Happy New Year and welcome to issue #27 of our ongoing newsletter series, From the First Row!
Thanks to Aditi Gudi and David Zager 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> 🗣 Our next workshop, Milestone Development* *for Fundraising will be on Tuesday, March 21 from 12 - 1:30pm PT, including time for Q&A. Register here. Join us to hear a framework for choosing and validating strategic milestones. In the past, a few founders have even scheduled mentor calls to review their own work after the presentation.
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<aside> 📚 Thank you to Tom Zhang, CEO of Zenblen for presenting at Deals & Drinks this month! Tom is a Chicago founder and building a vertically integrated fresh smoothie kiosk business. It was fun to hear about! As always, the energy and thoughtful engagement from participants from a variety of stages & experiences brought many interesting points 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> 🎤 Yoko participated in a panel for the Seattle Angel Conference titled ‘Women Making an Impact in Angel Investing,’ where she reminded new and experienced angels alike that every investment we make is an impact investment, reflecting our values & perspectives on the type of innovation we are seeding into the world. Thanks to Tessie Decker, organizer for the 23rd round of SAC, for including us in the lineup!
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<aside> 🦮 Minda and Yoko have been anchoring a Seattle mentoring “zoo” (not zoom) for entrepreneurs and mentors every other Wednesday on the UW campus (12p - 2p) along with Elizabeth Scallon. This wildly unstructured session has been a high-energy, fun way to connect and share ideas. We like the unexpected “collisions” and creative entrepreneurial energy it creates. Email Minda or Yoko for more information on attending.
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<aside> 🌟 The VC’s customer – In this seminal piece, Fred Wilson discusses how VCs should think about their customers. He emphasizes that a VC's customer is the entrepreneur, even though their objective is to create value for LPs. Using the company analogy, LPs are shareholders and entrepreneurs are customers. This mindset enables VCs to do the right thing for their customer (the founder) which generates value for their shareholders (the LPs). It’s a crucial mindset for anyone in venture, especially considering the increased scrutiny today.
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<aside> 💽 Infrastructure in ‘23 – Every year, Bucky Moore from Kleiner Perkins zooms out to evaluate the state of infrastructure. In this accessible writeup, he calls out three prevailing trends in 2023: (1) The continued enablement of Javascript as the primary language for serverless compute (2) The rise of specialized workflow systems to handle the explosion in backend workflow workloads and (3) The unbundling of the cloud data warehouse architectures to unlock pricing, performance, and scalability flexibility by dis-intermediating the various elements of storing, indexing, processing, and querying data. As software continues to accelerate, it’s important to be familiar with these foundational blocks to ensure you can press forward in the easiest and fastest way – definitely worth the read!
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<aside> 💾 NLP Models from RNN to Transformer – With the mind-blowing applications we’re seeing in the LLM world, it’s worth digging a little deeper to understand the “how” behind it all. Much of what we see today revolves around an architecture called the Transformer, which allows ML Models to keep track of more data than before. This is a longer writeup, but provides you with a digestable means to wrap your head around how and why LLMs have become so powerful. Worth a read for founders and investors alike!
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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!).
<aside> 🧠 Digital Brain | Replicate, a startup that runs machine learning models in the cloud, raised $12.5 million in a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Y Combinator, Sequoia and angel investors including Figma CEO Dylan Field and Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch
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While we’re seeing the outputs of ML advances today, the reality of building and deploying ML Models is far messier. Opensource models need to be implemented from scratch and deployment involves ML engineers or researchers deciding on an API, identifying ideal servers, packaging up dependencies, wrestling with CUDA, and finetuning for efficiency. With a founding team from Spotify ML and Docker, Replicate packaged up the intricacy in deploying ML models to make it accessible to Software Engineers. We’re big fans of tools that make a complex area more accessible to a broader audience. And by focusing on allowing software engineers to do more with less in ML, Replicate could prove to be one of the foundations for the evolving ML revolution we’re living through.