Matt Piccolella

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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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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It is so exciting to witness so much innovation at TechCrunch this week in SF! Spending time learning as well as reconnecting with fellow investors, acquaintances and friends. If you are around, please drop in a DM. Would love to catch up. 🙂 #innovation #techcrunch #startup #learning #founders

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Founder <> founder convos are the biggest unlock for company building. I spent the last 2+ weeks in SF. Besides meeting with customers, I spent a ton of time with founders / early stage builders that I deeply respect (shoutout to Abhinav Asthana, Christina Cacioppo, Kevin Van Gundy, Akshay Kothari, Yuhki Yamashita, Tara Viswanathan, Celine Halioua, & Michelle Valentine). I’m extremely grateful to have the chance to spend time with these folks. Some reflections from these brilliant people. 1/ People > everything. A company is a collection of people. Company success comes down to hiring the best people. 2/ Startup problems aren’t *that* unique. Startups are HARD and even if you think your challenges are specific to your company, they’re likely not. Someone else has faced the same thing, and you likely don’t need to reinvent the wheel. 3/ Let some fires burn. Focus > trying to do everything. As a startup, you can’t fix everything at once with limited resources (even if you want to). You need to focus on the stuff that will move the needle the most. Pick the top 1 or 2 problems, fix them, then move onto the next. It’s okay if some fires need to burn for a little in the meantime. 4/ Company operating cadences are key. We’re redoing our cadences now, so it was super interesting to learn how others run their board meetings, leadership meetings, all hands, etc. A consistent theme for board & leadership meetings is to have everyone complete a prompt in written doc, share with each other, then use the time to have meatier discussions. 5/ Be competitor aware, customer obsessed. Competitors cause unnecessary noise. Build products and make decisions based on customer / market need and founder intuition, never based on competition. Are these learnings helpful? If so, can share more founder learning posts in the future!

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TWO OR THREE-STEPPING TO SERIES A A lot of software founders are still trying to raise a $4-5M seed round from a pre-revenue standpoint to get to Series A. I get that we all want more buffer nowadays but it's also a harder calculus to go from pre-monetization, to early customers, to giving yourself enough sales cycle time in order to hit $1-2M ARR proxy for a strong A. Which is why inevitably, more founders end up having to raise messy extensions/bridges/Seed II or whatever you want to call them. So my advice is that IF you have the luxury of starting a company today, PLAN AHEAD. Even prior to even raising your first angel round. Break up your path to Series A into 2 or 3 tranches of mission-driven capital. Each tranche has a clear goal that you can rally your team and investors around. For example: First tranche to build the product and get early design partners. Second tranche to get to $300K of ARR. Third tranche to get to Series A. This will help support higher operating discipline and awareness. Incremental purchasing and hiring decisions will instantaneously shorten your runway in a way that a larger $5 million seed round obfuscates. And you'll be motivated to find GTM efficiency faster in the journey. Great habits for long term success. For context, Peter Walker of Carta recently sent an update on the arduous path from Seed to Series A. The survival rate is about 1/2 of what it used to be: "Something like 20-24% of startups that raised a seed round would graduate to their Series A in 24 months or less. For companies that raised their seeds in H1 2022, only 13% have made it to Series A across the 6 industries in the chart."

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Imagine you’re meeting a VC today and pitching your company. Now, also imagine the VC goes home tonight and tells his or her spouse about the meeting with you. How do you think the VC would (or should) describe your product to the spouse? Remember, this is for someone who doesn’t have any context, and probably doesn’t have time to listen the whole story. If you can think of a story version that's plain and simple -- how you want the VC to describe your product to the spouse -- perhaps that version should be your pitch in the first place?

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We had Linear event for founders in SF last night, and as part of that I had a fireside chat with Patrick Collison from Stripe. We covered some topics like the importance of craft, product management, good leaders, etc. Some highlights: The importance of craft: At Linear we see the craft as the requirement for quality. People who care about their craft, almost automatically produce quality. Patrick: "We want to employ really good people. Really good people just don't like working on kind of sloppy things. There's just a deep spiritual aspect to that." Power of small teams: In my experience in companies, some of the best work was always done by a small, focused team, most features at Linear are built by 2-4 team members. Patrick: "The original iPhone software team was 20 people. The kernel, the apps, the browser, the touch interface, like the whole thing. So when people are telling you that they need 40 people for some project, you can explain to them how the iPhone was built with 20 people. So how big would you consider your project in multiples of the iPhone?" How Stripe still builds products in a startup way: Patrick: "There is an internal recipe for this which first guides you to figure out the right user for the product, then the team should go talk to some of those people. Then you should get some of these people into the Slack channel or some other channel where you can get them to try it, get more feedback or try the product. Once you have 5 excited users for something, you can scale it to 100. Then you can start looking at some metrics, but again you look at things like is it actually solving their problems etc."

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🎉 Exciting news: We’ve closed an oversubscribed $2.2M round & launched our Waitlist! 🎉 I’m thrilled to share that Andrés Ornelas Vargas, Jason Kim, and I successfully closed an oversubscribed $2.2M round for Verve Market! This milestone brings us closer to our mission: to empower you to plan, discover, and shop for food in minutes—no matter how unique your needs are. Over 110MM Americans regularly navigate a dietary need or preference—60MM for a medical reason. While following a diet leads to better health outcomes, adherence is hard: hours spent meal planning, shopping, and checking labels. Products and recipes you choke down instead of enjoying. Cheat days turn into cheat weeks, your health worsening all the while. The fact is, the food industry isn’t made for us—partially hydrogenated what? Semolina, spelt, durum—did you know there are 100 terms for wheat? Rosemary extract sounds nice—oh, it’s a preservative the same as any nitrate? Cool. It’s no wonder navigating food is exhausting; they make it So. Damn. Hard. Now add a diet; Low-FODMAP can treat IBS—I saw this myself—but it involves removing or limiting dozens of ingredients and thousands of products. Grocery shopping was like playing gut Russian roulette and yet, my case was pretty simple; many households have to manage multiple, competing diets—yikes. That’s why we’re building Verve: to make it effortless to find the foods that make you—and your family—feel their best. An online supermarket built around your needs. 💫 𝗝𝗼𝗶𝗻 𝘂𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝘅𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗷𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆—𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝘂𝗽 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘄𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗲 𝗮𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗩𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗲! 💫 https://lnkd.in/gpb4G-bs — A heartfelt thank you to our amazing backers and supporters: Noramay Cadena, Federico Antoni, Jimena Pardo, Shayna Harris, María Fernanda González, Rachel Stinebaugh, and Jose Manuel Martin. Your belief in us and our vision has been, and will always be, a cornerstone of our journey. #PersonalizedNutrition #FoodTech #HealthAndWellness #HealthyLiving #Nutrition #Startups

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GPs taking $25K LP checks - Just met with a new addition of my LP collective community, she is looking to deploy into: -Climate funds -Frontier tech funds -Devtool focused funds. Especially supportive of female and underrepresented GPs. Has a background as an ML engineer, and directly invests small checks as an angel. If you are a GP raising a fund in one of these areas, feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected] with the exact title: "GP open to $25K LP Checks" and include: -Which of these sectors you are focused on. -Blurb on your fund -Deck if you have one.

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If you had a great startup idea, should you keep it a secret? Are musicians natural entrepreneurs? In this episode, Seed Zeng and I chat with Yotam Rosenbaum, musician, YC founder, and investor. 👉 Listen on your podcast app: https://tr.ee/ZmRr5NjEtk

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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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Three lessons from building and launching a P2P payments app without doing the proper customer validation first (despite knowing better): 1) Building something you need is a great starting point - but not enough to validate an idea. As someone drawn to building solutions, I’m an early tech adopter. This led me to overestimate consumers’ willingness to onboard, especially with a P2P payments app that requires KYC/KYB compliance and relies on a network effect to be useful. 2) Manual solutions are often best to start with It’s good business to be in business - transitioning from ideating to operating as early as possible is the BEST way to learn effectively. While the move fast and break things mindset has attracted well-deserved skepticism, getting stuck in a multi-year build trap distracted me from critical real-world validation. 3) Consumer appetite shifts quickly In my case, the proliferation of free and instant P2P payment options like Zelle added additional pricing pressure that I couldn’t compete with. This disincentivized the consumer event/payment collection market, turning my bottom-up go-to-market strategy upside down. Pitch (https://www.pitch.fun) is currently on the back burner as I’ve begun building custom solutions in various industries to sharpen my skills, solve specific problems, gain a hands-on understanding of operations, pain points, and workflows, and build a network of experts to lean on as I keep my eyes peeled for high-impact opportunities.

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Some of the most inspiring founders I've backed take expertise from one field and apply it to another. They're able to create solutions that might not emerge within disciplinary silos. I call these people "missionary misfits.” I'm drawn to these misfits because they tackle big problems without being constrained by the “rules” of individual domains. They combine their deep subject expertise with unbounded curiosity for adjacent disciplines to solve real-world problems. I believe that the most disruptive innovations come from the unconventional remixing of insight and experimentation. That’s why missionary misfits are the apex predators of innovation. These are the ones who initially raise eyebrows yet become study material for future generations. They will transform industries and solve societal problems. And I want to partner with as many as possible.

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I spent most of last week in SF at TechCrunch Disrupt. I met some great people and learned a lot at the fantastic panels. My biggest takeaway was a lesson that is crucial for all founders - remember why you are building and who you are building for. Your goal in creating software is to make people's lives easier, not introduce complexity. Ideally, your solution should be doing one or more of the following: 1) Making people money 2) Saving people money 3) Saving people time 4) Saving people effort If what you're building doesn't check one of those boxes, it might be time for a pivot.

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How to pitch: The company has zero traction —> “We’re early” You only have 2 customers —> “We’re working with design partners” You currently have no revenue but hoping some pipeline finally closes —> “we’re on track to exit this year at $3M ARR” You’re in the natural kill zone of a FAANG —> “We view them as partners rather than competitors” There’s no way the tech can actually work —>“We’re manifesting the future” And of course: One of your developers uses Co-Pilot to write some front end code —> “We’re an AI company”

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Hi everyone! I don’t share too often on here, but we’re at a very exciting moment at AptDeco, and I wanted to let you all in on it. AptDeco opened a community investment round and the response has been incredible. We’ve raised over $2M so far from institutional investors, customers and supporters. Nothing is more validating than customers doubling down with their own capital. And now, I’m inviting you, my network, to be part of our journey. When we started AptDeco, we set out to make buying and selling furniture easier. Over the years, many of our competitors have come and gone, but AptDeco continues to thrive. Why? Our technology, logistics and branding continues to set us apart and that's why major retailers including West Elm, Pottery Barn, La-Z-Boy, Article and 30+ more have partnered with us. The beauty with this investment round is that anyone can be an investor. Learn more and invest directly at wefunder.com/AptDeco.

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Random untargeted outreach: I'd love to see how xxx can help unbundled vc with *substitute any service I don't need*. If you're not the right person for this, could you point me to whoever is. Me: nobody here is the right person for this. Harsh? ------------------- Please ❤️ Like, ♻️ Share and 💬 Comment to spread the word. ➕ Follow me, Marc Cohen, for deep yet concise insights into venture investing, startups, fundraising and AI.

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DeepCast shipped a number of really cool new features recently in advance of a broad outreach push to podcast listeners. One new feature is our new Daily DeepDigest tool that sends you a concise daily email including any new episodes from the trailing 24 hours from any podcasts you Subscribe to (on DeepCast). Think daily podcast cliff notes or podcast news ticker tape, with a hint of Morning Brew various brews or PitchBook News—it's increasing information throughput when you're pressed for time. And this feature is rapidly evolving to distill other key extractions from shows you're already interested in, but also exposing you to other shows you might be unfamiliar with that also have nuggets to share—and thus increasing your aperture yet still conscious of your time. Want to go deeper on any given episode? Click the episode detail and you're off to an episode on DeepCast, where you can subsequently read a longer form distillation of that episode or go straight to the source and listen to the episode. (And podcaster friends, these pages are definitely increasing indexing and thus Google entry points to your shows!) I'm loving this feature as a user, personally. Can't wait to see what others think! #BuildingInPublic #Podcasts #AllTheWorldsInformation #HowYouWantIt

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