Jeremiah Lowin

LLMs are trained on internet-scale data. But to make AI work for work, models need to be grounded in your enterprise data -- a much harder problem than meets the eye! How do you connect to all your data sources and ingest them frequently enough while managing compute/storage costs? How do you make sure that you only show users results from documents they have access to? How do you rank results without internet-scale click and link data? How do you process the content of documents that are often hidden in PDFs and presentations? These are tricky problems, and it's why enterprise search didn't work for nearly a decade, until Glean came along. Turns out it's the exact same set of challenges needed to give LLMs the right context to work their magic on your enterprise content. Glean spent 5 years building the ingestion, search, and ranking infra needed to solve this problem well. This has given them the right to run the "Work AI" race and delight users at work. CEO Arvind Jain shares more on the latest episode of Training Data. Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube: https://seq.vc/ytd Apple: https://seq.vc/pit Spotify: https://seq.vc/jnz 

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Seed VCs are turning to new ‘pro rata’ funds that help them compete with the big firms Alpha Partners, SignalRank and now SaaS Ventures help seed VCs pay for shares when big VCs try to price — or push — them out Lee Edwards, partner at Root VC, has a saying at his firm that “pro rata rights are earned, not given.” That may be a bit of a stretch since pro rata refers to a term that VCs put in their term sheets that gives them the right to buy more shares in a portfolio company during consequent funding rounds to maintain an ownership percentage and avoid dilution. Still, while these rights are not exactly “earned,” they can be expensive. One of the latest trends in VC investing these days are funds dedicated to helping seed VCs exercise their pro rata rights. https://lnkd.in/dRM3RvdA By Christine Hall

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From Crypto Ice Age to AI Inferno- Gartner Curves or Extreme Weather Conditions Precipitated by VC? A few thoughts I've been reflecting on recently on learnings from being through many crypto cycles I can apply to this moment in AI investing... https://lnkd.in/d6KSM3EN

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Startup failures have risen 60% in the last year. This is going to lead to the great rebundling in data. Read below to see how this will impact your architecture. There are always cycles of "bundling" and "unbundling" in markets. As capital gets cheaper, as problems get more difficult, as market access increases (etc.) more and more people enter markets. To become differentiated, they focus on smaller and smaller problems. During boom times (like periods of low interest rates), there is a perfect storm. We need only take a look at the Matt Turck MAD Landscape of vendors to see how crowded the area is. Now that funds are scarce, everyone is beginning to tread on each others' toes. Fivetran is charging for running dbt Labs models. Snowflake is running Spark. Databricks has a warehouse product. Everyone is trying to do everything, so the question as #dataengineers becomes - where do you want to consolidate? What do you really really need? Here are the things you have to prioritise 🤓 Visibility If you can't see what's going on in your data pipelines then you have no way of scaling beyond a 5 person team / helping others learn data. You will forever be stuck running a central time, balancing ad-hoc requests with managing infra ⚡ Warehouse / Lakehouse It should go without saying everyone needs somewhere to store data and transform it. For example, BigQuery or S3 + Spark. It really doesn't matter 🖥️ Control Plane This is a new concept that is essentially the backbone of a modern data platform. It is the "Thing that connects the things" / connective tissue between components of the data stack. You can check out Orchestra for this Other candidates: ingestion tools (but you can just run your own!), a place for all-purpose compute (like AWS) and *perhaps* a BI tool ;) Who else in data feels the same way? #datatrends #engineering #analytics

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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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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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AI memory is fundamental for conversational AI and AI agents. It is critical for building personalized experiences and improving reasoning. Check out Letta’s course to understand how to use AI memory to enhance the customization and quality of your AI app.

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Check out my recent post on why President Trump is the forcing function for us to solve the “Missing Middle” and catch the industrial Tsunami of onshoring coming to the US!

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Dan Primack had some pointed criticism for #VC yesterday in his Axios Pro Rata newsletter (a daily must read IMO 😤). In short, the model doesn't work if it can't produce exits for LPs. Don't blame public markets (which are at all-time highs) for the lack of liquidity either. 📈 💸 Instead, this is a "liquidity drought of your making" where "...swinging for the fences on every pitch, rather than taking the single or double that's available" is the only way out when you invest at "sky high valuations." 😰 "A whopping 37% of "unicorns" are being held for at least nine years by VC funds, including 13% that are past the 12-year mark." 😳 ⌛ Is he right? Is VC at a dire inflection point? Or is Primack prematurely hitting the panic button? 🚨 https://lnkd.in/dts92pXr

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Grim news from Forbes last week. #Point72 Ventures (run by famous billionaire, Steve Cohen) has laid off their fintech team in an attempt to #pivot away from crypto and shift into more of a focus investing in #AI and defense technology startups. Five #investors, and a few rumored partners of the company including are also rumored to separate from Point72 as well. The initial wave of fintech #startups were intended to disrupt the old school banking system and allow modern technology to thrive. Now that AI is an #industry wide trendsetter, Point72 are making a dire mistake of using it as a replacement for human input and perspective instead of a supplement. Hopefully this won’t set a precedent for future companies to get rid of their fintech experts and #investors who use their skills to great success.

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Collate is emerging from stealth with $30 million in seed funding led by Redpoint that values the fledgling business at more than $100 million, a significant number for such an early-stage company. VC firms First Round and Conviction Partners also participated, as well as Y Combinator. https://lnkd.in/ey4mjHy2 #startups #venturecapital #fundraising #artificialintelligence #ai #biotech #lifesciences

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Insightful look into bioplatform strategy, and what it takes to raise a Series A from my partner, Omri Amirav-Drory: https://lnkd.in/dFv7GbF6

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~40% of Frec’s customers are engineers working in tech, many of whom expect frequent and large capital gains. They also prefer to self-manage their money, which makes Frec an ideal platform. Meet Evan: an engineering leader who upgraded from investing in ETFs to direct indexing. Direct indexing appealed to Evan because it offers comparable returns to his ETFs while saving him money on advisory and ETF fees. “ETFs are true and tested, and giving folks a different way of investing in the market while saving more money is really appealing.” He’s used many other robo-advisors and other fintech tools, but “Frec seems to maximize tax loss harvesting opportunities better than any other product that I’ve used.” He also likes Frec's transparent fee structure.  “I feel like with a lot of other companies, that’s muddled in with the cost of investments,” he told us, “and you don’t really know how much you’re paying or how much you’re not saving as a result. I think Frec does a really good job of laying all of that out and giving you a true understanding of the cost of these investment products.” Read more about his Frec journey here ⬇

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Non-Engineering Roles at Early-Stage Startups Offering $120K+ Base Salary with Meaningful Bonus and Equity: Chief of Staff @ Milo (Consumer), Remote Biz Ops Lead @ Fractal Agriculture (FinTech), Remote; Backed by Virta Ventures Chief of Staff @ CakeAI (AI SaaS), NY; Backed by Primary Venture Partners Demand Generation Specialist @ Rootly (Consumer), Remote; Backed by YC, 8VC, Gradient Ventures Account Executive @ CommandBar (Enterprise SaaS), Remote; Backed by Soma Capital, YC, Insight Partners Product Marketing @ Slope (Enterprise), Remote; Backed by YC, Union Square Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures Supply Planning Manager @ PROVEN Skincare (Consumer), Remote; Backed by YC, FJ Labs, Soma Capital, Social Capital Account Executive @ Accrue Savings (Consumer), NY; Backed by Ground Up Ventures, Tiger Global Chief of Staff @ UNIGRID Battery (Climate), CA; Backed by Union Square Ventures, LiquidMetal Ventures Job details and the full list (40+ opportunities) are in the comments below. If you're interested in non-tech jobs focused on specific industries like HardTech, HealthTech, Climate, etc., then DM me or let me know in the comments.

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We have an another lineup of star investors for MELT. Let me introduce 23 amazing VCs and Angels ! ☞ Stedde Capital Sector: Biotech, B2C, B2B ☞ The Collective Sector: Fintech ☞ Muivona Capital Sector: Healthtech, Legaltech, Retailtech, AI, E-commerce, B2B ☞ Touring Capital | AI SaaS Fund Sector: SaaS, B2B, AI ☞ Forum Ventures Sector: Fintech, Climate tech, Govtech, Legaltech, Cybersecurity, AI, B2B, SaaS ☞ Plain Sight Capital Sector: Fintech, Insurtech, Retailtech, Legaltech, Govtech, Adtech ☞ Fantastocker INC Sector: Fintech ☞ Biran Capital Sector: Fintech ☞ Lynx Ventures Sector: Fintech, Proptech, Legaltech, AI ☞ CLNM Capital Sector: Fintech ☞ Brilliant Minds Sector: AI, Fintech, Climate tech, Retailtech, Biotech, Neurotech ☞ Woodside Capital Partners Sector: Adtech, E-commerce, B2B, B2C, SaaS ☞ Generous Ventures Sector: Fintech, Healthtech, Climate tech, Edtech, Insurtech, Proptech, Agtech, Govtech, Legaltech, Retailtech, Biotech, Adtech, Mobility, Cybersecurity, AI, B2C, Gaming, Web3, Robotics, AR/VR, Neurotech, Spacetech, B2B, E-commerce, SaaS ☞ 615.vc Sector: Spacetech ☞ seedlabs co / Harvard Sector: AI ☞ Bullpen Capital Sector: Fintech, Healthtech, Climate tech, Edtech, Proptech, Insurtech, Agtech, Govtech, Legaltech, Retailtech, Adtech, Biotech, Spacetech, Gaming, Web3, Mobility, Robotics, Cybersecurity, AR/VR, Neurotech, AI, B2C, B2B, SaaS, E-commerce ☞ Connecticut Innovations Sector: SaaS, B2C, B2B ☞ Matr (Matter) Ventures Sector: Fintech, Cybersecurity, Healthtech, Climate tech ☞ Sanctor Capital Sector: Web3, AI, AR/VR, Gaming ☞ Clockwork // 171 Ventures Sector: Fintech, AI ☞ W Ventures Sector: Fintech ☞ BASE64 Capital Sector: B2B, SaaS, AI, Cybersecurity, Robotics ☞ Conscience VC Sector: Healthtech, AI, B2C Founders x Investors Dynamic Network 『MELT』 6/3 5pm https://lu.ma/ldbfgkez 【💎VIP Sponsored】 ​Bradley Kam ​・Founded 2 companies Unstoppable Domains & Talkable ・Raised over $70M ・Unstoppable Domains recently raised $65M in a Series A round led by Pantera Capital, reaching a $1B valuation. Aquibur Rahman ​Founder of Mailmodo, has received funding from Sequoia and is an alum of Y Combinator S21 ​Nathan Stevenson ​CEO and Founder of ForwardLane Inc. has been featured by Forbes, the World Economic Forum, and American Banker ​Rene Anziani & Leevar Williams ​Founded by MIT alumni, APrime Technology Technology is an elite team of experienced engineers, product managers, and data experts intent on helping startups build innovative products that matter. Our customers operate in complex, data-driven, highly regulated industries such as quantitative finance, healthtech, fintech, and edtech. We have received 400+ registrations. ​・76 VC and Angel Investors ​・280+ Founders/CEOs ​3 Series D companies ​2 Series C companies ​6 Series B companies ​35 Series A companies ​15 Pre-Series A companies ​106 Seed companies ​146 Pre-Seed companies ​26 Bootstrap companies ​50+ Executives Meet at us MELT!

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We (Climate VC) need to stop making excuses for the growth trajectories of our companies There’s a reason why Matthew Stotts and I chose the venture capital asset class to focus on - it has to GROW fast. And there are a lot of fast-growing, money-making opportunity areas with huge problems that could benefit from highly motivated well-funded and skilled teams looking to build a large company. If you need to make an excuse or caveat for any of the statements in the previous paragraph, you’re in the wrong asset class The good thing about VC is it grows fast and BIG. The clock is ticking on our biggest problem areas - let’s get to work!

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Came across this great resource in the smashmag newsletter this morning and it spawned some thoughts about Zen and the art of Data Viz… Data visualizations are often the first thing users encounter when they log into software solutions, especially those designed to support their daily professional workflows. However, many platforms fall short by not offering appropriate visualizations for their specific data types. The Financial Times Visual Vocabulary is an excellent starting resource for teams operating in data-intensive environments. Selecting the right visualization is only the beginning—and arguably the easier part. The real challenge lies in presenting insights that enable users to draw meaningful conclusions and take informed actions. This requires a blend of domain expertise, clear business objectives, and iterative learning. By focusing on the relationship between accurate data representation and actionable insights, we can enhance user experience and drive better decision-making. Improvements don't always necessitate a full redesign. Often, small tweaks can unlock significant outcomes. It all starts with the seemingly simple question, "What are your users trying to accomplish?" I’m 2 months into mat leave so hopefully sleep deprivation has not eroded my ability to talk shop and that these are coherent musings. Shout out to CGPT for at least supporting sentence structure and grammar #UX #datavisualization #dashboards #SaaS #usability #maternityleave

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“This results in a sort of asymmetric, multi-player prisoner’s dilemma, where mutual cooperation is the optimal outcome, but individual incentives lead to suboptimal results.” Paul Murphy nailing the last 3 year story of “climate tech”. https://lnkd.in/emRpJCZ9

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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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