Rebecca Chiu

"Build the event you wish existed" That's what we at Monadical did last week at #NYTW. We wanted an AI Engineers discussion for Engineers. There's always a lot of events out there for VCs to network, or for startups to learn about G2M, but very little on lessons learned from actual engineers in the field. So that's the event we hosted. Big thank yous to our awesome panel, Roy Pereira, Ben Cohen and Corey J. Gallon. Here's the key takeaways and the AI tools we're using. 🚀 All three panelists independently called AI Agents the most transformative LLM application they’ve used. They specifically called out Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its accuracy and reliability. 🪨 We dug into how LLMs are “jagged”, not general. They can be shockingly good at some tasks and completely fail at others. Everyone agreed: good evaluations are critical (and hard.) 🧪 Corey noted how public benchmarks and reality are two different things. Most public evals are saturated or gamed. ♊ Ben emphasized that AI projects are actually two projects: building the tool and building the evaluation process. 🧱 We explored how falling dev costs may impact startup defensibility and labor demand. Roy shared that founders are already shifting strategies in response. ⚒️ In a world of daily AI launches, the panel discussed how they decide what’s worth attention, and what’s just noise. They called out tools like Goose, Aider, Claude Code, and Monadical’s own Cubbi, which helps run agentic workflows safely in dev environments. (links in the comments). CTA: What would you want to hear in an AI Applied Engineering talk you attended?

33

5 Comments

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: https://lnkd.in/ewhEGjV3. 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.

229

1 Comment

🚨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: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg

19

1 Comment

Honored to have been invited to fal and Henry Shi’s Lean AI Leaderboard Celebration Dinner, celebrating some of the leanest and fastest-growing startups in SF. Here are some of the most overwhelming trends that were discussed among high-growth companies working with small, high-output teams: 1/ Headcount is no longer used as a success metric. As Henry Ward said, “Hiring means we failed to execute and need help.” Headcount is not a flex measure anymore. People aren’t asking “How big is your team?” anymore. They’re asking “How many customers do you have?” 2/ They're finding ways to leverage AI across every function. Every engineer uses Cursor or Windsurf. Every GTM leader is in Clay. The most efficient teams are built AI-first across the board. Thank you to Henry Shi, Burkay Gur, and Gorkem Yurtseven for putting this all together!

67

A few weeks ago, we spent time in the San Francisco Bay Area meeting founders, operators, and investors who are building at the frontlines of this shift. Across conversations with people like Aliisa Rosenthal, former Sales Head at OpenAI, Emily Cohen, Head of Operations at Cognition, Malte Ubl the CTO at Vercel, and Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia Capital, one theme kept coming up in operating discussions: The real AI advantage is not intelligence. It is reliability. Teams are no longer asking, “Can AI do this task?” They are asking, “Can this system run every day, without supervision, and still deliver predictable outcomes?” That shift changes how products are built. In many of these companies, the conversation has already moved beyond models and prompts. The focus is now on: • How decisions flow across systems • How data moves in real time between teams • How errors are caught before they become operational problems • How workflows keep running even when conditions change In other words - AI is becoming part of the operating layer, not an add-on feature. That lens resonated strongly with me because construction has always been an execution-heavy industry. If you’ve spent time on live sites, you know the challenge isn’t a lack of effort or intent. Contractors, engineers, and site teams are professionals who manage enormous complexity every day. The friction usually comes from systems that don’t reflect how projects actually run - fragmented information, delayed visibility, and decisions that arrive too late. Small gaps compound quickly: • A material delay turns into idle labour • A missed update turns into rework • A cash timing mismatch turns into project stress None of these are intelligence problems. They are system coordination problems. What I saw in the Bay Area conversations was a clear direction: AI is being used to close these coordination gaps: quietly, consistently, and at scale. Not as a mere feature. As operational infrastructure. Over the past few months, we’ve been taking these ideas and pressure-testing them against the realities of the Indian construction ecosystem: across projects, teams, and workflows that run every single day. The goal is simple: - Build systems that reduce surprises - Improve predictability, and - Help teams focus on execution instead of firefighting On Thursday, we will share the next step in that journey for Powerplay. More soon.

97

"I can't trust an AI black box solution" Hot takes like this are why I love gathering founders and operators together. I recently hosted two dinners at re:Inforce alongside CJ Moses, Paul Vixie, Hart Rossman, Nancy Wang, and Daniel Bartus. Though the groups had different backgrounds, we noticed some common trends: 1: Data: AI is dramatically accelerating the amount of data being generated and moved across services. More data means more surface area of sensitive content. This impacts everything from storage to security, and more. 2: Identity Security: Humans are the weakest link, and AI will increase the number of identities (human, service accounts, etc.) by 100x in coming years. Incumbent providers aren't capable of managing this scale and complexity, and often rely on manual processes to deliver compliance outcomes for employees. 3: Secure AI Enablement: Security practitioners are interested in AI solutions that enable them to maximize impact with fewer resources, but many recognize the risks and challenges in adopting these solutions. They want to trust the vendors, but still verify. Some black box solutions have proven difficult to sell. A huge thank you to the incredible founders, practitioners, and friends of Felicis that came to make the dinners so spectacular! cc Jacob DePriest Alex Bovee Luke O'Malley Tanya Verma Vrajesh B. Eric Tan Prabhath Karanth George Barnes Janusz Wasiolek Marcus Johnston

138

5 Comments

Honored and excited to partner with Drew Baglino and the incredible team at Heron Power as they re-imagine the electric grid for the modern world. Power in America is not zero sum. We deserve access to cheap and abundant electricity and we should win the AI race. And we must build the capacity to manufacture critical technology here at home. When faced with existential challenges, we deploy technology against them. And we win.

54

1 Comment

I’m thrilled to share that White Star Capital is backing AMI - Advanced Machine Intelligence in their historic $1.03bn seed round 🚀 - Led by the legendary Yann LeCun and Alex LeBrun. AMI isn't building another LLM, they're building World Models. Why this matters: *Beyond Text: Grounded in JEPA architecture to solve physical-world problems. *Global Powerhouse: A dream team from Meta FAIR, OpenAI, and DeepMind. *Sovereign Tech: A credible European-led alternative to US Big Tech. Excited to be part of this journey along with the rest of the WSC team Eric Martineau-Fortin, Matthieu Lattes, Bérénice Moustial and Victoria Pozzi Rocco Belforti. 🌍✨ https://lnkd.in/eiCKZKSQ #VentureCapital #AI

85

2 Comments

Big win for our portfolio company Abacum who redefines how FP&A teams operate, with Julio Martínez as the co-founder and CEO. They secured new funding from FOG Ventures. FOG Ventures has built a strong reputation for backing what they believe are category leaders across the Office of the CFO. Having their support is a powerful proof point that Abacum is shaping the future of collaborative, AI-powered financial planning.

16

3 Comments

You can have groundbreaking science, elegant engineering, and even early customer interest. But without this one thing, you don't have an investable business. After two decades running IP strategy projects and now leading UC Berkeley's Deep Tech Innovation Lab while building the Berkeley Gateway Accelerator, I've watched countless brilliant technologies die in the valley between breakthrough and business. The problem isn't what most technical founders think it is. It's not about having better tech. It's not about getting more funding. It's not even about finding product-market fit. The fatal flaw shows up much earlier—and it's almost always the same mistake. In my latest piece, I answer questions from a Taiwanese entrepreneur about what really separates deep tech ventures that scale from those that stall. Including one provocative suggestion for Asian ecosystems that has nothing to do with technology. Read the full conversation, linked below. #DeepTech #Innovation #Startups #IntellectualProperty #VentureCapital

60

6 Comments

"We've become so insular in who we talk to and listen to, and I didn't realize how much that was keeping me in tunnel vision and tunnel thinking." Seth Levine, Co-Author of Capital Evolution and Partner at Foundry, talks about seeking out more diversity of thought on Tech Scenes Unplugged. #venturebacked #vcbacked #venturecapital #leadership #ceo #founder #operatingsystem #peakOS #foundermode

27

1 Comment

Voice is a super interesting modality right now - maybe the first modality we're seeing move to open source models across a number of scale ups / enterprises. Reliability concerns, high costs, and open source model performance are pushing engineers to do their own fine tuning vs. relying on third-party vendors of proprietary models. Many of these orgs have already been collecting their own first-party data and now with third-party vendors like Extrian, David AI, etc they can train really high quality models. RL has been insanely hyped, but it's been unclear how long it will take scale ups and enterprises to actually lean in. Voice AI might be hitting that inflection point faster than expected.

45

7 Comments

If you know... A 10x engineer Who loves the speed and intellectual challenge of early stage but also Wants job stability and Equity diversification then This is the one job that checks all of their boxes

12

1 Comment

We first backed Kavitta Ghai and the Nectir team at seed in 2024. They raised $1.4M from VCs on our show, and then deployed across the California Community College system (2.1M students, 116 colleges). Today they announced a $12.5M Series A led by Rethink Impact. We followed on. If you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in AI and education, this is worth your attention. Nectir is the FERPA compliant AI infrastructure layer purpose-built for schools. The results from peer-reviewed research: 20% increase in GPA. 13% rise in final scores. 36% boost in intrinsic motivation to learn. Students are also staying enrolled and finishing their degrees. This isn't ChatGPT for homework. It's a personalized learning partner that knows your textbooks, assignments, and lectures. Plus it gives schools safe AI infrastructure for everything from FAFSA advising to career coaching. The vision is all 50 states. Every institution in the US is going to need safe AI infrastructure. Nectir is building it. Proud to be backing Kavitta and the team twice.

130

16 Comments

Biopharma teams generate oceans of data, yet still spend weeks assembling spreadsheets before they can even start asking “What’s next?” Argon AI flips that equation. Their AI-native workspace turns scattered clinical, market, and competitive data into decision-ready insights, so scientists and strategists can spend their time on better science, smarter strategy, and faster paths to patients. When you cut the data drudgery out of drug development, you don’t just make workflows nicer, you help lifesaving therapies reach the people who need them sooner. Congrats to the Argon team on the raise and the relentless execution behind it. Excited for what’s ahead. Pioneer Fund and I are proud to support Samy Danesh and Argon AI!

17

2 Comments

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: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

71

3 Comments

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!

278

6 Comments