Ben Mones

Great post by Josh Wagner on the importance of urgency. If you don't want to build a company characterized by urgency and extreme intensity over a long period of time - at least a decade - you would be better off not raising venture capital.

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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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The Founder’s Dilemma: Balancing Growth, Culture, and Relationships This is a video of a staff strike outside a well-known hotel that I filmed walking home today in San Francisco. It struck a chord. As founders, we’re often caught between driving the growth investors demand and nurturing the culture that defines our team. This balance can feel like walking a tightrope, especially in high-growth phases where external pressures are intense, and investor expectations are high. But the cost of neglecting your team is real. As the video shows, when employees feel undervalued or ignored, the effects ripple out—hitting not just the people, but the brand and the long-term sustainability of the company. Rapid growth, when not managed alongside the care of your people, can actually damage your bottom line. Here are 5 key considerations for founders (as well as CEO's) to effectively balance both sides: 1. Align Vision with Execution: Investors and stakeholders want to see growth, but your team needs to feel like part of that vision too. Make sure your internal culture reflects the mission you’re selling externally. Growth can only be sustained when your team is engaged in the company’s larger purpose. 2. Communicate Transparently with Everyone: Founders are often juggling multiple relationships—investors, stakeholders, employees. While it’s easy to focus outward, transparent communication with your team is just as critical. When employees are left in the dark, they start to disengage. Keeping them in the loop builds trust and reinforces their belief in the company’s future. 3. Create a Culture of Shared Ownership: For founders, the company is like a baby; for employees, it’s a job. The more you can cultivate a sense of ownership among your team, the more they’ll invest in its success. When employees feel like co-creators, they’ll weather the storm of investor pressures with you, not against you. 4. Don’t Sacrifice Culture for Growth: Scaling doesn’t mean compromising the internal culture that made your company special in the first place. Growth will come and go, but culture is what keeps people engaged and committed. Ensure your team’s well-being is a priority, from mental health to workload balance, especially when external pressures mount. 5. Balance Investor Expectations with Internal Reality: Managing investor relationships can often feel like a full-time job, but it’s important not to let those demands overshadow your responsibility to your team. Balancing the expectations of stakeholders with the internal realities of your company is an art form. The stronger and more connected your team is, the better equipped you’ll be to deliver on both sides. Founders, we live in a world where external pressures are high and expectations can feel endless. WE must be the example - equally, to investors, understand the reality for your founders and aim to support them over treating them like race horses.

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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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If anyone is in North County San Diego, on Thursday May 2nd, we will be hosting a tech entrepreneur and investor meet up at 5:30pm. We’ll have a couple speakers, one of which is a fin-tech start-up raising a round, followed up by a presentation on the state of the stock & crypto market. We host these events quarterly and usually get a lot of founders and investors to attend. If anyone is interested, please message me and I can send you the details. LaunchPad San Diego #startups #startupincubator #entrepreneur #investing #crypto #meetup

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We're just TWO WEEKS AWAY from VSC Ventures' first-ever Dirty Jobs Summit in SF. 50 founders and 50 VCs + strategics will 'talk dirty' about the most pressing and relevant topics for startups building, selling, hiring, and fundraising in our oft-overlooked but much beloved dirty, dusty, and dangerous industries. Roundtable topics include: — Where's the downstream funding for robotics startups? — What are the most effective storytelling tactics in legacy industries? — What do strategics & CVCs *actually* need to partner & invest? — From PMF to GTM: How to build a revenue/GTM engine in Dirty Jobs? You'll meet and hear from founders, including several from the VSC Ventures portfolio such as: — Nick Hegeman (PaintJet) — Claire Burke Trewin (Homemade) — Rebecca Hu & Areeb Malik (Glacier) — Alex Hall (concrete.ai) — Bob S. (Goodcall) — Nishant Jain (Presso®) Special thanks to our incredible and supportive sponsors: — Fidelity Private Shares — SVB — Trinity Capital — Goodwin as well as our newest sponsor Anish Shah from Ruckus!

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One of my proudest moments as an investor occurred today as Alaffia Health announced its series A because it shows how the Aperture® Venture Capital vision of multi-level, multi-generational #impactinvesting is succeeding in the marketplace. Here’s the model in its most basic form : ✅As diverse fund managers with meaningful capital to allocate, we are changing the VC landscape every day just by doing our day jobs. ✅As Black/Brown investors with ~40 years experience collectively, Aperture GPs have access to talent /excellence that others do not, so our portfolio *organically* is more inclusive by race, gender and geography even while optimizing for financial outcomes (all about the alpha). ✅Our most successful portco’s are using financial #innovation to solve market problems that impact underrepresented demographics and underserved communities. Alaffia Health is a shining example of the impact portion of our overall fund thesis, and we couldn’t be prouder of TJ Ademiluyi and Adun Akanni, MPH, PMP - the dynamic brother-sister founder duo whose vision we have steadfastly supported on their journey. Congratulations to TJ and Adun from William Crowder and myself, as well as the whole Aperture team- Marjorie King Philip McKenzie Yves Louis-Jacques Tanvi Lal Michelle Dhansinghani Lisha Bell Katie Kelly Amy Chung Cindy Chong, CFA Brian Fernandes-Halloran Monroe France Jayden Pantel Darren Herman Evan Wladis Neal Triplett Thomas Scriven Peter Ammon Irina Bit-Babik Tim Milanich Rob Rahbari

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An interesting article below, that demonstrates out how San Diego is punching above its weight.  And how Connect's strategy and execution over time, contintues to be central to that success. The article describes the current state of the market in Seattle.  (And i love Seattle.) It's a market that we tend to track with relative to venture fundings.  They used to kick our butts, we outraised them each of the last three years.  This despite the fact they have 3x as many funds there, and 9x the amount of resident capital there. (per pitchbook) Some key takeaways:  * They continue to compare themselves to SIlicon Valley. Instead, we leverage our proximity. *They whine there's not enough local investors (see note above - they have more than us). We bring over 200 VCs to SD annually! * They say founders are not connected with one another. We bring CEOs together regularly, in a variety of ways - private dinners and through our Springboard program. * They say they need to elevate their image on a national & international stage. Why we created and continue to build Five.Ten.Thirty (aka Inno Day).  * And the last paragraph - they need to concentrate on making their region a great place to live. Our mantra: "It's about Better, not Bigger." (See XEO, TL Fund). THANK YOU FOR ALL OF YOUR SUPPORT. WE ARE ON A MISSION TOGETHER!!!  (Comments, whining, suggestions on SD always welcome.) https://lnkd.in/g6Rq_f2Y

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I recently saw this metric from Carta’s 1Q24 VC Fund Report, which is very concerning. DPI... is nowhere to be found in earlier vintages that probably should start showing DPI. Funding early-stage projects is great, but ultimately, these venture dollars need to exit their investments and pay back their limited partners. That’s where the metric Distributed to Paid-In Capital (DPI) comes in. While managing a fund, we get interim measures during the life of the fund (e.g. IRR, MOIC), but ultimately, “you can’t eat IRR.” If you want to build a lasting venture capital organization, you need to start showing DPI for your fund. Keep in mind that this is traditional VC data from Carta, and is not strictly crypto venture. Crypto venture tends to get liquidity earlier (tokens) and things tend to go parabolic sooner (faster, more unicorns) - but I’d wager that the data here is somewhat similar for Crypto VCs… Not as much DPI as there should be from these earlier vintages. Read the full article, as well as a recap of all the crypto fundraising rounds for August, here: https://lnkd.in/g3eVJ-iF

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Hiring alert! One of our newest MKT1 portfolio companies is hiring a founding marketer. nodaFi is vertical SaaS that understands a wedge-in strategy. The team is scrappy and values marketing--and really understands their ICP - facilities managers. If you're based in the Bay Area and interested in helping bring a tech-first approach to an industry that operates with pen & paper, take a look. The founders are awesome (cc Jacob Pandl & Michael Loyda) JD link in the comments.

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I believe two of the big winners over the next 10 years in the SMB category will be PE who are rolling up the businesses and GenAI powered software that makes running these businesses significantly more turnkey and/or profitable. Thanks for having me on Jay Kapoor. If you want spicy takes fast forward to 25 min mark. If you want to get deep in market analysis buckle in for the whole thing. https://lnkd.in/d8M7Jyrx

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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 enjoyed going on Nick Telson-Sillett’s podcast, Pitch Deck by Forward Pursuit. Nick is a serial founder and investor (founded and exited DesignMyNight) so knows both sides of the table which always makes for an enriching chat. Some things we discussed: - The perceived power dynamic between VCs and founders can hinder productive conversations. - A compelling product demo can significantly influence investor interest. - Founders must focus on solving real customer problems to succeed. - Hiring standards are crucial for building a successful startup team. - Behavioural roadblocks can prevent the adoption of new solutions. - Validation from potential customers is key for pre-revenue startups. - The early-stage funding landscape has become more efficient and selective. - Pace of execution is a critical factor in attracting investment.

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The state of venture capital is wild right now. We are witnessing a surge of innovation across the spectrum: - Funds merging - VC doing PE - PE doing VC - Secondary funds - Buyout funds - Spin-out funds - Debt funds - Continuation funds - Infrastructure funds - GP turnover - Hard Tech surging - Family Office uptick

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Where should you build your startup? Last week, I attended LA Tech Week. For the first time since moving to Los Angeles three years ago, it felt like a real startup community with legitimate entrepreneurs. I met several founders who went through YC, several founders with exits, and many who came from strong LA backgrounds, including SpaceX, Riot Games, Google, Facebook, and more. For context, LA has struggled to build a startup scene until recently despite its size, proximity to Silicon Valley, presence of big tech, and access to great talent from top universities. So what changed? We all agreed that it was one thing. Access to capital. If you are an entrepreneur and you have the flexibility to choose your city, you optimize for two things. 1. Access to customers  2. Access to capital Before I moved to Silicon Valley 13 years ago, the LA venture scene was just a handful of firms and a handful of angels. Today, the tables have turned in favor of founders, and there is more capital than deals to invest in. What city will you build in?

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In vertical SaaS, the very best companies landed with a product solving a specific, burning pain point that horizontal solutions solved badly and then became broad product suites over time (ServiceTitan, Veeva Systems, Doximity, etc). My partner Gordon Ritter calls this “layering the cake”. In vertical AI, the landing wedges are much more brittle. While the painpoints they solve are very real (and often unaddressable by SaaS alone), they’re also much more likely to commodotize in the near term as the tech advances. 👀 Therefore, the need to layer the cake in vertical AI is much more urgent than in vertical SaaS. 👀 The best vertical AI CEOs not only recognize the dynamic, but talk about it openly. Helps those around them keep up the speed of innovation and their eyes on the bigger prize.

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At SIERRA Ventures, we invest in Seed & Series A. This quarter we hosted our Annual Emerging VC Summit with some incredible pre seed investors. Founders - here are some early-stage (often first check) firms that might not be on your radar and are definitely worth following: 10vc, San Francisco, CA 8-Bit Capital, San Francisco, CA Abstraction Capital, San Francisco, CA Array Ventures, San Francisco, CA Ascend Ventures, Seattle, WA Atria Ventures, San Francisco, CA Beat Ventures, San Francisco, CA Bowery Capital, San Francisco & New York Bridge Venture Fund, Chicago, IL Cofounders Capital, Cary, NC Dispersion Capital, San Francisco, CA E14 Fund, Cambridge, MA eGateway Capital, Columbus, OH Foster Ventures, San Francisco, CA GTM Fund, SF AZ Garuda Ventures, San Francisco, CA Hannah Grey VC, New York & Denver Inner Loop Capital, Baltimore, MD Leadout Capital, Portola Valley, CA Looking Glass Capital, New York, NY Matchstick Ventures, Minneapolis MN & Boulder CO Motivate Venture Capital, Chicago, IL Necessary Ventures, San Francisco, CA NewBuild Venture Capital VC, San Francisco, CA One Way Ventures, Boston, MA Pack Ventures, San Francisco, CA Position Ventures, San Francisco, CA Rackhouse Venture Capital, San Francisco, CA Range Ventures, Denver, CO Recall Capital, San Francisco, CA Redbud VC, Columbia, MO Refinery Ventures, Cincinnati, OH Schematic Ventures, San Francisco, CA Service Provider Capital, Denver, CO Sure Ventures, San Francisco, CA Surface Ventures, New York, NY Tau Ventures, Palo Alto, CA Tech Square Ventures, ATL Tokyo Black, San Francisco Twin Ventures, San Francisco, CA Vela Partners, San Francisco, CA Zelda Ventures, San Francisco, CA Added: HCVC, Redwood City, CA, Nomad Ventures, SF/LA mu ventures, NYC  Ripple Ventures, Toronto Enigma Venture Partners, Toronto Fairbridge, NYC Beyond Genius Ventures AZ-VC Ag Startup Engine, Chicago IL Drive Capital, Columbus, OH Bee Partners, SF ResilienceVC Champion Venture Partners, LA Reach Capital, SF Coyote Capital, SF Lombard Street Ventures, Menlo Park Convoi Ventures, SLC UT focal, SF CA Park Rangers Capital Meridian Ventures LOI Venture Tundra Ventures ATX Venture Partners Enigma Venture Partners Tenzing.vc Northside Ventures VC 414, Milwaukee, WI Antler, NYC & Austin Xcellerant Ventures, AZ Cerulean Ventures (climate fund) Companyon Ventures in Boston & NY Avalanche, Austin What did I miss or get wrong 🙃?

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🎙️ New podcast of Supra Insider is live with Chris Hulls, founder & CEO of Life360 (Nasdaq:LIF). It's jam-packed with hard-earned founder wisdom from 15+ years of building a company. Ben Erez and I covered a bunch of ground with Chris in this episode that will be relevant to product-minded founders and startup product leaders: 🌎 Chris's journey from founding Life360 to taking the company public 🌎 The qualities Chris looks for in product leaders at different growth stages 🌎 His views on metric-driven product culture and the lean startup ideology 🌎 Why Chris brought on Gibson Biddle (frmr VP of Product at Netfix) as an interim product leader and his reflections on the experience hiring fractional executives 🌎 How Life360 maintains agility as it scales 🌎 Chris's approach to building conviction and product taste as a founder 🌎 The challenges and benefits of being a publicly traded company 🌎 Chris’s future aspirations and continued motivation after 17 years in the business 🌎 And more! I'm pumped for you to check it out. Episode links in the comments 👇

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