists a step further by providing our insights into what investors are listening for in your conversations. Register **here** and share with founders and newer investors!

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<aside> 🤝 Yoko participated in Venture Forward’s virtual LP Office Hour program, where she connected with experienced Fund LPs to better understand the nuances of the GP-LP relationship and navigating the fundraising path.

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<aside> 🌟 Yoko and Minda attended Mentor Madness meetings for Techstars Seattle and met with companies in vastly different industries and business models. Minda will be a lead mentor for one of the companies focused on a menopause community and products platform called “Perry.”

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<aside> 💡 Minda, Yoko & Elizabeth Scallon have been hosting informal coworking sessions with the MS Entrepreneurship students at the University of Washington each week. As we’ve gotten into a groove with the format, we love seeing students collaborate with and help each other and have enjoyed bringing in speakers and guests to share their entrepreneurial journeys with them.

Thanks to Tom Zhang for stopping in to share about his experience building Zenblen out of Chicago and tackling the hardware, supply chain and operational challenges of offering fresh smoothies from a vending machine. He talked about how he applied the concept of ‘controlled failure’ to build and de-risk parts of his business model. At one point, he built PART of the vending machine mechanics but still wanted to see if consumers would buy a fresh smoothie from a vending machine. So, Tom climbed inside (!) the machine to manually operate a few parts during this phase. There are lots of ways founders can apply this concept to the way they approach the value-building and de-risking parts of their businesses.

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First Row Partners | What we've been reading

<aside> 📈 10 Charts the capture how the world is changing – A fascinating curation of 10 charts/graphics curated by partners at Index Ventures. It’s worth a quick read to get an easily graspable take on key changes occurring across cloud operations, AI, energy transition, and consumer behavior. Worth a browse for founders and funders!

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<aside> 🤖 Madrona on Intelligent Applications – In a new newsletter focused on AI, Madrona outlined their thesis around “Intelligent Applications”, which they define as software services with contextually relevant machine/deep learning models embedded in the application. In what is already proving to be a fast growing space, their dissection of two categories, enablers and applications, should help us all think clearer about the value propositions and long term viability of novel products in the space.

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<aside> 🔒 Proof of Solvency and Beyond – While there are plenty of excellent articles diagnosing what went wrong with FTX, this was a fantastic read on what the world of crypto exchanges could look like in the future. Importantly, it outlines how Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) could be to web3 what transformers are to AI: a general purpose technology that completely boosts the space. In this article, Vitalik outlines how we can apply ZKPs to exchanges so they can both demonstrate “Proof of Reserve” and lose the ability to dabble in customer funds. If web3 is all about going from “don’t do evil to can’t do evil”, this could be a pivotal technological shift in how exchanges are built.

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<aside> 📢 20VC: Why Market Size is Everything – An incredible episode of 20VC with Martin Escobar, the co-president of General Atlantic. Martin very clearly outlines why market size is such a dominant factor in startup investing, how he remains disciplined even in prolific markets, and his approaches to negotiations throughout his multi-decade career. A fun and illuminating episode that’s certainly worth a listen!

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Venture Funding News | The Big Picture

Trends:

We’ve framed our funding news to match our evolved pillars: Digital Brain (applied data science) and Human Collaboration (the Digital Brain won’t replace everything/us!). This month we’re exploring a new serverless data analytics platform, revisiting MLOps, and diving into a new AI-based english learning application.

<aside> 🕸️ Human Collaboration | MotherDuck, an SF-based serverless data analytics platform, raised $35m in Series A funding at a $175m valuation. Andreessen Horowitz led, and was joined by Redpoint Ventures (which led a $12.5m seed round), Madrona, Amplify Partners and Altimeter.

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