Kevin Shah

So much of VC recruiting is just about being seen. Let’s get aspiring VCs noticed 🌟 Along with posting open VC roles every Wednesday, I like to have posts where aspiring VCs make themselves known to VCs looking to hire. I’ve done this a handful of times and IT WORKS! Many aspiring VCs have been contacted by firms just from commenting their info. Lets do it again! Leave a comment: 👤 Name 📍 Location 💼 Desired role 📊 Stage focus 🔍 Industry focus #venturecapital #startup #recruiting #hiring

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Impactful Biz, Ops & Investment Roles at Early Startups & VCs: • Chief of Staff to Ex. Head of Product at Google • Founding GTM at the most YC product used by other YC companies in the past four years • Chief of Staff to a Partner at a Top-Tier VC Fund • Head of Platform of a NY State Backed Accelerator • Investment Associate at a Seed Stage Fund Investing in Category-Defining Companies • Partner at a Defense-Focused VC Fund • Chief Revenue Officer of a New Space Company in El Segundo • Venture Capital Analyst at a fund investing in overlooked geographies • Investment Associate at a Spirit-Focused Fund • Strategy & Ops Lead at a Company Focused on Helping Improve Autism • Senior Product Manager at a Company Focused on Building Shopify for Content Creators • Program Manager for a Space Security Company • Open-ended Investment Position at a Top-Tier Accelerator • Biz & Ops Lead for One of the Most Loved Digital Consumer Products 💸 All companies are well-funded and backed by top-tier investors. ⬇ You can find links to the roles above, plus many more, in the comments.

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If I was to do a monthly podcast epiosde segment called This Month in VC 1) Who should I invite as a guest for this segment? 2) Any VC's who would be down to come on and share their stories + insights on this? Basically recapping what happened in that month in VC - It would be an under 30 minute discussion - Recorded remotely using Zoom, Riverside DM me or reply to this if interested Inspired by Harry Stebbings This Week in SaaS to try out a different format

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Halfway through our Y Combinator batch, over 60% of the startups in our cohort (including us) were stuck pivoting. That’s when Paul Graham flew in from England to talk about finding a great startup idea. Here’s what he told us: 1️⃣ Turn off the three ‘bad idea filters’: By turning off the ‘bad idea filters’ in your head, it instantly becomes easier for good ones to emerge. 1/ The sanity filter: Often, the greatest startups come out of ideas that originally seemed insane. So don’t shut down ideas because they seem impractical. For eg, when Airbnb started, no one ever thought people would let strangers sleep in their homes. 2/ The money filter: Money is important for a startup, but if you’re able to drive strong growth without generating revenue, don’t discard the idea. For eg: JustinTV (now Twitch), began with a guy live-streaming his life with a camera strapped to his head. There was no revenue stream initially. 3/ The schlepp filter: Don’t dismiss an idea just because it seems like too much work. For eg: Stripe had to handle unholy amounts of legal and regulatory work to get banks onboard their payments platform. Still, they did the hard work, and Stripe solved a problem that hundreds of their contemporaries were afraid to work on. Often, the impractical hard work becomes the moat that protects your startup from competition. 2️⃣ Don’t build for boomers   If you’re only building for boomers, your company will die with them. Whatever you’re building needs to become popular amongst the younger generation. If you’re a college student and you find a lot of your peers using what you’re building (and not just because they’re your friends), it could well be the start of something big. 3️⃣ Stop thinking all the best ideas are taken As founders, we often come up with an idea only to realize another company has already built it. We then find ourselves wishing that such other company didn't exist. You need to throw that mentality out the door. One quote I’ll always take away from PG’s talk is that there are billions of years of existence left. It would be practically impossible (and quite frankly depressing) for all the good ideas to run out by 2024. These tips really helped us zero in on what we’re building today. At our last startup, Desklamp, we’d spend weeks on end producing each feature launch video. During our pivot phase, PG’s talk inspired us to ask ourselves if we could automate that process using AI. That bold question led us to Clueso (YC W23): end-to-end AI automation for producing software videos for companies. #startups

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Hiring a strong founding engineer is one of the hardest but most impactful decisions a startup makes. Three methods to find founding engineers I’ve seen work well on PeopleGPT: - Engineers at Seed / Series A companies - Former VC-backed CTOs or founders - Current founding engineers In each case, the searches filter for 1) background in a high-growth or venture-backed environment (powered by PeopleGPT's integrated funding data), and 2) significant IC experience. Do you have other strategies? Share in the comments below 👇

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I’ve aggregated a list of 50+ VC roles in one spreadsheet. It’s updated weekly and can be filtered by location, position, firm, etc. Check out the latest list here (as of June 24th) 👇 https://lnkd.in/dRC3XtjS Tag someone who needs this in the comments 💭 — Want a quick snapshot? Here are a few of my favorite postings: Associate, M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund Link: https://lnkd.in/eNFaaSBy Associate & Principal, Wischoff Ventures Link: https://lnkd.in/gu6Mun7p Consumer Investor, Stripes Link: https://lnkd.in/eZdRk6jV Venture Lead, Struck Studio Link: https://lnkd.in/exGcNHJ5 New Ventures Associate, Live Nation Entertainment Link: https://lnkd.in/e3mBYGCt — I’m creating more tools, guides, and other free resources for Junior VCs to (1) 2x their network and (2) carve their path to partner. If you found this helpful, check out the Venture House website for more 👇 https://venturehouse.xyz/ #venturecapital #startup #recruiting #hiring

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On this week's Andreessen Horowitz Raising Health podcast, Vijay Pande, PhD and I interviewed Tom Hale, CEO of ŌURA. Our conversation spans lots of fun topics, including: -- Our love for our Oura rings, despite them being literal “buzz kills” in revealing the ruinous effect of alcohol on sleep  -- How the worlds of consumer and healthcare are merging, as consumers essentially now have access to clinical-grade wearable devices  -- How AI algorithms are deployed in wearable devices & what wearables might look like 20 years from now (implanted into our bodies and clothes)  -- How the sexiest people sleep in earplugs and eye masks Check it out! https://lnkd.in/eTAsX_sY

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Read our team's thoughts on YC valuations!

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📰 Solo VCs are rising in popularity once again. This means only one General Partner is leading the firm, versus multiples. 💔 Why? There are GP breakups going on all around us after partnerships have been tested by the market for years now. The bar to co-found a venture firm with a partner is very high. Those GPs that thought they might graft another one on in the short term to share the load are stopping in their tracks to deeply consider those implications. 🌱 Many are opting to bring in more junior talent and grow them into Partner roles instead. It’ll take time and capital to be able to do that as the firm grows. Talked to 3 diff GPs about this at dinner last night and we’re all leaning toward that approach in our short and long term planning. 💡 FYI - this is just an observation of the moment we’re in. There are plenty of firms thriving with full partnerships as well as solo GPs. But it’s worth calling out that new partnerships are particularly risky right now, especially if the partners haven’t worked with each other for a long time.

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Y Combinator (YC) is a renowned startup accelerator that has helped launch successful companies like Airbnb and Dropbox. Some key lessons learned from YC include the importance of finding product-market fit early on, the value of rapid iteration and experimentation, and the significance of building a strong founding team. YC also emphasizes the need for continuous learning and adaptation to market feedback. Overall, these lessons can be crucial for the success of any startup. #YCombinator #startupaccelerator #entrepreneurship

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Non-Engineering Roles at Early-Stage Startups Offering $120K+ Base Salary with Meaningful Bonus and Equity: Chief of Staff @ Milo (Consumer), Remote Biz Ops Lead @ Fractal Agriculture (FinTech), Remote; Backed by Virta Ventures Chief of Staff @ CakeAI (AI SaaS), NY; Backed by Primary Venture Partners Demand Generation Specialist @ Rootly (Consumer), Remote; Backed by YC, 8VC, Gradient Ventures Account Executive @ CommandBar (Enterprise SaaS), Remote; Backed by Soma Capital, YC, Insight Partners Product Marketing @ Slope (Enterprise), Remote; Backed by YC, Union Square Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures Supply Planning Manager @ PROVEN Skincare (Consumer), Remote; Backed by YC, FJ Labs, Soma Capital, Social Capital Account Executive @ Accrue Savings (Consumer), NY; Backed by Ground Up Ventures, Tiger Global Chief of Staff @ UNIGRID Battery (Climate), CA; Backed by Union Square Ventures, LiquidMetal Ventures Job details and the full list (40+ opportunities) are in the comments below. If you're interested in non-tech jobs focused on specific industries like HardTech, HealthTech, Climate, etc., then DM me or let me know in the comments.

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"We started as delivery drivers" This is the DoorDash application to YC in 2014. Today, it's market cap is $46.5B. I love this because it underscores that especially in the beginning, just simple brute force is often the best & only way to go. There is no system, no algorithm, no process, etc It is not effortless. In fact, it's all effort. When we started CB Insights, the first 50,000 financing and M&A transactions were done by hand in a giant spreadsheet. It was just manually copy/pasting data about transactions from various sources into rows & columns. We could have waited to find an engineer who could automate that or we could just get going. And the reality was that those 50,000 rows served as invaluable training data for eventual algorithms we used to automate that data extraction effort. Sometimes, you gotta embrace 'the suck'. --- Separately, if curious where Y Combinator is investing today, we got you ⤵ https://lnkd.in/eXnFbejr

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Wiz - $0 to $23B in 4 Short Years + The Actual Reason Why Alphabet Inc. is Happy to Make it Happen Alphabet is likely buying Wiz for $23B - an insane amount of value created in just 4 years since its founding in 2020. For context, it took OpenAI 7+ years to get to $20B. Alphabet buying Wiz at $23B puts a fantastic comp out there for investors to underwrite to and justify insane valuations (kinda kidding, kinda not). Currently, Wiz is over $500M in ARR (~46x) but plan to get to $1B in ARR by the end of '25, which would put it at a bit more reasonable 23x, but still a steep price and certainly an indication of conviction in the strategic value of Wiz. So why could Alphabet spend such an insane amount to buy Wiz at such a hefty price? Because the actual golden goose here is winning market share in the ~$300B/yr Cloud Services market that is growing at an insane 21% YoY. The means nearly $60B in new TAM will be up for the taking the next 12 months alone.. Today, Google Cloud (11%) is a distant 3rd in market share behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) (31%) and Microsoft Azure (25%), but it is growing the fastest at 28% YoY. If buying Wiz can help Google accelerate their growth and continue to gain share, they'll be able to capture a bigger slice of that fast growing Cloud Services TAM. And with a market that big growing that fast, there is almost no price too high. Every marginal point of market share is worth at least $15B of EV (assuming 5x). Alphabet currently trades at 5.5x revenue so assuming they can get a marginal $5B of ARR out of the deal over the next few years, the economics make sense almost immediately. Google Cloud is also Alphabet Inc.'s best hedge against AI's potential disruption to their core search business as more people turn to generative AI instead of that trusty search bar to answer their questions. This will be Google's biggest acquisition ever by nearly 2x, and it will be a massive, much-needed replenishment of funds into the venture ecosystem (Index Ventures Sequoia Capital Greenoaks, Insight Partners, Andreessen Horowitz) Fun aside - Wiz has some wildly notable angels on the cap table like Howard Schultz and Bernard Arnault. If this deal goes through it's going to be a huge win for a bunch of founders, investors, and employees and an overall great mark for the early-stage technology ecosystem! All of this is assuming Lina Khan lets it happen!

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Turns out, Sword Health has an interesting org structure where they hire ex-founders/wannabe founders as GMs, invest $1 million as a seed round, and give them 12 months to work. If the product performs well after a year, they follow up with a Series A investment. We do something similar at Docquity, and each time, the products have generated quite a bit of value for the organization in a fraction of the time it usually takes. In my humble view, this is the only way to create urgency and build value from 0 to 1 as a company matures. h/t Nikhil Krishnan

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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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As someone who played competitive tennis growing up, Roger Federer’s message at Dartmouth's commencement resonated with me and should inspire startup founders everywhere. As one of the greatest tennis players of all time, Federer pointed out that, despite his huge success in matches, he actually only won 54% of all the points he ever played. He went on to share: "When you’re playing a point, it is the most important thing in the world. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you... This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point… and the next one after that… with intensity, clarity and focus. The truth is, whatever game you play in life... sometimes you’re going to lose. A point, a match, a season, a job... it’s a roller coaster, with many ups and downs. And it’s natural, when you’re down, to doubt yourself. To feel sorry for yourself. And by the way, your opponents have self-doubt, too. Don’t ever forget that. But negative energy is wasted energy. You want to become a master at overcoming hard moments. That to me is the sign of a champion." When you're a founder, you're in a fierce battle every day - sometimes against competitors, sometimes against markets, and sometimes against yourself. The most successful founders accept that they'll get a lot wrong but have a mindset to adapt and bounce back from setbacks as quickly as possible. It's not about winning every point. It's about winning the most important points. Because often the victory comes down to a slim margin. https://lnkd.in/g6JRcSee

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TL;DR: Hire me (and my team). Over the last year, my team and I at Endeavor Labs have developed: 1) A custom ML solution for predictive invoice coding for a fintech SaaS company 2) Predictive models for demand planning in the warehousing and logistics space 3) A RAG-based app for answering security questionnaires. (Still a work-in-progress.) We’ve also done a couple data platform builds, helped a legal AI startup hire their founding team, and provided technical diligence for several on M&A transactions related to data analytics and AI. Here are some nice things our clients have said about us: ▶ “Thanks to their capabilities and highly collaborative approach, we were able to get our AI product to market in record time. I would gladly recommend them to other CTO’s.” - Pauly C., CTO of Ascend Software ▶ “I was impressed with how quickly they understood our business, and navigated the quirks of our data and processes to actually deliver a working solution.” - Hill H., Co-CEO of Central Storage & Warehouse ▶ “The systems that Endeavor Labs set up significantly reduced the time and effort needed to get answers from our data.” - Alex F., CEO of Axl.net Are you looking for a partner to help get your data or AI/ML project off the ground? Or get an existing one back on track? Let's talk. (Calendar link in the comments.)

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Founder <> founder convos are the biggest unlock for company building. I spent the last 2+ weeks in SF. Besides meeting with customers, I spent a ton of time with founders / early stage builders that I deeply respect (shoutout to Abhinav Asthana, Christina Cacioppo, Kevin Van Gundy, Akshay Kothari, Yuhki Yamashita, Tara Viswanathan, Celine Halioua, & Michelle Valentine). I’m extremely grateful to have the chance to spend time with these folks. Some reflections from these brilliant people. 1/ People > everything. A company is a collection of people. Company success comes down to hiring the best people. 2/ Startup problems aren’t *that* unique. Startups are HARD and even if you think your challenges are specific to your company, they’re likely not. Someone else has faced the same thing, and you likely don’t need to reinvent the wheel. 3/ Let some fires burn. Focus > trying to do everything. As a startup, you can’t fix everything at once with limited resources (even if you want to). You need to focus on the stuff that will move the needle the most. Pick the top 1 or 2 problems, fix them, then move onto the next. It’s okay if some fires need to burn for a little in the meantime. 4/ Company operating cadences are key. We’re redoing our cadences now, so it was super interesting to learn how others run their board meetings, leadership meetings, all hands, etc. A consistent theme for board & leadership meetings is to have everyone complete a prompt in written doc, share with each other, then use the time to have meatier discussions. 5/ Be competitor aware, customer obsessed. Competitors cause unnecessary noise. Build products and make decisions based on customer / market need and founder intuition, never based on competition. Are these learnings helpful? If so, can share more founder learning posts in the future!

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⌛ The deadline for YC’s S24 batch is April 22! I get a ton of requests for application feedback, so I’ve consolidated my advice here: 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦 > 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐚 + 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 Your idea will change; that’s what it means to be pre-product-market fit. A bet on an early-stage company is a bet on the team to iterate rapidly and figure it out; think of your idea and your progress as useful evidence. Don’t be discouraged if you feel like you haven’t made enough progress, because the amount of progress you’ve made is not nearly as important as how fast you made it. In other words: “slope, not intercept”. 𝐁𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞. 𝐁𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭. Explain your idea clearly in 1-2 sentences: who are your users and what problem do you solve? Avoid jargon, marketing-speak, technical intricacies, or an exhaustive list of features. Tacking on “...with AI” or “...with blockchain” is not any more helpful than “...with computers”. Bad: “We are transforming the global software development industry with a revolutionary AI platform that streamlines the SDLC for tremendous efficiency gains using cutting-edge LLMs.” Better: “We’re a developer tool that automatically reviews code and fixes bugs.” 𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐬 You should feel like an expert on your users, and have some unique/contrarian insights about them. You’ve hopefully identified a “hair-on-fire” pain they have, and you’re building a product to fix their problem. It’s hard to spend too much time talking to your users. Interviewing 50-100 people seems like a good place to start. If you’ve talked to less than, say, 10-20, it might be hard to know you’re solving a real problem. 𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐲𝐨𝐮’𝐫𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲 What’s your path to $1B in revenue? Keep it simple. You don’t need a 5-tier pricing strategy and a multi-year product roadmap, you need to know roughly how many potential customers you have and how much they’re likely to pay (bottom-up analysis), and how big the overall market is (top-down). Reasonable estimates are OK. Remember, the VC model is based on a power law of startup returns, where one huge exit makes up for all other investments going to zero. This makes a tiny chance at becoming a $10B company quite valuable, and a high chance at becoming a $50M company surprisingly useless. 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐲? Emphatic yes! YC was an awesome experience for us and every YC alumnus I’ve asked so far - it changed the trajectory of our startup. Even if you don’t get in, we found the application process itself was valuable and forced us to think deeply. If you’d like some eyes on your application, send me a message - I’m happy to help!

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