Benjamin Ling

Insightful breakdown from my great Partner Omri Amirav-Drory on the simple factors that really separate the top 1% of investors from the rest, and how more operators should become investors! https://lnkd.in/gEiZdT2h

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Ever since we launched SHAKTI, every quarter we write a letter to our LPs = Each letter includes an update on the portfolios, the GP's (our) view on the zeitgeist, an interview with a portfolio CEO and an interview with a TITAN = So far, we have 16 such letters = it's been on our "to do" list to share these publicly (i am lazy) = then Google comes along to save lazy people like me (thank you NotebookLLM) = here's a 10 min podcast summarizing our journey since Dec/2020 with the 16 LP letters as source = if you wanted to know what we are about, this is a pretty good place to start = https://lnkd.in/db7K2TrT cc SHAKTI

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Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

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🚰 VODA.ai is building software to make one of our scarcest, most important resources safer and more cost effective to manage🚰 It's W13 / Q2 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got VODA.ai, an AI startup helping analyze our nation’s water infrastructure at a local level to deliver better service for utilities and local populations across the country. Co-Founder & CEO George Demosthenous was working in product management at a utility technology vendor that builds metering & network infrastructure for utilities. George consistently heard that while the technology Mueller was selling was effective, the external pipe detection equipment and sensors they were purchasing didn’t necessarily stop leaks. There are 2.2M miles of drinking water pipes across the U.S. In Jackson, MS more than 65% of their processed water does not make it to end customers. In Detroit’s Highland Park neighborhood an estimated 70% of water is lost from 120 year old pipes. Imagine if Apple shipped 100M iPhones stateside and 50M were littered across the Pacific Ocean floor on their way over from Asia. Crazy, right? VODA.ai is building a software company that uses existing data to assess the condition of pipes that cannot be seen and determine which ones will have the highest likelihood of an event, like a leak or a break. VODA.ai created an AI engine dubbed “daVinciTM” here in Boston that uses pattern recognition in the way that LLMs probabilistically identify the next word in a sentence. daVinciTM has been tested head-to-head with other alternative models and has always outperformed! No pressure.. Since COVID they have grown both revenue & customer count by 200%+ y/y, continuing to leverage AI with both their product & team. AI’s emergence has helped VODA.ai’s sales cycle fall from a full year to three months as utilities broadly want to leverage best in class AI software. This Seed-stage startup has already analyzed over 1M miles of pipe (almost 50% of America!) and over 2M miles of service lines with customers from Boston to San Jose, CA. They are planning to more than 2x revenue in 2024, becoming the go to decision support platform for water utilities across the country in the next five years. VODA.ai is backed by local Boston investors Innospark Ventures and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. MassCEC has named VODA.ai a top carbon reduction emission leader, the team has twice been voted (by water utilities!) the Best Smart Water Solution at the Smart Water Summit, and VODA.ai plans to continue to grow their team in Boston in the quarters ahead. Operators to Know: -Kyra Dubinsky, Chief of Staff -Cory Sides, SVP Sales -Dan Hack, EVP of Operations and International Sales -Lowell Rust, MBA PMP, VP of Customer Success If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments! And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you next week, will you?? #bostontech #startups #AI

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Learn a bit more about our DNA and how we operate at Acurio Ventures from Kate Cornell

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Let's finally get rid off the "VC alphabet song" and redo the system to become more founder friendly. "The benchmarks set by funding stages are often arbitrary and not necessarily aligned with the actual development needs of individual startups." #vc #venturecapital #founder #fundraising #startups #fundingstages #funding #fundingrounds #pitchbook

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Many of today’s startups are making the exact same messaging mistake I made a few years ago. Here’s the messaging test that failed to attract developers and (hopefully) you can learn from. At ScraperAPI we had messaging centered around managing proxies and CAPTCHAs. But that wasn’t what people were buying our product for. What they were buying was the major pain point ScraperAPI solved - being able to scrape any page with a simple API call. This is the exact same mistake AI startups are making today with talking too much about LLMs and not enough about the things customers actually care about. tl;dr: Messaging should focus on the benefits, not the implementation or features.

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Can creator-led education businesses get to venture scale? And more importantly, should they? Listen in as I discuss this topic and more with Blake La Grange on the most recent episode of The Expertise Economy podcast.

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Instacart is a market leader when it comes to leveraging AI tools to boost productivity at work. I had an amazing conversation with JJ Zhuang, Instacart’s Chief Architect, who has shepherded over 50 AI-driven initiatives to market across the org. We explored what catapulted Instacart to the forefront of AI integration, supporting radically diverse use cases across various functional areas. One striking insight (echoed by Ethan Mollick and others elsewhere) is that you often don't need specialized tools for specialized work. Frontier models like GPT-4 can seamlessly adapt to a wide range of functions and use cases. They're not just for engineers; they're incredibly versatile tools used by marketing, comms, and legal teams. From generating code to proofreading and ideation, GPT-4 empowers every department to leverage AI for enhanced productivity and innovation. By integrating LLM’s like GPT-4 into their workflows, teams can streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and unlock bandwidth for new creative possibilities. How can you harness the power of AI in your own work to boost productivity? Share your thoughts below 👇 Want to hear more insights from JJ? Check out the full podcast episode by clicking the link in the comments.

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📈 Curious about the startup scene in Massachusetts? Explore our detailed funding list featuring startup names, HQ locations, and investor info. Perfect for investors and entrepreneurs alike! Check it out: https://lnkd.in/dAp3xj-Q #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #managementconsulting

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Big announcement below! 👇 Let's talk about the current state of GP-LP affairs: 🤯Emerging VC managers have absolutely exploded over the past 5 years. 📈 At the same time, more and more data has surfaced that shows that emerging VC firms tend to outperform larger, established firms. 🤔 All of this has made it intriguing but tough for LPs to know where to direct their attention. 🛍 GPs frequently meet LPs at conferences who are window shopping but not committed to the asset class or emerging managers. 🧾 And both crews get overwhelmed by transactional convos. So Sydney Paige Thomas and I created Abundance. Abundance is a private, nomination-based retreat for active LPs and top emerging GPs to form new experiences together and build lasting relationships. Why Abundance? Abundance is knowing that there is more than enough for more than one to succeed. And a single win within a community is a win for the community itself. The journey of an emerging VC manager from 1st close to final close or Fund 1 to Fund 2 is (1) communal and (2) requires an abundant mindset. LPs look for structure and confidence to feel comfortable investing in early VC firms. Yet many of the feeds we scroll and conferences we attend reinforce inherent power dynamics and transactional thinking, which allows scarcity mindset to creep in for emerging GPs. Some of the best events I’ve attended have been intentionally non-transactional, e.g. Camp Hustle, Recast Summit, and other GPs’ AGMs. The fundraising success stories we see usually involve a community (usually of other GPs & LPs) coming together to support and open doors for the emerging GP. We designed Abundance to be an immersive gathering that fosters these connections. Starting tonight, ~100 GPs and LPs are descending upon Seattle for the inaugural Abundance retreat. This has been under wraps for months and I can’t wait to see it come to life! Thanks in advance to our awesome sponsors who were the earliest believers in this vision: Sydecar, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Gunderson Dettmer, & Zelda Ventures. And shoutout to my dad Ed Illig for logo design & Halle Kaplan-Allen being the first sponsor to say yes 🤩 Presented by The Council Capital & Symphonic Capital.

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I 💯agree with Oz Merchant on this topic. Some folks advise founders to pitch very selectively and 'pick your pitch' - you get one shot, choose it wisely? I'm 180 degrees opposite of that - be a promiscuous pitcher! - ABP - ALWAYS BE PITCHING. Because your pitch gets better with every no, take that feedback, learn, iterate. Right now it's taking 50-100 no's for Triangle co's to get funding, it's still tough out there, so get through the no's fast to get to a yes. Check out the event - also go see others pitch, it all helps you get better - pitching is like PMF - lots of iteration, tons of grinding to get through to the other side.

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RevOps vs Chief of Staff work "I think RevOps is like a right hand to CRO of an organization. So a Chief of Staff is essentially like an extension of an executive member on any team. I think if you're smaller, than you have your hands in a lot of different pots." - Ravi Neppalli from our new Chief of Staff Podcast episode 🎧 Key takeaway: the size of company and who you report to impacts the work you do!

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"The best offsites create space for serendipity." ✨ That was our guiding principle for Clarify‎'s recent team gathering in Seattle. The result? A transformative experience that's already paying dividends in team cohesion and product innovation. 🙌 Our key ingredients for offsite success: 🤝 Prioritize unstructured bonding time  💼 Mix work (hello, hackathon!) with 🤿 play (who's up for a lake plunge?)  ❤️Create opportunities for vulnerability and deep connection   💸 Keep it budget-friendly without sacrificing impact But the real magic? Watching our team of 11 take all their energy and use it to ship 6 awesome customer projects in the week following our return. Austin Hay‎ packed all our insights, learnings, highlights, and even a few missteps into the latest Clarify blog. Whether you're planning your first offsite, looking to level up your team gatherings, or just want some recommendations for things to do in Seattle, we've got you covered. 🌆 Bonus: We're turned the Notion and Google Sheets project docs we used to plan everything into templates you can steal for your next offsite.  You can find the link to the full write up w/ our templates in the comments. 👇

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Cohosting a webinar with Joseph and Alex from Syncly (YC W23) on strategies for keeping long-time customers happy. What questions should I ask?

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I wrote two term sheets this week into startups backed by amazing founding teams, and in both cases I recommended a pivot to the team’s initial GTM strategy.   Sometimes being well networked, or building in a white hot problem space can be a gift and a curse when it catches the attention of enterprise customers.   On paper, it is the exact type of validation a funding team is seeking as they work through an initial version of their product, but more often than not it has the potential to derail a startup’s potential for success.   The startups in question were both experiencing this exact dynamic.  In one case, the team had caught the eye of one of the largest robotics companies in the world and begun conversations around a potential partnership.   The second company is backed by a 20 year industry veteran with a deep rolodex of enterprise customers within his ICP.  Some of the largest retailers in the world were engaging in conversations around piloting his product.  As I explained to both of these founders, this was amazing validation, but should also not be the focal point of their initial GTM.   The reality is, in order to successfully deploy within either of these customers, they were looking at a long and arduous path, filled with security reviews and product feature sets that realistically an early stage pre-seed company with 2 founders could not deliver upon.   My advice to them, continue those conversations, with the realization that they could take 1 year+ before realistic deployments, but focus the lion’s share of their GTM energies toward customers with lower deployment hurdles, in this case Series A/B backed robotics companies and $50M-$250M retailers.    To be clear, the  genuine interest from these enterprises is a massively positive indicator on the problem/solution set they are building for, and it is part of the reason we are bullish on the market opportunity of each startup.  I’ve just seen so many startups fail to deploy an initial product and ultimately never raise a seed round because they get stuck in a seemingly never ending enterprise sales cycle.

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