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Rob Go shared thisWonderful listen chronicling the early days of Bobbie! Fun stroll down memory lane. https://lnkd.in/gE39iT7Y
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Rob Go shared thisThis is the biggest challenge of building a system to compete with human judgement in a world of outlier outcomes. But to repeat one of my favorite movie quotes - "It's supposed to be hard. The hard is what makes it great."Rob Go shared thisEverybody likes it. Nobody loves it. Nothing spikes. You've sat in some version of that meeting: a product bet, a senior hire, a book deal or a TV/film script somebody wanted to make. Ours is about a company, and this version of the outcome is the one we've learned to distrust. We call it a "doable deal". NextView Ventures' investment voting rule is conviction-based: consensus isn't required, and one partner's conviction can drive the decision. Across fifteen years of our own portfolio, the investments that actually worked sit at the ends. Either the whole room loved it, or one or two people had real conviction while everyone else ran from lukewarm to negative. Today, we run an agent that finds the companies worth a partner's attention. Tuning that one to agree with us is exactly right, because competent analysts mostly agree with each other. Partner-level work is the opposite: agreement lands in the middle, and the middle is what we should distrust. That's the machine we're working on now, and it's definitely the more difficult task to get it right. The only fast way to check whether it's any good is whether it agrees with us. The real answer, whether the company worked out, takes a decade. But we deliberately built a process where agreement is the wrong test. We want the machine as a sixth voter, and a sixth voter that always matches the other five adds nothing to a room that only needs one yes. So tuning the machine toward our judgment quietly removes the only reason it is useful. That's consensus by construction. Nobody chooses the bias, but the bias is an easy one to fall for because that's the fastest measurement available. The same trap is waiting wherever the payoff sits in rare exceptions and the verdict takes years. Point a model at expert work and expert agreement is usually the only signal that arrives fast enough to tune on. But anything built to catch rare exceptions is wrong most of the time by definition, so on that metric it looks like a defect. Tune it away and the number goes up, which makes it look like progress. I explored more of this dynamic (and what we're doing to design against it) in the full essay in the first comment. If you've put an AI tool into work where you won't know for years whether it was right: what did you end up measuring in the meantime? I don't have a clean answer and I'd like to hear the messy ones.
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Rob Go reposted thisRob Go reposted thisEveryone wants to hire AI fluent talent. Almost nobody can identify it at scale. The demand is in the job titles: "AI Strategist." "Forward Deployed PM." "Chief of Agents." US postings requiring AI literacy are up 70% year over year, and open AI PM roles are up 465% (!!) since 2023. Very soon, using AI well will stop being a job title and start being a expectation. But how do you tell who uses AI effectively, and with judgment? • AI-generated resumes blur together. • Candidates turn in polished take-homes but can't explain them. • Live interviews work, but they're expensive and slow to schedule. So today, Ashwanth and I are launching Gradient, to help companies identify and hire AI fluent talent. With Gradient, candidates complete a realistic work task, like writing a product memo or creating an AI workflow, alongside an AI assistant. Hiring teams get the finished work, an AI fluency score, and the specific evidence and behaviors behind every rating. If you're hiring AI fluent talent (or know someone who is), visit our site to check out a demo and sign up for our newsletter, both linked below in the comments.
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Rob Go reposted thisRob Go reposted thisThere’s never been a more interesting time to build a startup, and we’re looking for someone exceptional to build alongside us at Handspring. We’re hiring a Director of Strategic Initiatives who will work closely with me and Kwasi on some of the most important opportunities and challenges across the company. It’s a high-ownership role with a front-row seat to what it takes to build and scale a company. If you’re ambitious, entrepreneurial, and excited by the idea of helping build the future of mental healthcare for children and their familles, we’d love to hear from you. Please apply below (my LinkedIn inbox is buried!) https://lnkd.in/gBmJAtAJ
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Rob Go reposted thisRob Go reposted thisMet Aaron White, founder of Appy.AI, for coffee recently and walked away genuinely impressed. Their angle: instead of juggling agents and prompts yourself, you give Violet (their AI Chief of Staff) a goal, and she coordinates the agents to get it done. I tested her on something real. I built NoteChirp a few months back and have been tinkering with features ever since, but marketing it? Not so much. So I told Violet: help me get more traction for NoteChirp. What came back was a bit humbling 😂 An app analysis, a social strategy, App Store listing fixes, a callout that I'd buried the shopping list feature, and a finished Instagram/TikTok reel. Super impressive! Could I have gotten there with ChatGPT or Claude? Sure. But I'd have had to manage every step myself. Here I gave one goal and it ran with it. Signup's free for $100 free credits (which I have used up after putting it though it’s paces!) #AI #AIAgents #AppyAI
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Rob Go shared thisNot surprising!Rob Go shared thisFinancial fraud is affecting more and more people every day. That’s why we’re helping clients protect their financial life by offering another layer of security through our relationship with Carefull. Designed for individuals and families, this financial safety service helps monitor financial activity, identify potential threats early and maintain greater financial security. And it’s completely free for all Edward Jones clients in the United States. It’s one more way we’re working to serve you—today and in the future. Reach out to your Edward Jones financial advisor to learn more or visit https://lnkd.in/gSjyt_K3
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Rob Go shared thisWhat a milestone! So proud of what this team has accomplished. Just getting started!Rob Go shared thisBIG DAY OVER AT BOBBIE! We've gone platinum! 💿 and have officially fed more than 1,000,000 million babies! 🍼🎉 It’s a massive number, but to us, it’s not about the scale of our growth. It’s about the depth of the impact. Behind that number are one million unique stories, families, and babies. 🙀Like the FIVE-time Bobbie mom who has fed all of her babies with Bobbie (yes there's a set of twins in there). 🤰🏻Or the couple who turned to surrogacy and relied on Bobbie to nourish their sweet baby girl. 💚 Or second-time mom who excluslively-breastfed her first but chose to combo-feed with her second, and turned to Bobbie for that just-in-case can, confidently. When our founder, Laura Modi, started Bobbie, she wasn’t trying to build a company that hit massive milestones. She was just a first-time mom looking for a formula she could trust for her own baby. And she couldn't find it. Today, one million happy, healthy babies later, that same mission is exactly what continues to drive us. Feeding American babies is both an honor and a massive responsibility. And we don't take a single ounce of it lightly. To our Platinum Class 💿: the OG one million families who trusted us to nourish your baby: Thank you. You didn't just help us reach a milestone; you helped us change feeding culture. If you're a Bobbie grad or Bobbie parent YOU are a part of our Platinum Class! Tell us your story below! 💚 #infantfeeding #momfounded #americanmanufacturing #CPG #combofeeding #growth
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Rob Go shared thisExcited for @skyfallai to come out of stealth. Super ambitious team with huge aspirations!Rob Go shared thisAround 15 years ago, Kaheer Suleman and I started Maluuba with the vision of building Universal Turing Machines. Back then, we were one of the pioneer research labs building foundational modules of deep learning and Reinforcement learning with Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio and Richard Sutton. There was no AI hype then, as there is now. Those were the good old days of doing pure scientific research unlike the n+1 research that we see today. Maluuba was later acquired by Microsoft and became Microsoft AI Research Canada. Grounded in that same mission, we're finally ready to introduce Skyfall AI to the world after a lot of experimentation in stealth over the last year. We're a frontier neo lab building the first Autonomous Enterprise by moving beyond the current LLM paradigm. For the last 5 years, the foundational model market has relied on a single paradigm: scaling laws for LLMs - more data, more compute, bigger models. However, the real world is messy and much more complicated. In order to achieve our long term vision, the next generation of AI models requires a different approach. Skyfall is solving the hardest open problems in frontier AI: long-horizon planning, data inefficiency, and brittle performance in dynamic real-world environments. To achieve the team's vision of a completely autonomous enterprise, the team is developing a next-generation frontier model (Enterprise World Models) using Continual Learning and World Modeling. Enterprise World Models can simulate the multi-layered consequences of strategic business actions. I'm building this company with the people I trust the most: my longtime friend Kaheer Suleman (prev. Co-Founder of Maluuba) and my brother Sumit Pasupalak (prev. YC founder). Sumit and Kaheer are the first principles thinkers I can trust to go to the end of the world with to achieve the mission impossible together. Together with a stellar team of 25 researchers and engineers, we're pushing a new frontier in AI forward. We unpacked our long term vision in today’s Forbes feature 🔗- read it to see what we’re building toward. Thank you so much Victor Dey for the interview. To achieve our goal of enterprise world models, we are soliciting bids to acquire small SaaS startups (up to $1M) and fully automate them. If you’re interested, submit your business here: https://lnkd.in/gCzrgR55 Finally, thank you to our investors for believing in our vision since day one: Fidelity Investments, Samir Kumar and Nagraj Kashyap (Touring), Karamdeep Nijjar and Chris Arsenault (Inovia Capital), Morgan Blumberg (M13), Stephanie Palmeri (NextView Ventures), Mike McCauley and Michael Litt (Garage Capital),Jenny He, François Chollet, Naveen Rao so many others for supporting us in this journey. We are just getting started in our mission of Enterprise Super Intelligence. Onwards and Upwards. 🚀
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Rob Go shared thisIt seems timely to write this post after we just invested in a $300M seed at a rich valuation: Where Do You Live on the Valuation Curve? Carta released an interesting graph showing seed valuations by percentile over time. The TLDR - everything is going up, but the spread between the top percentiles and the lower percentiles has increased dramatically. Every investor tends to live somewhere on this curve. But as the curve has shifted, where an investor lives may have shifted quite significantly over time. One may find themselves pretty much only looking at companies in the bottom 25% valuation range because that's what your model is tuned to. But perhaps 10 years ago, you were mostly looking at companies in the top 25th% percentile range. Sure, the prices you paid went up, but probably not nearly as much as the market has moved. Is that good or bad? You can win either way, but you need to know where you live and what kind of bet you are making as a result. Full post in the first comment.
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Rob Go liked thisRob Go liked thisTwenty years ago, Eleanor Laurans and I started SimpliSafe with a simple idea: security should be accessible to everyone. We had friends in Cambridge whose homes had been broken into, but as renters, the security options available just didn’t work for them. So, we decided to build something different. I still remember putting together those first prototypes on our kitchen counter, wondering where this idea might lead. Looking back at the photo from moving in to our first office, it’s incredible to see how far we’ve come. The office sure has changed a lot in 20 years. But why we started hasn’t. To everyone who has been part of the journey, thank you. Here’s to the next twenty years.
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Rob Go liked thisRob Go liked thisTwo highlights from a very fun night in Boston: 1. I got to hang with Laura Bronner in our matching light-up sneakers, and lounge at The Wig Shop 👩🎤🧑🎤 for the first time. Clearly, I need to get out more. 2. I got to watch some very brave founders pitch judges inside an elevator at Pitch Lift. It was so much fun seeing founders like David Franklin pitch Naviday Health, Geneva Hinkson pitch PooPoof, Inc., Jerome A. DuVal pitch Housing Navigator Massachusetts, Inc., and many more (including one 15-year-old rockstar founder). Kudos to Rob Hughes, Karen Kelly, and the entire team for creating an event that brings together a wonderfully diverse range of innovators, and adds a little Hollywood-style✨ production, drama, and energy to Boston’s startup scene.
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Rob Go liked thisGenerational company being built by the perfect team. Indicator Ventures was lucky enough to have led Hike Medical's seed round. Couldn’t be more excited for what they’re building!Rob Go liked thisToday, I'm proud to announce that we've raised $22.5M to fix the custom medical device supply chain in America: the paperwork that blocks them and the manufacturing that slows them. Seed and Series A, both in the last 12 months. An opioid prescription takes five minutes and one signature. The custom device that prevents that same patient from losing a foot takes six weeks, three signatures, and a denial you appeal twice. Roughly 100,000 Americans lose a limb to diabetes every year. We built the slower system for the safer treatment. I grew up in my family's orthotics clinic. Three generations. I watched my dad make devices that changed how a kid walked, then lose his evenings to a fax machine fighting for payment on work he'd already done. Everyone in this field knows the problem. A perfect device nobody approves never reaches a patient. Approval on a device that takes six weeks to make in some lab doesn't help either. We're solving both sides of the problem. Our AI agents clear the referral, the documentation, and the insurance approval before the patient walks in. A clinician scans the foot in the chair, on a phone. That scan goes straight to our own factory in Peoria, Illinois, and comes back a finished device. No plaster, no outside lab, no hands in between. We've delivered to all 50 states, to patients in more than 500 counties. Proven on custom insoles. Next braces, orthoses, prosthetics. Then bionics. Every device that goes on a human body is made the same broken way, and the ones that will matter most haven't been built yet. So proud of the entire Hike Medical team for making this possible. Thanks to Max Altman at Saga Ventures for leading our Series A, and to Indicator Ventures (Seed Lead), Fifth Down Capital, RiverPark Ventures, etc, and our individual angels like Sam Blond & Jerod Mayo for backing this when it was a thesis and a room with 15 3D printers.
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Rob Go liked thisRob Go liked thiscounterpoint: this is... good it means we're reaching scenarios that are unpredictable, extreme, etc vs everyday. Of course it matters how Waymo, et al handle these - both in training data and real life - but as someone who has taken probably 100+ Waymo rides, i'm generally thrilled. https://lnkd.in/graxHGczWaymo Is Growing Faster Than Ever. So Are Its Glitches.Waymo Is Growing Faster Than Ever. So Are Its Glitches.
Experience & Education
Volunteer Experience
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Mentor
// Praxis //
- Present 12 years
Science and Technology
Creating cultural & social impact through entrepreneurship
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Member Board Of Directors
Courageous Parents Network
- Present 5 years 4 months
Health
Courageous Parents Network is an innovative non-profit organization providing support - through its digital platforms, media, and live virtual events - to families and pediatric providers caring for children with serious illness.
Publications
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The Product Manager
Harvard Business School
Industry note. Describes the role of product manager (PM) in technology companies, detailing: 1) PMs' responsibilities; 2) different ways to organize the product management function; 3) how PMs interact with other functions within technology companies (e.g., engineering, product marketing); 4) how the nature of the PM role varies depending on context (e.g., early vs. late-stage startups, business- vs. engineering driven cultures); and 5) the attributes of effective PMs.
Other authorsSee publication -
Product Development at Opower
Harvard Business Publishing
Harvard Business School Case 811-075
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Languages
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Mandarin
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Matt Littell
The search fund model is built on alignment. But "usually" isn’t "always." While search funds are collaborative by design, collaboration doesn’t eliminate tension. Based on experiences from both sides of the table, our latest note explores the moments when incentives between ETA CEOs and investors naturally drift apart. Why this matters: It’s Structural: These aren't "bad actor" stories; they are inherent constraints of the model. It’s Predictable: Tensions surface when timelines, personal realities, or stakes shift. It’s Navigable: Understanding these frictions upfront builds empathy, clearer expectations, and better discussions. Grateful to collaborate with Alex Hodgkin, CFA, and A.J. Wasserstein on a topic that rewards honesty and dialogue over optimism alone. Read the full paper at: https://lnkd.in/e_eskQ9V #ETA, #SearchFunds, #Searchfund, #EntrepreneurshipThroughAcquisition, #Entrepreneurship, #CorporateGovernance, #InvestorRelations, #PrivateEquity, #YaleSoM, #Kellogg, #Booth
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Matt Logan
I’m thrilled to share Earthshot Ventures most recent investment, Unlimited Industries! Unlimited is an AI-native construction company that both designs and builds. Its platform can generate and evaluate hundreds of thousands of design configurations in parallel, automatically identifying optimal layouts for cost, safety, and performance before construction begins. Why did we invest? Solving a real need we know well: Over the last decade, we have worked with hundreds of companies that are ready to deploy their technology, but struggle with slow construction timelines and cost overruns. Unlimited makes it feasible for emerging infrastructure companies to bring projects to life reliably and efficiently. Massive market potential: The EPC market is ~$800B. While this entire market is not addressable from day one, early adopters will pave the way for the mass market, enabling massive possible scale over time. Exceptional team: The company is led by Alex Modon, a repeat founder and multidisciplinary engineer. To accelerate the company, Alex teamed up with Tara Viswanathan and Jordan Stern, who previously built and scaled Rupa Health as the founder/CEO and first teammate respectively, from zero to millions in revenue before its successful nine figure acquisition in 2024. Software is eating the world, and AI will eat engineering: Software engineering is increasingly being augmented and automated by AI, aided by large repositories of coding data like Github. Other engineering disciplines will be transformed over time as analogous data sets are compiled and software encodes the operating principles of the real world. Companies that can create proprietary datasets, like Unlimited’s burgeoning catalogue of projects, will gain defensibility through data moats. Lastly, since a good portion of my network here consists of founders who could be customers of Unlimited and their investors, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say - hit me up if you’d like to connect with Unlimited to deliver your next project on time, on budget! Welcome to the Earthshot portfolio, Unlimited!
6 Comments -
Jeff Immelt
Dayna Grayson is a leading VC who has “sat in every chair” at a young age. She founded Construct Capital with Rachel Holt, an early leader at Uber. Together, they are tackling the digitization of industry. Dayna will discuss macro trends, what it takes to be a founder, and the potential for AI. She is one of the few who have successfully blended a career of operations and investing. Check out our discussion at: https://lnkd.in/eYBUGjbW #leadershipdevelopment
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Tom Lazay
An emerging VC manager's fundraising lessons... the first two funds are a grind. Now, we’re on our third fund, it feels like we’re almost over the hump, but fundraising never gets easy for most of us. I want to congratulate the emerging VC firms presenting at this year’s RAISE Global conference. As former RAISE presenters, and (soon-to-graduate) emerging managers, we thought we’d share this LP Translator, a lighthearted guide to decoding what LPs really mean during the fundraising process. Fellow GPs, which ones did I miss? 👇 The LP Translator 📣 "Let’s stay in touch.” Translation: We’re not interested. “We want to see your track record develop.” Translation: Either we don't believe in your strategy, or we’re focused on managers with more buzz. “We’re not allocating to new managers right now.” Translation: We’re not allocating to you right now. "Show us your deals so we can get to know you.” Translation: We’d like free co-invests if you get something hot. “We need to see more DPI before we commit.” Translation: We don’t really understand VC, but we’re pretending to. “We’re fully allocated for this year; check in early next year.” Translation: Next year we’ll still be fully allocated (just not to you). “Call us before final close.” Translation: I’m too polite to say no at this time, so I’m kicking the can down the road. “Your fund is too small.” Translation: Okay, that one might actually be true (for some LPs). “We went through your data room and want to meet face-to-face.” Translation: We’re genuinely interested, keep going! “Can you send us your LPA for signature?” Translation: Let’s go! 🚀 -------------------------- Fundraising is a long game, longer than we ever expected. We're now seeing how LP relationships are built across several funds, not several months. If they’re investing time to learn about you and your strategy, that’s your best signal of real interest. #emergingmanager #venturecapital #LP #RAISEGLOBAL
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