Dan Gill

Imagine you’re meeting a VC today and pitching your company. Now, also imagine the VC goes home tonight and tells his or her spouse about the meeting with you. How do you think the VC would (or should) describe your product to the spouse? Remember, this is for someone who doesn’t have any context, and probably doesn’t have time to listen the whole story. If you can think of a story version that's plain and simple -- how you want the VC to describe your product to the spouse -- perhaps that version should be your pitch in the first place?

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One awesome thing about our work at Groops is that the organizations who seek us out are the ones who care deeply about their people. Summer Friday is one of those companies. Culture is built into their core values and shapes everything they do. Every decision they make is grounded in how it impacts the human doing the work. I know because they have Groops for their entire company and I also lead their executive Groop. We have been with them for over a year now. We bring experts in organizational psychology to meet with their teams on a regular basis, teach core content in high cohesion / high performing teams, and help them have regular, honest conversations about what is working and what they want to improve. We provide ongoing insight reports with recommendations so everyone stays in communication. So, we end up knowing our partners well. They invited us to lead a full day (virtual) retreat last week where everyone took a personality assessment and we spent the day discussing how team makeup impacts their performance, how engaged they feel, and the direction of the organization. This is particularly important for them as they are a virtual company and clear communication and exploration and articulation of team functioning are mission critical. Having these types of conversations is also how cohesion is built. Bravo Summer Friday. We are proud to be your partner. Awesome work Rob Simone, Sarah Roberts, CPA, Michael Cruz, and Alicia Wiedemann. You are great leaders. And thanks Charlotte Bingaman MArch EdM , Sydney Davis, and Allison L. Barnes, MA, PCC. I am proud to have you on our team. #peoplematter #workplacewellness #peakperformance #IOPsychology #IOPsych #industrialorganizationalpsychology #cohesiveteams #connection

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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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Valuations are starting to (only slightly) be in check. Investors looking for revenue, quality of revenue, margins, and repeatable GTM. This has the best founders focused on what matters, and reaching out to their Boards and advisors for real advice and guidance. Good stuff.

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How to Think About VC _______ I stumbled upon this podcast by Heidi Roizen of Threshold Ventures. It’s a great primer for founders who aren’t familiar with how VC works. Here are three things from this episode that I wish every founder who pitched PHX Ventures knew: 1. "Venture capital is a hits business – and in order to attract VC money, your startup needs to have the potential to be that hit. That usually means not only are you addressing a large market, but you have a credible and compelling plan to dominate that market." 2. "It turns out that the VC model is not a good fit for the vast majority of startups – and in fact, more than 99% of US startups build their businesses without VC money." 3. "It’s only a good deal – for both the VCs and the entrepreneurs – if the money invested is used to capture and hopefully dominate a large market. And it’s usually some type of business that wouldn't have been able to do so without the venture capital."

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Great to see Eric Glyman's post on the impact of moving support into the product organization. Even better would would be to move support into engineering. We did this at Outlook mobile and Spendesk to great effect. The majority of tickets tend to be performance, quality, or reliability-related. Bugs and glitches. Putting a colleague's name on a ticket increases the rate of those tickets getting resolved. UX issues will surface, but they'll be in the minority. They will be well-understood by your design and UX/Research team already. And the triad can work through those as part of their regular planning cycle. Support reporting into engineering eliminates the distance between the user and engineers and puts the responsibility for quality where it needs to be.

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There is a lot of change within early stage venture. On one hand, we’re seeing seed rounds that are $100M+. Big funds are investing $5M+ in seed. Then non-AI companies are often in the $1-2M for seed category or raising angel rounds. What is really seed? What happens to the average outcomes? From what I’ve seen, capital has no intelligence so companies that raise $5M go through the same pains as $2M, but time will tell how the change in rounds & valuations impact outcomes.

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Some of the most inspiring founders I've backed take expertise from one field and apply it to another. They're able to create solutions that might not emerge within disciplinary silos. I call these people "missionary misfits.” I'm drawn to these misfits because they tackle big problems without being constrained by the “rules” of individual domains. They combine their deep subject expertise with unbounded curiosity for adjacent disciplines to solve real-world problems. I believe that the most disruptive innovations come from the unconventional remixing of insight and experimentation. That’s why missionary misfits are the apex predators of innovation. These are the ones who initially raise eyebrows yet become study material for future generations. They will transform industries and solve societal problems. And I want to partner with as many as possible.

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This spring Antler US had 8,000 Founders apply to come and work with us. 300 Founders were selected to join our residency and we invested in 32 of those teams. Last week, I shared an inside look of this recent batch of investments with our inner circle of pre-seed & seed investors. If you’re interested in joining this group of investors - please comment below. Examples: 1) AI-driven drug discovery software: Created by Ph.D. holders in genetics, chemistry, and computer science, with the CEO previously raising $50M for AI models in genomics. 2) AI-powered oncology decision support: Founded by a serial entrepreneur with two exits, including a significant sale to United Healthcare. 3) Fleet electrification through data access: Led by an engineer-turned-product manager with experience at Amazon, Waymo, and SpaceX’s Starlink. 4) Unlocking wastewater data: Founded by a serial biotech entrepreneur and Ph.D. biochemist who launched the first commercial COVID-19 wastewater lab, raising over $50M in grant funding. 5) Building mobile games with AI companions: Developed by a 2X founder with a decade in gaming at companies like Ubisoft and a co-founder with 23 years of experience at Amazon, Unity, and Lucasfilm. 6) AI-driven peer review for scientific documents: Led by an AI research engineer with experience at Fermilab and the Smithsonian, alongside a software expert skilled in aerospace and robotics. 7) Turnkey AI agent platform: Built by a software engineer with 20+ years of experience, who co-founded a pioneering no-code AI platform and led engineering at a healthcare startup. 8) IP scoring and licensing for AI content: Developed by a team with diverse backgrounds, including work in AdTech, fintech, and legal roles. 9) AI-powered talent optimization: Developed by a former growth equity investor managing $180M in HR and marketing software investments. 10) Automated application security: Founded by engineers who built and sold a company, with backgrounds in fintech, model risk, and AI automation solutions. #founders #venturecapital #vc #startups

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The geek in me is always fascinated by "the craft" of different things The recent NBA Playoffs led me down the rabbithole of strategies, how the young Wolves thrashed the Suns and defending champions Nuggets, then in turn was beaten comprehensively by Mavs, who then was shut down by Celtics' excellent defense in the Finals (shout out to Jrue Holiday the true MVP in my opinion!). That was my love for the craft of basketball (and why I enjoyed listening to JJ Redick's podcasts) As for the craft of VC & fund management, I had a very interesting discussion with an LP with a global exposure who posed a very good question, "after this winter, can the SEAsian paper unicorns exit at real unicorn value?" - an existential question for all VCs, and got me thinking real hard. Since most historical SEAsian exits have been sub-$500m, can we really expect billion dollar liquidity events? If expected exits need to be adjusted to $250-300m, can the Power Law still work to get to 3x DPI in 10 years? With those adjusted assumptions in the fund models, what's the best portfolio construction strategy? So glad that many LPs write/talk about their opinions nowadays. Also to find more GPs write/talk about the craft, like this one I found on a fine Saturday afternoon. Yeah sadly geeks spend weekends thinking about work Here's to more discussions about the craft of whatever you do! 👷🏾‍♂️ #earlystage #venture #craft #portfolio

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Interesting concept to rename rounds by milestones. But "Series Client Expansion Extension" just doesn't have the same ring to it 😋 . Maybe we can start incorporating it into a descriptor to add context, "Series Seed Extension: client expansion." #startups #venturecapital

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