Marko Gargenta

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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VC platform teams rarely add meaningful value to portfolio companies. They’re mostly a tool for GPs to justify raising larger funds and collecting higher management fees.

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At Forum we look at thousands of deals each year across our Accelerator and Pre-Seed funds but only end up investing in a little over 1% of those startups.  As an early stage VC, I am in the business of saying no to nearly every startup I meet, and while there is nuanced rationale for many of the startups I pass on, a vast majority of businesses that don’t meet the qualification to get funded typically fall into one of two buckets. ▪ First time founders have a tendency to go out to market too early to raise pre-seed capital ▪   I’m sure most founders have heard some iteration of this from VCs that ultimately pass on their business.  In some cases it's a blanket excuse covering up for other pass reasons- perhaps a VC doesn’t believe in a team or isn’t bullish on the market opportunity - but in many cases founders simply haven't proven enough to the market to warrant an investment. I meet many teams with an articulate vision for the product that they want to build, but they either haven't performed enough customer discovery to prove demand for their initial wedge product, or need to raise pre-seed capital to build out an MVP.  In those cases, pre-seed investors are unwilling to underwrite those risks.  To be default fundable, teams need to be able to keep costs low, perform extensive customer discovery, and ship some version of an early product - pilots and early paid customers are key. A huge piece of this is having founding engineering talent on the team. ▪Not every startup is a venture opportunity ▪ By definition, a venture backed business is solving a problem within a market opportunity so massive and so desperately needed, that its growth rate is off the charts.   It spreads like a weed, absorbing almost unlimited amounts of capital to fulfill demand within its customer base.   Each year there are maybe 20 companies launched that ultimately have venture scale outcomes. The bar to reach this rarified air is unfathomably high and the reality is the vast majority of founders simply aren’t building for opportunities that have the potential to be one of these generational companies. Many startup founders view VC as the only viable option for capitalizing their business, but not every great business is a venture business, and most successful founders never take VC dollars.  In order to reach an IPO/acquisition large enough to generate venture returns, a startup needs a credible path to $100s of millions in revenue. This is the standard by which early stage opportunities are evaluated. The flip side to this, and I share this feedback often with founders I meet that are building interesting business in non venture markets, if you are able to scale to $10- $20M in revenue that can be a massively successful outcome for a founder.  There are investors who focus on these type outcomes, namely lower middle market PE shops, and the typical path to those deals is a bootstrapped business or a friends/family capital raise.

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A common mistake early-stage VCs make is confusing good decisions with good outcomes. Good outcomes don’t always mean good decisions—luck often masks flawed reasoning. Focus on process over outcome bias. Invest in strong decision-making frameworks, not just duplicating “wins.”

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New VCs aren't joining the game. First time VC investments are at an all time low. While this is not ideal for some startups who will have less access to capital it's a long term positive for the entire industry. Things got way too hot a few years ago and too many new VCs piled in, raising valuations to a point where ROI was near impossible on some deals. I feel like every celebrity had their own fund. Now we're probably over-correcting on the other side, but hopefully will find market equilibrium soon. We're seeing consistent demand increase for our portfolio companies deals since the nadir. To learn more about our early stage tech portfolio in South and Southeast Asia as well as our fund go here: https://lnkd.in/gfxsVB4A

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I'll be co-hosting a Cap Table Management Workshop with Fidelity Investments on Tuesday, 11/19! This will be part of a series of Startup Workshops that help founders with practical tips and actionable learnings. If you are a founder looking to raise future rounds of funding, this workshop is for you. Learn how to create, manage, and scale your cap table! https://lu.ma/vp0tzwtm

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A System of Agents: Our view on how founders can jump on a $4.6T opportunity. 👇 When Foundation Capital partner Jaya Gupta and I first outlined the Service-as-Software framework months ago, we knew we were describing something transformative. Now, after engaging with hundreds of startups, the potential is even clearer: the way to put Service-as-Software into action is through a System of Agents. Unlike traditional software systems that passively wait for human input, a Systems of Agents approach reimagines how software operates. Groups of cooperating AI agents aren't just tools; they're autonomous workers—capable of capturing, processing, and acting on both structured and unstructured data with unprecedented intelligence. The agents understand context, make decisions, and continuously improve. The initial Service-as-Software shift was significant. But a System of Agents? This is the paradigm shift that will unlock new, previously unimaginable categories of work. Here are four tips for founders building with Systems of Agents: ✔️ Capture data at the source Traditional software relies on human input, but Systems of Agents thrive when they operate directly at the source of data creation. By owning the interface where data originates, you empower your system to orchestrate downstream actions seamlessly. ✔️ Reframe costs as workforce investments When a System of Agents handles an entire job function, think beyond software budgets—classify it as part of a company’s workforce spending. This positions your solution as something that aligns with personnel costs, rather than operational software expenses. ✔️ Expand workstreams with AI’s 24/7 capabilities AI agents never clock out. Builders can use this round-the-clock reliability and scalability to unlock new opportunities—think of offering constant support in healthcare or real-time operations in logistics and customer service. ✔️ Prepare for pricing and business model changes Embrace the shift from seat-based pricing to outcome-driven models. With Service-as-Software and Systems of Agents, your value proposition is tied not to the number of licenses issued but to the measurable outcomes and improvements your AI delivers. Read our full analysis in the comments 👓

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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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My predictions for what 2025 will look like for the world of startups 1/ Funding toward legacy vertical SaaS businesses will hit an all time high in 2025. 2/ Flight to SF: SF will be the place as a preseed & seed founder to raise their first rounds. The emerging founders will pop in in SF first before making their ways to NYC and beyond. 3/ Year of Exits: We'll see a lot of the companies that couldn't exit in 2022-2024 start to exit this year through IPO, M&A and more. Will add much liquidity towards the VC market and drive LP diversification versus in 2024 where $35B of the $72B raised towards VC firms went to the top 9 venture funds in the world. 4/ Early stage fintech makes a comeback: The peak for early stage fintech was 2022 with $4.1B raised across 970 deals. 2024 early stage fintech numbers fell to 5 year lows with only $1.9B raised across 505 angel, preseed and seed deals. Seeing some improvements in funding numbers from quarter lowers which was Q2 2024 and some improvement in Q4 2024. Macro trends, AI, and some late stage funding for later fintech cos gives me an impression early stage fintech will rebound next year. 5/ RTO is coming back: The best startups will no longer be distributed but will return to the office in 2025. We'll see an increasing amount of startups, especially the early stage ones, emphasize in person work and hires. 6/ Biohacking the supermarket: Interest in health and longevity for consumers and the advancement of AI are long to lead to more demand for personalized food plans built for each individual person. 7/ Built for you: media and everything we consume on the internet will become for you. Think an extension of the for you page on Tik Tok but for everything else you consume, shop and watch. It won't be long until media becomes personalized to you and I and your favorite influencer is actually AI. 8/ Digital Twin Simulations: Someone will build out your digital AI twin for decision making. From testing career changes to planning relationships, these virtual replicas could provide insights into life’s "what-ifs. 9/ AI buyers: Just like with the rise in SDRs, we'll soon see a company test our buying with AI. Take product features, demos, pricing and more into account and AI will optimize to buy the right vendor stack for a founder based on exactly what they need.

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This is a solid basic primer. Over the years, I've observed a growing overlap between Private Equity (PE) and Venture Capital (VC) mandates. Today, some VCs are ready to invest hundreds of millions, particularly in companies with the potential for significant growth or hyper-growth (10X+ over 10 years) and irrespective of typical Stage A, B, C classification. Meanwhile, some PEs are shifting their focus to companies in the later stages of VC funding, targeting more moderate growth (3X-5X over 5 years). The expectations and approaches of PEs and VCs are overlapping and in some cases converging, as both feel they might be missing out on value capture opportunities.

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Please go through our GP, Gautam Kapur’s thoughts on founder’s deep understanding of the problem v/s potential market opportunity! Chanakya | Puneet Malik | Gautam Kapur

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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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I recently sat down with a group of Forum Ventures founders about to go out to fundraise and the topic of SAFE rounds came up. The context focused on the pros/cons of raising a priced vs a SAFE round and the conversation notably shifted toward the dilution implications of a SAFE round. Founders are keenly aware of the top line dilution of any funding round - ie selling 20% of their startup for $3M at a $15M cap - but very few fully grasp the implications of doing a SAFE round vs a priced round. The universal standard for institutional VC investors is a post money SAFE. This document essentially outlines ownership that an investor will have in a startup just prior to the execution of a priced round. Most importantly though, it is structured so that an investor in that SAFE will not be diluted by subsequent SAFE's that are issued. This is where founder education around the implications of this structure are not fully appreciated. In a situation where a founder continues to stack subsequent SAFEs, they don't actually convert until the first priced round and the net dilution they are taking is actually more than they realize. Here is a practical example - take a situation where a founder has already sold 15% of their business on a post money SAFE in a pre-seed round, and is now choosing to sell another 20% in a seed round. If the founder opts to raise this money on SAFEs, the dilution of that additional 20% will come entirely from common equity holders- meaning they will now own 65%. If SAFE holders were also diluted by that round, as they would be in a priced round, the founder would own 68%. This dynamic becomes more dramatic the more capital a founder raises on SAFEs. Note - this is a high level example and does not include an option pool carve out or other round nuances. Almost universally, when a founder raises their first priced round, there is some degree of sticker shock at the outright dilution on their cap table, particularly when options pools are factored in. This pain is even more acute when a founder has raised a fair amount of capital on SAFEs along the way. There are certainly benefits to raising SAFE round, mainly cash in hand 6-8 weeks faster and not having to decide on board seats too early, but I encourage all of our founders to run through cap table modeling and correctly account for the implications of SAFE rounds before they make fundraising decisions.

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Update call with a portfolio founder/CEO turned into a riffing session on how to develop the best narrative around the business, which led us to very meaningful discussion on products, core value proposition to customers, and customer personas. Startup sausage-making!

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As a VC, there are times when you have to choose between prioritizing returns and supporting the founders you work with. It’s not easy because we have a fiduciary duty to our LPs, which, in our case, are primarily non-profits, to maximize returns. At Eniac, we play the long game: if we do what’s best for our founders, it will ultimately benefit our brand, reputation, and relationships, which will be best for our LPs in the long run.

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