Alex Chen

In retrospect, 2024 was a pretty amazing year for innovation out of University of California, Berkeley. My Top 10 highlights below. Any I missed? 1. Databricks secured the largest VC round ever—a $ 10B funding round, led by multiple Berkeley founders. 2. OpenAI raised the 2nd largest VC funding round ever - $6.5B. Co-founded by Berkeley alum John Schulman. 3. Since launching Built By Berkeley (a newsletter that tracks Berkeley founded companies funding) in July 2024: 229 companies raised 27.4B. ~$1.1B per week raised by Cal founders! Wild! 4. Out of the 13 2024 Nobel Prize laureates - 4 had Berkeley connections. 5. Record-breaking Berkeley Olympic performance: 5 Gold, 10 Silver, 8 Bronze medals. More than many countries!  6. Berkeley-founded Perplexity emerged as a genuine Google Search competitor, reaching a $9B valuation (9x increase in a year) with 15M+ active users (probably already much higher than this). Along with some unbelievable execution speed from Aravind Srinivas and team. 7. Chatbot Arena, founded at Berkeley, became the industry standard for AI model benchmarking. 8. Rich Lyons became the new Berkeley chancellor. Rich will be a huge innovation catalyst for Berkeley. 9. Berkeley beats Stanford University 21-24 in the Big Game…not innovation but fun nevertheless.  10. Berkeley leads the PitchBook rankings with 1,642 VC-backed undergrad alumni-founded companies. 245 more than second-placed Stanford. Berkeley is shaping up to be ground zero of the coming AI wave from a company formation and research perspective. Looking forward to a bigger and better 2025.

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LP Tip #20 out of #50: To re-up or not to re-up A re-up refers to an LP making an additional investment in a fund where they previously invested. Before we dive in I want to share that there are reasons an LP may not to re-up which are not in your control. Here is a short list: ➡️ The LP may have evolved their strategy and needs to scale back the #️⃣ of funds they invested in.   ➡️ The LP was never set up to re-up in the first place. ➡️ The LP could be an individual that found themselves in a cash crunch and overly exposed to venture.  I'm assuming that when you got your investment that the LP explicitly told you they do re-ups. Please do not assume they do. My expectation is also that the LP dug in to properly underwrite the fund. 🏴 Re-ups are not automatic. An LP will have to re-underwrite each fund. The speed of the re-up also depends on how much work was done in the initial investment, who led the investment, level of confidence there existed when that investment was done, and current pipeline of funds. There are 4 flags that may cause an LP to walk away. 1️⃣ Partner Breakups/Changes and Team Turnover:  The biggest risk in Partnerships are whether the Partners will stay together. One LP gave me a framework on how to think through this issue that has stuck with me. Partnership is like a marriage. If one feels there is potential for a breakup, does one believe it will be an amicable breakup? Or, does one believe the spouses will never talk again? If it is an amicable split that is manageable. The Partners can find a way to support the fund. Then the question becomes whether the LP wants to back the Partner/s that remain.  If there is high team turnover. The LP will want to investigate because team stability is used as a proxy for firm sustainability and ability to scale. 2️⃣ Fund Does not Execute on what they Sold the LP:  The LP “bought” something specific and typically it is because they were missing this strategy or wanted exposure to a strategy for the portfolio they were constructing. An institutional LP will invest and write a detailed investment memo flagging all the things you said you were going to do and then go back and compare when you come back to ask for money. If for example you pitched a generalist seed stage fund and you show up asking for money sharing that you invested in deeptech at A that will cause alarm. The same can be said for the number of companies you promised to invest in or check sizes you wrote. If there are big differences LPs will want to know why. 3️⃣ Bad Actions  The fund manager/s does something that is unethical. This is a no go for an LP.  What if the situation is not clearcut? This is different for everyone and requires discussions b/w GP and LP, but most LPs don't want headline risk. 4️⃣ Continuous Underperformance  If it's early days an LP will look at some key indicators to see how you are progressing over time.

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Kettleborough VC has been active for ~6 years, invested in ~30 companies, gone through ~80 funding rounds, witnessed ~12 exits including ~4 instances of partial principal erosion, seen ~4 seed to $100M journeys, tracking ~29% XIRR across the portfolio. A couple of IPOs from the portfolio surely seem very much in line ahead.

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🎃 Ready to carve out your path to Product-Market Fit?🎃 Join Companyon Ventures’ Behind the Curtain roundtable tomorrow (Oct 30) with Michael Ho, Firas Raouf, Eric Morgan, and Hersh Tapadia as they 'exorcise' the mysteries of PMF. Don’t ghost us—RSVP in the comments 👻 https://lnkd.in/emCJcn4w #emergingmanager #venturecapital #productmarketfit

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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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In the past several months, I have been to more events than I can keep track of, but the Seed Stage Summit last Friday truly stands out. 🎯 Huge thanks to Andrew Yeung and Justin Wolz + Drew Parten for hosting such an incredible gathering of 200+ founders and investors from across the globe. 🌍 The highlight for me was listening to Alexa von Tobel from Inspired Capital. ⭐️ No pun intended, but listening to her share her experience about building a company and her insights around founders - the grit and commitment necessary to find success and live a life without regret - was truly inspiring. 🚀 My takeaways: When you're finally in the lane where you're doing what you're supposed to do, you come alive. I worked every minute, I slept thinking about it - and I was incredibly happy because I felt self-actualized. ✨ Find your true north: The hardest thing founders do is sign up for something that's not their life's work. She never considered quitting because she was solving a problem she deeply cared about. 🧭 Follow the data, but trust your vision: The best businesses are testing machines. Yet she also emphasized the importance of having conviction about how the world will unfold and building for that future. 📈 The regret machine is expensive: People always regret the things they don't do, not what they tried and failed at. 💭 It was incredible meeting so many founders building amazing things - this NYC startup community is truly special. 🗽✨ Tommy McNulty Brent Greenberg Surge Aravindan Rho Courtney Cardin Ruth Kresha Camilo Tobacia Ishita Jindal Korina Edwards Dima Syrotkin 🇺🇦 David Alson Colby Cox Ihar Mahaniok Anaid Chacón Rachel ten Brink Max Kolysh Aakash Shah Eve Halimi #startups #entrepreneurship #venturecapital #leadership #nyctech #inspiration 🚀

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Since the YC deadline to hear back for W25 is coming up next week, here’s the story of how we went from 2 students coding in an MIT dorm room to being full-time YC founders building Delve in SF. For all you founders anxiously waiting to hear back, just keep building — you’ll be successful regardless of the decision. -- In Fall 2023, my co-founder Karun Kaushik and I were studying AI at MIT and spending all of our free time building an AI medical scribe to help doctors. We had vaguely heard about YC from a friend who had just gotten accepted but had no plans of applying whatsoever. However when the YC deadline rolled around, we spontaneously decided to put in an application on the very last day. We spent that whole day in Karun’s dorm room typing up the application and filming all the required videos. We finally hit submit the minute of the deadline! By the next day we had already moved on. We went back to the usual rhythm of coding in the dorm room, calling with doctors, attending conferences, etc. If anything, we were even more motivated now to get more traction and be successful regardless. Later that week, while we were eating in the dorm kitchen, I noticed I got an email saying we had a YC interview scheduled. My heart rate spiked. I jumped up out of my seat and immediately told Karun. I never seriously considered YC, but for the first time it hit me that it might actually be a possibility. When the day of the interview rolled around, we did mock interviews with former YC founders and focused mostly on calming our nerves. More important than the actual content of the interview, we wanted to show our excitement for building and hacking together as co-founders. Unfortunately the interview caught us by surprise. The group partners didn't seem to care as much about our actual AI medical scribe. Instead, they seemed more curious about a side idea we had listed in our application that we wrote up in a day. The idea was about streamlining HIPAA compliance (since we had to go through HIPAA for our AI medical scribe). By this point, we were already seriously considering pivoting into this and had made a lot of progress on the idea. The YC interview was our tipping point Not too long after, we got an ominous email titled “YC.” We were freaked out. I could not sleep the entire night. Then, in the middle of class the next day, I got a phone call from Karun with Surbhi on the other end of the line. My heart rate spiked. I ran outside of the classroom. That turned out to be our acceptance call:) -- For everyone out there still waiting to hear back, just keep grinding. Build as if you’ve been rejected and you might just be pleasantly surprised. I’m also always here to help with mock interviews/give advice! We’ve helped a handful of friends through the YC app process and are always here to support other founders!

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💡 Almost daily, I hear a leading investor say that their firm is betting on Carta Fund Admin as the future. It is thanks to Vrushali Paunikar's team who are the masters helping revolutionize the present. The game-changing potential this announcement holds for our clients and the industry is one of the many reasons why folks back Carta to reshape how private markets should have operated over the last dozen decades. Our robust infrastructure powers crucial transactions with unparalleled efficiency and transparency & I'm excited to share how Carta is redefining the status quo once again ... 💼 🌐 Automated Money Movement for Fund Admin 🌐 💼 In this new era we partner with clients to optimize supporting the treasury function while managing their funds and spvs. The future is bright with Carta leading the charge welcoming the following: > Automated Setup for Client Approval: Client requests related to management fees and expense reimbursements are auto set up for the VC/PE firm approval, reducing processing time and providing real-time fund performance tracking. Did someone say, DAILY NAV? > Consistent Processing and No Transaction Fees: Error-free money movement, without the worry of unexpected fees on late or expired wires. > Consolidated Infrastructure for Enhanced Transparency: Systems that communicate reduce headaches of multiple log-ins to separate bank portals and provide clients payment status visibility directly within Carta's Platform. Clients believe that with the correct #People, #Systems, & #Controls in place we as an industry are ready to say farewell to manual processes, black-box operations, and cumbersome transactions. #FintechInnovation #FutureOfPrivateMarkets #Treasury #MoneyMovement #VC #PE #FundAdmin

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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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People often talk about how magical it was to take Uber (or now, Waymo) for the first time. If you extend this to fintech, the comparable that comes to my mind is doing an x-border transfer on WISE. Going from the tedious, opaque, expensive SWIFT payment to cheap, fast WISE payments. The magic behind WISE: Local Processing. Over the past few years, we have seen a few renditions of Local Processing across building global teams, remittances and payments among others. In the second edition of A Prepared Mind, I talk about Local Processing as a service, its various avatars and how it unlocks savings for customers while building interesting businesses! If you are building or thinking about building in the space, I'd love to jam with you, and exchange insights. I am always available at satvik@quona.com https://lnkd.in/gen2mVEz

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A new era of deep tech has emerged. First time funds will raise “unheard of” amounts of capital to fuel next gen deep tech startups - producing outsized, superior returns for LP’s compared to the rest. Prudent investors will act on this data and shift investment strategy as LP’s or risk being left behind savvy wealth managers and CIO’s / FO’s who saw this trend begin 4 years ago.

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I love YC Demo Day season. It’s an insane concentration of driven founders building something they deeply believe in at the frontier of tech. I know it's more trendy for VCs to complain about YC. But I believe Garry Tan when he says 5-10% of companies become worth a billion dollars. Maven’s hit rate from YC is even higher: 16% have had $B+ exits, and we’re trending toward a 40% graduation rate from Seed to Unicorn with investments we’ve made alongside YC. Since Maven’s founding in 2013, we’ve funded 12 YC startups out of the 66 companies we’ve invested in. Here are a few: Cruise: acquired by GM for $1B+ Embark: $4B SPAC, acquired by Applied Intuition Chariot: acquired by Ford before Series A May Mobility: raised $300M+ in follow on funding, including from Toyota Carrot Fertility: raised $100M+ in follow on funding, including from CRV and USVP Daybreak Health: Series A from Lightspeed, Series B from USV Moment Robotics: acquired by Cruise founder Kyle Vogt’s new company, The Bot Co (Maven is an investor) Our strategy differs from other YC investors. Many funds build a YC “index fund”, investing in many startups per batch. It’s not a bad move. But we focus on concentration, meeting all the companies in our thesis area and investing in one or two. Gratefully, I think every company from the list above can point to Maven as one of their most trusted partners that made a difference: intros to customers, closing follow-on funding from top VCs, connecting key hires, and offering genuine care and advice in both the best and toughest of moments. What are we looking for in a YC investment? 1) Team - a technical product team with startup DNA and hustle that can achieve a bold vision. Brilliant, determined founders no one would bet against who are ambitious enough to build an iconic company. 2) Vision worth fighting for - what are you bringing into the world that is worth all the time, effort and money required for success? Why aren’t existing solutions good enough? Are we proud to help bring this idea to the world? 3) Massive market - because of the valuation premium YC demands, even a $B outcome may not return today’s average Seed fund. Honestly, that math sucks. In order to pay the premium, we have to believe that if we’re right, we’ll be wildly successful. 4) Consumer trend - Maven invests in tech companies addressing emerging consumer trends. Even if some investments are B2B or B2B2C, they are always grounded in a consumer insight: autonomous vehicles in 2014, fertility care in 2017, mental health in 2020. Today, we’re looking at consumer applications of AI and frontier consumer health. Many successful companies we fund are outside of YC as well – like Zoom, Hello Heart, Epic!, Class, Wildtype. So we match YC’s Unicorn % across the rest of our portfolio, too 💪 YC founders in consumer tech and digital health: if you want to build an iconic company that delivers a positive impact for millions of consumers - I can’t wait to talk to you!

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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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Hot take on a lot of early-stage digital health companies out there: You're not a tech company. Most tech-enabled care companies I've seen over the past two years are only tech-enabled in the sense that they use telehealth as their delivery mechanism for care. There are exceptions to this, of course - companies who build computer vision and applied AI tools to better the doctor-patient experience, companies who build tooling around risk scoring and stratification to enable more personalized medicine, companies who build truly novel intakes to better route patients to the appropriate care, etc. These companies have real technology chops and, if they sell it right to the market, can get credit for this from investors. But if you're truly a telehealth provider, you need to realize now that the goal post has shifted dramatically from 2021 and you're going to be valued at maturity at something like 3x EBITDA. That's profit. Not revenue. Throw a revenue multiple out the window. That's not the world we live in if you're a virtual doctor's office. Think of how that impacts venture math. If you're raising a seed round at $15M post-money (or $12M pre-money), it means you'll have to generate something like $150-200M in annual EBITDA to be a fund returner for your seed investors. Maybe even more with dilution, since telehealth businesses are not traditionally capital efficient and will likely need to raise material additional capital to reach that scale. You need to be ridiculously profitable (probably on $800M-$1B in annual revenue since you're likely going to be a 40% gross margin business). Here's the good news: you can set yourself up well (and probably be a contrarian founder relative to your peers), by talking about EBITDA growth and how you can grow into a fund-returning outcome based on realistic mature market comps. This will stand out for the investors you're pitching, even at the early stage. This is how you can beat the malaise of the tech-enabled care market. Focus on the right metrics and the right type of growth. You don't have to have all the answers (no founder does), but you need to make sure the ship is headed in the right direction. A focus on profitability for "tech-enabled care" (*ahem* telehealth) businesses is a good first step.

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The insane story of how Retool (YC W17) went from zero to a $3.2 billion company in just 5 years 👇 David Hsu founded Retool in 2017, 6 months after he graduated from Oxford. As an undergrad, he started Cashew, a Venmo competitor for the UK, where he first experienced the frustration of building internal tools and admin dashboards. This frustration would inspire Retool. David applied to the W17 batch of Y Combinator with the mission of improving the internal tools experience. He experimented with various ways to position Retool, but couldn't drum up much interest. Until... One day, David sent a cold email to a startup called Rappi, telling them Retool "helps companies build internal tools faster." Rappi's CTO replied within 15 mins to request a demo. David had finally landed on positioning that worked! He continued to refine this positioning over the next few months and continued to leverage cold outbound as a way to reach his ICP. 9 months later, Retool had already hit $500k in ARR. After a year of growing the business primarily via cold outbound, David decided Retool needed a scalable inbound strategy. Turns out, this was easier than he thought. After launching officially on Hacker News, Retool began to get 15-20 new company sign ups every day 📈 To keep these new customers happy, Retool spied on them. No, not literally. But the Retool team had a notification set up whenever an error happened and made it their mission to contact the customer and fix the error before they even knew they had it. This helped immensely in building trust and a strong user community, and these early product evangelists supercharged Retool's growth. From there, it's been product led growth and traditional enterprise sales. In July of 2022, Retool raised a $45M Series C led by @Sequoia at a $3.2 billion valuation. They're a major player in the growing dev tools market and are one of the most successful recent YC companies. Key learnings: 1. Early stage startups can focus on outbound as a GTM strategy until they have 100% product market fit. 2. Companies can find product market fit via sales. Retool analyzed the feedback they were getting from emails and used it to change not just their messaging, but their product features as well. 3. Be customer obsessed to the point that it's almost crazy. A community of product evangelists is one of the most valuable growth engines a company can have. Thank you for reading! Source for this post linked here: https://buff(.)ly/4f5Pwcl ____ Find this helpful? Follow Jake Johnson for daily startup insights ⚡

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~40% of Frec’s customers are engineers working in tech, many of whom expect frequent and large capital gains. They also prefer to self-manage their money, which makes Frec an ideal platform. Meet Evan: an engineering leader who upgraded from investing in ETFs to direct indexing. Direct indexing appealed to Evan because it offers comparable returns to his ETFs while saving him money on advisory and ETF fees. “ETFs are true and tested, and giving folks a different way of investing in the market while saving more money is really appealing.” He’s used many other robo-advisors and other fintech tools, but “Frec seems to maximize tax loss harvesting opportunities better than any other product that I’ve used.” He also likes Frec's transparent fee structure.  “I feel like with a lot of other companies, that’s muddled in with the cost of investments,” he told us, “and you don’t really know how much you’re paying or how much you’re not saving as a result. I think Frec does a really good job of laying all of that out and giving you a true understanding of the cost of these investment products.” Read more about his Frec journey here ⬇

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