Jen Grant

Rolling into another day of the Primary Summit. Hit me up if we should connect onsite. Kudos to the Primary Ventures team so far, as yesterday’s Pre-Seed Summit was on point. Mar Hershenson, Benjamin Sun, Chris Douvos, Zach Weinberg, and Graham Pingree all dropping helpful nuggets for fund managers. Some paraphrased highlights: - Chris Douvos (AHOY Capital) - Most fund decks are terrible. Start with your people (not your strategy) and know you have about 6 slides of his attention. - Zach Weinberg (Curie.Bio ) - beleives SF’s AI talent is a significant advantage over NY, wouldn’t build AI in NY. Also questions if VC exits can keep up with VC expansion (generally hilarious and smart Twitter follow) - Mar Hershenson (Pear VC) - VC is so much more competitive now. It’s not enough to be an ex-founder with a great network and domain expertise. Have a better “why you are different” or do something else! - Benjamin Sun (Primary Venture Partners)- still sees arbitrage in going long NY venture (vs. SF). Do the work to keep various influential networking nodes aware of what you’re doing and how you think.

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Today, GTMfund’s is excited to announce to launch of Operator, its first incubated company. Max Altschuler (founder of GTMfund) teamed up with co-founder Adam M. (design engineer and 0-1 builder) and co-founder Mark Kosoglow (Outreach employee #1 and former SVP of Global Sales) to create Operator.ai alongside an insanely talented team Pleasant Middelhof, Jeremy Jonas, Carl Gunderson. We've entered a period called “The Great Ignore”. Spam and irrelevant, poorly-automated outbound campaigns are running rampant.   Operator gives you an easy-to-use Growth Engineer that allows you to build and enrich lists with accurate data, and run experiments and queries using AI to generate highly targeted outreach.    Check out their website to get updates, early access, and see how they are taking the world back to 2 touches meant to attract buyers into conversations that convert, instead of 20 touches meant to make sure you hit your activity number: https://www.operator.ai/

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In his latest piece, Paul Graham dives into a thought-provoking realization sparked by Brian Chesky's memorable talk at a recent YC event: **what if the conventional wisdom on scaling companies is fundamentally flawed for founders?** Graham dissects why advice that works for professional managers often fails founders, leading to disastrous results. He introduces the concept of "Founder Mode" — a distinct approach to running a company that clashes with traditional management practices. Graham argues that embracing this mode could be the key to unlocking greater success for startups, potentially revolutionizing how founders scale their companies. Made me think. https://lnkd.in/exHmEE5M

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Fostering a culture of continuous improvement involves getting feedback from all levels of your company, not just your direct reports. Jeffrey Sullivan, CTO at Consensus, joined the panel of experts for our C-Suite Roundtable to share his strategies on how he gets feedback from all levels of his company and encourages reflection to make the changes in the culture that they need. Listen to the full episode of #Supermanagers below:

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Another INDUSTRY in the books. Thank you Mike Belsito, Paul McAvinchey, and all of Product Collective for once again putting on a pitch-perfect product conference with real experiences, valuable insights, and above all else, fabulous people (including Tami Reiss, Maggie Crowley, Yana Welinder, Bob Moesta, Quincy Olatunde, John Haggerty, Sean Flaherty, and more). Stay tuned for a recording of my talk along with a copy of my deck. #INDUSTRYConf #productmanagement #strategy

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Since early 2021, VC quarterly exit values have plummeted to $50B or below, a stark contrast to the six consecutive quarters of $100B+ exits before then. With IPOs dwindling and M&A activity slow, the future of venture industry exits appears uncertain. Will we see a surge in private venture-backed company acquisitions? This could be a crucial and innovative strategy to boost VC exits. Increased private acquisitions might offer a much-needed lifeline, providing a creative solution to the current exit drought in the venture capital market. #venturecapital #inspireglobalventures

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Check out this survey from our friends TSIA

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Hey folks, I think you might be aware that what we're building at DeepCast includes a podcast discovery and exploration platform for listeners at www.deepcast.fm. We also recently unveiled www.deepcast.pro -- a promotions, marketing, and monetization platform for podcasters (and folks like networks and agencies who support them). "You make the shows, let us help you with what comes after." Shows claimed and processed via DeepCast Pro are also published for listener consumption on DeepCast. High value all around! If you're a podcaster, claim your show at www.deepcast.pro to get started. Free speaker-labeled transcripts for all your episodes as well as generated insights for each (key takeaways, quotes, topic & keyword sets, summaries, and more) plus many more features—and growing daily! We're shipping fast over here! (Thanks to Rachel Perez Hosna Qasmei Kim Burgaard Benjamin Moon Rachel Magana Hari Ramachandran!)

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Some midweek wisdom from Y Combinator founder, Paul Graham, on why startups shouldn't stress over competitors. According to Graham, based on Y Combinator's extensive data set, few of their startups are actually killed by competitors. He compares the protection a startup has against competitors to the vastness of space, emphasising that the market is large enough for multiple players to thrive. Graham's analogy likens encountering a competitor to suddenly finding another runner in your race lane - the best course of action? “It’s sort of like if you’re running the hundred meters and suddenly a lane appears with another runner in it. What should you do? Run as fast as you can, just like you presumably were.” #Startups #Competition #Entrepreneurship #wearehiring

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Ever since we launched SHAKTI, every quarter we write a letter to our LPs = Each letter includes an update on the portfolios, the GP's (our) view on the zeitgeist, an interview with a portfolio CEO and an interview with a TITAN = So far, we have 16 such letters = it's been on our "to do" list to share these publicly (i am lazy) = then Google comes along to save lazy people like me (thank you NotebookLLM) = here's a 10 min podcast summarizing our journey since Dec/2020 with the 16 LP letters as source = if you wanted to know what we are about, this is a pretty good place to start = https://lnkd.in/db7K2TrT cc SHAKTI

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