Raj P.

Friends, Q2 was a quarter of progress and learning for us at HawkTower, where we invest in early-stage startups applying breakthrough computing technologies to maximize California's natural resource markets. Our focus is on technology-enabled interventions (e.g., AI-enabled geospatial radars for lithium-ion batteries in the waste stream) for critical, market-level imperatives (e.g., disaster prevention) that can drive rapid commercial adoption (e.g., placed on every recycling truck in the world). Our current investment priorities are: - Agricultural productivity and efficiency - Biomanufacturing - Labor and mobility automation - Waste stream optimization and decarbonization - Disaster prevention and management Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve been up to: Milestones and Investments: - In late April, we officially launched our fund, filing with the SEC. Yay. - By June, we completed our first fund close ahead of schedule, with backing from family offices, foundations, high-net-worth individuals, and organizations aligned with California's future. - Our portfolio now includes three early-stage investments (Farm-ng, Agriful Software, and Nexstera Tech). Strategic Partnerships: - We believe that startups operating closer to their customers and resources, especially in agriculture and biomanufacturing, have a strategic advantage. For instance, the Salinas Valley, a major agricultural hub, is less than an hour from Silicon Valley and serves as a center of thought leadership in the convergence of agriculture and AI (from Western Growers, Taylor Farms, and others). - Similarly, the North San Joaquin Valley is emerging as a biotech and agtech innovation hub, and we are proud to support BEAM Circular, a startup hub for the circular bioeconomy. Key Relationships: - Karen Warner, CEO of BEAM Circular, joined HawkTower as a strategic advisor. - Jackie Cruz, Ed. D. Cruz, Hartnell College’s VP of Advancement, advises on Salinas Valley and workforce development. - Ben Palone from Western Growers, with his technical background in agriculture, became a trusted advisor. - Matthew Hoffman from Driscoll's Global R&D team provides insights on global agriculture, product positioning, and investment strategy. - We collaborated with Monterey Bay DART for workforce development and automation in agtech. - Dominic Milano and the Milano Technical Group from Merced collaborated on key initiatives and advised us on investments. - HawkTower is participating in Santa Cruz Works's accelerator cohort as a mentor and advisor. Thank you Doug Erickson. - We published an overview of entrepreneurship across the UC system with input from across the University of California system. Moving into the fall, we remain deeply committed to supporting founders shaping California's future natural resource markets. Stay tuned and be in touch! : ) Db

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HawkTower is a new venture capital firm focused on Underleveraged California. Our mission is to foster innovation and commercialization in critical rising and emerging regions of California, a state that still holds untapped potential as the world's fifth-largest economy. A thriving California, one that continues to grow, compete, and innovate on a global scale, is crucial for America's overall prosperity. Today, our website launched. We are also excited to announce additions to the team and advisory, including: Bill Sherrod, EdD, a 29-year Navy veteran and former Strategic Advisor to the President of the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), has joined HawkTower as a Venture Partner. Bill, who initially joined us as an advisor in February, has quickly become an indispensable part of our team. His extensive experience in dual-use technology, advanced air mobility, and more brings HawkTower a wealth of knowledge and expertise. Vittoria Lecomte is a new Venture Partner. Tori is a former Forbes 30 Under 30 and an investment banker at Barclays in their Technology, Media, and Telecom Group. She was lead analyst on the Fitbit (now part of Google) and GoPro IPOs. Before joining HawkTower, she was the founder and CEO of Sesh which had a successful exit to Caraway. HawkTower is thrilled to announce our strategic partnership with Tesserakt Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Central California. This collaboration, at a time of critical opportunity for emerging California, will drive cohesion in the marketplace. Daniel Emilio Sabzehzar (Venture Partner) and Phoenix Skeahan (Operating Partner) will join HawkTower, enhancing our sourcing, diligence, and portfolio support capabilities. Lenny Mendonca, a Turlock native, is a new advisor. He served as Governor Newsom's Chief Economic and Business Advisor and is also a Senior Partner Emeritus at McKinsey & Company, where he founded the firm's U.S. state and local public sector consulting practice. Walt Duflock, head of innovation for the Western Growers , is also a new advisor. Walt is a partner at a 5th-generation family farming operation in Monterey County. In addition to 30 years of experience at Silicon Valley tech startups, Walt and his team at WGA are extraordinary thought leaders in the AgTech ecosystem. Our technical advisory capacity is significantly strengthened with the support of Alexander Wolf, Dean of the Baskin School of Engineering at University of California, Santa Cruz, Amy Fleischer, Dean, the College of Engineering California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), and Rakesh Goel, Dean, School of Engineering, University of California, Merced. HawkTower is confident in the entrepreneurial acumen and potential of each of these universities (as well as NPS, UC Davis, Fresno St., and others). I'm humbled to share these updates with you as we continue to grow our firm out in the open with your input.

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As we get prepared for our Angel Conference program, we run workshops to help get things lined up for the right conversations between investors and early pre-seed startups. We have a deadline coming up on August 27th for startups. One of the places that we see companies having a bit of trouble is on the customer discovery side of things. So we have a couple of workshops on that early customer discovery and associated efforts to get traction early before your MVP. As Angel Investors, we need to think with a portfolio mindset instead of investing in one or two companies to "see how it goes". We have a panel of SAC alumni talking about their perspectives on their portfolio of companies. We also know that startups don't practice pitching enough. So we we have workshops for improving pitches before people pitch for real. You can see the upcoming workshops here: AI+Lean  Building automated content experiments for customer discovery Tuesday, August 6, 2024 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM PDT https://lnkd.in/gJMiyQZC Building Your Angel Investment Portfolio Tuesday, August 6, 2024 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM PDT https://lnkd.in/gD9ATSyG Pitch Deconstruction and Review Thursday, August 8, 2024 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM PDT https://lnkd.in/g-RRajrX Finding your first paying customers Tuesday, August 13, 2024 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM PDT https://lnkd.in/gN-DaRJ8 Angel Investing and Taxes Thursday, August 15, 2024 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM PDT https://lnkd.in/gjs9cQfy Solving Real Problems: The Key to Market Success Tuesday, August 20, 2024 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM PDT https://lnkd.in/gYkJFD-X Structuring a Pitch Deck That Engages Investors Thursday, August 22, 2024 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM PDT https://lnkd.in/geyYR4wB Seattle Angel Conference (SAC 26) Application Deadline Tuesday, August 27, 2024 9:00 PM to 9:05 PM PDT  (But REALLY … Apply early)  https://lnkd.in/gM_fSmbZ  Companies need to apply here - https://lnkd.in/gWbtkAaf Please let the folks around you know about these workshops.

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In 2020, Karan Talati predicted what many of us take for granted today: we are in a revolution in hardware innovation that is revitalizing American manufacturing. Karan was part of this movement at SpaceX, where both hardware and software played key roles in making it the generational company it has become today. Having seen what software can do at SpaceX and noticing a glaring need to bring better hardware engineering and manufacturing software to the broader hardware innovation ecosystem, Karan set out to build a solution. The aerospace, defense, and other hardware manufacturing industries are rapidly shifting to a more dynamic and efficient production methodology. First Resonance exists to help them achieve their goals with better software.

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Alon and David meet with the Tezos / Etherlink Accelerator companies to learn about the new Tezos EVM compatible layer 2 and some of the products being built on it!

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Really interesting to see this: how Europe is moving up. It is interest to contrast this qualitative survey with the #siliconcatalyst analysys that UK is sixth in Europe in funding value fir silicon investment. And I will put in a plug for our #UKTIN Forward Capabilities paper on recommendations for UK Semiconductor sector: https://lnkd.in/eNNAsCAz

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The Information is out with breaking details on NVIDIA is winning in the marketplace by placing calculated bets on #AIchip design and production being in the right place at the right time. Anyone who needs proof that, in #AndyGrove and Intel Corporation's famous phrase, "Only the paranoid survive," need look no further than Intel Corporation's financial releases earlier today about missing numbers and being punished by the markets. What do you think? #Management #venturecapital #privateequity #capitalmarkets #AIChips

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Last week Factory announced a new record on the AI coding benchmark SWE-bench. This week, founders Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes talk about their vision for autonomous Droids, Archimedes' compound lever, and their latest SWE-bench results on our new Sequoia Capital AI podcast, Training Data with me and Pat Grady. New episodes weekly. Listen or watch, and subscribe! Available on these platforms and wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube: https://seq.vc/TDE2y Spotify: https://seq.vc/TDE2s Apple: https://seq.vc/TDE2a Amazon: https://seq.vc/TDE2am (01:36) Personal backgrounds (10:54) The compound lever (12:41) What is Factory? (16:29) Cognitive architectures (21:13) 800 engineers at OpenAI are working on my margins (24:00) Jeff Dean doesn't understand your code base (25:40) Individual dev productivity vs system-wide optimization (30:04) Results: Factory in action (32:54) Learnings along the way (35:36) Fully autonomous Jeff Deans (37:56) Beacons of the upcoming age (40:04) How far are we? (43:02) Competition (45:32) Lightning round (49:34) Bonus round: Factory's SWE-bench results

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I find it hard to believe that with millions of EVs entering the market and the proliferation of AI compute that PGE is actually going to have excess capacity in 2040 without any additional generation from 3rd parties. I am also curious if there are enough transmission lines and if PGE views that as someone else’s problem. Maybe they are planning on AI and ACTUAL figuring it all out! https://lnkd.in/gybsMmaw

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Batteries are so 2023 https://lnkd.in/gZMKyc7i

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#Semiconductor companies related to #AI infrastructure are hot, in both the public market and private early-stage stage. At-scale AI application requires new infrastructures, which lead to opportunities at the silicon and hardware level. Thus far this year, VC-backed chip startups have raised nearly $5.3 billion in just 175 deals, per Crunchbase data. https://lnkd.in/gC2FZwC6 Previous articles from us already feature reasons of these trends: The WHY behind Impressive IPO of AI Infra Startup 👉 AI Compute's Bottleneck Lies in #Connectivity 👉 Advanced Packaging and Si #Photonics https://lnkd.in/eN35P5YY Next AI Infrastructures for New AI Decade 👉 Power Hunger Issue https://lnkd.in/gdcbB6S8 AI Infrastructure Hardware and Software Accrue the Most Value in AI Stack 👉 Big funding from VCs or tech titans going into the software infrastructure of generative AI stack in the past year only increased the devastated demand for AI servers and GPUs – hardware is more a bottleneck than software now.... https://lnkd.in/gYK7aaBP

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Founderville believes one of the most significant opportunities is emerging in legacy system applications. We look for manual tasks to leverage AI for efficient automation. Rather than chasing massive TAM, which will be addressed by larger VCs, we focus on smaller market domains that won't be chased as hard. Think of "boring" processes that require human intervention or manualized tasks. Those are opportunities. Keep your eyes open if you have deep domain expertise in a non-automated and fragmented industry. #entrepreneurs #venturecapital #startups #saas

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Cerebras Systems - Pioneering Wafer-Scale AI Computing (2 min read) Cerebras Systems, based in Sunnyvale, CA, is pioneering a new class of computer systems to accelerate AI by orders of magnitude. The company was founded in 2015 and is led by CEO Andrew Feldman, a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur who previously co-founded and led SeaMicro (acquired by AMD for $357 million) and had roles at companies like Force10 Networks and Riverstone Networks. At the core of Cerebras' solution is the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), the largest chip ever built with 2.6 trillion transistors. The WSE powers systems like the CS-2, enabling breakthroughs across industries. Major customers include TotalEnergies in energy, GlaxoSmithKline, and AstraZeneca in pharma, the Mayo Clinic for medical AI, and national labs like Argonne and Lawrence Livermore. Cerebras has around 335 employees but a major industry impact, with customer commitments approaching $1 billion. With over 400,000 AI cores, massive memory bandwidth, and ultra-fast interconnects, the CS-2 delivers cluster-scale performance in a single system. This allows for cutting training times from months to minutes on complex workloads like seismic modeling, drug discovery, and COVID research. Key verticals are pharmaceuticals/healthcare, energy/industrial, scientific research, and AI/ML. Cerebras removes current hardware constraints, allowing researchers to explore novel architectures and drive previously impossible innovations. As AI complexity grows, wafer-scale computing solutions like those developed by Cerebras Systems may be increasingly important in accelerating AI workloads and enabling new innovations across various industries. Credit: Jeffrey Cooper & Perplexity.ai For more on AI, robots, and Semicon, check out my blog: https://lnkd.in/eWESid86  

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Introducing the Alinia AI Alignment Platform. From their announcement: "Alinia AI enables companies to evaluate the performance of their GenAI applications and obtain evidence on how aligned these are to their values, policies, and business preferences. Following the performance assessment, Alinia AI recommends the best next actions to further guide and control LLM output and improve alignment."

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At the AI & Big Data Expo in Santa Clara today. https://lnkd.in/gAedFr9W AI today is like cloud migration 10 years ago or dot coms 20 years ago - companies know they need to incorporate AI but not sure the best way how or the best reason why. Need to have a Plan, not a Fomo. AI will definitely impact people and roles. It can help individuals, organizations, science, health, etc in many positive ways. "AI won't replace you. People using AI will." Many new and exciting possibilities and responsibilities! Thanks Olga Chetorkina for joining the sessions with me. #aiandbigdataexpo

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It appears the semiconductor industry, that bastion of modern tech innovation and economic stability, is grappling with a dojo-sized talent gap; a significant hurdle to growth and continued prosperity. According to respected authority Deloitte, the sector will require in excess of a million skill-ready employees by 2030 to keep pace with increasing demand. • A situation like this underscores the urgent need for strategic talent acquisition, workforce training, and a profound revamping of the outlook on career modalities in the 21st century. The clock is ticking. Here's my prediction: • The sheer demand for expertise is going to trigger an unprecedented era of focused technological education and expedited learning pathways, the ripples of which will be felt not merely in the semiconductor sector, but across the tech industry at large. • Private and public sectors will each play pivot roles in shaping this radical new landscape - an arena truly fertile for innovative partnerships, resourceful strategies, and visionary leadership. Everybody has a stake at this table. • The economic impact of cinching this talent gap can't be overstated, particularly considering the semiconductor industry's centric position in today's technology-reliant landscape. Plugging the talent gap is equivalent to maintaining global prosperity and advancing our society – as sweet a deal as that might sound! A critical outlook: • The challenges are mammoth and the solutions will require a much-needed degree of complexity. However, this isn't a doom and gloom narrative. Instead, the story of securing our future in this high-stakes game requires a vision that forecasts far-reaching market dynamics, nascent technological evolutions, and the indispensible role of human skills and ingenuity in this awe-inspiring narrative. Taking an optimistic and professional stance underlines my belief that the future remains bright despite the challenges ahead. When the stakes are high, so too is the potential for groundbreaking innovations and inspiring collaboration. To the semiconductor industry, I say: Onwards and upwards! #SemiconductorIndustry #WorkforceDevelopment #EconomicGrowth #FutureOfWork

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Vinod Khosla Sir, you are one of my role models and a visionary par excellence. One of the first INDIAN to establish a name for INDIA overseas. Your thought on AI AND SOFT COMPUTE SKILLS IS VERY VERY FORWARD THINKING AND WE ALL STARTUPS MUST THINK. #Leadership #Visionary #RoleModel #STARTUP

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And with lowest power - uses only 16 RDU chips to achieve this performance!

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