Alan Zhao (Click-Through King) 👑

We gathered dozens of operators from the MGMT Boston Operators Club and local founders alongside the 186 Ventures team this October to discuss the evolution of our dear software markets, the status of some predictions for 2024 (all looking good!), and what’s on deck for next year. General Partner Giuseppe Stuto led us through the following predictions for 2025 to share with you all.. ↕ We will see more vertical AI applications manifest themselves within the Enterprise in a similar ways that SaaS moved from horizontal to vertical use cases 🔔 We will see services business models more common and software budget purchasing models less common - SaaS may even be given away for cheap/free as a “way in” ⚖ Capital efficiency, on a relative basis, will almost be required to create enduring & compounding defensible enterprise value. Details like procurement cycle lengths and creativity with non-dilutive financing, like leveraging revenue based financing tools for example, will all matter 💡 Specific to AI, premiums will be placed on applications that can actually get “reasoning” right. All purpose LLMs still have a ways to go and there are multiple approaches with the “jury still out” on how to get context and reasoning right. Infrastructure solutions that use general purpose or customizable knowledge graphs to help application developers get to 100% (enterprise acceptable accuracy) will emerge OR savvy application developers will fill the gaps themselves. We will likely see both, depending upon the specific case! Thank you Giuseppe, Julian, and Sophie for a great discussion and evening!

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Wonderful article about Emily Knight and the whole The Engine Accelerator team on the amazing work their doing changing the world with #ToughTech!

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🎃 Ready to carve out your path to Product-Market Fit?🎃 Join Companyon Ventures’ Behind the Curtain roundtable tomorrow (Oct 30) with Michael Ho, Firas Raouf, Eric Morgan, and Hersh Tapadia as they 'exorcise' the mysteries of PMF. Don’t ghost us—RSVP in the comments 👻 https://lnkd.in/emCJcn4w #emergingmanager #venturecapital #productmarketfit

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That's why it's often very difficult to recognize new leaders – their ideas go beyond the conventional frameworks we're accustomed to. Keep your mind open. Don't let yesterday's templates define your future. #Leadership, #Innovation, #OpenMind, #FutureThinking, #venturethinking,   https://lnkd.in/eASPGsuu

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🗽🌳 Exciting News for NYC Tech Community! 🚀 Join us for an invigorating Venture Walk & Talk, proudly part of NY Tech Week! Scheduled for June 4th from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM at the scenic Maine Monument in Central Park, this unique event is hosted by Founders Committee Ventures. 🌟 Why Join Us? Imagine a relaxed stroll through the beautiful pathways of Central Park, where you can disconnect from the digital world and engage with NYC’s finest founders, angel investors, and venture capitalists. This is more than just a walk; it’s an opportunity to forge meaningful connections, share innovative ideas, and enjoy the great outdoors—all within the heart of Manhattan. ✨ Event Highlights: - Network with industry leaders and peers - Brainstorm new ideas in a refreshing setting - Enjoy the vibrant atmosphere of Central Park Whether you’re looking to collaborate on new projects, explore potential investments, or simply enjoy a break from the office routine, the Venture Walk & Talk is the perfect occasion. 👉 Registration is open but spots are limited and approval is required. Don’t miss out on this chance to be part of something special during #TechWeek. Lace up your walking shoes, grab a coffee, and let’s make strides together in the tech ecosystem! 🔗 https://lu.ma/wj9o67iy See you there for a breath of fresh innovation! #NYTechWeek #TechNetworking #StartupLife #VentureCapital

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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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I’ve aggregated a list of 50+ VC roles in one spreadsheet. It’s updated weekly and can be filtered by location, position, firm, etc. Check out the latest list here (as of June 24th) 👇 https://lnkd.in/dRC3XtjS Tag someone who needs this in the comments 💭 — Want a quick snapshot? Here are a few of my favorite postings: Associate, M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund Link: https://lnkd.in/eNFaaSBy Associate & Principal, Wischoff Ventures Link: https://lnkd.in/gu6Mun7p Consumer Investor, Stripes Link: https://lnkd.in/eZdRk6jV Venture Lead, Struck Studio Link: https://lnkd.in/exGcNHJ5 New Ventures Associate, Live Nation Entertainment Link: https://lnkd.in/e3mBYGCt — I’m creating more tools, guides, and other free resources for Junior VCs to (1) 2x their network and (2) carve their path to partner. If you found this helpful, check out the Venture House website for more 👇 https://venturehouse.xyz/ #venturecapital #startup #recruiting #hiring

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TechCrunch's Mary Ann Azevedo discusses our list of 85 potential M&A target predictions for Ramp Watch this list of targets If you're a corp dev team and want to quickly build a target M&A list in seconds, we got you note: We made some predictions for Wiz M&A targets earlier this week (see first comment) https://lnkd.in/ezQ7mmex

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Calling all #Founders: Venture Capital Association of Alberta (VCAA)’s Deal Flow Calls represent a great opportunity for #PreSeed to #SeriesA companies to gain exposure to some of the countries most active Venture Capital #investors. If your company is raising equity capital, I strongly encourage you to check out the link below!

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In a recent episode of The Expertise Economy podcast, I sat down with Johnny Page, CEO, and Matt Verlaque, COO, of SaaS Academy. Johnny shared a crucial insight for SaaS founders that challenges conventional wisdom 👇 "Many founders aim to delegate sales once they reach $15-20K MRR. This is often a critical mistake. We advocate for founders to remain deeply involved in sales for as long as possible." Why? According to Johnny, "No one can articulate the problem and solution more compellingly than the founder." Key takeaways from our discussion: > Founder-led sales drive stronger growth > Focus on consistent wins rather than quick handoffs > Clarify your customer acquisition strategy > Define your ideal customer profile precisely > Optimize your sales channel and offer > Maintain this focused approach for at least 12 months This strategy is the catalyst for transforming steady growth into exponential scale. For a deep dive into scaling strategies for your SaaS business, watch the full interview now: https://lnkd.in/dju-Be2u SaaS founders, what has been your experience with sales leadership? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. #sales #SaaS #SaaSAcademy #Scale #Startups #Podcast #Leadership

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Exciting News: Schematic is publicly available and we’ve raised $4.8M in seed funding! 🚀 I’m pumped to share that Schematic is now publicly available! We've also raised $4.8M in seed funding, led by MHS Capital with participation from NextView Ventures, Active Capital, Atlanta Ventures, and Ritual Capital—along with support from incredible founders of companies like CrowdStrike, LaunchDarkly, and Salesloft. A big thank you to our investors for believing in us, to our customers for guiding us, and to Benjamin Papillon, Jasdeep Garcha, Giovanni Hobbins, Vladyslav Len, Youssef Salah, Christopher Brady, Joseph Chrzan, Mohammed Almusaddar, and Markiian Simkiv for the opportunity to build this together. ➡️ Solving the last mile of pricing & packaging At every startup, one thing is certain: pricing and packaging will always change. Product and engineering teams shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time this happens. Most companies hard-code pricing and packaging into their applications, making it slow and painful to evolve as market demands shift. ➡️ What We’re Building We're building Schematic to transform pricing and packaging for B2B SaaS companies by getting product and engineering teams out of billing projects. With Schematic, B2B SaaS companies can change pricing & packaging without code changes or billing refactors. ➡️ How It Works With just a few lines of code, businesses can implement pricing and packaging into any application—end-to-end—from feature delivery through billing and customer experience. Quickly roll out new features and tie them to your pricing plans. Target specific plans to customers and adjust them without engineering support. Experiment, scale, and manage pricing & packaging operations: trials, plans, limits, entitlements, metering usage, handling exceptions, provisioning customers, & embedding front-end purchasing components —all without code changes. ➡️ Who we’re building for We’re building Schematic for B2B SaaS companies who want their pricing & packaging roadmaps to move in sync with their product roadmaps, without slowing down their engineering teams. Some key use cases our customers are already benefiting from: 🔹Outsourcing homegrown & hard-coded entitlement services. 🔹Programmatically managing feature access based on subscription plans. 🔹Metering usage and actually enforcing limits. 🔹Updating and managing plans, add-ons, bundling, and customer exceptions 🔹Delivering embeddable purchasing experiences (pricing tables, customer portals, upgrade/downgrade flows, etc). We’re still in the early innings, but the foundation is strong—we're already handling 500K entitlement flag evaluations every month. If you’re a founder or a product leader looking to avoid building what should be out-of-the-box (feature flags, entitlements, admin dashboards, customer portals), check out Schematic and let us know what you think.

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Excited to be part of NY Tech Week! 🎉 Come see me and let's talk tech. Whether you have questions, want to start or scale your business, or are interested in a quick intro to AI as a productivity tool, drop by and say hello! Let's innovate together. 🚀 #NYTechWeek #Innovation #AI #BusinessGrowth

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Fin Capital’s Fintech CEO Pulse Report is out! We surveyed over 50 CEOs and C-suite leaders of private companies from our portfolio and the broader fintech industry during June and July 2024 to get a quick pulse on what’s top of mind for fintech’s leaders. Here are some key takeaways: Optimism in the Air: More than 60% of CEOs reported being bullish or highly bullish on the fintech industry for the second half of 2024. Regulatory Changes on the Horizon: CEOs identified Cryptocurrency, Open Banking, and Buy Now Pay Later as the top three sectors likely to see increased regulation by the end of 2024. CEOs Want Business Development Support: Beyond capital and fundraising, business development support emerged as the top area where CEOs seek investor assistance.For more insights, including comments from my colleagues Ren Riley, Logan Allin, Matthew D. Mann, CFA, and Stephanie Perez, check out the full report here: https://lnkd.in/euHK8-9B

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NY friends! Please come see me at Tech Day on my panel discussing the future of the NY tech ecosystem and what I hope to bring to it!

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Kettleborough VC has been active for ~6 years, invested in ~30 companies, gone through ~80 funding rounds, witnessed ~12 exits including ~4 instances of partial principal erosion, seen ~4 seed to $100M journeys, tracking ~29% XIRR across the portfolio. A couple of IPOs from the portfolio surely seem very much in line ahead.

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Please pass this along to all of the #Fintech and #Insurtech founders you know who are raising capital or will be in the next month.

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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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Want to build wealth faster? Skip startups. Buy Boring Old Businesses. Here’s why: 1. They’re already making money. 2. They come with customers, systems, and momentum. 3. They’re undervalued – 2.5x profits is standard. 4. SBA loans or seller financing make them accessible. 5. Easy profit boosters: raise prices or add new products. 6. They’re easier to scale than startups. Startups fail 65% of the time within the first 5 years. But "boring" businesses? They’re built to last. Don’t build from scratch. Buy something proven. If you could buy a "boring" business, what type of business would you buy?

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New York City startups are addressing the lack of charging infrastructure for electric vehicles (EVs) by installing curbside solutions. These startups, such as It’s Electric, Gravity, and Voltpost, offer different approaches, including tapping into existing power sources, utilizing fast charging technology, and integrating chargers into lampposts. Despite challenges like grid capacity and vandalism, these startups aim to make EV ownership more accessible and appealing to urban residents.

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