Smart Venture Podcast

Craig Newmark - Founder of Craigslist
Jim McKelvey - Co-founder of Square 
Justin Osofsky - COO of Instagram 
Chris Slowe - CTO of Reddit
Todd Kaplan - CMO of Kraft Heinz, ex- CMO of Pepsi
Suzanne Kounkel - CMO of Deloitte
Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean - Chief Corporate Affairs Officer of DoorDash
Daniel Kan - Co-founder & CPO of Cruise 
Matt Madrigal - CTO of Pinterest
Ben Kus - CTO of Box
Berent Bellm - ex CEO of BigCommerce 
Henry Schuck - CEO of Zoominfo 
Tony Stubblebine - CEO of Medium 
Chris Koehler - CMO of Twilio 
Kevin Rose - Partner at True Ventures, ex-GP at Google Ventures
Robert Rosenberg - 35-Year CEO of Dunkin' Donuts, ex-Board Member @Domino's Pizza 
Monty Moran - ex-CO-CEO Chipotle Mexican Grill
Jeetu Patel - CPO of Cisco, ex-CPO & CSO @ Box
Paul Madera - Co-founder & General Partner at Meritech Capital. Portfolio: Facebook, Salesforce
Rob Chesnut - ex Chief Ethics Officer @Airbnb, SVP @eBay & Chegg
Olivia Nottebohm - CRO of Notion, ex COO of Dropbox, ex VP at Google 
Marvin Chow - VP of Google 
Erin Egan - VP & Chief Privacy Officer, Public Policy at Facebook / Meta
Ethan Evans - VP of Amazon
Howard Wright - VP of Nvidia 
David Cowan - Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners Portfolio: LinkedIn, Twitch
Kim Scott - NYT&WSJ Bestselling Author of Radical Candor, ex-CEO coach of Dropbox &Twitter  
Chris Voss - WSJ Bestselling Author 
Bob Muglia - ex CEO of Snowflake, ex President of Microsoft
Aparna Chennapragada CPO @ Microsoft AI for Work, ex CPO of Robinhood, ex VP of Google
Sumit Chauhan - CVP of Microsoft
Roman Chernin - Co-Founder of Nebius 
Gary Pinkus - Chairman of McKinsey North America 

+more

Ranked by Listen Notes as one of the top 1.5% most popular shows globally
Listenership 100 + countries 
Nominated by Asian American Podcasters Association for Golden Crane Awards

Apple:https://apple.co/3d6bGea
Spotify: http://bit.ly/gracegong
Website: https://www.smartventurepod.com
YouTube: https://bit.ly/gracegongyoutube

Founder, CEO & Host

Venture with Grace

I go LIVE with a VC/ LP/ founder daily here on LinkedIn. Past guests:

Co-Founder & Managing Partner @ Greycroft - Ian Saginaw
Partner @ Sequoia - James Flynn
Partner @ Sapphire Ventures - Rajeev Dham
Partner @ NEA - Aaron Jacobson
General Partner @ IVP - Somesh Dash
Partner @ Lightspeed - Hemant Mohapatra
Partner @ Bessemer - Mike Droesch
Managing Director @ Insight Partners - Nikhil Sachdev
Partner @ a16z - Emily Bennett 
Partner @ Pear VC - Vivien Ho
General Partner @ Gradient Ventures - Darian Shirazi 
General Partner @ Lux Capital - Shahin Farshchi 
Partner @ Upfront Ventures - Aditi Maliwal
Partner @ Primary Ventures - Emily Man 
Partner @ Menlo Ventures - Steve Sloane
Partner @ M13 - Brent Murri 
Partner @ Madrona - Vivek Ramaswami 
Partner @ Craft Ventures - Bryan Rosenblatt  
Partner @ Bain Capital Ventures - Saanya Ojha
Partner @ True Ventures - Tony Conrad 
Co-Founder and Partner @ Tribe Capital - Arjun Sethi
Managing Partner @ Eclipes Venture - Lior Susan 
Managing Partner @ Left Lane Capital - Jason Fiedler 
Founder & Managing Partner @Ahoy Capital - Chris Douvos 
Partner @ Vintage Investment Partners - Shira Eting
Founder & General Partner @ Boldstart - Ed Sim
Founder & Partner @ Defy VC - Neil Sequeira
Partner @ Cendana Capital - Kelli Fontaine 
Founder & CEO @Techstars - David Cohen
Partner @ Redpoint Ventures - Jordan Segall 
Partner @ Wing Venture Capital - Chris Zeoli 
Founding Partner @ NewView Capital - Ravi Viswanathan 
General Partner @ DCVC - Alan Cohen 
Managing Partner & Co-Founder at 645 Ventures - Nnamdi Okike
General Partner @ Foundation Capital - Ashu Garg 
Managing Partner @ Base 10 - Adeyemi Ajao 
Partner @ Lead Edge Capital - Emila Damjanovic 
General Partner @ Headline - Jett Fein
General Partner @ AlleyCorp - Abe Murray 
Partner @ 500 Global - Clayton Bryan
General Partner @ Polaris Partners - Gary Swart
Founding Partner @Acrew Capital - Mark Kraynak
Chief Investment Strategist @ Ark Invest - Charlie Roberts 

And more …

Founder, CEO, Host 

Grace Gong

Investor in AI startups, portolios including Generative Alpha, Emancro Robotics, LD Talent, Vantager, Hyperspell (YC F25), Hyperbolic, AgentHub (YC S25) among others. Advisor to Quill.

Angel Investor

Smart Venture Media

​My first conference: https://www.smartventuremedia.com

Speakers include: 

​Grace Gong (Founder & CEO of Smart Venture Media) 
​Shravan Narayen (Partner of IVP)
​Dave Zilberman (General Partner of Norwest Venture Partners)
​Shomik Ghosh (Partner of Boldstart Ventures)
​Casber Wang (Partner of Sapphire Ventures)
​Bala Sathiamurthy (former CISO of Atlassian & Nerdwallet)
​Anna Sarnek (Cyber BD at AWS)
​Jake Flomenberg (Partner of Wing VC)
​Nikhil Sachdev (Managing Director of Insight Partners)
​Eugene Lee (Partner of OMERS Ventures)
​James da Costa (Partner of Andreessen Horowitz)
​Anna Patterson (Founder of Ceramic. ai, Formerly VP of Google & Managing Partner of Gradient Ventures)
​Miloni Madan Presler (Partner at IVP)
​Timur Yarnall (Head of AI/ML Startups Business at Amazon Web Services)
​Anna Barber (Partner of M13)
​Brandon Yahn (Partner of Convivialite Ventures)
​Aditi Maliwal (Partner of Upfront Ventures)
​Henry Yin (Co-Founder of AGI House)
​Eylul Kayin (Partner of Gradient Ventures)
​Tejas Manohar (Co-CEO of Hightouch)
​Sydney Sykes (NVIDIA VC Partnerships)
​Kevin Novak (Managing Partner of Rackhouse Ventures)
​Phil Boyer (Partner of Crosslink Capital)
​Alan Cohen (General Partner of DCVC)
​Aidan Madigan-Curtis (Partner of Eclipse)
​Megh Gautam (Chief Product Officer of Crunchbase)
​Meagen Eisenberg (Chief Marketing Officer of Samsara)
​Tim Shi (Co-Founder of Cresta)
​David Yarbrough (Business Consultant at Sequoia)
​Cris Cafiero (Business Consultant at Sequoia)
​John Benetti (Managing Director of Silicon Valley Bank)
​Andrei Meganov (Head of GTM at Nebius AI)
​Simon Lee (Business Development at VESSL AI)
​Ben Bergman (Senior Correspondent at Business Insider)
​Vanessa Larco (Formerly Partner at NEA)
​Samantha Wu (Chief Marketing Officer of Eventbrite)
​Simon Wu (Partner at Cathay Innovation)
​Many thanks to our amazing sponsors:

​AWS
​SVB
​Sequoia
​Nebius
​VESSL AI
​Rackhouse Ventures
​Wayo

Founder & CEO

Alumni Ventures

America’s Largest Venture Firm for Individual Investors
Top 20 Venture Firm (CB Insights ’24)
#1 Most Active Venture Firm in the US (PitchBook ’22 & ’23)
World’s Most Innovative Companies (Fast Company ’22)

Alumni Ventures collaborates with elite angel investors — a select group of co-investors chosen for their track record, sector expertise, and community connections.

The AV Venture Scout Program is an extensive network of independent angels, entrepreneurs, and connectors. Venture Scouts share attractive investment opportunities with AV.

Super Angel + Venture Scout

Berkeley SkyDeck

Honored to have joined Berkeley SkyDeck as an advisor, alongside an incredible group of tech leaders—like the co-founders of YouTube, Tesla and Synopsys Inc, the VP of Robinhood, Box and others from top tech companies.

Advisor

Intro

Book me: https://intro.co/gracegong

Need startup advice? 👉  Book a 1:1
Let’s chat all things AI 👉  Book a 1:1
Let’s chat fundraising from VCs 👉  Book a 1:1

Expert on Intro | Book a 1:1 Session Now ⬇️

Floodgate

Building Breakthroughs Cohort Member 

Sigma Delta Partners Investment

Capital Markets Analyst

Summit Investment Management Consulting Co., Ltd

Investment Manager

Grace Gong is the founder of Smart Venture Media and the host of two well-known VC podcasts: Smart Venture Podcast (SVPpro.com) and Venture with Grace, a daily show. She is an angel investor in the AI sector, a super angel & venture scout for Alumni Ventures, Advisor at Berkeley SkyDeck. 

Her podcasts have featured high-profile guests such as C-level executives and VPs from companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Sephora, Dunkin' Donuts, Chipotle, Adidas, Pepsi, Instagram, Deloitte, Reddit, DoorDash, Pinterest, Cisco, NVIDIA, Snowflake and more. Additionally, she has interviewed Managing Partners from top funds, many of whom have appeared on the Forbes Midas List, as well as unicorn founders from companies like Craigslist, Square, Loom, and Glean. Grace regularly posts about technology, venture capital, and entrepreneurship and has been recognized as a LinkedIn Top Voice in Finance. She is also a #1 Bestselling author in the VC category on Amazon New Release. Before founding Smart Venture Media, she worked in venture capital and private equity. If you share her interests, feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn @GraceGong.


2025: Spoke at AWS, Seattle Startup Summit, event collab w/ various funds. Hosted Smart AI Leadership Summit, Hosting Smart AI 100 Summit SmartVentureMedia.com (10M+ impressions/ yr)
2024: Venture with Grace daily live podcast (top 10%) features top GPs, LPs, execs, and founders. Angel investing in the AI space. Companies/ funds we have worked with including LG, Microsoft, Convivialité Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Amazon AWS, among others. 1.5M+ impressions in 7 days end of 2024.
2023: Spoke at LinkedIn HQ, ads clients: VC funds, startups, big tech.
2022: LinkedIn Top Voice in Finance, LinkedIn's creator accelerator fellow; clients including big tech & unicorn startups, speaking engagements: Dell, Microsoft
2021: CEO of Smart Venture Media (monetized, joined VC fellowship)
2020: Podcast - Smart Venture Podcast (top 1.5% among 3.4M podcasts globally, listeners in 100+ countries)
2019: PE 
2018: VC  
2017: Book 2 - How To Be A VC (No.1 new release on Amazon VC category; ft. 22 investors on the Forbes Midas List - investors who invested in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Apple, etc) 
2016: Book 1 - The Last Key To Success (ft. 21 founders on Forbes 30 under 30)
2014: Master's + PE
2013: UIUC

🤓 svppro.com
🚀 Stay connected: https://linktr.ee/gracegong115
💼 Book an ad on my podcast | Book me to speak at your conference/ events: 
grace@smartventurepod.com
💰Book to chat with me: https://intro.co/gracegong

🚀 I was fortunate to attend Silicon Valley AI Hub's exclusive grand opening at Snowflake!

This invite-only event brought together only the best founders and enterprise executives in AI - Andrew Ng, OpenAI, Anthropic, Glean, Windsurf among other amazing tech company execs, top Snowflake leadership, and some speakers and guests happen to be amazing former Venture with Grace guests.

What I learned will change how you think about AI.

Especially inspired by Andrew Ng's insights, here are my key takeaways:

🔥 The brutal truth? If you're not moving NOW, you're already behind.

The urgency in that room was real. These aren't conversations about "someday" - this is happening RIGHT NOW.

⚡ The biggest shift I witnessed: Everyone is becoming a builder

Here are my key takeaways:

🎯 The New Reality:
- Coding is getting easier and becoming a necessary skill
- Using all the coding and no-code tools - equip yourself with coding skills
- Solution? Turn EVERYONE in your company into builders
- Custom software development is no longer just for engineers
- The winners will democratize creation across their entire workforce

🧠 What the smartest people in the room are prioritizing:
- Sandbox environments for rapid AI experimentation
- Evals and agentic systems (mentioned in EVERY single conversation)
- Change management strategies for the "builder revolution"
- Making valuable projects with AI

🏗️ The Great Divide We're splitting into two camps: those who build with AI and those who get left behind. 

The companies that make their ENTIRE workforce more productive through AI will dominate the next decade.

The message from the smartest people in AI was crystal clear:

"Get everyone coding. Make everyone a builder. The window is closing."
What hit me most? The sheer SPEED. This isn't a 5-year transformation - it's happening in months, not years.

The future belongs to companies that can turn every employee into an AI-powered builder.

Are you ready?

Many thanks to the amazing Snowflake team (Timur Cuceloglu Yarnall Lucky Byas Matt Carter Elsa Mayer Benjamin Gotfredson) for putting together this amazing gathering and inviting me to your amazing event! 

What's your take? Are you seeing this "everyone becomes a builder" shift in your organization?

#AI #SiliconValley #AIHub #Snowflake #BuilderEconomy #TechLeadership #ArtificialIntelligence #Innovation #FutureOfWork

Just left LinkedIn's AI Day at LinkedIn's headquarters.

Heard directly from LinkedIn's CEO and top execs about the future of work.

And I've now heard the same message from LinkedIn's CEO Ryan Roslansky, Andrew Ng, and Snowflake's CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy in one week.

If you're not paying attention, you're already behind.

The future belongs to BUILDERS.

Not people with fancy degrees. People with prototypes.

You don't even need to code anymore. You just need to BUILD using AI tools.

Here's what's actually happening right now:

📊 AI is unlocking $6.6T in productivity globally.
- Job postings requiring AI literacy? Up 70% year-over-year.
- Your skills? 50% will change by 2030. Up to 70% with GenAI.
- Over 20M professionals already added AI certifications to their profiles.

💼 Brand new roles that didn't exist 2 years ago: AI Engineer. Prompt Engineer. Head of AI. Responsible AI Architect. AI Artist Engineer.

The industries changing fastest? Media, Marketing, HR, Engineering, Arts & Design.

Translation: if you're in any of these fields and not adapting, someone else will take your spot.

I also saw The Rewrite Button live—rewrites your cold DMs in one click.

As someone who came to America from a different country, this hits different. LinkedIn built my entire network here.

Features like this? They level the playing field for anyone breaking into new spaces.

Here's the reality no one wants to say out loud:
40% of workers will shift roles in the next 3 years because of AI.

The question isn't "what's your background?" anymore.

It's "what can you create?" and "how fast can you adapt?"
Those who embrace AI will replace those who don't. Period.

Also got to connect with so many creator friends, made incredible new ones, and saw some amazing Venture with Grace podcast guests irl. The energy was unreal.

Super grateful to the LinkedIn team for the invite—shout out to Jessica, Bri Foster, and the whole crew.

Let's keep building. 🚀

#LinkedInAIDay #AI #FutureOfWork #ArtificialIntelligence #TechInnovation

Have you wondered how Perplexity competes with some of the other popular AI tools that people use?

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of attending Zetta Venture Partners's AI Native Summit where Apoorva Pandhi (Managing Director at Zetta & our past Venture with Grace podcast guest) had a fireside chat with Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity's founder/CEO.

As a founder & angel investor, here are the takeaways that blew my mind 🧵

1/ Product-Market Fit Insight: Aravind's "lazy prompter" philosophy is genius product thinking. Users don't want to craft perfect prompts—they want answers. Perplexity's UX does the heavy lifting to understand intent. Classic example of removing friction to find PMF.

2/ Differentiation Strategy: "Every sentence has a source" isn't just a feature—it's their entire moat. While other AI chats treat hallucination as "entertaining," Aravind made it a bug from day one. His academic background shaped this, but the business insight is pure gold for trust-dependent verticals.

3/ Performance Psychology: Streaming answers word-by-word isn't just technical—it's behavioral design. Users PERCEIVE speed even during complex queries. For founders: sometimes the feeling of progress matters more than actual speed.

4/ Hypergrowth Metrics That Matter:
Day 1: 3,000 queries
Today: 300M+ queries/week
Only independent company in top 3 US productivity apps
For VCs: This is what category creation looks like. They're not just growing—they're defining a new search paradigm.

5/ The Real Moat (Critical for Founders): Don't build what model labs might enter. Perplexity focuses on the "harder problem"—search infrastructure, indexing, crawling, real-time knowledge. This requires specialized expertise that's genuinely difficult to replicate. Choose problems that scale with difficulty, not just capital.

Key Takeaway: Perplexity shows how to compete with incumbents—find where their business model constrains their product, build infrastructure that's genuinely hard to replicate, and design for the next paradigm (voice/conversational), not the current one.

Sometimes the best moats aren't technical—they're philosophical commitments (accuracy > engagement) that shape everything else.

Shout out to Apoorva and the Zetta team for an incredible event.

What's your take on Perplexity's approach to building in this space?

#AI #Search #Startups #VentureCapital #ProductStrategy

Just got back from Seattle. 🧵

Very privileged to attend the Madrona IA 40 Summit for the second year. 

Here are the 3 core lessons that will stick with me:

LESSON 1: Your customer is changing (and it's not who you think)
Parallel just revealed something wild.

They're not building AI tools for humans. They're building for AIs as the primary customer.

Amazon? They're not competing on models. They're building a model factory—different timelines, different use cases, industrial scale.

Databricks put it simply: "When the user changes, you have to change."

Here's what's coming: There's going to be an agent between you and your end user.

That agent doesn't think like humans. Different needs. Different UX expectations. Different buying behaviors.

The shift: Stop asking "what do humans want?" Start asking "what do agents need?"

LESSON 2: Humans don't scale (and that's now a solvable problem)
"Humans don't scale."
The room got quiet.

Their solution? Multi-agent simulations that generate synthetic humans at scale.

Then Glean dropped the numbers that got everyone's attention:
50% of jobs are getting automated
15% are MORE than 50% automatable right now
But here's where it gets interesting.

The real problem isn't AI capability. It's this: "You can't delegate if you can't supervise."

Most managers have no idea how to supervise AI work.
The shift: The question isn't "can AI do this?" It's "can you supervise AI doing this?"

LESSON 3: We're in the "time jitter" era

Model performance jumped from 6% → 20%. Sounds amazing, right?
Wrong. We're in a crisis of evaluation.

The problem is time jitter. You don't know if AI will take 3 seconds or 30 seconds.

You can't predict when to trust the output. And reverting mistakes? Nearly impossible.

Vercel sees where this is going: Chat interfaces are just training wheels.
The future? Deeply personal agents that act independently.

But nobody's solved the real UX problem: What's the experience of managing multiple independent agents?

Modal nailed it: "You can't vibe code the infrastructure."
The shift: Stop trying to make AI fit into 2024 workflows. Build the 2026 interface.

"The team you build = the company you build."
If you're hiring for humans serving humans, you might already be behind.
The agent economy isn't coming.

It's here. And most of us are building for the wrong customer.

Massive thanks to the Madrona team for inviting me back—what an experience.
Shoutout to my conference bestie Mason for sharing notes! 🙏 shout out to Matt, S. Somasegar, Coral, Rolanda, Jon, Vivek, Chris and team for hosting! 

So fun running into amazing friends and meeting legends like Parag Agrawal(Parallel Web Systems CEO, former Twitter CEO), Eric Phillips (CDO, Delta Air Lines), Chase Lochmiller (CEO, Crusoe), Jason K. (CSO, OpenAI), Rob Seaman (CPO, Slack), and ofc S. Somasegar (MD, Madrona), and more.

#IA40 #Madrona #AIAgents

What are you building for—2025 humans or 2026 agents?

🚨 OKAY THIS IS HUGE 🚨

Tomorrow at Dreamforce, I'm sitting down with two absolute legends:

8:00 AM PT 🔥 President & CTO of Salesforce - Muralidhar Krishnaprasad (MK)
12:00 PM PT ⚡ CMO of Slack - Ryan Gavin 

Two back-to-back conversations you absolutely cannot miss.

📍 Dreamforce (going live across ALL platforms!) 
📅 TOMORROW (Thursday, Oct 16) | 8am & 12pm PT 
📺 LinkedIn | YouTube | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook

Got questions? Drop them below 👇 I'll ask the best ones LIVE!
See you tomorrow 🔥

#SalesforcePartner #DF25
#Dreamforce #Salesforce #Slack #Agentforce

Moderated a reverse pitch yesterday where VCs had to pitch to entrepreneurs. Right before a robot fight.

2000+ people showed up.

Watching VCs scramble to impress founders was incredible. Total role reversal.

"We add value, we help you hire, we move fast, we—" 
"NEXT."

VCs stumbling through 90-second pitches like their lives depended on it. The energy was wild.

It was basically VC Fight Club before the actual robot fighting started.

Everyone started sweating through their Patagonia vests.

Then everyone went nuts watching robots destroy each other with hammers and spinning blades. JK, not sure if this happened because there were too many people in front of the stage - even the TV screen was buried by people.

Made more real connections in one night than months of coffee chats.

Only in SF do you get VCs pitching hard AND robot battles in the same night.

Big thanks to the talented Mariane Bekker for the wild invite and shoutout to David Carvalho and Kristopher Floyd for hosting as well - got to see some friends pitch and met a ton of new people.

What's the wildest networking event you've been to?

#startups #sf #vc #robotfight

🚨 MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨

This Thursday at Dreamforce, I’m sitting down with:

• CMO of Salesforce  
• CMO of Slack 

Back-to-back interviews with two of the biggest names in tech: Ariel Kelman and Ryan Gavin   

📍 Where: Dreamforce
📅 When: Thursday, 12pm PT
📺 Watch: LinkedIn | YouTube | Twitter | IG
Drop a 🔥 if you want me to ask YOUR question!

See you there 👇


#salesforcepartner

#Dreamforce #Salesforce #Slack #Marketing #TechLeadership #CMO #LiveInterview

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Went to IBM Ventures x a16z speedrun "Scaling Over Cocktails" last week and had the biggest full-circle moment

I've been using IBM laptops since 3rd grade. That laptop with the blue logo was basically my childhood.

Last week I'm at their event with a16z speedrun during TECH WEEK by a16z, talking to Emily Fontaine —IBM's Global Head of Venture Capital (https://obvs.ly/gracegong).

First thought: IBM has a venture fund? Since when?

Turns out they've got a $500M enterprise AI fund backing startups like Not Diamond (AI that picks the best LLM for your question), QEDMA (improving the performance of quantum computers), AuthMind (AI-powered identity security), OX Security (AppSec that cuts through the noise).

The kind of tech that sounds like sci-fi but is already disrupting their industries.
Here's what stuck with me:

The brands you grew up with are funding the future you're trying to build.

IBM brings Fortune 500 access—the crucial "how do we actually get this used by real companies" part. Andreessen Horowitz speedrun brings the "what's about to explode" radar. Both in one room.

Watching founders talk to people who understand BOTH worlds made me realize:

The best opportunities aren't "move fast and break things" OR "play it safe." They're in the middle—building something crazy that actually works at scale.

Whether you're starting a company, switching careers, or just trying to do something ambitious: you need people around you who've walked both paths. 

The dreamers AND the people who know how to ship.

Don't just pick one side.

Watch our BTS videos—link in comments 📹

#IBMPartner

Just got back from Burning Man for developers, aka OpenAI Dev Day.

Saw some friends, made new ones. Yes, there was matcha, an AI photo booth, and a claw machine for OpenAI dolls. Peak SF.

But past the spectacle, something shifted for me.

Watched someone build a working agent on stage in 8 minutes. AgentKit—drag, drop, ship. No code required.

I used to call myself non-technical. Now I'm a vibe coder. And honestly? That line keeps blurring.

The tools are finally good enough that intent matters more than perfect code. You don't need to be a 10x engineer anymore. You just need to know what you want to build and be willing to iterate.

As an entrepreneur, this changes the game. I can build tools in-house now. Automate the tedious stuff. Ship faster. The friction between idea and execution is collapsing.

The past few weeks I've been going to talks and dinners with some iconic people in tech. Different stages, different companies, different approaches. But the message is the same everywhere: builders win. 

Not the people with the best pitch decks. Not the ones playing games or chasing clout. The people who ship.

We're entering an era where the cost of trying is approaching zero. Where small teams can move like entire companies. Where one person with taste and conviction can compete with legacy players.

The question isn't "can I build this?" anymore. It's "what am I going to build?"
Technical skill was the moat. Now taste, speed, and conviction are the moats.

The builders are going to have an unfair decade.

#OpenAIDevDay #AIAgents #AgentKit #BuildInPublic #NoCode #JustShip #BuilderMindset #AITools #StartupLife #ShipFast

Happy Friday! Releasing an album soon ;) #Sora2

Çağla Kaymaz is a partner at Category Ventures where she invests in founders building transformative companies in enterprise software. Previously, she was at Citi Ventures, where she backed AI infrastructure and application startups including Datavolo (acquired by Snowflake), Galileo, Glean, Lexion (acquired by Docusign), and Norm Ai. Cagla began her career at Microsoft as a software engineer before moving into product management, where she led highly technical software teams shipping enterprise software. She has also worked as an investor at Maverick Ventures, served as Chief of Staff at Season Health, and founded a vertical SaaS startup during business school. She holds a BS in Math and Computational Science and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School. Originally from Turkey (where everyone can pronounce her name—it's "Chala"), Cagla now calls the Bay Area home.


Topics:
- Investing trends in AI infrastructure, Apps, and dev tools 
- Lessons from both sides of the table: founder, operator, and investor
- How AI-native tools are reshaping enterprise workflows and productivity

#VentureCapital #EnterpriseAI #AIInfrastructure #WomenInTech #StartupInvesting

Çağla Kaymaz, Category Ventures Partner on AI Infra & Enterprise SaaS

Alexander Danilowicz is the Co-founder of Magic Patterns, a Y Combinator–backed AI design platform that enables teams to instantly turn text prompts, screenshots, and user stories into interactive, production-ready interfaces. A Dartmouth College graduate in Computer Science and Economics, Alexander previously worked as a software engineer at LiveRamp and Canopy before launching Magic Patterns in early 2023 to automate front-end design and coding workflows. The platform, which he co-founded with longtime collaborator Teddy Ni, has become a go-to tool for product and design teams at scale, integrating AI with popular component libraries to generate high-quality UI elements. Based in San Francisco, Alexander continues to build at the intersection of AI, design systems, and developer productivity.

Topics: 
- The Evolution of AI-Native Product Design
- Product Vision and the Future of Creative Work
- Scaling Smart: Building Big with a Lean Team

#LeanStartups #AIStartups #VentureCapital #StartupGrowth #DesignTech #AITools

Alexander Danilowicz, Magic Patterns Co-Founder on AI-Driven Design

BTS from one of the most subscribed event at TECH WEEK by a16z 

& everything IBM Ventures 

Ft.  IBM Global Head of Venture Capital Emily Fontaine  & 
  IBM Ventures- Platform and Growth Partner Austin Flon  

#ibm #a16ztechweek #a16z #sftechweek #a16zspeedrun #speedrun

Jonathan DiVincenzo is Co-Founder and CEO of Impart Security. Prior to founding Impart, Jonathan was the VP of Product at Signal Sciences, an application security startup that sold to Fastly for $825M. Prior to Signal Sciences, Jonathan was product lead at Edgecast Networks, a global content delivery network that sold to Verizon for over $400M. After the sale of Edgecast Networks, Jonathan served as VP of Product at Verizon shaping the digital product portfolio, leading to the acquisition of Uplynk, Volicon, AOL, and Yahoo. Jonathan started his career building secure applications as a developer at the Wall Street Journal, 21 Century Fox, and Resource (acquired by IBM).

Topics: 
- From Signal Sciences to Impart: lessons in scaling and selling category-defining security startups

- The evolution of web and API security — why runtime protection is the next frontier

- Building technical products for modern cloud environments and high-stakes security demand

#Cybersecurity #APISecurity #StartupLeadership #AIProtection #VentureCapital

Grace Gong, Dulari Parikh and 2 other attendees

Jonathan DiVincenzo, Impart CEO on AI, API & Runtime App Security

Underrated ai trend?  Ft. Partner at a16z speedrun Andrew Lee  

Shout out to IBM Ventures for having me at the amazing event with a16z speedrun!! :) 
TECH WEEK by a16z Andreessen Horowitz  

#a16z #sftechweek #a16ztechweek #a16zspeedrun #speedrun

Erik Bernhardsson is the founder and CEO of Modal, the serverless platform for AI, data and ML teams that enables deployment of generative AI models, large-scale batch jobs, and job queues with effortless scaling across thousands of CPUs and GPUs. Modal's pay-per-use model charges only for actual compute time down to the CPU cycle, eliminating idle costs while accelerating development and reducing infrastructure overhead. Before founding Modal, he served as CTO of Better.com (2015-2020), scaling the engineering team from 1 to 300 people, and spent seven years at Spotify where he built their music recommendation system. With a background in competitive programming—including an IOI gold medal—Erik combines deep technical expertise with leadership experience and shares insights on technology, data, and management through his blog at erikbern.com.

Topics: 
- How compute economics are changing with GPU demand and what that means for AI startups
- Scaling engineering teams from 1 to 300+ (lessons from Better.com)
- Fundraising and building in the crowded devtools/infrastructure space

#AI #MachineLearning #Serverless #CloudComputing #DevTools #Infrastructure

Erik Bernhardsson, Modal CEO on AI Infra, Data Compute & Scaling GPUs

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