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Worklife invests up to $3M at the formation stage.
Our pitch to founders is…
Articles by Brianne
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Introducing the Worklife Storytellers Collective
Introducing the Worklife Storytellers Collective
We’re launching the Worklife Storytellers Collective with support from 100+ film and TV writers, podcast producers…
12 Comments -
I'm joining ElevenLabs!
I'm joining ElevenLabs!
I met Mati last September to give advice and make intros as the company evolved from single to multi-product, a similar…
64 Comments -
AI-Native GTM: Why GTM Engineering is the Competitive Advantage You're Missing
AI-Native GTM: Why GTM Engineering is the Competitive Advantage You're Missing
The traditional playbooks for startup growth & GTM are now obsolete. Blog posts feel dated.
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Creative Hackers: How AI is collapsing credentials and breaking all of the rules
Creative Hackers: How AI is collapsing credentials and breaking all of the rules
There's a scene in the film Booksmart where Molly, the school-obsessed overachiever who dresses and acts like she's…
4 Comments -
Tomato Girl Summer vs. AI Slop
Tomato Girl Summer vs. AI Slop
What this summer's most wholesome trend tells us about what people want to see I love a good trend, especially ones…
2 Comments -
If you want taste, study the greats
If you want taste, study the greats
As “taste” has become a hot topic of conversation in Silicon Valley, I’ve spent the last few weeks reaching out to…
5 Comments -
Investing in GC.AI: a specialized tool for a growing team of in-house experts
Investing in GC.AI: a specialized tool for a growing team of in-house experts
As I reflect on the last five years of building Worklife, I’m reminded how quickly Silicon Valley as an ecosystem can…
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How we’re doing and what we’ve been up to
How we’re doing and what we’ve been up to
As we enter a new phase of growth at Worklife, I want to take a moment to highlight where we’re at as a firm and recent…
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A lesson for AI-first companies: excitement doesn't mean intent to buy
A lesson for AI-first companies: excitement doesn't mean intent to buy
A false signal I see a lot with early stage AI-first companies is excitement around AI is misinterpreted as likelihood…
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Build for the expert, you.
Build for the expert, you.
The tangible advantages that respected operators with deep domain expertise see when they choose to start a company. As…
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Activity
39K followers
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Brianne Kimmel shared thisVery impressive to see the immediate impact Merge has on AI spend. (a Worklife Fund I company)Brianne Kimmel shared thisWe just cut AI spend by 75% across an entire workforce in one click. Introducing: Merge for Workforce. Without Merge, your employees are left choosing one of two options: 1. Spend 100x the cost they should be from using frontier models for everything 2. Deliver subpar work from overly restrictive model access Instead with Merge, IT can connect any identity provider and set model routing policies by team in one click. Merge pushes them to every machine through a desktop client, overriding the model configs across your team’s AI assistants and coding tools. Now every task gets the right model for the job. The result? 75x fewer tokens with faster and better output.
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Brianne Kimmel shared thisNYC: We're back next week with another design x research night with Contra. Come learn best practices from Cursor, FLORA, and MagicPath. Our last event had over 400 RSVPs. Great energy, live music, and discussions with creative leaders in AI See you next Thursday! https://luma.com/0t9hold9
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Brianne Kimmel shared thisHow does Replit make product decisions for 60M+ users? "Six months before that initial [agent] launch, the company was tiny—barely 60 people, almost exclusively technical folks. A few executives, the co-founders, our head of design. The vast majority of us were AI researchers and software engineers. So one of the first principles I kept repeating was: We’re not building this for us. Don't get excited about what we're building because you’d use it daily. Get excited because we're building something for people who've never written a single line of code in their lives—people who are going to have their first "aha" moment when their software runs for the very first time. As we grew, that became part of the company's DNA. Every designer we hire, every PM, keeps reminding us daily that this is the most important principle we follow. Our ideal customer is the knowledge worker—a group nobody else was really talking about, and it's worked well. There's a constant tension between design quality and engineering. Early on I struggled with it myself, because I spent my whole career on the technical side, with a fixation on moving fast and shipping as soon as possible—which the AI space forces on you anyway. Things move so fast that if you wait even a few days, your product is already deprecated. But over time I've learned to value the teams that pull the handbrake and say, "No, we need to take our time on user journeys, we need to do the interviews to understand whether this is actually exciting for our customer." That tension can feel like your startup is slowing down. In reality, it's exactly what keeps you on track." Listen to the full conversation: https://lnkd.in/gj_KVAcz
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Brianne Kimmel shared thisWe had over 400 RSVPs on a Friday evening, NYC really shows up! Thank you again Contra for hosting. We'll be releasing the summer and fall schedule for our creator series soon featuring design leaders from FLORA, fal, Runway, Cognition, and more.Brianne Kimmel shared thisSitting front row at the fireside chat with Michele Catasta, President and Head of AI at Replit, and Brianne Kimmel, Founder of Worklife Ventures, for builders & creators on a June Friday evening in NYC was kind of insane. There’s a lot of respect for the achievements, of course. But even more for the authenticity and the sharing of the non-glamorous parts of the founder journey. An intellectual conversation with good humor. What can be better? Hard to pick just one takeaway. As AI tools get more accessible and generalist skills get the spotlight, deep expertise still matters. Cybersecurity is the clearest example, but not the only one. 🪐 Listening to people like Michele who lead in AI IRL is a different kind of experience. Such a pleasure meeting you both, Brianne and Michele! Appreciate the warm welcome, Margarita Di Monte. I wish we spoke more. And thank you to everyone I chatted with, you made the evening!
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Brianne Kimmel shared thisFrom the very beginning Hex made a decision to have the best swag in tech. Now, you can get forever swag (tattoos) at their conference booth. 🤘Brianne Kimmel shared thisTattoos are back at Club Hex Tattoos are back at Club Hex Tattoos are back at Club Hex Tattoos are back at Club Hex Tattoos are back at Club Hex come hang out with us (and get your tattoo) at Snowflake Summit from June 1-3 → https://hex.tech/club-hex/
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Brianne Kimmel shared thisAs storytelling continues to be one of the most important skills in Silicon Valley, we've spent the last few months building a first of its kind community with creative services for founders. Introducing the Worklife Storytellers Collective with support from 100+ film and TV writers, podcast producers, production companies, and the best creators in entertainment.
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Brianne Kimmel shared thisOnly 11% of investors have backed a company at seed that scales to $100M in revenue. As the founder of a new firm, I'm so grateful the Hightouch founders took a bet on me when they were raising. For anyone thinking about starting something, we write the first check to one or two people with an idea and help you every step of the way to building a massive venture-scale business. No pitch deck, no website, maybe you haven't even left your current job yet.Brianne Kimmel shared thisWe’re excited to share that we’ve passed $100M in ARR 🚀 Enterprises have adopted our Composable CDP and Agentic Marketing Platform to power personalized customer experiences with AI and their own data. This milestone reflects where the market is headed: Data-platform native, AI-powered architectures are becoming the standard for modern marketing teams. Thank you to our customers, partners, and team for trusting Hightouch to power this shift. Read more on TechCrunch: https://lnkd.in/evhpP6MD
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Brianne Kimmel shared thisA great move by Zendesk to bolster agentic AI capabilities. I invested in Forethought in 2018, one of the first truly agentic AI companies. Forethought’s agents have 15x return on investment and 98% resolution rate.Brianne Kimmel shared thisThere are moments where you stop. You look back at the journey, and realize just how rare it is. Today is one of those moments. I’m incredibly proud to share that Forethought has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Zendesk. Roughly 1% of venture-backed companies ever reach a successful exit. More than seven years ago, we set out with a simple but ambitious idea: AI could transform the customer experience. When we first launched Forethought at TechCrunch Disrupt, that vision felt bold—even a little crazy. Today, AI agents aren’t just transforming customer experience. They’re transforming every industry imaginable. And seeing that original vision come to life in ways even bigger than we imagined is deeply humbling. I’m incredibly proud of the grit and resilience of the entire Forethought team. Startups test you in every possible way, and this team has showed up again and again to bring us to this moment. I’m especially proud of my co-founder, Sami Ghoche, who stepped into the CEO role over the past year and a half and has driven Forethought forward with relentless execution and deep customer obsession. And who will continue to take Forethought to new heights in our continued mission to serve our customers, alongside our new teammates at Zendesk. Thank you to all of our investors who believed in us, bet on us early, and supported us throughout it all. And most importantly to our customers—thank you. To the visionaries who trusted us when we were just a handful of people in a room, sitting alongside you, learning how to serve you better. Forethought simply does not exist without you. In terms of our product and team, Forethought will continue as per usual, to serve our customers, delivering billions in ROI for you and your customers. Only now, alongside Zendesk, we will be able to do this at a global scale, and move even faster with innovation. Cheers to all the Forethinkers who made this happen. #entrepreneurship #ai #customerexperience #forethought #zendesk New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Blue Cloud Ventures, Vlad Tenev, Alex Kolicich, Athos Private Wealth, Rob Markey, Suranga Chandratillake, Baron Davis, Henry Ward, Cleo Capital, Collaborative Fund, Mathilde Collin, Frontline Ventures, Geodesic Capital, Gwyneth Paltrow, Andrea Coravos, Industry Ventures, Alexa von Tobel, Jason Boehmig, Jean-Philippe Jabre, K9 Ventures, LL COOL J, INC., Vladimir Novakovski, Neo, Kelvin B., Operator Collective 🔆, Original Capital, Sound Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, South Park Commons, Accomplice, Jeremy Erlich, Christopher Manning, Robert Downey Jr., Village Global, William Smith, Brianne Kimmel, Shaherose Charania, Gary Sahota, and many more (hit the mention limit 🙈!)
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Brianne Kimmel shared thisI've joined ElevenLabs to build our latest product Creative Platform. Excited to work with our customers like Disney, Duolingo, and Epic Games. If you're in marketing, music, gaming, publishing... I'd love to chat!
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Brianne Kimmel liked thisBrianne Kimmel liked thisMultitasking that actually works? 👀 This or That with Benjamin Lee (Engineering Lead at Hex) and Amy Ru (Product Manager at LangChain). Are you a run-it-live or a set-it-and-check-later when asking Hex questions?
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Brianne Kimmel liked thisBrianne Kimmel liked this"Wish you were here” is a weird thing to say before an event. So instead: Be here! 🌉 See you Oct 27 in San Francisco for Prompt: the Data & AI conference for people shaping the future. Get on the list: prompt@hex.tech
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Brianne Kimmel liked thisBrianne Kimmel liked thisIn 2021, a big tech company offered to buy Replit for $1bn. We were six people, and broke. We had plenty of users but little revenue to show. It was a tough time both at the company and personally. My mother was fighting cancer back in Jordan. Saying yes would have been the easiest thing in the world. But I thought about that for a long time. I ended up saying no. Part of it was that it felt too early. Big companies acquire startups and then don't develop them any further. It would have taken the life out of it. But the bigger part was a question I couldn't get past: if I sell, what do I do next? You watch founders sell their companies. Most never build anything meaningful again. A lot of them get depressed. And I already knew what I'd want to work on. This. I'd probably end up trying to build the same thing again, from zero, without the team or the users. Selling wouldn't have ended the work. It would have just ended the progress. Years later, in a much worse stretch, Paul Graham asked me if Replit was a phase or the thing I wanted to keep doing. I couldn't picture doing anything else. He said, then why does a bad month matter? Or a bad year? You have decades. I've been building like that ever since.
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Brianne Kimmel liked thisBrianne Kimmel liked thisGenerate with any model on Runway, then take it to delivery spec with Ruby. Seedance 2.5, Gen-4.5, MiniMax H3, whatever you use, converts straight to 16-bit EXR or 10 and 12-bit ProRes and HEVC. Try it now: https://app.runwayml.com/
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Brianne Kimmel liked thisBrianne Kimmel liked thisThe engineers who thrive here have one thing in common: they want their work to ship and matter. If that's you, Gamma is hiring.
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Brianne Kimmel liked thisBrianne Kimmel liked thisWe wanted to send you a little save-the-date to say we'd love to see you at Prompt - our first customer conference! Clear your schedule for October 27th and get ready to spend the day in San Francisco with people who are building the future of data in the age of AI. Come find out what a data conference feels like when it's actually good. Grab your spot at prompt@hex.tech
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Brianne Kimmel liked thisBrianne Kimmel liked thisI’ve officially joined SpaceX AI! I first started talking with Michael T., Jordan Topoleski, and Brian McCarthy, at Cursor and was blown away by the product and the team. I was hired as Cursor’s CMO. Then on my first official day, the SpaceX acquisition closed. Something that already felt special has now gained the most inspiring mission on Earth (and beyond), massive consumer reach, and a huge advantage in compute. Both companies move at a pace that’s hard to understand until you’re inside. I’m wrapping up week one, and we’re already off to the races. This is a wild time in AI. I’m excited to dig in, learn, and help shape what’s next.
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Brianne Kimmel liked thisExcited to share what Batu and I have been working on as a part of YC!Brianne Kimmel liked thisTovenAI is an AI-powered intelligence platform for compliance at institutional trading firms. Their platform is built for the scale and complexity of compliance at firms ranging from specialist brokerages to banks, with agents already live across multiple workflows at a top-10 U.S. trading firm. Compliance teams today have to juggle disparate systems – from recorded calls and chats to trade blotters and internal policies. Important context gets lost as teams move between these systems, and gathering the evidence needed to form a complete picture is cumbersome. As firms trade more, capture more data, and face rising regulatory expectations, this burden compounds. Leaders are left with three poor options: narrowing coverage, slowing business expansion, or escalating resource investment – often with diminishing returns. TovenAI’s agents reason across communications and trade data as one connected whole, with each firm’s internal policies and relevant regulations in context, giving compliance officers the evidence they need to make decisions. Batuhan Balci and Sam Turchetta met eight years ago at Stanford before building AI systems at Meta and Citadel. If you work in finance or compliance, or know someone who does, reach out to founders@toven.ai Congrats on the launch, Batu and Sam! 🚀 https://lnkd.in/gestEUuH
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Brianne Kimmel liked thisBrianne Kimmel liked thisThere is one book that got Basedash to product-market fit. It's not The Lean Startup. It's not Zero to One. It's Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. Competition is hotter than ever. You can't compete on money, talent or speed alone anymore. So, how do you even stand a chance? By putting the customer first in everything you do. Basedash competes with products made by Microsoft, Google and Salesforce - some of the top companies in the world. Convincing our first dozen or so customers to move off these platforms was unsurprisingly difficult. We succeeded because we answered every Slack or email within minutes. We turned down a lot of business so that our early partners knew they had our full attention. We under-promised and over-delivered. We prioritized them in our roadmap. To this day, we try to treat every customer like they are the only one that matters. Which is why Unreasonable Hospitality is required reading for every new hire.
Experience
Education
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Kent State University
Top 1% of class
Began taking college classes my junior year of high school.
Graduated top 1% of class
Nominated by peers & faculty: Student Leader of the Year & Junior Leader of the Year
Created investment program to connect student entrepreneurs with mentors, investors and thought leaders in Silicon Valley, Chicago, NYC and other tech hubs.
Developed original entrepreneurship curriculum for student-led businesses. Led entrepreneurship pitch nights and participated in Entrepreneurship…Began taking college classes my junior year of high school.
Graduated top 1% of class
Nominated by peers & faculty: Student Leader of the Year & Junior Leader of the Year
Created investment program to connect student entrepreneurs with mentors, investors and thought leaders in Silicon Valley, Chicago, NYC and other tech hubs.
Developed original entrepreneurship curriculum for student-led businesses. Led entrepreneurship pitch nights and participated in Entrepreneurship Immersion Week with select students from top universities.
Created women in entrepreneurship program, which I taught in New Orleans, Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and low-income communities throughout Northeast Ohio. This program was adopted by student-run non-profit organizations.
Languages
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Spanish
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