Pedro Pachuca

The adoption of AI will continue to have MASSIVE implications on our healthcare system. Three that stand out to me: Early detection --> AI algorithms are revolutionizing early disease detection by analyzing medical images and patient data with unprecedented accuracy, leading to earlier diagnosis and intervention, ultimately saving lives. Continuous monitoring and surveillance --> AI-powered devices and applications enable continuous monitoring of patients' health status in real-time, allowing healthcare providers to intervene promptly when necessary, especially for those with chronic conditions, thus improving patient outcomes and reducing hospital readmissions. Streamlined operations --> AI streamlines healthcare operations by optimizing resource allocation, predicting patient admission rates, and automating administrative tasks, ultimately improving efficiency and reducing costs. Prime example covered by Morning Brew's Healthcare brew today: How UC San Diego Health Used AI to Reduce Its Sepsis Mortality Rate

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In retrospect, 2024 was a pretty amazing year for innovation out of University of California, Berkeley. My Top 10 highlights below. Any I missed? 1. Databricks secured the largest VC round ever—a $ 10B funding round, led by multiple Berkeley founders. 2. OpenAI raised the 2nd largest VC funding round ever - $6.5B. Co-founded by Berkeley alum John Schulman. 3. Since launching Built By Berkeley (a newsletter that tracks Berkeley founded companies funding) in July 2024: 229 companies raised 27.4B. ~$1.1B per week raised by Cal founders! Wild! 4. Out of the 13 2024 Nobel Prize laureates - 4 had Berkeley connections. 5. Record-breaking Berkeley Olympic performance: 5 Gold, 10 Silver, 8 Bronze medals. More than many countries!  6. Berkeley-founded Perplexity emerged as a genuine Google Search competitor, reaching a $9B valuation (9x increase in a year) with 15M+ active users (probably already much higher than this). Along with some unbelievable execution speed from Aravind Srinivas and team. 7. Chatbot Arena, founded at Berkeley, became the industry standard for AI model benchmarking. 8. Rich Lyons became the new Berkeley chancellor. Rich will be a huge innovation catalyst for Berkeley. 9. Berkeley beats Stanford University 21-24 in the Big Game…not innovation but fun nevertheless.  10. Berkeley leads the PitchBook rankings with 1,642 VC-backed undergrad alumni-founded companies. 245 more than second-placed Stanford. Berkeley is shaping up to be ground zero of the coming AI wave from a company formation and research perspective. Looking forward to a bigger and better 2025.

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Since the YC deadline to hear back for W25 is coming up next week, here’s the story of how we went from 2 students coding in an MIT dorm room to being full-time YC founders building Delve in SF. For all you founders anxiously waiting to hear back, just keep building — you’ll be successful regardless of the decision. -- In Fall 2023, my co-founder Karun Kaushik and I were studying AI at MIT and spending all of our free time building an AI medical scribe to help doctors. We had vaguely heard about YC from a friend who had just gotten accepted but had no plans of applying whatsoever. However when the YC deadline rolled around, we spontaneously decided to put in an application on the very last day. We spent that whole day in Karun’s dorm room typing up the application and filming all the required videos. We finally hit submit the minute of the deadline! By the next day we had already moved on. We went back to the usual rhythm of coding in the dorm room, calling with doctors, attending conferences, etc. If anything, we were even more motivated now to get more traction and be successful regardless. Later that week, while we were eating in the dorm kitchen, I noticed I got an email saying we had a YC interview scheduled. My heart rate spiked. I jumped up out of my seat and immediately told Karun. I never seriously considered YC, but for the first time it hit me that it might actually be a possibility. When the day of the interview rolled around, we did mock interviews with former YC founders and focused mostly on calming our nerves. More important than the actual content of the interview, we wanted to show our excitement for building and hacking together as co-founders. Unfortunately the interview caught us by surprise. The group partners didn't seem to care as much about our actual AI medical scribe. Instead, they seemed more curious about a side idea we had listed in our application that we wrote up in a day. The idea was about streamlining HIPAA compliance (since we had to go through HIPAA for our AI medical scribe). By this point, we were already seriously considering pivoting into this and had made a lot of progress on the idea. The YC interview was our tipping point Not too long after, we got an ominous email titled “YC.” We were freaked out. I could not sleep the entire night. Then, in the middle of class the next day, I got a phone call from Karun with Surbhi on the other end of the line. My heart rate spiked. I ran outside of the classroom. That turned out to be our acceptance call:) -- For everyone out there still waiting to hear back, just keep grinding. Build as if you’ve been rejected and you might just be pleasantly surprised. I’m also always here to help with mock interviews/give advice! We’ve helped a handful of friends through the YC app process and are always here to support other founders!

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Success in deep tech, like any other startup, hinges on not running out of money It’s more pronounced in deep tech since business metrics won’t happen until after several funding rounds So founders need to convince investors and employees that whatever they are raising now will generate results (with ample buffer) that will entice investors to put in more money, even though there likely still won’t be a business that traditional investors can underwrite. Pure technical progress won’t cut it. It’s about turning armies of talent, customers, and partners into believers of the future you’re making possible Props to Becky Pferdehirt, PhD and Rajesh Swaminathan for a fantastic convo and Matt Caspari for hosting and moderating!

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118 VCs (one hundred eighteen!) are gathering in San Diego next week - to meet with 30 SD startups. But it's so MUCH bigger than just those 30 co's. It brings VCs back - when they see quality companies. It helps those who are next-in-line and adjacent. It enables us to send deal flow all year 'round. It attracts talent and other companies. It inspires entrepreneurship. Connect is working for SD. Together, we're building the best damn innovation ecosystem on the planet. Year over year. Five.Ten.Thirty.

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Friends, Q2 was a quarter of progress and learning for us at HawkTower, where we invest in early-stage startups applying breakthrough computing technologies to maximize California's natural resource markets. Our focus is on technology-enabled interventions (e.g., AI-enabled geospatial radars for lithium-ion batteries in the waste stream) for critical, market-level imperatives (e.g., disaster prevention) that can drive rapid commercial adoption (e.g., placed on every recycling truck in the world). Our current investment priorities are: - Agricultural productivity and efficiency - Biomanufacturing - Labor and mobility automation - Waste stream optimization and decarbonization - Disaster prevention and management Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve been up to: Milestones and Investments: - In late April, we officially launched our fund, filing with the SEC. Yay. - By June, we completed our first fund close ahead of schedule, with backing from family offices, foundations, high-net-worth individuals, and organizations aligned with California's future. - Our portfolio now includes three early-stage investments (Farm-ng, Agriful Software, and Nexstera Tech). Strategic Partnerships: - We believe that startups operating closer to their customers and resources, especially in agriculture and biomanufacturing, have a strategic advantage. For instance, the Salinas Valley, a major agricultural hub, is less than an hour from Silicon Valley and serves as a center of thought leadership in the convergence of agriculture and AI (from Western Growers, Taylor Farms, and others). - Similarly, the North San Joaquin Valley is emerging as a biotech and agtech innovation hub, and we are proud to support BEAM Circular, a startup hub for the circular bioeconomy. Key Relationships: - Karen Warner, CEO of BEAM Circular, joined HawkTower as a strategic advisor. - Jackie Cruz, Ed. D. Cruz, Hartnell College’s VP of Advancement, advises on Salinas Valley and workforce development. - Ben Palone from Western Growers, with his technical background in agriculture, became a trusted advisor. - Matthew Hoffman from Driscoll's Global R&D team provides insights on global agriculture, product positioning, and investment strategy. - We collaborated with Monterey Bay DART for workforce development and automation in agtech. - Dominic Milano and the Milano Technical Group from Merced collaborated on key initiatives and advised us on investments. - HawkTower is participating in Santa Cruz Works's accelerator cohort as a mentor and advisor. Thank you Doug Erickson. - We published an overview of entrepreneurship across the UC system with input from across the University of California system. Moving into the fall, we remain deeply committed to supporting founders shaping California's future natural resource markets. Stay tuned and be in touch! : ) Db

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Silicon Valley Slackers: Myth or Reality? We sat down with Menlo Ventures’ Deedy Das to discuss his viral tweet about underworked engineers earning $300K+ and the phenomenon’s broader implications. Mouse Jigglers & Ghost Engineers: Deedy shares wild stories of remote workers gaming the system, from "working" in Mexico for years to productivity software catching patterns of inactivity. Misaligned Incentives: Deedy argues that middle managers prioritize headcount over productivity, creating an environment where underperformance is overlooked. Measuring Productivity: Lines of code and git commits aren’t enough. Engineering productivity remains complex and difficult to quantify, so there’s no silver bullet. Viral Backlash: Deedy’s anecdotes sparked heated debates in tech, with some engineers admitting to coasting while others criticized him for "narking" on the culture. Should companies rethink how they measure and incentivize performance?

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Exciting to see startups aiming to use AI to discover chemicals, materials, drugs, etc. Semi companies have taken notice: AMD is investing in and Cadence is acquiring them. Semi/EDA companies have broken out by becoming critical path, whether it’s through critical software, packaging, IP, design kits from foundries, or user communities. Aside from just making it easy to make new materials, these “AI for making X” companies also need to articulate a vision as to how they can establish monopolistic positions in their industries.

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Two weeks ago I spent 3 days with brilliant human beings discussing the state of AI investment with other angel syndicate leads, angel investors and VCs at Hustle Fund's #camphustle in Los Gatos. It was brilliant. Truly awesome to learn so much from insanely accomplished investors. But was so clear to me again is that the US and the UK are two countries divided by separate languages of ambition. Aspiration and ambition underlined by the cluster effect of successful exits, incredible talent and venture capital driven by operators and founders rather than accountants. But one reason why the US often trumps (pun not intended) the UK is they learn from failure. Run a startup that didn't reach the dizzying heights of venture-scale returns? Learn, reset and go again. What they certainly do not do is look at failure with glee and an "I told you so" attitude. Which is what I sense when I read most of the narrative around the failure of Cazoo. Alex Chesterman swung and missed. The business was flawed, unit economics didn't add up and in reality - there was very little innovation outside the vertical alignment of a well-understood business. But when we look down upon what he tried to do and 💩 💩 it all we're doing is making it harder for someone else to be equally as ambitious. Focus on what went wrong. Focus on the fundamental underlying business models that drive efficient use of capital and the push for profitability. But let's celebrate people shooting their shot and not celebrate the failures.

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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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A new era of deep tech has emerged. First time funds will raise “unheard of” amounts of capital to fuel next gen deep tech startups - producing outsized, superior returns for LP’s compared to the rest. Prudent investors will act on this data and shift investment strategy as LP’s or risk being left behind savvy wealth managers and CIO’s / FO’s who saw this trend begin 4 years ago.

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Did you know that YC founders get a secret weapon… and it’s not what you think. “Bookface” is YC’s internal social network. It was needed because YC had funded larger batches and the hardest part of a community is knowing who is in it and who you can trust and ask for help. On the platform, founders share real methods and advice that would break if it were shared widely It’s secret knowledge shared with a trust-first community - answering 80% of the questions a founder can have about building and selling a product, be it to clients, candidates or investors. Before the platform, if you had a B2B startup, you had to reach out cold to potential customers. Now there are over 1000 YC companies you can sell your service to and all of their contact information is in Bookface. As a result, YC alumni companies are often over 50% of your new sales during YC. It’s superpowers like this that make YC deals so attractive compared to the norm. You are investing in a founder with a 10x network already!

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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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Team San Diego! I though you may find this as surprising as I did...we are not alone. Read this quick article from Jon Prentice's (Silicon Valley Bank) interview with with James Newell (Voyager Capital), published in GeekWire on Seattle's innovation ecosystem....they lament the SAME issues as we do in San Diego: * Lack of angel investors, (Especially, it calls out, given the local giant tech co's) * "We need low-conviction check writers." * Lack of "cachet associated with being an angel investor" - We have similar efforts (as described in the article) to drum up angel activity: NuFund Venture Group and, Interlock Capital (read the article and you'll see why the Interlock effort is tops as relates to "paying back into the ecosystem") Connect.org strives to 'connect' innovative companies with investors of all types (angel, VC, PE...) - just see "Innovation Day". Their Springboard program provides another great way for experienced entrepreneurs to give back through mentorship...as for the companies going through Springboard: "Ask for advice, and you often get $$" Your thoughts on the article or San Diego innovation ecosystem? https://lnkd.in/gfwq6mfq

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I love YC Demo Day season. It’s an insane concentration of driven founders building something they deeply believe in at the frontier of tech. I know it's more trendy for VCs to complain about YC. But I believe Garry Tan when he says 5-10% of companies become worth a billion dollars. Maven’s hit rate from YC is even higher: 16% have had $B+ exits, and we’re trending toward a 40% graduation rate from Seed to Unicorn with investments we’ve made alongside YC. Since Maven’s founding in 2013, we’ve funded 12 YC startups out of the 66 companies we’ve invested in. Here are a few: Cruise: acquired by GM for $1B+ Embark: $4B SPAC, acquired by Applied Intuition Chariot: acquired by Ford before Series A May Mobility: raised $300M+ in follow on funding, including from Toyota Carrot Fertility: raised $100M+ in follow on funding, including from CRV and USVP Daybreak Health: Series A from Lightspeed, Series B from USV Moment Robotics: acquired by Cruise founder Kyle Vogt’s new company, The Bot Co (Maven is an investor) Our strategy differs from other YC investors. Many funds build a YC “index fund”, investing in many startups per batch. It’s not a bad move. But we focus on concentration, meeting all the companies in our thesis area and investing in one or two. Gratefully, I think every company from the list above can point to Maven as one of their most trusted partners that made a difference: intros to customers, closing follow-on funding from top VCs, connecting key hires, and offering genuine care and advice in both the best and toughest of moments. What are we looking for in a YC investment? 1) Team - a technical product team with startup DNA and hustle that can achieve a bold vision. Brilliant, determined founders no one would bet against who are ambitious enough to build an iconic company. 2) Vision worth fighting for - what are you bringing into the world that is worth all the time, effort and money required for success? Why aren’t existing solutions good enough? Are we proud to help bring this idea to the world? 3) Massive market - because of the valuation premium YC demands, even a $B outcome may not return today’s average Seed fund. Honestly, that math sucks. In order to pay the premium, we have to believe that if we’re right, we’ll be wildly successful. 4) Consumer trend - Maven invests in tech companies addressing emerging consumer trends. Even if some investments are B2B or B2B2C, they are always grounded in a consumer insight: autonomous vehicles in 2014, fertility care in 2017, mental health in 2020. Today, we’re looking at consumer applications of AI and frontier consumer health. Many successful companies we fund are outside of YC as well – like Zoom, Hello Heart, Epic!, Class, Wildtype. So we match YC’s Unicorn % across the rest of our portfolio, too 💪 YC founders in consumer tech and digital health: if you want to build an iconic company that delivers a positive impact for millions of consumers - I can’t wait to talk to you!

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The next wave of AI-native startup builders are coming from top schools like UC Berkeley. As a judge at the UC Berkeley Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (SCET) bi-annual Collider Cup, I recently got to see some of these student builders in action. 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜 I've learned how important it is to understand how students are leveraging AI today—they're the first generation of daily AI power users. From assignments and studying to research and time management, students are using AI every single day. 𝗔𝗜 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 I was bracing myself to hear “AI” as the headline in the pitches – instead, most teams treated AI as a tool for building rather than as a product itself. This approach is a great way to ensure that products becomes better as the models become more powerful. By using AI as a tool for building, model improvements can directly translate into improvements in product capabilities over time, rather than being at risk of direct competition from foundational model providers. 𝗔𝗜 𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗱 We’re entering the early majority phase of the AI adoption curve. This means that we may soon hit a moment where we stop explaining that there’s AI in the product, and it will simply assumed to be in there. If you’re not building with AI now, you're likely to be behind in a few quarters. 𝗧𝗼𝗽 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝘆𝗽𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴: 𝗔𝗜 + 𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 Combining specialist backgrounds and private datasets with AI models.  - Swim team using computer vision on practice recordings build to help coaches better monitor athlete stats and improve technical training. - Football team using computer vision to take field sport recordings and flatten them into strategic maps for game analysis. 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝘂𝗴𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗼𝗿 - Bioinformatics platform enabling academic research teams to use natural language to manage complex research workflows and automate testing. - AI receptionist who picks up calls and schedules appointments at clinics powered by language models powering speech models. 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵/𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵 - Improve access to medicine in low middle income countries with AI-powered features like drug authentication and automated inventory management - Alternative milk grown sustainably and naturally in a lab without cows With lower barriers to apply specialized data with AI models + new AI-native talent entering the workforce, I’m looking forward to benefitting from the solutions that are brewing from top schools like UC Berkeley.

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During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth + good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

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🚨🚨 🚨 Unlocking Innovation: The Power of the Adjacent Possible Innovation programs can stall when the team tries to ideate way beyond their collective perspective and frame of reference. Like a software engineer brainstorming genetic modification of mycelia, or a senior executive ideating process improvements which they haven't been participated in for decades. It's challenging, exhausting, and ultimately self-defeating. Enter the concept of the "Adjacent Possible" - a game-changer for innovation. What is it? The Adjacent Possible, coined by Stuart Kauffman, represents the realm of new ideas within reach based on our current knowledge, resources, and capabilities. Why it matters: ➡️ Realistic Innovation: it focuses on achievable advancements, not far-fetched concepts. ➡️ Incremental Progress: each innovation opens doors to new possibilities. How to leverage it: • Constantly explore the boundaries of your adjacent possible. What's in your line of sight is what you know best. • Combine existing ideas in novel ways. Even small perturbations from status quo can generate large innovation leaps. • Stay curious about developments in adjacent industries. Cross-domain patterns create fresh sources of ideas, while also expanding the adjacent possible. Most of all, it takes the 'genius' pressure off the team. No one knows everything, but each one of us knows a lot about something, and we can all drive plenty of innovation potential by focusing on the spaces we know best. Are you exploring your Adjacent Possible? Share your thoughts below! 👇 #Innovation #innovationsystems #AdjacentPossible

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