Nathan Beckord

What does the future hold? 🤔 According to top VC Vinod Khosla, it's looking optimistic! In a recent article, Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures shared his views on our plausible futures in 2035-2049, and it's a nice counterbalance against the too-pessimistic doom thinking out there. ⚡ Khosla believes that entrepreneurs, with passion for a vision, invent the future they want. And if we allow it to happen, abundant, awesome, technology-based, “possible tomorrows” are likely ⚡ ----------------------- Are you interested in building the future with/ for your company? Take the first step here 📆 https://lnkd.in/e6kjakzF Let's make the future happen! 🚀 #Future #Venturing #Innovation #Entrepreneurship #Technology #Possibilities

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Great time on the Embracing Erosion podcast w/Devon O'Rourke! We talked about: 🚀 How to scale a company from concept to 9-figure exit 🔄 How to break away from the traditional consulting model and apply product approaches ⏩ Why it’s important to iterate quickly and often with messaging 💸📈What signals are important to pay attention to when investing in startups and much more!

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Our revamped newsletter, The Angle by Angular Ventures, officially launched today! We hope this new format will make it easier to read, share, and subscribe. Back to it, in this week's column, Gil Dibner covered the spirit of risk-taking that inspired Angular to venture into unusual spaces. While, of course, we invest in AI and SaaS, as of late, we have been investing in more and more contrarian spaces - from quantum, to spacetech, to energy, etc. in search of the supposedly impossible - the truly contrarian. Read the full column via the link.

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As we dive into 2024, the Series A fundraising landscape is becoming increasingly daunting. Investment standards are soaring, and fewer startups are making the cut. Series A investors are finding many seed stage companies too premature. The median valuation jump from seed to Series A skyrocketed from $19.5 million in Q1 2022 to $28.7 million in Q1 2024. Investors now demand stronger revenue performance, targeting $2 million to $3 million in ARR, up from $1 million to $2 million. Alarmingly, only 12% of Q1 2022 seed startups secured Series A funding within two years, down from 31.8% in Q1 2020. #venture #earlystage #seedtoseriesa #seed #seriesa #inspireglobalventures https://lnkd.in/gW4bkcNy

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Join us August 1 for our 3rd Annual Web3 Investor Day. We once again bring over 200+ asset allocators, venture capitalists, and web3 innovators to assess the transitions today driving the changes tomorrow. Thank you for our partners in joining us this year - a curated group of industry leaders building adoption of blockchain innovations. Brian Walls and Keith Johnson of Bridge Alternatives have the energy and passion to bring together capital providers and technologists to accelerate innovation. Dean Marks and Keating Crown of Sterling Bay design and build the physical spaces such that innovation ideas flourish, across teams and borders. Bob Harazin of Grayscale Investments is leading the forefront of publicly traded products that enable investors access to digital assets. Jan-Dirk Lueders and Sam Hallene of CMT Digital are top investors in blockchain technologies and digital assets ventures, drawing on their decades of experience in ventures, trading and regulatory to advance our industry. Michael Frisch and Paige Bolinger of Croke Fairchild Duarte & Beres are legal thought leaders in the evolving landscape of regulatory, financing and governance in digital assets. Jay Kolbe and Philip Robertson Impact Partners form the narratives for family offices, venture investors and web3 companies at the frontiers of innovation, crafting their stories that are relatable to the mainstream audiences. Stephen Vlasak of Richey May provides the world class technology risk and audit management for our industry across the patchwork of evolving special situations innovation entails. Gary Newlin and Patrick Clancy of MG Stover LLC streamline the fund administration processes across liquid and illiquid digital assets for investment managers to focus on their investment alpha in web3. Srinivas Dhulipala of New Form Capital deploys his decades of financing trading markets to today's crypto markets with liquid strategies that fuel this innovation cycle. Join us and many others to understand and build the future of our Internet.

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When in Rome… write a blog Since changing the side of the table from entrepreneurship to VC I long resisted the established practice of content generation. After a year and sharing similar stories and tips with dozens of start-ups time to scale the approach   Time for Barbarians at the (Golden) Gate blog. This is a practical guide of scaling to the US by companies rooted in the CEE (Central and Eastern Europe). Loosely inspired by Booksy experience and discussion with leaders from other companies who are scaling successfully from the CEE    I start with structural advantages of CEE start-ups that make conquering global tech markets possible. Next episodes go through the lists of hoops and traps (in most of which you fill find my footprints 😱 ) – I will do my best to warn and give my $0.02 on these.   Many thanks for those of you have contributed to this (often unknowingly 😉 ) by sharing your experiences, thoughts, comments or reviewed early drafts. The list clearly includes Booksy mafia (Stefan Batory, Konrad Howard Dorota Machaj), those who built even bigger tech businesses out of CEE (Peter Bialo), those who will soon make it (Agata Mroczkowska, Wojtek Rokosz, Dhruv Agrawal), and shepherds of other cohorts of global challengers out of CEE (Andris K. Berzins).   Episode 1 here. The only rosy episode in the season. Enjoy responsibly, comment, disagree, trash or encourage

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We love seeing founders be able to keep their equity and take advantage of non-dilutive funding sources⚒️. We're excited to collaborate with Stacy Chin, PhD leader of KeepYourEquity.co, who has secured over $15M in SBIR/STTR grants for startups across various sectors. She's written a guest blog post sharing her insights on navigating the competitive landscape of grant funding 💰. Some highlights: ❇️ Understanding SBIR/STTR: A lifeline for startups, offering up to $2 million in non-dilutive funding! ⏺️ Learning how to overcome hurdles and capitalize on the golden opportunity. ❇️ Gaining essential tips on outlining your go-to-market strategy, choosing the right program, and preparing thoroughly. ⏺️ Benefiting from Stacy Chin's 10+ years of grant writing experience and her extensive track record in securing funding for startups. Read More in the blog post linked in the comment below 👇🏾 #SBIR #STTR #GrantFunding #StartupSuccess #SmallBusiness #KeepYourEquityCo #ShayCPA #cpafirm #techaccountants #startupaccountants #techstartup #techcompany #nondilutivefunding

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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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Big things on the horizon, we are motivated and blessed to be at the dawn of a new age for the internet. Read more about our journey below or listen to the podcast: https://lnkd.in/eJeNhvVa

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Great analysis by the AGC team on SaaS public company comps. It's worth a look as we recalibrate mid-way through earnings season. The analysis aligns with the broader Nasdaq equity performance, where the Mag 7 (or fab 4 now :-)) have shown more resilience than the rest of the market. #AGC #SaaS #EarningsSeason #Nasdaq #EquityPerformance

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To all #climatetech #founders and #funders in NYC and beyond, please join us on June 5th for an evening of #breakthrough #decarbonization #innovation at the ReGen Accelerator #DemoDay! 🎉 Get ready to be inspired by our cohort of #earlystage startups: ​ ▶ aich2 is engineering a novel #hydrogen ecosystem, built around Solid Hydrogen carriers. ​​ ▶ carbogenics produces sustainable #carbon adsorbents from difficult-to-recycle organic waste, including coffee cups and wastewater screenings ​​ ▶ TeamStack.ai is driving better performance by harnessing #AI, data, & the collective intelligence of teams. ​ ▶ Tesleon LLC uses compelling characters and #storytelling to instill compassion for communities and our planet in the next generation. ​ ▶ Tolam Earth is a trusted #marketplace for high-quality, high-impact carbon offsets. Don't miss out! Secure your spot below. Big thank you to Brown Rudnick LLP for hosting this event, our partners at ClimateHaven for their hard work and dedication during the entire program, and to our incredible network of #mentors and #facilitators, each of whom have dedicated time to working with these incredible founders this spring, including Jason Ambrose, Marina Rakhlin, Lauren Zujkowski, Stuart DeCew, Matt Puccini Andy Rooks, Nina Raab, and Bill Stephney. And of course Shai Tamary, Lars Korby and Sarah Cleveland, without whom we would not be able run such a #program. #innovation #sustainability #climateaction #accelerator

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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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Sonoma, Ca - Women in CVC Summit! 65 women in CVC gathered together for real, honest conversations about the challenges and complexities in CVC investing versus traditional venture capital. CVCs face challenges such as aligning the interests and expectations of the corporation and the startup, managing the relationship and communication between the two parties, and balancing the trade-offs between strategic and financial returns. But what's truly inspiring is the impact women are having in this space! Female-founded companies exit faster but make up a smaller share of total exit activity. CVCs participated in 17.5% of all female-founder deals in 2023, while more CVC firms have majority female checkwriter representation. Furthermore, female founders closed a record of 22.8% of total VC funds in 2023. We are thrilled to support this vibrant community of women alongside our friends and partners, Counterpart Ventures. Tanvi Narain and Abbie Wolf, congrats on curating such an impactful event. Special thanks to Annemarie Donegan from PitchBook for the data and research she shared with the group. The phenomenal lineup of speakers from corporate and traditional venture capital funds included: ​Amy Daniels Burr, President, JetBlue Ventures Danielle D'Agostaro, Partner, WVV Capital Vivien Ho, Partner, Pear VC Betty Lee (Lee) Bryant, Principal, Woven Capital, Toyota's Growth Fund Savannah Greene, Principal, Workday Ventures Heather Reginelli, Ventures Manager, State Farm Ventures Marie-Christine Razaire, Principal, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures Beth Devin, Scout, Investor & Advisor, HearstLab Priya Saiprasad, Co-Founder and General Partner, Touring Capital Agustina Sartori, Founding Managing Director, Prisma Ventures #WomeninBuisness #VentureCapital #CVC #CorporateVentureCapital #WomeninLeadership TriNet Abbie Wolf Tanvi Narain Patrick Eggen David Haraburda Kim Thomas Matt Mahoney Samantha Santaniello-Lawrence

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🔥 Thrilled to see Hydrolix crushing it with a $35M Series B! 🔥 Data is the new oil, but too much gets discarded due to prohibitive storage costs. Hydrolix cracks this with its streaming #datalake platform that leverages object storage, decoupled compute, indexing, & compression. As Marty Kagan puts it: 'We’re cheaper than cold storage and faster than hot storage' Hydrolix’s streaming data lake platform is a game-changer for #AI, #observability, & #security workloads. 💥 Real-time query performance at terabyte scale 💰75%+ savings on log mgmt & 4x more data retained  ☁️ Stateless & containerized for seamless scaling with Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, Google Cloud GCS, Microsoft Azure Blob 💡 Had the early conviction (first investor) that data is key to unlocking AI & enterprise workloads. It's proving right. Huge thanks to Marty Kagan Hasan Alayli for letting me early on their journey to build an impessive company 🙏 Super pumped to have awesome Aaron Perman at S3 Ventures leading this round along with other strong existing investors - Nava Ventures (Manish Patel) Wing Venture Capital (Peter Wagner) Oregon Venture Fund (Matt Compton Scott Grout) and others 💪 Onwards! 🚀🚀🚀 #cloud #data #ai #ml #llm #largelanguagemodels #analytics #security #loganalytics #datalake #datawarehouse https://lnkd.in/g5i6afP5

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How do we make investment decisions at Scalebridge? 👀 This is a common question from founders and investors. 💬 To shed light on this opaque process, we are launching 𝗙𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 newsletter. Naturally, we kick things off with our investment theses. 🔮 🚀 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 is a key investment thesis at Scalebridge, expected to redefine the tech landscape over the next decade. 🌟 The potential immense opportunity, with >$𝟱 𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱 up for grabs. ❌ Traditional digital transformation, despite heavy investment, has a failure rate exceeding 70% 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁-𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗱𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹 𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗯𝘀𝗼𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲, due to its rigidity and complexity. 🦾 Autonomous Transformation leverages data, workflow automation, and AI to achieve strategic goals with minimal manual interference. It allows for real-time autonomous decision-making and process adjustments, directing human efforts towards strategic management. 💸 The convergence of services and emerging technology capabilities has created 𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 #automation 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀 to lead the future of Autonomous Transformation. These automation companies are poised to replace traditional IT services and consultancy, addressing accumulated technological and process debts. ❓𝗙𝘂𝗹𝗹-𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 #autonomoustransformation 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗺𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶-𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗱𝗲 𝗷𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆, facing key challenges including limitations of #AI, #data quality & governance issues, and intricate enterprise #workflow. 💫 𝗔𝗹𝗹-𝗶𝗻 𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗗𝗮𝘆 𝗢𝗻𝗲. A new wave of automation startups is spearheading #autonomoustransformation, replacing traditional consultancy and IT services. The future is here! Check out our investments: Versori, Spendkey, Garvis (exited), Trusstor. 📥  https://lnkd.in/ehUh6eiW #Automation #Scalebridge #thesis #VC #emergingmanager #founder

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What if we could convert cargo ship exhaust into safe ocean salts? At lomarlabs, we’re collaborating with climate tech start-up Calcarea to test their breakthrough technology that does just that. The technology, which spun out of research at Caltech, mimics a natural process. According to CalTech professor and Calcarea cofounder Jess Adkins, “This is the buffering reaction that the Earth has used for billions of years to deal with volcanic CO2 coming into the atmosphere.” However, the journey from lab to market is often challenging. That's where our maritime corporate venture lab, lomarlabs, comes in. They provide #deeptech startups like Calcarea with insights into the maritime industry, access to Lomar Shipping 's vessels as floating labs to pilot new technology, and help them secure purchase orders. I couldn’t be prouder to be part of a team that takes its role as an industry leader seriously. By maintaining an open mind and a willingness to systematically experiment, I hope that we can demonstrate that what's good for society can also be (very) good for business. That's the only way this will work. Thank you, Fast Company, for covering Calcarea’s technology and our partnership. Decarbonizing shipping is both urgent and important. Jess Adkins said it best, “CO2 that we remove tomorrow is way more important than CO2 that we remove in 10 or 20 years.” 🌍 #ClimateAction #SustainableShipping #Innovation #TechForGood #LibraGroup

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In our latest episode on the Practical Nerds podcast, Patric and I talk about our earned learnings on how founders (and other VCs) should choose the right (Co)Investors for their startup (Construction-tech or otherwise). Which of these do you agree with ? What did we miss ?

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On our latest podcast, Peter Marton, CEO of OpenMeter, dives into the challenges and opportunities of usage-based billing for AI companies. As the industry shifts towards models like those pioneered by OpenAI, accurate metering and cost control become crucial. In This Episode, We Discuss: -The Rise of Usage-Based Billing in AI: How it aligns with the industry's needs. -The Engineering Challenges: Processing massive amounts of data in real time while maintaining a seamless user experience. -OpenMeter's Solution: How their platform helps companies implement and manage complex billing models. -Use Cases: How OpenMeter enables features like balance updates, usage limit enforcement, and customer notifications. Don't Miss the Full Episode: Get the complete story on how OpenMeter is empowering AI companies to optimize their monetization strategies. Listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch on YouTube - https://lnkd.in/ebAQFhi7 . . . . . #OpenMeter #AIMonetization #UsageBasedBilling #YCombinator #SaaS #Startups #Engineering #AI #CostManagement

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