Menlo Ventures

NEW: As venture firms struggle to raise new funds, they have been hiring fewer roles and even shedding staff. On rarer occasions when they are hiring, they are increasingly seeking out candidates with deep domain expertise, especially in artificial intelligence. "We certainly noticed it in the past 3 to 6 months, and like a lot of VC, once it kind of takes momentum, it snowballs, and all the other VCs are doing it," Matt Hoffman said. "The traditional MBA background will not be sufficient for the best investors going forward." Evaluating previous generations of startups required less sophistication, according to Deedy Das, who this year was hired as a principal at Menlo Ventures, which backs OpenAI rival Anthropic. "To understand Facebook, you don't need to be technical to get it," Das said. "You know people go online to use an app and connect with their friends. You can see how it can make money. For AI, if I tell you I have the best model in the world, how are you, as a non-technical person, going to call my BS on that?" https://lnkd.in/gHGF7EnH

Abnormal Security has hit several incredible milestones and recognitions this year, and today, we add another: being named a Leader in the inaugural Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security Platforms. We’re positioned as being the furthest on Completeness of Vision – something I’m incredibly proud of because our vision is ambitious: to protect humans better than humans by supercharging cybersecurity with AI. When Sanjay Jeyakumar and I first started Abnormal, this has always been – and continues to be – the blueprint for everything we do. This recognition is a testament to the success we’re seeing as we turn that vision into a reality for our customers. Thank you to Gartner for recognizing us, to everyone at Abnormal who helped us reach this latest achievement, and to all our customers for your continued support. We couldn’t have done it without any of you, and together, we’ll continue redefining the future of email security. https://lnkd.in/deKgtNnQ

Today we unveiled the first cohort of companies backed by the Anthology Fund, our $100M partnership with Menlo Ventures. From AI interpretability research to healthcare innovation, these 18 startups showcase what's possible when you combine Claude's capabilities with visionary founders. Looking forward to following these teams as they build the next generation of AI-first applications. Learn more about the cohort below!

Looking to stay ahead of enterprise AI trends? Our '2024: AI in the Enterprise' report makes for perfect holiday reading: https://lnkd.in/grj-_bYD

Meet our first Anthology Fund cohort: 18 AI-first trailblazers chosen from thousands of submissions! Thrilled to partner with Anthropic on this, as we back incredible founders using AI to transform healthcare, security & beyond. This is just the start!

In the video AI space, 5 second heavily post-production edited shorts are impressive but aren’t close to truly disrupting how we watch and create videos today. The devil will be in control and realism, maintaining character-consistency, maintaining storyline-consistency, crossing the uncanny valley of physics realism, and being able to create much longer video content. Text-to-video is not going to be the solution, but rather agentic image-to-video creation and newer techniques. As we move to longer form video, as top AI video companies open their APIs (Kling, Minimax, Sora etc) the old truism in media will prevail: “content is king.” It will be as important to have talented creatives and writers storyboard and know how to create the best stories from the near-term limitations of gen video as building the video production itself. The space is moving at lightning fast speed. Excited to see our portco Higgsfield AI launch ReelMagic today in a major step producing long-form content and to follow where they take this. 🎬🎥 https://lnkd.in/gjPjCHjp

Stoked to invest in my good friend Molly DeWolf Swenson and Ev Williams’s new social company Mozi. As social media has bifurcated into “social” or “media”, Ev and Molly are bringing social back by helping you connect with new friends and old when you’re going to be in the same place, city and event. I’ve loved how many friends I’ve been able to fortuitously bump into using Mozi. More on the vision from Ev’s deeply personal launch post 👇 https://lnkd.in/ekS8RznA

Listen in as Deedy Das shares his candid views on quiet quitting and what drives engineering excellence: https://mnlo.vc/deedy-TWIS

Congratulations to Astrix Security on being named one of CRN's 10 Hottest Cloud and AI Security Startups of 2024! Full list here: https://lnkd.in/gi-6mhpg