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Felicis
Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
Menlo Park, California 19,021 followers
We back founders building iconic companies and invest directly in their growth to make them unbreakable.
About us
We back founders building iconic companies that transcend boundaries: we partner around the world, across sectors, and at various stages, primarily before success is obvious. We also invest directly in founders' growth by committing 1% on top of every first check we write towards personalized executive coaching, therapy and more. Felicis has backed more than 40 companies valued at $1B+ and more than 90 companies that have been acquired or gone public, including Shopify (IPO), Adyen (IPO), Credit Karma (acq by Intuit), Cruise (acq by GM), Ginkgo Bioworks (IPO), Guardant Health (IPO), Meraki (acq by Cisco) and Ring (acq by Amazon).
- Website
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http://www.felicis.com
External link for Felicis
- Industry
- Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
- Company size
- 11-50 employees
- Headquarters
- Menlo Park, California
- Type
- Partnership
- Founded
- 2006
- Specialties
- Venture Capital and Business Advisory
Locations
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Primary
Get directions
2460 Sand Hill Rd
Suite 100
Menlo Park, California 94025, US
Employees at Felicis
Updates
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Watch Andrew Ng’s lesson on federated learning with Flower Labs.
Founder of DeepLearning.AI; Managing General Partner of AI Fund; Founder and CEO of Landing AI
Learn to train an LLM with distributed data while ensuring privacy using federated learning in a new two-part short course, Intro to Federated Learning and Federated Fine-tuning of LLMs with Private Data, created with Flower Labs and taught by Daniel J. Beutel and Nicholas Lane. Federated learning allows a single model to be trained across multiple devices, such as phones, or multiple organizations, such as hospitals, without the need to share data to a central server. This two-part course gives you an introduction to federated learning, and then teaches you how to fine-tune your large language model with distributed data using Flower Lab’s open source federated learning framework. You’ll learn: - How to use federated learning to train a variety of models, ranging from speech and vision models to LLMs, across distributed data while offering data privacy options to users and organizations. - Privacy Enhancing Technologies like differential privacy (DP), which obscures individual data by adding calibrated noise to query results. - Two variants of differential privacy - Central and Local - and how to choose depending on your use case. - How to measure and decrease bandwidth usage to make federated learning more practical and efficient with techniques like using pre-trained models and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning - How federated LLM fine-tuning reduces the risk of leaking training data. Sign up here! https://lnkd.in/gajf4wSE
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"We're living through the largest capital investment in human history." Crusoe CEO and co-founder Chase Lochmiller shares the company's ambition and why supporting AI with climate-friendly energy is so critical. #energy #ai #aiinfrastructure
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Resilience is a powerful force, one that founders need to harness. Notion reinvented itself 4 times and now has over 100M users. Congrats to the founders and the team for building such an enduring and beloved company!
Last week, Notion passed 100M users! I found a photo I took after we reached 1000 users. And I still recall the day when we passed 1M in 2020 right before covid. I feel grateful, introspective.❤️ Looking back, there's so much learning, yet much remains unchanged...
100 Million of You
Ivan Zhao on LinkedIn
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Go behind the scenes of satellite company Astranis Space Technologies in this awesome video from Jason Carman: https://lnkd.in/ef2YhWEv
Inside the Astranis Satellite Factory — How to Connect Millions
https://www.youtube.com/
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Felicis reposted this
Wiz’s $23 BILLION acquisition would be the most unprecedented in cybersecurity history* It would be Google’s biggest acquisition of all time, surpassing the $12.5B Motorola Mobility acquisition in 2011. It would be BY FAR the LARGEST PURE PLAY security acquisition of all time. Larger than the $14.2B deal for McAfee - a well diversified security company doing ~$2B revenue and 35 years old. Smaller than only Splunk which derives much of its revenue outside of Security, across DevOps & Observability.** And all this, amazingly, only 4 years after Wiz’s founding in 2020. How in the world did this happen? - Right product at the right time - in 2020, Gartner sized the “Cloud Security” category at only $585mn, consisting mainly of Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB). Fast forward to today, CASB is no longer a category and Wiz’s core Cloud Security market is estimated north of $9B, a 100% CAGR - Incumbent missteps - most analysts and incumbents underestimated the market because they applied the old thinking of security: virtual firewalls, network segmentation, etc. Firewall leaders tried to sell more firewalls to address much of the cloud, and made small tuck-in acquisitions to overlay the public cloud, which was viewed as peanuts vs firewall dollars. - Product architecture - built specifically to address cloud security posture, Wiz tailored the product to perfectly address the growing problem at hand. Companies like Palo Alto Networks responded well, scooping up quality assets, but faced a tough task of stitching acquisitions together and into existing platforms, as well as firewall cannibalization dilemmas. This left the door open for a best of breed Cloud Security platform to emerge. - Customer love - Wiz had customer love since day 1 and continues to delight even the largest organizations in the world (incl. 40% of the Fortune 100). A big part was delivering value and rapid innovation adding workload protection, data posture management, code security and more. - Exceptional execution - this is obvious when you’re the biggest and quickest success story in the history of the market. Wiz announced in August 2022 that it had gone from $1mn to $100mn ARR in 18 months - the fastest ever for any software company at the time. From the outside looking in, the perfect combination of market timing, product, competitive dynamics, sales & marketing, innovation, and execution came together to make Wiz the biggest security startup acquisition ever. Inside Wiz, I’m sure there’s more to their execution secret sauce and it’ll be a case study for years to come. Truly impressive what Assaf Rappaport Ami Luttwak Raaz Herzberg Colin Jones Roy R. + team have done. *The Google / Wiz deal has been widely reported in the press, but not yet confirmed ** A few of the largest Security deals in our chart have experienced multiple acquisitions, we focused on the most recent and largest Thanks Eric Flaningam for the collaboration
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Felicis GP Viviana Faga talked to Walter Thompson about how she helps AI founders build out their GTM strategy.
If you're an #earlystage #AI founder with a clear niche and specific problem to solve, this Fund/Build/Scale episode with Felicis General Partner Viviana Faga will be of interest. Thanks very much to Viviana for setting aside time to talk about using #marketing to build a defensible brand, leveraging channels like #Discord to reach target #customers, and why founders are better off partnering with investors who can support their #GTM strategy. Subscribe now: Apple: https://lnkd.in/gpQJzKgc Spotify: https://lnkd.in/g4S4DdHd
Fund/Build/Scale S2 E3: Felicis' Viviana Faga on early-stage AI brand development + investment tactics
Walter Thompson on LinkedIn
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Felicis reposted this
I recently talked to Walter Thompson about what we at Felicis look for in early-stage AI companies and some of the key lessons I try to teach founders, including: The top AI companies are shipping faster than their competitors. There's no reason researchers/PhDs can't become GTM experts (but they need help). Marketing is formulaic and shouldn't really scare anyone. The best teams solve an acute problem and then open up to a broader category. Thanks, Walter, for having me on! https://lnkd.in/ddB2axtx
I launched season 2 of Fund/Build/Scale earlier this week, and early this morning, I uploaded episode 3, an interview with Felicis General Partner Viviana Faga. If you’re interested in learning about how she evaluates potential #AI investments (and coaches #founders on #positioning, #branding and #GTM strategy), please check it out. https://lnkd.in/gyh6kJhG The term “hat trick” has been in my head for days, so I finally looked it up: it referred to a cricket bowler who dismissed three batsmen in a row. As a reward, they’d receive a new hat at their club’s expense. I set a goal of releasing a trio of episodes this week and was afraid I’d bitten off more than I could chew, since I’d also scheduled three interviews to record. A trusted advisor always says “work smart, not hard,” which is why I’ve been using Descript, a text-based audio/video editor. It's been a game-changer in terms of productivity. (I’ve also been drinking a lot of coffee and hitting the gym.) I have three more interviews scheduled for next week: - Benjamin Humphrey co-founder/CEO, Dovetail - 🌱🤝🌍 Nicolas Sauvage, president, TDK Ventures - Sri Chandrasekar, Managing Partner, Point72 Ventures To keep the momentum going, I’ve set a goal of releasing episodes 4, 5 and 6 next week. (I’ll have to buy my own hat, though.) Season 2 is gonna be great! If you haven’t done so already, subscribe to FBS now: https://lnkd.in/gpQJzKgc
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Felicis Operating Partner Michelle Delcambre wrote a recap of our Felicis Fellows Program. In it, she shares what we all felt about that week: "I personally found it immensely rewarding to contribute to the professional journeys of some of the smartest people I’ve encountered. I genuinely believe I was in the presence of the next generation of entrepreneurs and AI practitioners, which was incredibly invigorating." Read more about the week and the winners of the awards: https://lnkd.in/gvvFV4U9