Andrew Nystrom

The Neighborhood Studios team spent the last few days thinking about our new idea pipeline and its output. Tons of thoughts on this after being in a venture studio for 2 years. Here are some summary stats... - 1,750 new (raw) ideas considered per year. - 110 of those are given a second glance. - 66 of those are seriously considered. - 10 of those become experiments...real products in the hands of customers. - 2 of those are spun-out into studio companies. What the studio team has been discussing over the past few days is that 66 number. That's the number of ideas that 3 people on the team can dig into every year. Venture studios can be perceived as a "startup factory"...an engine to launch startups. The reality is that venture studios are a machine to invalidate ideas. We invalidate many more ideas than we validate. We touch 1,750 ideas per year, seriously dive into 66 of them, build experiments for 10 of them and only launch 2 of them. All that work turns into 2 studio companies per year that have a way higher success rate than the average startup in the wild. Said another way...startups are hard. Talk with Tapan Patel Gabe Hart Whit Anderson IV Jonathan Brinson if you wanna talk about this. They are world class.

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When you bring effort to every engagement you are telling your culture accountability matters. When you take the time to work on a problem, idea or solution with someone, you are telling them they matter. It’s not a surprise sustained high performing cultures have effort, accountability and teamwork as cornerstones of their existence. #pathtoyes #growth #growthmindset #leadership #culture https://lnkd.in/eqtTvhcK

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UGC creators should be on red alert. UGC is turning AI-GC. We've been sharing our thoughts on AI disruption on Influencer Marketing, and predicted UGC was the most vulnerable category of the creator economy, the most susceptible to transformation. Now Techcrunch reports that TikTok will allow brands to create UGCs (more like AI GCs) with genAI. What does this mean for creators? What does this mean for brands and agencies? Will YouTube and IG follow? https://lnkd.in/dU-iPaBK

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Wow SNL. Just wow. You perfectly captured something with humor that activists and politicians struggle to explain. Anyone who knows me knows I love dry humor, and SNL nailed it. After the laughs wind down the work remains to build responsible supply chains. #fastfashion #supplychains

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"The Death of the Follower" I can't recommend this talk enough from Jack Conte, the CEO/Founder of Patreon. It's a must watch/listen for anyone who works in the creator ecosystem (including creators themselves). There is an irony of me discovering this via YouTube but the keynote explains the subtle but drastic shift from meaningful fan connections from 2000-2011 to a breaking point where platform algorithms took the reigns (and really haven't looked back). As someone who worked at YouTube for 8+ years, I struggle with this. Subscribers don't actually mean much anyone. 80%+ of watchtime comes from "Browse/Recommended" content. TikTok's FYP dissolves any sense of true creator-fan relationship. Most viewers lose track of their favorite creators. Platforms surface new videos/talent continuously and match specific pieces of content over emboldening a direct connection to a specific individual's work (especially if it's not work that drives watchtime, retention or high CTR). So where does this leave us? For creators, I don't think there will be a stark 0 -> 1 shift to suddenly jump to direct-to-fan supported sites but instead a slow merging of Ad-supported / Fan-supported content. Ad-supported sites are inherently aligned with discovery (they are selfishly going to surface the most engaging and relevant content, thus pushing you stuff you'd maybe never seek) Fan-supported sites naturally favor deep engagement trees but inherently lack discoverability. I'm curious how Patreon can solve this but there is a lot to be said about me typically going to someone's Patreon AFTER watching something on Twitch/YouTube. Connecting video (our modern language), fan-funding, discovery, and ultimately VAST CREATIVITY seems like a daunting task for a single platform to do itself but I'm insanely bullish that the next generation of creator-borne platforms are on the horizon (think Gumroad, Fourthwall, Moment, Kajabi, hell even OnlyFans). Who else am I missing here? I'd love to chat.

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🌿 Notable development in the world of AMCs (Advance Market Commitments): a new coalition of Big Tech players called Symbiosis Coalition will remove 20M tons of carbon through nature-based solutions by 2030. Reminder: The idea behind AMCs is to pool capital upfront so that carbon removal projects know once their project is live they'll have a market for it / customers to buy their credits. In the case of the Symbiosis, the first projects will work on ARR, i.e. afforestation, reforestation, revegetation projects (inclusive of agroforestry.) Turns out, the most-proven way to capture carbon remains not cutting trees and planting new ones! 🌳 🧠 Overall a welcome news, but perhaps on the flip side of that coin: 20 million tons is about the equivalent to Microsoft's carbon emissions for 2023 (17.2 to be exact), which by the way saw a 30% increase in emissions YoY due to AI demand. ''The good AI can do for the world will outweigh its environmental impact.'' - Msft President Brad Smith https://lnkd.in/erbq6_Ci

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Top 10 pre-seed to Series A funding rounds of the week: ⚫ Environmental services ⚫ 🔶 1. Rainmaker, a one-year-old startup based in El Segundo, CA, that is developing technology to seed clouds, raised a $6.3 million seed round. → Investors: Long Journey Ventures, Day One Ventures, Tamarack Global, 1517 Fund, Starship VC, Champion Hill Ventures, Garry Tan, and Balaji Srinivasan. → Founded by: Augustus Doricko ⚫ Security ⚫ 🔶 2. Niobium Microsystems, a startup that specializes in designing microelectronic components for secure data handling for both commercial and defense clients, raised a $5.5 million seed round. → Investors: Fusion Fund, Morgan Creek Capital, Rev1 Ventures, and others → Founded by: Georgios Dimou ⚫ Robotics ⚫ 🔶 3. Lucid Bots, a startup whose bots want to clean more than your windows, has raised $9.1 million Series A round. → Investors: Cubit Capital, Y Combinator’s Growth Fund and others → Founded by: Andrew Ashur ⚫ TechHealth ⚫ 🔶 4. Humanaut Health, a startup that offers services such as diagnostics, lifestyle modification guidance, hormone therapies, and regenerative cell treatments, raised an $8.7 million seed round. → Investors: The Kabech Fund, Midnight Venture Partners → Founded by: Jim Donnelly, Paul Pagnato, Amy B Killen MD, Harry Adelson ND, Tony Cheng, Elliot Karathanasis, Trey Owen 🔶 5. Ciba Health, a startup that offers a range of programs for health conditions via digital therapeutics or virtual care, raised a $10 million Series A round. → Investors: DigiTx Partners, Plug and Play Ventures, and others → Founded by: Innocent C. 🔶 6. Testmate Health, a startup focused on developing a game-changing at-home rapid STI test, secured $6 million in seed funding. → Investors: H Capital, Amboy Street Ventures, and others → Founded by: Siew-Veena Sahi 🔶 7. Dandi, platform dedicated to improving the fertility care journey, secured $1.3M in funding. → Investors: Tiferes Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, WeWork Alumni Fund and others → Founded by: Jake Kent ⚫ Automation ⚫ 🔶 8. Composabl, provides engineers with tools to build intelligent automation systems, raised a $4.2 million seed round. → Investors: Momenta Ventures, Hannah Grey VC, and others → Founded by: Kence Anderson, 🤖 Xavier Geerinck ⚫ Saas ⚫ 🔶 9. Nudge Security, a startup whose service is designed for companies looking to improve their oversight of SaaS applications, raised a $16.5 million seed round. → Investors: Forgepoint Capital, Ballistic Ventures → Founded by: Russell Spitler ⚫ Crypto ⚫ 🔶 10. Mitosis, a crypto startup whose platform is designed to streamline the process for people investing in digital currencies and assets, raised a $7 million round. → Investors: Amber, Foresight Ventures → Founded by: Jee Yong Kim, Jake Jae Won Kim ⚜⚜ ⚜ ⚜ ⚜ Btw, I'm Ivelina, content lead at doola and founder of my new passion project EverythingStartups. Follow me for more of this. ;) #startups #funding #venturecapital #fundraising

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Consumer founders in SF come check out our event next week and register below

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Check out my co-founder below illuminate an important subject on the value of #nationalsecurity focused investments 

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The predictable enshitification of maps with ads: https://lnkd.in/g8ptc4_s But hey, what if it was all more contextually relevant? Like what if you really needed gas and it showed you gas stations nearby? Isn't that useful? That's still a very likely "no" -- esp. if the ad-tech company is using your personal information against your personal best interests. E.g., even if you do need gas, the system can hurt you if the ad auction winner is more expensive, got worse reviews, and was farther out of your way than the other options you weren't told about. FWIW, at Keyhole (which became Google Earth after acquisition) we also played with how to monetize maps via ads. Serving earth data is very expensive, esp. for a small company without cloud resources. The best idea we had was to promote map labels to show up earlier or more prominently when zooming or panning in, based on a prior auction. Turns out, you never want to show all possible map labels at once -- TMI. Highlighting a key city name often leverages negative space (no labels) around it. So the ad auction would be one way to pick and prioritize which comes first to make everything more readable. Contextual picking is even better. We also played with less conspicuous visual ads. But none of these were very satisfying. All felt kind of icky, so we never did it. Google won our attention in the 2000s not simply because search worked better than the other options, but because the text ads were small and easy to ignore. Remember that? Ad-tech business models always drive to the worst outcome over time.

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What prompted it all: “Could we electrify the cold chain? What would it look like to do battery-powered shipping?” What they made: The device is a white plastic cube, small enough that it can be held with one hand. Pop the lid, and inside up to four vials can be stored. On the outside, there’s a USB-C port to charge a lithium-ion battery that powers a solid-state heat pump, which provides cooling or heating depending on outside conditions. The cube can keep samples at 3 degrees C (37.4 degrees F) for at least 56 hours. Thermometers, accelerometers and GPS keep track of the package, and a cellular connection lets customers keep tabs on its precious cargo. Who made it: Hannah Sieber and the Artyc team use battery-powered refrigeration to create sustainable and reliable shipping solutions for temperature-sensitive items -- starting off with pharmaceuticals; with a total addressable market down the road including perishable foods, chemicals/materials to name a few. So proud to be an investor and supporter.

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If you’re a brand integrating genAI into your infrastructure now, don’t overlook “outside experts.” By that I mean, you need to know what’s going on in the ecosystem on a macro level, far beyond the behavior of your own users. Otherwise, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity. This was a big learning for me as we launched NielsenIQ's genAI tool Ask Arthur. Obviously we have an enormous wealth of data at our disposal, we know our clients’ preferences, needs, wants…but we also had to look outward and train our models on other users and systems. That included people who knew the industry, and people that were just using data in similar ways. Those broader users (all of our customer success associated) were being used to train models. Without knowing the inputs and outputs of their criteria, we wouldn’t be able to compete. Still, this concept isn’t necessarily obvious. But getting broad usage covering thousands and thousands of use cases is key to driving better genAI results. There's a trend now where everybody thinks they can do the stuff on their own, build it internally, use what they have in their network. In some cases, that may be true, but the reality is to win in the long term, you have to look holistically, and incorporate collective intelligence.

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This week I had the privilege to interview Vidit Agrawal, the founder of GajiGesa , and learn how he acquired her First 100. Listen to the Full Episode on: If you like the podcast, please subscribe and support us on your favorite podcast players. We would also appreciate your feedback and rating so that we can reach more people. We recently launched our new newsletter, Principles Friday, where I share one principle that can help you in your life or business, one thought-provoking question, and one call to action toward that principle. If you like our content, please subscribe Here. hadiradwan.substack.com

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Digging this artwork (POW!) created by Polina Pinchevsky for the #EarthDay campaign of the startup she and I -- along with Alisa Herr -- co-founded. It's our first-ever “What If” savings promotion for Unit Of Impact. What if you could turn your impact into a compelling storytelling tool that attracts customers who value your social responsibility – and receive 50% off the software platform that enables this secret marketing power? What if you could unlock special deals from a network of partners with services and products ranging from carbon calculators to sustainability consulting – and get 50% off the software platform that provides this? What if you could save precious time managing and measuring your social and environmental impact – and save 50% on the software platform that makes it easy for you to do this? Use discount code EARTHDAY2024 at checkout to claim 50% off any annual subscription to Unit of Impact – this offer runs through Sunday, April 28, and is good for first-time customers only. https://lnkd.in/gNpy-qzG #impactreporting #impactmeasurement #sustainability #bcorps #smallbusiness

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To celebrate Cal.com, Inc.'s newest launch on @ProductHunt today, I sat with Peer Richelsen to discuss how building Platform and Atoms is a full-circle moment + more 🚀 In this ep, we covered:  ✊🏻 Open vs. Closed and why OSS will win 💡 The importance of IP in a post-AI world 🔥 How premium products can be built using OSS 🤑 How to approach enterprise sales as a 1x founder 🙏🏼 The impact of Y Combinator on Peer as a founder PS: I'm a tiny investor in Cal.com and a big believer in Peer and the team! If you are into OSS, support the launch here: https://lnkd.in/e_CaE_KQ Links to the ep 👇🏼 🔗 Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eBUv5E9q 🔗 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/epngcvFU ❤️ Sponsor Corner ❤️ Big shoutout to acquire.com for making this episode happen! Acquire is the best online marketplace (I can vouch for this) to buy/sell startups, and I know many founders who have sold their businesses there. If you're looking to wind down your business and cash in some of your founder chips, check them out - https://lnkd.in/gM5VZBFC Andrew Gazdecki and the team are always on the hunt to find ways to help more founders through Acquire 🫡 Lastly, if you are a listener and have been enjoying the episodes, please take a minute to drop your rating on the podcast: https://lnkd.in/eaaw-tJk I appreciate you for giving your attention and time 🙏🏼

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I bleed six colors. I first programmed on an Apple II in 1982 and have used Apple products ever since. My loyalty is grounded in my belief that Apple products are the best tools for creating—from art to design to music to films. My love of creating tools for creatives is why I find the recent Apple iPad ad so disappointing, crushing in fact. I wouldn’t be surprised if those responsible were simply trying to make a spectacle of how much could fit in an ultra thin iPad and thought using a TikTok craze of crushing things would appeal to the TikTok generation. But the reality is that they crushed those I consider to have been the most important customer segment the company has had for more than 40 years. In the video, Apple uses an absurdly large crushing machine to destroy art, instruments, cameras, records, and games. A rainbow of paint sprays as a piano is shattered. Statues are contorted under the compactor’s pressure. In a particularly poignant moment, a computer displaying Final Cut Pro is crushed along with a lamp that is eerily similar to the iconic Pixar lamp, Luxo Jr. My heart empties as I watch Apple crush the software that Steve used to reseed Apple. I am shocked to watch Apple crush an upright piano so similar to the “Imagine” Steinway played by Steve’s beloved John Lennon. And I am stunned to see Apple crush a lamp so similar to Luxo Jr. More through the link below… #apple #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #ipad #creativity #complexity https://lnkd.in/gKdgCEFk

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🔥 My fireside chat with the legendary Nolan Bushnell from TechCon SoCal is out! (Thank you TechCon Team, for sharing) . Early-stage entrepreneurs, especially those navigating the AI transformation age, you won't want to miss this! Nolan's journey from founding Atari to pioneering the tech industry is not just history, it's a living testament to the power of vision and innovation that can guide us in the present: ✨ "Entrepreneurship is about envisioning a world that could be, and trying to make it happen." Nolan's story is a testament to the power of vision. From transforming TV sets into interactive home entertainment with Pong to creating a $400 billion gaming industry, his innovative mindset has paved the way for countless technological advancements. 🌍 Nolan's early family upbringing and education planted the seed of innovation and creativity, leading to groundbreaking creations like the first car navigation system, video phones, and early online shopping platforms. His story shows how crucial it is to nurture creativity from a young age and stay curious. 🔍 "Entrepreneurship is about making the future happen faster. If you want to live it in the future, create it." This mindset is essential for today's entrepreneurs, especially in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. 💡 During our chat, Nolan also shared profound insights on the importance of adaptability and resilience. His advice on having multiple ideas and timing them right to curate a successful company is not just theoretical, it's a practical strategy that can guide any entrepreneur: 🧠 One standout moment was Nolan's perspective on company culture: "I don't care how you come to work, what you wear, I don't care if you come to work, I don't care when you come to work, if you get the job done, I'm happy." This ethos of prioritizing outcomes over processes is a key driver of Silicon Valley's success and a valuable lesson for any startup looking to innovate and grow. 🌐 As we navigate the AI transformation age, Nolan's advice on embracing societal changes and staying ahead of the curve is more relevant than ever. He urged current AI founders to be aware of the potential job displacement AI may cause and to see the immense opportunities it brings. "You look for things that are broken. There's a lot of things in the world right now that are broken, and education's one of them." 🎥 Watch the full video to dive deeper into Nolan Bushnell's incredible journey and gain insights to help you shape the future. This conversation is a goldmine of inspiration and practical advice for any early-stage entrepreneur. (Special Thanks for making this fireside chat possible: Faisal Mushtaq, Alex Altomare) #TechConSoCal #Innovation #Entrepreneurship #NolanBushnell #AI #Startups #FutureTech #Inspiration #SanDiego https://lnkd.in/grVQKv8R

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