Cathryn Chen

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 Context VC team has been in Seattle for our offsite for the last 2 days. We exist to support veteran entrepreneurs & executives - here's how/why 👇 HOW 1. We host the Military Veteran Startup Conference in February each year. This event draws 450 - 500 veteran founders, VCs, and early-stage operators. 👉 Register at milvetstartups [dot] com 2. We invest in Military Veteran led teams. We do seed and pre-seed investments across industries. This is a venture capital fund, so not a perfect fit for most businesses, but if you're building a venture scale company, 👉 Reach out to startups@contextvc [dot] com 3. We host happy hours around the country. We have 6-10 HHs that we'll host around the country in the coming months. 👉 Sign up for our newsletter at themilvet [dot] org to stay up to date on our happy hours! ---------------------------------- 👉 Venture-backed founders, we can help you hire amazing talent. Reach out to me via DM. WHY WE DO THIS: We believe in veterans. We think veterans are incredibly smart, capable, hard-working, gritty founders and businesspeople. This belief drives all of our actions. Leave a comment if you've attended one of our events or to share your perspective on veteran entrepreneurs

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The most popular question among startup founders this week is 'Which Tech Week events are you going to?' I've done my homework: went through 450 events. Of course, I had some help from AI, but I double-checked everything myself. I’ve drawn some conclusions: who’s the most active, where the top tech minds will be, which funds and corporations have really put in the effort, and I even created a personal list of the most unique formats.* In the end, I came up with a schedule – the week kicks off with an ice plunge at 7 AM on Monday, followed by 3 events a day for the first 3 days (since I’ll get lazy after that), then 1 event per day, and saving the lightest and most fun formats for the weekend. Feel free to use, save, and share! 😉 *Last year, morning hikes were all the rage, this year it’s all about the Cold Plunge. Interesting!

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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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if you know, you know masayoshi son. SoftBank Investment Advisers. Arm. all-in. https://lnkd.in/eTEkXyZ9 2500X's his 20 millys into 50 billys. for sv the son shined for all those including Sequoia Capital JPMorgan Chase & Co. Goldman Sachs and all the others in the investment game for many years. they were happy to dump on son. just like wall street does in extracting wealth from the middle class. well we know how both turned out. ouch. it hurts. although it's kinda expected, don't you see. what is remarkable about son is he is underestimated. today. the WeWork fiasco was truly epic. i mean really son, that neuman is a fraud. total fraud. yet you decided to go with it. now a16z has fallen under his spell. good luck marc, ben. it won't work out. now it appears he's going to Arm wrestle NVIDIA Taiwan so given that NVIDIA Taiwan has created team Amazon Web Services (AWS) Dell Technologies in jensen's last keynote. so who is Arm with these days? my guess is that arm is a bit atrophied. and jensen NVIDIA Taiwan is so far ahead that everyone including the peeps at home are super jealous of the usd 2 trilly. jensen is singing https://lnkd.in/ebSc7rGS sergey & larry is singing https://lnkd.in/espr2X44 bill gates is singing https://lnkd.in/eaZxP5AV ok. everybody together now. https://lnkd.in/eqhXQJQD source: https://lnkd.in/e6MfTmtk < . >

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Thrilled to announce the launch of our inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks at Emergence Capital. This comprehensive report dives deep into the metrics and trends shaping the early-stage enterprise cloud market. A huge thank you to our VC partners and contributors for making this possible! Here's a sneak peek of our findings: --> 60% of companies have already integrated GenAI into their service offerings, with another 20% planning to do so this year. --> While most companies use OpenAI as their primary LLM, many are experimenting with multiple models. We’re seeing a trend toward intelligently routing GenAI inference requests based on cost, performance, and security. --> Companies that have implemented GenAI are showing promising results, with a 7% higher NDR compared to those that haven’t. Beyond Benchmarks goes further with more GenAI trends, insights on the current fundraising environment, and key performance metrics. Our goal is to provide founders and their teams with valuable benchmarks to help them make better-informed decisions. At Emergence Capital, we're committed to helping founders build iconic companies. Dive into the full report here: https://lnkd.in/g6bnvAZM

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Big announcement below! 👇 Let's talk about the current state of GP-LP affairs: 🤯Emerging VC managers have absolutely exploded over the past 5 years. 📈 At the same time, more and more data has surfaced that shows that emerging VC firms tend to outperform larger, established firms. 🤔 All of this has made it intriguing but tough for LPs to know where to direct their attention. 🛍 GPs frequently meet LPs at conferences who are window shopping but not committed to the asset class or emerging managers. 🧾 And both crews get overwhelmed by transactional convos. So Sydney Paige Thomas and I created Abundance. Abundance is a private, nomination-based retreat for active LPs and top emerging GPs to form new experiences together and build lasting relationships. Why Abundance? Abundance is knowing that there is more than enough for more than one to succeed. And a single win within a community is a win for the community itself. The journey of an emerging VC manager from 1st close to final close or Fund 1 to Fund 2 is (1) communal and (2) requires an abundant mindset. LPs look for structure and confidence to feel comfortable investing in early VC firms. Yet many of the feeds we scroll and conferences we attend reinforce inherent power dynamics and transactional thinking, which allows scarcity mindset to creep in for emerging GPs. Some of the best events I’ve attended have been intentionally non-transactional, e.g. Camp Hustle, Recast Summit, and other GPs’ AGMs. The fundraising success stories we see usually involve a community (usually of other GPs & LPs) coming together to support and open doors for the emerging GP. We designed Abundance to be an immersive gathering that fosters these connections. Starting tonight, ~100 GPs and LPs are descending upon Seattle for the inaugural Abundance retreat. This has been under wraps for months and I can’t wait to see it come to life! Thanks in advance to our awesome sponsors who were the earliest believers in this vision: Sydecar, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Gunderson Dettmer, & Zelda Ventures. And shoutout to my dad Ed Illig for logo design & Halle Kaplan-Allen being the first sponsor to say yes 🤩 Presented by The Council Capital & Symphonic Capital.

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