Happy New Year and welcome to issue #26 of our ongoing newsletter series, From the First Row!
Thanks to Mamei Sun and Shelley Whelan 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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<aside> 🛠️ Our portfolio companies are hiring! Please let us know if you you or anyone in your network is interested in these opportunities:
<aside> 📚 Thank you to Hannah Brannan, CEO of Gather Flora for presenting at Deals & Drinks this December! 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, Fundraising 101: Standing Out in a Tough Market, will be on Feb 9 from 2 - 3:15pm PT. In addition to the basics of fundraising for early stage startups, we will highlight what we’re seeing in the market and welcome your questions. Register here with other founders and investors!
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<aside> 💡 Yoko hosted Alberto Savoia, author of The Right It, for an AMA with students from the Masters of Science in Entrepreneurship program. She’s had the privilege of working with the students this year as they apply classroom learning on entrepreneurial thinking & skills to their own ideas. This session was an opportunity to test their understanding and how they were applying the concepts laid out in The Right It to their own ideas.
This book is a mainstay on the First Row bookshelf. We encourage all entrepreneurs to use the XYZ hypothesis to rapidly test and validate their ideas and get closer to finding their Right It.
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<aside> 🧵 Building APIs – Despite the enormous shakeups across the technology world, one thing is for certain: developers love using APIs. Abstracting complexity away into a few lines of code has historically created enormous businesses (Ex. Stripe and Twilio) and will continue to create more. But it can be daunting to start. This short thread consists of some fantastic, practical resources and steps to get the ball rolling for potential founders and investors.
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<aside> 💽 The Empty Promise of Data Moats – Especially relevant given the new wave of Generative AI companies we’re seeing, this essay outlines (and questions) the validity of data moats in enterprise software companies. While it’s no doubt that amassing data is critical, this essay outlines a strong foundation on how to think about data’s defensibility so founders don’t underinvest in critical areas. Dominating go-to-market, customer relations, and verticalization may not be the flashiest levers, but they’re critical in weaving together a powerful moat.
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<aside> 💾 An overview of distributed systems and security – A fantastic summary of the state of infrastructure and developer tools from Renee Shah, a Partner at Amplify Partners. Emerging trends often start with developers, and we’re always fans of digging into what tools they’re gravitating too. It was particularly eye opening to see how applications like DuckDB and SQLite have accelerated the shift towards thinning backends and more browser-native application logic. What will this mean for infrastructure tools in the coming years, especially when it comes to maintaining synchronization across platforms?
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<aside> 🔏 An intuitive explanation of Zero-Knowledge Proofs: ZKPs (Zero Knowledge Proofs) are quickly becoming one of the core foundations of web3, but they’re incredibly confusing to grok. Online explainers are typically either too technical or over-simplified, making it hard to gauge their second or third order implications. This explainer from Mina Protocol was one of the first writeups that truly balanced technical and accessible to shine some light on ZKPs. They’re the foundation of the Mina Protocol, and while web3’s in a steep lull, it’ll be fascinating to see how this technology evolves!
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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 cloud-based coding platform that’s accelerating developer productivity, a lab report translation platform to ease doctor-patient communication, and a startup easing the process of implementing usage-based pricing.
<aside> 🕸️ Human Collaboration | DevZero, a Seattle-based cloud-based coding platform for developers, raised $21 million in Series A funding. Anthos Capital led the round and was joined by Fika Ventures, Foundation Capital, and Madrona Venture Group.
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The continued shift to cloud computing presents an opportunity to streamline traditional development processes, especially testing. Conventionally, developers code and test on their local machines before migrating to production environments. However, with cloud computing, test environments can be replicated exactly as production. Doing so would be cumbersome, but CloudZero has packaged this process into a user-friendly cloud-based development environment. Developers can get started in seconds and push code to test right within the platform. This allows them to focus on what they do best: writing code. We’re big believers in enabling people to do more with less, and developers are no doubt one of the highest leverage professions to further unlock.