Virtual Event

“There’s far more flexibility than people realize.” Many people in venture have heard of DAFs. Fewer understand what you can actually do with one. That was the premise behind our latest virtual event, and after an hour with Daniel Blake (CEO of UI Charitable and a former founder who sold his company to Scotts Miracle-Gro) … Read more

Most emerging managers think about IR as something that happens after you’ve raised. The firms getting to yes faster have figured out it starts much earlier, and the person running the finance function is often the one making it happen. We brought together four people who live at that intersection for a conversation on what … Read more

“You become known for the things that hit.” Adrian Aoun is an investor in OpenAI, Anduril, Pinterest, Stripe, Airbnb, and Uber, among hundreds of other companies. He’s backed roughly 300 startups, about 40 of which are now unicorns or decacorns. He’s also an LP in around 100 venture funds. Ask him about his investment thesis, … Read more

“Claude told me to sign up; I don’t know what your service does.” Google is sending less traffic than it did a year ago. Your potential customers are finding and evaluating products inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. And most founders are still running the 2021 playbook. This week, we ran a working session on what’s … Read more

“Close to half of our final round candidates will wash out.” The hiring playbook most founders are still following was written for a different world. We just wrapped a conversation with Michelle Volberg, founder and CEO of tech-enabled recruiting and referral platform Twill, and Ryan Denehy, founder and CEO of ITaaS provider Electric. The topic … Read more

You should have built X yesterday and showed me a demo. What happens when your customer can just ask Claude Code to do your startup’s job? What if the moat you spent two years building gets bypassed by someone texting an AI agent on their phone? And what does a VC actually want to see … Read more

Don’t Be the Accountant Who Chose Not to Adopt Excel

“You have to play the game as it’s on the board.” What does a corp dev team actually look for when they’re evaluating your startup? And what’s it like on the other side of the table when you’re the founder getting acquired? We brought together two perspectives that rarely share a stage: Scott Haylon, Senior … Read more

“Our data science team is bigger than our investment team.” Many VC firms claim they want to be “data-driven” or “AI-native.” But when Melody Koh at NextView shifted from full-time investing to spending 75-80% of her time on data and AI initiatives, she made a prediction: most firms trying to follow suit will give up … Read more