Welcome to issue #29 of our ongoing newsletter series, From the First Row!
Thanks to Ian Ito and Ed Wilson 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> 🔍 TOMORROW, Tuesday, May 9th, from 12 pm PT, we’ll be hosting our workshop, Understanding Due Diligence. Whether you’re a founder or an investor, we’ll cover our perspective on the goals of due diligence, and provide guidance around areas to cover during the process. Sign up here.
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<aside> 🏃🏼 Congratulations to the 7 teams (out of 37) from the Masters of Science in Entrepreneurship program who moved forward in the Dempsey Startup Competition! Yoko has been working with these students since last summer, and Minda has mentored them during countless coworking sessions. It’s exciting to see their classroom learning applied to their ideas! (Breaking news! On May 4th, 4 of these teams moved forward in the Sweet Sixteen round!)
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<aside> 🔄 Minda attended the Flywheel Conference this month along with 300 entrepreneurs and angel investors. She joined a panel with other investors from Alliance of Angels and Cascade Seed Fund to share insights on what investors are motivated by when they meet entrepreneurs with an investment opportunity. The picture below is Minda on stage with the moderator, Chrismon Nofsinger.
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<aside> 🎤 Founder’s Live started in Seattle and is now a global phenomenon. This month, Minda delivered a headline talk on fundraising fundamentals before the entrepreneur fast pitches to the audience of startup enthusiasts. Thanks to Kelly Lawton-Abbott at SSM law firm for inviting First Row to have a speaking role this month!
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<aside> 💬 Yoko facilitated a conversation for the WTIA with a panel of active angels and investors: Gavin Hewitt, Elizabeth Cross-Nichol, Tessie Decker and Peter Mueller. They shared their thoughts on preparing for fundraising, meeting with investors and getting on an investors’ radar with the WTIA’s 9th Startup Cohort.
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<aside> 🌟 Optimizing LLMs for Cost Efficiency – With soaring LLM costs quickly catching up to cloud costs, Vantage accumulated a series of tactics to drive LLM optimization in this accessible article. From prompt engineering to vector store caching and chained summarizations, this article is bound to teach you something on how to not only drive costs down, but increase LLM performance. Worth a read for anybody exploring the space!
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<aside> 📈 Enterprise Trends from YC W23 – The recent YC batch had 265 startups, making it a great source for teasing out trends. In this article, Wing VC distilled these trends along with companies that symbolize them. While there were many exciting Generative AI examples, we were particularly excited by the data, ML, and dev enablers that drive these rapid trends. A must-read for investors and aspiring founders who are looking for exciting areas to build in!
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<aside> 💻 Vector Embedding Explained – When any trend takes off, it’s crucial to drill into not only why it exists, but what enables it. Vector Embeddings are exactly that for Generative AI. They solve a gamut of problems, ranging from enabling enhanced semantic understanding through to enabling the ability to track context. While there’s a lot of technical material out there, Weaviate distilled what Vector Embeddings are in an extremely consumable manner. Whether you’re trying to better understand differentiation in the space or experiment, understanding vector embeddings is only going to grow more important.
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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!).