Tony Wan

It's here! Now in its fourth year, Business Insider's Seed 100 illuminates the most successful and high-potential early-stage startup investors. These are not just check-writers but shrewd risk-takers, enthusiastic collaborators, and trend forecasters. They are on the front lines, locking arms with visionary founders to transform ideas into full-fledged businesses, often putting money and support behind those builders before others see the opportunity. This year saw the return of a familiar face at the top (Ed Sim), alongside 36 newcomers, including Anne Dwane, Zal Bilimoria, Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Ryan Hoover, and Josh Kopelman. For her list debut, I spoke to solo capitalist Shruti Gandhi about how she's returned her maiden fund and scored 15 exits in the past five years: https://lnkd.in/e8xMbPqv Each year, as soon as we publish this list, I get a barrage of emails asking, "How can we get our investor on the list?" Our statistical analysis looks at an investor's performance in 25 areas using PitchBook and Crunchbase data. So if an investor isn't getting deal attributions on those sites, they're not included in our data set. We can't rank what we can't measure. You can read our full methodology here: https://lnkd.in/e3RsMj4K Massive kudos to Vishal Persaud for managing this project, our designers Annie F. and Jenny Chang-Rodriguez, our illustrator Nick Little, and our reporters Ben Bergman, Leena Rao, Samantha Stokes, and Rebecca Torrence. https://lnkd.in/evCqpHcP

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Over the weekend, I took a deep dive into the next big market opportunity in autonomous vehicles -- off-roading. In this article for TechCrunch, I looked at how two different startups are tackling separate niches in off-road automated driving. Overland AI just raised $10m in seed funding to advance its self-driving system that's geared towards military operations like reconnaissance, surveillance and delivering electronic warfare packages. Potential is solving for a different problem, aiming to automate off-road ADAS systems for a range of vehicles. Things like automatically changing to 4WD or mud mode and further optimizing those settings using existing vehicle sensors. https://lnkd.in/gqRq-xBK

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If anyone is in North County San Diego, on Thursday May 2nd, we will be hosting a tech entrepreneur and investor meet up at 5:30pm. We’ll have a couple speakers, one of which is a fin-tech start-up raising a round, followed up by a presentation on the state of the stock & crypto market. We host these events quarterly and usually get a lot of founders and investors to attend. If anyone is interested, please message me and I can send you the details. LaunchPad San Diego #startups #startupincubator #entrepreneur #investing #crypto #meetup

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Tribe AI raised venture capital to keep up with demand after six years of bootstrapping. Tribe AI founders, Jaclyn Rice Nelson and Noah Gale, told me that when they started the company in 2019, they had to convince companies that they needed an AI strategy, now they are raising their first outside capital to keep up with demand. More below 💰 #startups #venturecapital #artificialintelligence #AI TechCrunch https://lnkd.in/e6WTaqhG

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Here's a rather interesting take that runs counter to much of what CU leaders are often told, take for granted, etc, including why CUs should embrace “friction,” consider going from “100 to zero,” and how to really be thinking about AI: https://lnkd.in/erfx-9fg Plus, other coverage from WOCCU World CU Conference: * CEO stresses three themes https://lnkd.in/eZhZCdA2 * CUs challenged with an 'audacious goal' for growth, women in leadership https://lnkd.in/e8p9KCua

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This is a great article from Kevin Tian, founder of Doppel talking about how the company transitioned from detecting crypto scams to tackling digital threats like deepfakes and impersonations. Doppel uses AI to identify and remove harmful content, aiding in the protection of campaigns and organizations. With today’s environment and rapid growth of AI and deepfakes, Doppel is critical to help maintain election integrity. Tian highlights their effective partnerships with platforms to enforce content takedowns and their high success rate in removing policy-violating material. #cybersecurity #stayvigilant #AIrisk #deepfake #hireVets

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Taking stock of Tempus on its first day of trading: What it means to the company and other Chicago tech startups, and how its debut performance compares to other local IPOs. https://lnkd.in/gMjn95-V

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Digital assets are meant to be used. Not hoarded. Not endlessly flipped in pursuit of speculative riches. They’re to be used—for the unique purposes for which they were designed. That’s why Ayre Group is the world’s largest venture capital investor in Metanet apps. What is Metanet? Metanet represents the vision of a better, more inclusive and dynamic internet, an economically integrated online system that enables cost-effective, instant micropayments. Metanet will restore the original promise of a peer-to-peer internet model. Silicon Valley giants hijacked the original internet model by forcing all traffic through their centralized (and proprietary) hubs. Metanet will undo this sabotage. Metanet will bring a global democratization of access to data and services. Creators will be able to engage in an economically feasible direct-to-consumer model—no middlemen—allowing them to succeed on their merits, unconstrained by bureaucracy. Metanet will upend cross-border transactions by eliminating intermediaries. Remittances will be cheaper and more secure, as Metanet’s decentralized nature will enhance trust in digital transactions and offer greater control over personal data. Metanet is the marriage of IPv6, AI and the BSV Blockchain. IPv6 is bringing an exponential rise in the number of IP addresses, with a similar rise in the number of unique devices connected to the internet, including an army of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. All of these devices are talking to each other, many of them autonomously. AI’s assistance will be required as a traffic cop, helping to ensure that all these digital messages arrive where and when they should. The final piece of Metanet’s puzzle is BSV. BSV can process a huge volume of transactions swiftly and securely, at a cost measured in fractions of a cent, allowing the monetization of every piece of online data. BSV is the base value transfer token of the future internet. Developers can build with confidence on BSV. BSV is legally-and regulatory-compliant, with a locked protocol that traces its unbroken lineage to Bitcoin’s Genesis block, so what’s built today won’t be undone by unnecessary protocol tinkering. Metanet’s potential is too great to ignore. Learn more about how AI, IPv6 and BSV—the only public proof-of-work enterprise blockchain that can scale to make Metanet a reality—are building the internet of the future. https://lnkd.in/gxFM_jrW

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🚨 The former CFO of Dropbox, Sujay Jaswa oversees the investment and operating activities as a founding partner at WndrCo, alongside media vet Jeffrey Katzenberg. He joins us for VC Wednesdays.🚨 🖋️  You recently closed a $460 million VC fund. Where are you looking to deploy that? Everything we do is around the idea of the future of work and helping people optimize how they get work done. That’s why we're investors in companies like Airtable, Figma, Databricks, Deel, 1Password and others. That won’t change, but now, you'll see us really focus on the applications of AI that will meaningfully disrupt how work gets done, like in finance, HR and customer support. 🖋️  Why should founders work with WndrCo? One thing that we do that's different is starting one to two companies a year in areas that we think have the potential to yield big returns. So, when we talk to entrepreneurs, our operating experience stays current, and that angle on venture is fairly unique. The second is that each partner at WndrCo has built something, so we have the empathy that comes from that experience. Third, we do only five to seven deals a year, versus bigger firms that do hundreds. Because we have a smaller portfolio, entrepreneurs can get a hold of literally every partner within a couple of hours, 365 days a year. 🖋️ Which startup pitch sticks out the most in your memory over others and why? My favorite is one that’s not a household name yet, even though the business is absolutely on fire. It’s Aura, an all-in-one product to protect you and your family online. The idea is that unlike the physical world, you have no idea what your kids are doing on their phones and devices. Aura gives parents the tools to navigate raising a kid in our mobile-first and digital-first world. When the founder, Hari Ravichandran, walked me through how he would take it to market, it was love at first sight. He's an extraordinary entrepreneur and the best go-to-market person I've ever met when it comes to consumer products. 🖋️ What’s one investment you regret passing on and why? At the end of the day, this whole business is built on being part of monster companies as early as possible. One of the best enterprise companies of the last decade is Databricks. The founder and CEO, Ali Ghodsi, is a very good friend of mine, and for whatever reason, it never occurred to me in the early years to twist his arm to try and let him take our money. We invested in Databricks later than I’d have liked to. 🖋️  What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned working with Jeffrey Katzenberg? The biggest thing I've learned is that you can't be him, and it’s impossible to keep up with him. He's relentless, and I have never met someone who works harder than him. If he says he's going to do something, no matter how hard, if it's within his capabilities, he'll do it. He's a doer, and he just gets stuff done. I admire that so tremendously. #VCWednesdays #vc #venturecapital #startups #TechonLinkedIn

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The best things Founders can receive from investors (apart from term sheets) is feedback! At Funden, about 50% of pass notes come with some sort of feedback thats actionable and helpful to the Founder. Here’s an example of a pass note from earlier this month: “We focus on having live, paying enterprise customers with a repeatable, scalable sales process and line-of-sight to series-A financial metrics" Boom! That kind of transparency is unprecedented in the venture world. This type of feedback says, "Hey we're excited about the industry and product, but we need to just see a little more proof of concept on the business before we can dive deeper". Now, this founder has someone they can reach back out to, who is going to be familiar with them, and the Founder will now be right in their investable sweet spot! Another one we got recently was a few investors are telling the same founder, independently of one another, that their round size was far too big for their level of traction. Hearing the same type of feedback as to why they're passing in such a short period of time has a real and meaningful impact on how founders are structuring their raise. And we're happy to help them. https://lnkd.in/gZ_tVkTB ---------------------- Funden is the #1 fundraising platform connecting founders to capital. Founders use our tools and strategic guidance for quicker, more effective fundraises. Investors use us to receive curated, quality deal flow and broadcast co-investment opportunities to our audience of 1000+ global VCs, family funds, angel networks, syndicates, and more.

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🚨Norwest Venture Partners just closed its latest fund at $3 billion. Partner Scott Beechuk joins us for VC Wednesdays to discuss what he’s looking for, and more.🚨 🖋️ What’s the top thing you look for in an early-stage startup? How does that differ from the later stages? With early-stage startups, especially pre-revenue, my lens tends to be more focused on the product, because if you don't have a great product, it's hard to prop that up with good sales and marketing. In the later stages, I look for the ability of the company to continue to scale horizontally. For example, we have a company called Gong in our portfolio that started with a revenue intelligence product, but has now expanded into a whole platform of related products, and that's enabling them to scale in both vertically and horizontally. 🖋️ Norwest just raised a new $3 billion fund. What’s the biggest focus area for that? Where we are today with AI reminds me a lot of the early days of the internet, where there’s a whole new world out there that we can build on. AI has been around for decades, but never at this level of scale, sophistication and quality. So this new fund is an opportunity for us to invest in a new generation of companies born in the AI era, like Amazon and eBay back then. I’m really excited that we have fuel in the tank to be able to capitalize on that. 🖋️ Where do you think the biggest opportunity in AI lies? I don't think there's anything better than AI to transform a lot of front office things, whether it's sales or marketing or customer engagement. As a firm, we’re also investing in areas like security, data privacy, compliance and governance — which have taken on a whole new meaning with AI. How companies handle these will be equally, if not even more, important than AI applications themselves. We look for startups with deep technology stacks that are defensible, and would be difficult to replicate for any company of any size. 🖋️ What are some recent examples from your portfolio? One of my most recent investments is in a company called Lavender 💜,  which uses over 300 psychology heuristics coded into its product to coach salespeople on emails and improve successful outreaches. Another is Connect The Dots, which has used AI to build professional relationship graphs between people to enable warm introductions. The magic is all in the back-end, because something like this wouldn’t have been possible five years ago, since we didn’t have the compute, storage or cost structure to be able to process it. 🖋️ What areas within AI are overhyped? As much as I love the idea of AI agents, they are quickly becoming overhyped. Most companies are just characterizing AI assistants as AI agents, and that's wrong. AI agents are self-aware, they have memory and context, and they interact autonomously with other agents. We’re probably a year away from the first set of AI agents to really hit the market. #VCWednesdays #vc #venturecapital #startups #TechonLinkedIn

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What does it take for a startup to succeed in music-tech? More than Product-Market fit -- you also need Industry Market fit and Investor Market fit. I wrote about these patterns https://lnkd.in/gF4wBSfX

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If you're interested in a very open discussion on my motivations in founding The Generalist, the state of internet writing, and the nature of "taste" you might enjoy this discussion with Sachin and Adam. https://lnkd.in/eb2ubHpt

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An interesting article below, that demonstrates out how San Diego is punching above its weight.  And how Connect's strategy and execution over time, contintues to be central to that success. The article describes the current state of the market in Seattle.  (And i love Seattle.) It's a market that we tend to track with relative to venture fundings.  They used to kick our butts, we outraised them each of the last three years.  This despite the fact they have 3x as many funds there, and 9x the amount of resident capital there. (per pitchbook) Some key takeaways:  * They continue to compare themselves to SIlicon Valley. Instead, we leverage our proximity. *They whine there's not enough local investors (see note above - they have more than us). We bring over 200 VCs to SD annually! * They say founders are not connected with one another. We bring CEOs together regularly, in a variety of ways - private dinners and through our Springboard program. * They say they need to elevate their image on a national & international stage. Why we created and continue to build Five.Ten.Thirty (aka Inno Day).  * And the last paragraph - they need to concentrate on making their region a great place to live. Our mantra: "It's about Better, not Bigger." (See XEO, TL Fund). THANK YOU FOR ALL OF YOUR SUPPORT. WE ARE ON A MISSION TOGETHER!!!  (Comments, whining, suggestions on SD always welcome.) https://lnkd.in/g6Rq_f2Y

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📜 The Unexpected Journey of Walter Schramm and His Lost Fortune 📜 Escheatment can often feel like a complex process, but behind every unclaimed asset, there’s a deeply human story. NPR's Planet Money highlighted Walter Schramm’s saga of how his prudent long-term investment in Amazon became a nightmare for him and his family. 💡 A Dream and a Dilemma 💡 Walter, an entrepreneur, started selling Italian specialty products online in the late '90s. Facing fierce competition from an upstart called Amazon, instead of growing bitter, he invested in their stock, expecting long-term growth. 😲 The Shock of an Empty Account 😲 Walter wanted to avoid the temptation to sell early, so he decided not to log into his account. "If you believe in a company, you need to buy the stock and let it sit for 20 years. I mean, that's the philosophy of Warren Buffett. Go out and have a walk, enjoy nature, talk to your family, don't worry about the stock market." Unfortunately, Walter didn't know about escheatment. In 2015, after nearly two decades of patience, Walter finally logged into his E-Trade account only to find his investment gone. He reached out to E-Trade, who directed him to the Delaware Unclaimed Property Office. He learned that his stock had been liquidated in 2008 and the cash proceeds sent to Delaware. He was stunned -- he'd missed out on all of Amazon's stock appreciation since. ⚖️ Escheat: A Double-Edged Sword ⚖️ Escheatment, meant to protect unclaimed property, had reduced Walter’s stock to an $8,000 offer from the state—far below the fortune he'd own from his unliquidated shares. This system, designed to safeguard assets, can sometimes have unintended and life altering results. https://lnkd.in/eS97MywQ #Escheatment #UnclaimedProperty #Eisen #FinancialSecurity #HumanStories #PlanetMoney #WalterSchramm

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"We're just going to steamroll you". So so many startups building new AI products (with hopes of becoming businesses) are just solving near-term obvious problems or filling gaps that they see in current generation AI platforms. The (vast?) majority of these are really just features that will be absorbed by the platforms as they mature. Or as Sam Altman comments in this video - it's not because we don't like you, it's because we have a mission and we're "just going to steamroll you". The insane pace of advancement in platforms at this market stage makes a time-to-market advantage a foolish thing to bet on. Go deeper with critical thinking on moats, customer-centered product experience, and always build ahead of today's models... https://lnkd.in/gXe5nTHf

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Interesting piece from Marc Andreessen on how startups are not getting the regulatory support they need to sustain America's technological leadership. "Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain. Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence." While many investors themselves (both in the US and Europe) are worried how AI will change our lives, our jobs and social interactions, the top VC opinion leader thinks regulation is already too restrictive. #techstartups #techleadership #strategicgrowth

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