Thanks to Aviel and Levi for sending some startups our way this month!
Welcome to the fifth edition of our ongoing newsletter series, From the First Row. Look here for First Row firm updates and the startup ecosystem news that catches our attention. Feedback and ideas welcome. New here? Subscribe!
<aside> 👋 Thank you to Jessica from LegUp for presenting at Deals & Drinks this month! We had lively discussions around both LegUp and this art piece to get us warmed up. Sign up here to be included on the invite list moving forward, and scroll down to learn more about Deals & Drinks.
Deals & Drinks revolves around making observations before opinions, and it was exciting to see Megan McNally, Founder of Bomb Breakfast Club, capture this so well: "In listening to the discussion around the data points, I realized that I filled in the gaps with my own assumptions, not what Jessica/the founder actually said."
</aside>
<aside> 📚 We run a special edition of our Investor Perspective workshop one week prior to Deals & Drinks. Join us if you've never attended Deals & Drinks and/or would like a primer on the investor perspective prior to listening to a pitch. Our next workshop is on Wednesday, April 7th from 12 -1PM, register here.
</aside>
<aside> 🗣️ Yoko and Minda led a PitchBack workshop for University of Washington's MS&E Program this month. In a small group, founders rotate between pitching and evaluating each other, with the goal of refining their pitches through feeling what it's like "from the other side".
</aside>
<aside> 💬 Minda tweeted last week about how startups should think about an excess in venture funding. TL;DR more isn't always better - resourcefulness is a key 'muscle' for any organization, and too much funding can defeat you from within.
</aside>
<aside> 💡 Moore's Law for Everything - Sam Altman, of OpenAI, lays out a thorough assessment on how AI will transform wealth creation (by eventually driving almost all costs down) and how our economic system could change to manage it. As technology creates more wealth, effective policies and incentives will be critical to distributing that wealth fairly. Sam proposes an "American Equity Fund" focussed on taxing capital instead of labor as a mechanism to enable distribution of direct ownership and wealth. While there are many pieces to this puzzle, this proved to be an intriguing read to noodle on given the incentive-shift it introduces.
</aside>
<aside> 🚐 eCommerce, Cities, and Sustainability - In a wide ranging yet concise piece, Dynamo Ventures lays out how eCommerce can be a forcing function in helping cities toward their climate goals. Consumers continue to expect shorter delivery times and increased convenience, especially around packaging. But reshaping last-mile delivery (sidewalk bots, electric bikes, pickup locations), packaging (cross-company bundling), and introducing reverse logistics will not only help meet customer expectations, but also meaningfully improve sustainability by creating "hyperlocal" supply chains. Supply Chains have grown increasingly complex, so it'll be fascinating to see how this entropy is controlled in the coming years.
</aside>
<aside> 👨💻 Why Clubhouse will fail - Last month we shared a persuasive Ben Thompson article on Clubhouse's inevitability. But this month, Shaan Puri laid out an equally compelling (and entertaining) tweetstorm on how the Clubhouse saga will unravel in the opposite direction. The crux of Shaan's argument is what he calls the "Interesting-ness Problem" - when an app revolves around content, it has 7 seconds to 'hook' a user with captivating content. This is relatively straightforward when you have ample content to serve up (Ex. TikTok, Instagram), but exponentially more difficult when you're live and horizontal (Clubhouse). With the expansive gray area around any early startup's future, we find it advantageous to deeply explore multiple perspectives in deriving our own hypotheses. As these clubhouse examples show, smart people can (and usually do!) have equally convincing yet opposing ideas on how a trend will pan out.
</aside>
Trends:
March proved to be an extra exciting month. There was a flurry of excitement around Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and some eye opening AI advancements. Both trends mapped to our core themes, particularly around transforming how people connect and work. In this issue, we cover an NFT marketplace that's making blockchain data accessible, an AI powered marketing writer, and a Seattle-based startup that's striving to be the end-to-end platform for Machine Learning Operations (MLOps).
<aside> 👋 Connect | OpenSea closed a $23M round led by a16z with participation from angel investors such as Naval Ravikant and Mark Cuban to scale their NFT marketplace
</aside>
NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) were rediscovered and have been all the craze this past month. They are blockchain-based records that uniquely represent ownership over pieces of media (Ex. Digital art, virtual land, collectibles, etc.) But even for the tech savvy, the process of creating, finding, purchasing, and validating NFTs is nebulous and tedious. These characteristics represent a vibrant breeding ground for a marketplace to aggregate players and remove complexity. Enter OpenSea - they not only aggregate creators and consumers, but also eliminate the heavy-lifting of extracting blockchain data to understand the origins of particular NFTs. While bridging this gap between the infrastructure and consumer layers is a massive leap, the nascency of NFTs will bring unique challenges for OpenSea and similar marketplaces. How will they design themselves to accommodate both collectors and traders (if at all)? What role will they play in maintaining valuation integrity given the current exuberance? And given the inherent anonymity, what ethical issues will emerge around fund sources and even "faking" transactions?
<aside> 👩💻 Work | Copy.ai announced a $2.1M round led by Craft Ventures as they leverage GPT-3 to eliminate writers block in marketing
</aside>