Brad Hargreaves

Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

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Great idea for investor reporting I heard from a friend and great founder. Below every email you send to your shareholders, include a list of asks. Every time shareholder X helps you with one of the asks, give that person points. In your email reports, share a ranking where you can see all shareholders ranked by their points. It may sound irrelevant, but it seems to motivate shareholders to want to be at the top of the ranking. Thoughts on this? Has anyone tried something similar? #shareholders #fundraising #venturecapital #startup #entrepreneurship

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It was a real honor to interview Brad Burnham co-founder of Union Square Ventures and partner Placeholder on the history of hype cycles in technology and the value they bring to capital and market formation. Brad has had tremendous success across decades investing at the frontier - when it was the frontier/ before it was obvious. Crypto is still the underdog and his views on the opportunity and its nuances are prescient. Specifically it is both a technical and financial innovation which can lead to excess volatility and a unique muscle as it relates to being a venture manager. But the returns are real. And the innovation is real despite some of the the common narratives. No one debates the breakthrough applications in AI at M13 we have been very active. It is also very clear that incumbents have massive data and distribution advantages which can make it challenging to find the right pockets to invest. AI is on its own hype cycle and as always the best teams (typically with contrarian takes) win. Very exciting times to be a venture investor.

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Quite an insightful article. If we break down Voodoo's model to its core concepts, we'll arrive at Eric Ries' Lean Startup method. It's is about quickly validating ideas and products, and avoid wasting time and effort. The hyper/hybridcasual model definitely wouldn't work in indie PC games. This model was defined and refined by the mobile market. Instead of trying to apply the hyper/hybridcasual model to a market not made for it, indie devs should go to the source and look for ways to apply the Lean Startup method to indie PC games.

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We believe in extreme vetting of our founders. You can't build a unicorn if you spend time on silly stuff, like seeing family and friends. Grow up, and focus on investor returns. #vc #startups #investment

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Thrilled to share the achievement of one of my investments: Atomontage Inc., a revolutionary deep-tech company developing groundbreaking 🤯 Atomontage's Virtual Matter technology that represents a paradigm shift in 3D content streaming and collaboration, allowing for entirely new ways to stream and interact that can be used for example in social gaming experiences as described in the article bellow 🎮 . And guess what? It’s not just for gamers. Atomontage’s technology allows completely different user experiences of everything from architectural walkthroughs to medical simulations or any other applications where real-time 3D interaction is of utmost importance. You can guess the type of classified applications ����. 👩‍⚕️Their technology is the future for 3D real-time interaction and let's see if my bullish assumption on Atomontage's potential to disrupt the industry will materialize. 🚀 #venturecapital #startupinvestor #deeptech #gaming #3Dcontent https://lnkd.in/ePAFtT7x

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Over the years, we at GFR Fund have solidified our investment thesis, which is that we invest in "emerging digitally native communities." These communities can be built around games, social media, and any consumer applications. Now, founders have many easy-to-use tools to build user communities, such as Discord, X/twitter, Instagram, etc, and we believe the founders should start building communities even before they launch a product. The communities can help founders: - reach PMF faster - acquire users cheaper - retain and engage users longer - build better UX/UI, and - hire early employees Below, you can see how RTFKT and Omeda Studios built the community and then worked with them to create a product the users really wanted. We would love to talk to the founders who think the community is essential in building a product!

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Where can a large PE fund write a $100-150M check into the creator economy, and get good ROI? That’s a question I’m hearing more and more often. I have some ideas, but honestly I think that’s a challenging proposition at this stage of the market. It’s prompted me to repost my analysis of creator x media fundraisings. 👉🏼 https://lnkd.in/gF3EJSEY What do you think? Where can a check of that size solve a market problem, and generate good return? — I’m the founder of RockWater Industries. We do m&a and strategy advisory for media, agencies, and crestor economy. My DMs are open.

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Some highlights from last month at Hof Studio ✨ Highlights:  - Completed 8 design projects in 1 month - Brought on Dymension as a new client. Dymension has raised $6.7 million in funding to build its blockchain platform that enables team to quickly launch app chains. - Offered a new web development service with dedicated frontend and backend engineers.  - Live projects (8): Subsquid, Twin, Kodiak, Vase, Dymension, David, Hodl, Mande Notable projects - Designed a blockchain explorer for Dymension - Redesigned Vase’s pitch deck, resulting in increased booked meetings and closing 50% of its target raise in one week. - Designed a dashboard for compliance product for tokenized funds - Rebranded Mande network and redesigned their new website Team growth - Added 2 new UI/UX contract designers to manage the increased workload Asks - Referrals for experienced account managers to help manage increased project load - Portfolio introductions to Web 3 seed/pre-seed startups in need of app design, web design, and branding services. - Introductions to VCs in need of design partner for their marketing initiatives. Need design help? Let's chat!

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Let's finally get rid off the "VC alphabet song" and redo the system to become more founder friendly. "The benchmarks set by funding stages are often arbitrary and not necessarily aligned with the actual development needs of individual startups." #vc #venturecapital #founder #fundraising #startups #fundingstages #funding #fundingrounds #pitchbook

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Once you’re in it, you’re in it. #Startup #founders don’t just take financial risk - they invest years of their lives. For many, it’s absolutely worth it. To me, the first task is the most important one: to define your target and make absolutely sure it’s one worth that level of investment.

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NY friends! Please come see me at Tech Day on my panel discussing the future of the NY tech ecosystem and what I hope to bring to it!

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Despite the headwinds many software companies (even public ones) are facing today, there are still those that are delivering great results. Check out how the top decile companies in our Beyond Benchmarks survey are performing. And don't forget to review the full report for many more insights on the state of private software businesses.

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𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐨 This past Monday, I had the incredible opportunity to demo and pitch Jammy to over 100 investors at NY #TechWeek AI Demo Day. Two weeks ago, thanks to Cindy Berman, I found out about the event and hesitated to sign up, doubting our product’s readiness. However, I saw it as a chance to push our limits. After a screening with Shriya Nevatia we were one of eight companies chosen, and I had to figure out how to demo our work-in-progress app and deliver an eight-minute pitch. I prepared thoroughly and felt confident. On the day, Dorothy Chang informed me I’d be the first presenter, which made me both nervous and excited. The pitch went well until the live demo. When showcasing Jammy’s ability to recommend post-session music, the integration failed despite my preparation. I still finished the presentation, landing the vision for Jammy and with congratulations and consolation from my peers: “live demos always break,” they said. It helped. Though I didn’t win the $50K prize, I secured a check from an angel investor, generated interest from several others, and met amazing founders in AI. The winning pitch went to the highly deserving CAPSULE, who is set to revolutionize contextual visual shopping search (like Shazam for shopping). Very cool. This experience highlighted the value of taking risks and the importance of failing forward. It also reminded me of the supportive NY Tech and entrepreneurial community. The journey can be lonely, and many dismiss community events and networking as distractions from the "real work." While that might sometimes be true, Monday night was a reminder that we’re not alone in this journey. We all want to see each other succeed in building the - extremely AI-infused - future we envision. On to the next challenge! And definitely check out these amazing companies & founders: Glist, Gülin Yilmaz (Posokhow), Path, Soar.com, Abood Hannoon, DeepLeads.ai, pre.dev, and In The Loop

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I 💯agree with Oz Merchant on this topic. Some folks advise founders to pitch very selectively and 'pick your pitch' - you get one shot, choose it wisely? I'm 180 degrees opposite of that - be a promiscuous pitcher! - ABP - ALWAYS BE PITCHING. Because your pitch gets better with every no, take that feedback, learn, iterate. Right now it's taking 50-100 no's for Triangle co's to get funding, it's still tough out there, so get through the no's fast to get to a yes. Check out the event - also go see others pitch, it all helps you get better - pitching is like PMF - lots of iteration, tons of grinding to get through to the other side.

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“People need to eat – apps don’t,” states Evan Alcala, an entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. TriYum couldn’t have come at a better time. The app offers a number of solutions to a wide variety of bigger problems. The struggle in the food delivery app industry is real. In mid-February, food delivery app drivers, along with on-demand app drivers, went on strike in cities across the USA and Canada, demanding better pay and better work conditions. To top it all off, restaurants in cities everywhere are now being more vocal than ever before, calling third-party delivery apps a disadvantage with their high commission fees. Many restaurants now even contend that most food delivery apps are hampering their businesses on many levels: loss of brand identity, less control over customer experience, data ownership issues, and reduced customer loyalty. Customers too, like food establishments, are also getting fed up with all the hidden fees. TriYum however will be a game-changer in the food delivery app industry, which is expected to reach $165 billion market size by 2029. The new app will offer subscription-based fees for both restaurants and drivers, and customers will be billed with a flat-rate delivery fee. The app will not include any hidden fees. Customers will also receive “true” restaurant pricing. #app #fooddelivery #innovation #eat #employment https://lnkd.in/g4Zx48j3

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Can poop save the planet? 🤔 Well, in Silicon Valley, it's not just a punchline—it's a multimillion-dollar climate solution. Big players are teaming up with startup Vaulted Deep, paying $58.3 million, to pump organic waste underground. The deal was brokered by Frontier Climate, a coalition launched in 2022 by Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability. But why are tech giants getting their hands dirty with sewage and manure? Vaulted Deep's technology, rooted in decades-old methods used for oil and gas fracking cleanup, gives them an edge. But instead of sludge, they're tackling carbon-rich waste, aiming to sequester CO2 underground. They plan to sequester 152,480 tons of carbon dioxide by 2027 as part of the deal (That equates to 36,000 gas cars off the road for a year). Is this greenwashing, or a silver bullet? Critics warn of cost, the need for rigorous carbon accounting, and potential environmental trade-offs - i.e. emission prevention versus carbon removal. #decarbonization

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To the young founders starting drone pilot networks or marketplaces: I offer you some advice that is rooted in 5 years of fighting from this trench. The biggest problem in this industry isn’t the lack of cool tools to perform jobs (planning, scheduling, file delivery). If you focus your primary effort on building these, your company will fail. The #1 problem that plagues this industry is the imbalance between supply/ demand. The average pilot makes less than $13K per year with their drone. There is far more supply than there is demand, resulting in exceedingly high churn in supply. This creates a drone pilot gig economy with poor conditions for operators: high volatility, low equilibrium prices, low to no collection standards, low to no training quality amongst pilots. If you want to succeed, you must increase the demand market cap and address the supply side’s #1 problem: the lack of jobs. You will not create jobs by making cool tech. Don’t bother. You will only create more jobs by becoming the demand. Pick a vertical you want to focus on and productize drone data collected by your supply side. Know what buyers want in your vertical, and build a product that solves their problems. Sell the hell out of it and create the need for drone data- be the demand. I am your competition. I will strive to be bigger than you. But I would absolutely work with you to build a super network of marketplaces that focuses on collectively increasing demand side opportunities and creating a more healthy gig economy for all. I am willing to build a joint network with shared protocols so we can allow pilots to join one huge shared network and opt-in to focused service channels with the click of a button. This is the co-opetition that will create much-needed gravity and leadership in the drone gig economy. If you want to lay groundwork to partner together, contact me. Bobby@paypixl.io Let’s build awesome shit together.

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