Upfront Ventures

Excited for our next Upfront Ventures Summer Sundays going down July, 14! This is our 3rd session where each one gets better and better. If you are in the LA area, building something ambitious and want a place to camp out on a Sunday afternoon alongside others then apply below! Also, anyone looking to escape the Bay Area gloom and wants an excuse to come down to sunny LA for a weekend we would love to host you! https://lu.ma/v1qude0u Peter Zakin Kerry Bennett Sarah Rumball Lacey Hulsey Megan Healy Upfront Ventures

Had the pleasure of having Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures on the Sourcery pod this week! We discuss: - VC Exit Lockup, Are IPOs Over? - Investing in CapEx Heavy Businesses - Declining Demographics & The Demand For Robotics & AI - Deglobalization & National Defense And of course, some thought-provoking summer book recommendations 🎧 Full Episode Below (subscribe)

Obligatory "post press about myself" post :) I don't do too much press these days so hoping you'll forgive the share on this one. At a minimum I liked the photo with my Jordan 11s :) Jacob Suster approves lol https://lnkd.in/gYVWjxpV

Super pumped to welcome Daytona to the Upfront Ventures portfolio as they look to simplify development environments! Ivan Burazin and team are building something special and great to see Kevin Zhang and Peter Zakin continue to build out our portfolio of leading dev tool platforms. https://lnkd.in/gFyU-zSM

Very excited to announce our recent investment at Upfront Ventures in Daytona! The Daytona approach to dev environments marries the familiarity of local development (you can still use your existing IDE) with the benefits of cloud infrastructure (your team's dev environments run in a uniform computing environment). In many ways, it's reminiscent of the Codespaces experience: except it's open source and supports any deployment scenario. Ivan, Vedran, and Goran have been working to simplify developer environments for over a decade. In the last year, Kevin Zhang and I have seen first-hand their grittiness and passion for this space. It's a privilege to be able to support them.

Excited to lead a $5M Seed in Daytona, building powerful and flexible development environments for individuals (open-source, https://lnkd.in/gy_u7j-m) and enterprise teams. Establishing a uniform computing environment is challenging, everything from missing or invalid env variables to inconsistent database states to 3rd party integration can break your development environment. Tack on multiple projects per developer and many developers per org, the problem becomes a nightmare for the developer and internal platform team tasked with fixing it. Daytona enables devs to spin up an env in the cloud while using their favorite IDEs (VS Code, JetBrian) on their local machine. Companies can also host the development env however they like: public cloud, private cloud or on-prem. Leading tech companies like Meta, GitHub and Spotify have moved to cloud development environments, and we believe Daytona can democratize the practice for individuals and teams. We are thrilled to jump on this journey with cofounders Ivan Burazin, Vedran Jukic, Goran Draganić. They have been tireless advocates for developer experience, dating 10+ years ago to their prior startup Codeanywhere, one of the first web IDEs. Check out our blog and interview with the founders to learn more, they’re hiring! https://lnkd.in/gpn36TXt #DeveloperTools #OpenSource #DevExperience

We are proud to announce that we have secured $5M in fresh funding led by Upfront Ventures, following a successful $2M pre-seed round. This investment will enable us to further our mission of simplifying development environments and empower developers to focus on what truly matters – building great software. The "works on my machine" problem has plagued developers for far too long. According to an IEEE journal paper, devs lose a staggering 56% of their productive time due to inefficient dev environments. ⏰ Launched in March this year, Daytona's open-source project amassed over 2K GitHub stars in just 48 hours, consistently trending on the platform. This impressive momentum has continued, and the project has now exceeded 6,7K stars. 🌟 With a single command, `daytona create`, developers can set up a full dev environment, either remotely or locally. ☁️ This funding round, led by Upfront (Kevin Zhang, Peter Zakin, Mark Suster, Seksom Suriyapa, Aditi Maliwal, Nick Kim) and with participation from 500 Emerging Europe (Enis Hulli, Esat Acar, Arın Özkula, Tunya Irkad), is a testament to the strength of our mission and the belief in our ability to deliver. 🙌 As our CEO Ivan Burazin puts it, "Setting up a dev environment can feel like starting a car in the 1900s. With Daytona, it's like starting a car in 2024: any driver can just push a button and go!" 🚗 The ultimate goal? To enable a new cohort of creative people to become developers by removing unnecessary complexities and lowering the barrier to entry. 🚪 This is just the beginning. 🚀 A huge shoutout to our all-star angels who believed in us! 🙏 We’re humbled by the support from these seasoned founders and operators in the sector, such as: Abhinav Asthana, Charity Majors, Christian (Chris) Bach, Paul Copplestone, Prashanth Chandrasekar, Luke Kanies, Cassidy Williams, Milin Desai, Moataz Soliman, Shawn swyx W, Zach Lloyd, Aaron Kimball, Alan Sumina, Amir Shevat, Andrew Rollins, Ben Lang, Borja Burgos, Brian Douglas, Bukky Adebayo, Damir Sabol, David Apple, Derek Kleinow, Domagoj Vuksa, Edi Sinovčić, Ekene Eze, Eugene Yan, Feross Aboukhadijeh, Fredrik Björk, Grace Francisco, Ian Livingstone, Ilya Lyamkin, Izet Zdralovic & Jurica Cerovec, Jacob Smith & Zachary Smith, Jason Berry, Jernej Strasner, Jesse Miller, Jon 'Natty' Natkins, Jose Vargas, Kareem Kouddous,   Luka Abrus, Luka Sučić, Marin Tvrdić, Martin M., Merci Victoria Grace, Michael 🌫 Rybintsev, Nikolay Rodionov, Oliver de Albuquerque, Pierre-Louis Theron, Sead Ahmetovic, Surabhi Gupta, Tomislav Car, Traycho Ivanov, Zach Holman. Special gratitude goes to the incredible Daytona team. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/dV-p7KJE #DeveloperTools #OpenSource #DevExperience

New portfolio alert 🔔 Congratulations to Daytona on their latest $5M seed round! The entire team, including co-founders Ivan Burazin, Vedran Jukic, and Goran Draganić are making it easy to streamline development environments for developers all over the world. CEO Ivan Burazin says, “Setting up a dev environment can feel like starting a car in the 1900s—engaging the handbrake, adjusting the fuel valve, mixture control, spark advance, choke, and throttle, turning the ignition, and often running into issues. With Daytona, it’s like starting a car in 2024: any driver can just push a button and go. Enabling developers to focus on what truly matters—writing code and building innovative solutions” With their recent open-source launch, both enterprises AND individual developers can now enjoy using Daytona to simplify their development environments. We're excited to be on this journey with you! To learn more and why we're big fans of the team, check out Upfront Partner Kevin Zhang and Investor Peter Zakin's blog post here:

Comparing a screen to a rainforest? WTF does that mean? That was my first reaction when jake harper shared with me his vision for SOOT and why he thought the file system and user interfaces needed to be rethought from the ground up. Current search, feed or file system experiences are inherently linear. Scrolling for days or in some cases you are having to click through multiple pages of content. Perhaps someone gets a bit more fancy and presents information in a grid style structure sorted by one dimension. The experience only allows our brain to consume a very finite set of information in an extremely rigid structure often times searching for hours on end for those series of items we need. A rainforest (or other immersive experiences in nature) allows users senses to be consumed by thousands of sounds and visual stimuli all at the same time. SOOT attempts to recreate this dynamic through a proprietary combination of both advanced AI infrastructure and front end web technology. The feeling is almost like playing a video game as you are able to swim through information efficiently organized across a multitude of dimensions and seamlessly find what you are looking for in a way traditional linear systems just don't support. Seeing is believing, so can try out a tease of what they built through some of the few “playgrounds” they have begun to share that span from reimagining e-commerce with SSENSE where they have created an accessories shop of 15K items to exploring nature like never before. Very soon anyone will be able to build their own SOOT space with any asset type. You can read more about SOOT in Allie Garfinkle's piece in today’s Fortune Term Sheet and stay tuned for so much more that will be coming from household names you know who are already on the journey we at Upfront Ventures chose to go on with the team! https://lnkd.in/gVxgw8Me

I'm thrilled to share that my op-ed on the critical importance of provider data management has been published on MedCity News. In the article, I delve into the challenges and solutions surrounding accurate provider data, highlighting its impact on patient care, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance. I'm excited about our work at Certify solving this boring but really important issue in healthcare. Link to the full article here - https://lnkd.in/dqSUaZz8 #Healthcare #ProviderDataManagement #Innovation #PatientCare #MedCityNews #Leadership