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Evan Spiegel got rejected by tier-1 VCs like Sequoia. So I met the VC who seeded Snap with $485K. Here’s what he saw that others missed: In 2012, a senior partner at Lightspeed saw his daughter was obsessed with 3 apps: Angry Birds, Instagram, and Snapchat. 
Angry Birds was big. Instagram was huge. But he’d never heard of Snapchat. So he asked Jeremy Liew (another parter at Lightspeed) to look into it. Jeremy tried to email Evan— no answer. He hit him up on LinkedIn— no answer. So he DM’d on Facebook and finally heard back. Evan said the only reason he responded was Jeremy’s profile picture shaking hands with Obama. “I figured you must be a halfway decent human being." 20 minutes into the first meeting, Jeremy knew he had to invest: 20,000 DAUs 50%+ DAU to MAU ratio 50% MoM growth $0 in ad spend The app was growing virally and creating a habit of daily use. It was all organic, driven purely through word of mouth. So Lightspeed bought ~10% of Snapchat for $485K. Over time, Lightspeed invested a total of $8M. That $8M became $2B when the company went public. A small observation, a bit of hustle and one meeting led to a career-defining investment. And a 250x return. /// Listen to the full episode on The Product Market Fit Show #startups #venturecapital #founders

🌟 We are really excited to present at the Global Alternative Investing Summit 2024, General Partner Jasmine Shih, Head of Product Keshvi Radia, CTO & Co-Founder Philipp Omenitsch, Data Lead Ties Boukema, and Founder Silvan Cloud Rath, presenting at the panel “𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐧 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐬 – 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐞 𝐚 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐕𝐂?" on Monday, October 7, 2024. 📝 To register please visit, https://bit.ly/3vXTZNn or email info@opalgroup.net #OpalGroup #Finance #Market #OpalGroupGAIS

This might well be the coolest piece of research we have ever done. After 6 months of team work, I am extremely proud to share the most holistic clustering analysis of the VC ecosystem (incl. >2000 VC funds). This analysis segments the venture capital world into 4 distinct subcategories (i.e., the venture classicists, the super funds, the new asset managers and the artisanal masters) and shows you what VC fund is your closest peer/competitor. Now how cool is that? Link to the model: https://lnkd.in/eX2Da2Fk *Special thanks to: Vladislav Manolov, Adriaan van de Mortel and Jules Lucas.

This is one of the most honest & open discussions we’ve ever done on 20VC. Shaun Maguire does not hold back on: 🇺🇲 Has Kamala won the election? ☮️ Why Trump is our best hope for peace in the Middle East 🔇 Have we lost all freedom of speech? 🚨 Why DEI is a cancer for society If you do one thing today, listen to this episode 👇 1. Why DEI is BS and How it Will Destroy The West  - DEI supports equal outcomes not equal opportunities. - It means you can have quotas against hiring white men. - It is a toxic, woke ideology that is cancer for society. 2. Why Iran is the Greatest Evil in the World - They are happy to oppress their own people, the people of Gaza & the people of Israel. - They are deeply responsible for the global drug trade. - They’re creating as much chaos in the world as possible. 3. Will We See WW3 Happen Soon? - It will be a large regional war but highly unlikely unless China is involved. - If Iran thinks Kamala Harris will win they will wait six months. - If they think Trump will win they will do what they need to do now because they’re afraid of him. 4. Trump was the Best President at Dealing with China and Russia - Trump famously warned NATO leaders about Russia at a NATO breakfast. - They all laughed at him. - The liberal elites were clueless; Trump was our best president at dealing with Russia & China. 5. Is Europe F****d and Why Dubai is on Fire  - The entire West is in decline relative to the East. - The UAE nailed their policies & they’re doing better than anywhere else. - You can still have a great life & build great companies in Europe but those chances are lowering. 6. Why I Want to Bring My Kids Up in Israel - I want my kids to grow up with resilience and grit. - Being on the receiving end of information warfare shows you what the tactics are. - It gives you immunity against complacency & laziness. 7. The Management Hack that Musk & The Collisons Use to Ensure Quality Across Functions    - They randomly sample every single part of their company at all times. - They will follow a junior engineer’s onboarding process or listen in on a manager meeting. - They can diagnose problems early & solve them before it gets worse. 8. Elon Musk is One of the Best Spotters of Young Talent Ever - He doesn’t need someone to be from a non-obvious background. - He can meet someone off the street. - Because he’s an expert on so many things he can go deep on multiple topics. 9. Why The US Selling BTC is a Mega Mistake - Selling $2BN of bitcoin does not make a difference. - China is trying to weaken the dollar & a lot of oil trade is happening in Yuan now. - It is one of the stupidest decisions of all time. 10. Biggest Lessons from Working with Doug Leone 3 things: 1. Have a sense of humor 2. Be maximally direct 3. Do not waste anyone’s time - Combining 1 & 2 is a game changer. (links in comments) #founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #seed #funding #sequoia

🔥 Introducing OpenVC Decks - a free DocSend alternative to share your deck with investors. 🔥 Hi founders! After the Investor list (2023) and the Fundraising CRM (2024), we're introducing our next big feature to help you raise: OpenVC Decks. It's basically a free DocSend alternative. ⚡️ ✓ Upload your pitch deck and generate unique deck links ✓ Share your deck with investors via email, Twitter, Whatsapp... ✓ Track analytics: open rate, viewing time, and more The best part: all the data is automagically pulled into your OpenVC CRM. No more back-and-forth between your deck analytics and your pipeline! 😱 Every founder can use it today for free. Let us know your feedback. And please support us on ProductHunt! Link in 1st comment Steph & Lucas #startup #venturecapital #funding

𝗠𝗶𝗱𝗷𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗛𝗨𝗚𝗘 𝘁𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗲!🚨 German AI lab Black Forest Labs just dropped their new 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻-𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 (!!!) AI model FLUX.1 and it completely outperforms Midjourney. All you need to know: ⬇️ → The German-based company was founded by the original team that launched Stable Diffusion and recently left Stability AI (e.g. Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz). → The company's first product features their text-to-image FLUX.1 models that are built on what it calls a "hybrid architecture," combining transformers and diffusion techniques. The model is available in 3 variants: 1️⃣ Flux 1 Pro: [API Access](https://docs.bfl.ml/)   2️⃣ Flux 1 Dev: Open weight, but non-commercial license   3️⃣ Flux 1 Schnell: Efficient, 4-step diffusion model with an open-source Apache 2 license → The quality looks amazing (see pictures below) and FLUX.1 seems very strong at generating human hands, which was a weak spot in earlier image-synthesis models like Stable Diffusion 1.5 due to a lack of training images focused on hands. → Black Forest Labs also announced with their launch a $31 million Series Seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Along with that the company brought on high-profile advisers, including entertainment executive and former Disney President Michael Ovitz and AI researcher Matthias Bethge. → Though text-to-image generation is Black Forest’s current focus, the company plans to expand into video generation next (competing with OpenAI’s Sora, Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha, and Kuaishou’s Kling). In my view this is crazy to see that they were stealth-building this in just a few months and already outperforming Midjourney, DALL-E 3, etc. It’s unbelievable how fast things are moving. Must be a huge team effort to build up clusters, infrastructure and datasets to launch so fast. In addition, another contribution towards the open-source AI ecosystem. After Stability imploded, open-source AI has been missing a good image-gen company. Kudos to the Black Forest Labs team! As a German/European, I’m especially happy to see that we get this innovation here! Excellent work, guys. 🇩🇪 🇪🇺 🏎️ 👉You can have a play with it here: https://lnkd.in/eYuPV6hg 👉 You can find the weights & inference code here: https://lnkd.in/d_bPiYq7 #midjourney #llm #genai #flux

folk has been featured by Andreessen Horowitz in their latest article: “Death of a Salesforce” Salesforce and HubSpot have been dominating the CRM market for 20 years and are the CRMs of the cloud era, turning CRM into one of the largest SaaS markets. I admire the work done by the founders of these companies, but the way we sell has evolved a lot: - There is a lot more unstructured data about relationships that isn’t properly captured by CRMs, such as long text forms (e.g., emails), images (e.g., LinkedIn posts), and videos (e.g., Zoom calls) - These relationships have turned multichannels: they live on emails, calls, LinkedIn, Twitter, Zoom calls, Slack, and more - The sales models are different; it’s not simply about outbound or inbound, but a variety of different forms are adopted, like partnership-based sales, community-led sales, social selling, and companies are often combining several of them I believe a16z pointed out truly that the sales space is being reshaped as a result and the CRM of the future probably looks way different. More connected and capturing richer data. Fewer point solutions. Adapting to multiple forms of sales models. We are building folk to be the CRM of the future, today 😀 Zeya Yang Marc Andrusko Angela Strange

Discover how AI and data-driven decision-making are transforming M&A, PE, and VC. 📈🤖 Just created a overview about some intersting papers which delve into recent research and insights, showcasing revolutionary strategies and tools of AI, LLM and Data in Investment Decision. Have you explored AI in finance? Share your experiences and must-read papers, happy to add those to the list. Special thanks to Lele Cao for the amazing work and EQT Group open repositories at Github and Dr. Andre Retterath for this Data Driven VC landscape report. 🌟 #AI #LLMs #DataDriven #MergersAndAcquisitions #PrivateEquity #VentureCapital #InvestmentTech