Welcome to Issue #42 of our newsletter series, News From the First Row.
Thank you to Sara Eshelman and John Flemming for sending some deals our way! That said, no intros are required - any startup can share their investment opportunity here.
📣 Announcements
For the full feed, check out (and follow) our LinkedIn page.
Join us at these upcoming community events
SAT, MAR 1st @ 10:00am PT (Seattle) | Breaking Barriers: Expanding the Angel Ecosystem
Yoko Okano is spearheading an exclusive half-day session designed to equip and empower women investors with the knowledge, tools, and connections to back the next generation of transformative startups. This event is for those ready to take the next step into angel investing and for women who have previously invested (Accredited Investors). However, all who support increased access to investment capital and diversifying the investor ecosystem are welcome.
Sign up for event details here and consider inviting the “venture curious” folks in your network.
TUE, MAR 11th @ 5:00pm PT (via Zoom) | Deals & Drinks
Join us via Zoom for our 'Deals & Drinks' workshop! We bring a founder together with a group of investors (a mix of VCs, prospective angels, students, angels) to hear a pitch. We gather our notes and use them to facilitate a conversation about how we heard the pitch, what we observed, and what open questions we still have. Don’t miss it - RSVP today!
MON - TUE, JUN 2nd - 3rd (Seattle) | Seattle Investor Summit+Showcase (Seattle)
Organized by the Tech Alliance, this two-day event aims to connect innovators and investment in our region. Across presentations, panels and guided discussions, participants will hear from top researchers, entrepreneurs, and large enterprises. Venture capital and corporate venture investors will share their perspective on themes and opportunities. First Row Partner’s Minda Brusse will be joining a panel and attending other parts of the summit. Tickets are available here.
Can’t make the next Deals & Drinks?
Join in the invite list and we’ll include you on the next one!
Our portfolio companies are hiring
Please let us know (hello@firstrowpartners.vc) if you or anyone in your network is interested in these opportunities:
Ettos is hiring for 3 Asesora Comercial en Tienda de Belleza, in Medellín, Sabaneta, and Envigado, Colombia
mpathic has several engineering roles open on their website
Velt is hiring Software Engineer (Backend leaning), Software Engineer (Frontend leaning), and a Founding Developer Success Engineer
WAVEAI has several openings on their website
And in case you missed it
mpathic’s Dr. Alison Cerezo released a new mental health technology paper to introduce "EmpRes" - a novel tool that uses sentiment-guided, commonsense-aware response generation for improved mental health counseling. Click here to read it.
Wealthmore launched a new Community Plan!
🔆 Highlights
Minda leads a panel for UW CoMotion’s #FundamentalsForStartups | January 10 2025
Minda led an insightful panel of UW Foster School of Business MBA students for #FundamentalsForStartups. When it comes to nailing your next pitch to venture investors, Minda and the students suggest:
Segment potential investors by working backward from a future exit (size, type). Which kind of investors will be most attracted to that outcome? Are they focused on a certain multiple on their investment? IRR? How does your business model achieve it?
Venture investors are seeking substantial upside when they invest. By emphasizing exponential leaps, rather than linear business growth you align with that requirement. Answer the implied questions: “What is the opportunity to make progress on something novel in the next 18 months?” “How will your company (their capital) rapidly increase in value?”
Describe the market from the “bottom up,” in addition to any top down analysis you share. What will it take to reach $10M or $50M in sales? This question surfaces any limitations on revenue growth. Anticipate those questions and address them as part of your narrative.
Watch the full video here: https://bit.ly/4jcDLUq
Yoko attends Coolwater Capital’s Japanese Innovation Summit & Demo Day and B.E.L.L.E Startup Showcase in San Francisco | January 22-23 2025
Yoko visited the Bay Area to attend two events that brought together founders, funders and advisors across the ecosystem: Coolwater Capital’s Japanese Innovation Summit & Demo Day and B.E.L.L.E Startup Showcase.
Coolwater Capital, often referred to as the “Y Combinator for emerging venture capital funds,” partnered with the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) for a new emerging manager program aimed to grow the Japanese venture capital ecosystem. General Partners from top VCs came together to support emerging managers as they navigate early challenges and scaling and to share best practices on identifying high-potential startups in a competitive market. There, Yoko ran into Chris Yeh (Investor, Mentor, Entrepreneur, and Author of Blitzscaling). Chris joined an LP call with us last year for a Q&A with Minda. He and co-author Reid Hoffman have a distinct perspective on the kinds of companies and timing where blitzscaling is best applied.
B.E.L.L.E. (Boundless; Entrepreneurship; Liberty; Liaison; Empowerment) is a community of women entrepreneurs dedicated to breaking boundaries and building futures. Their Startup Showcase featured a diversity of high-potential startups, all of which highlighted the innovation of these talented entrepreneurs: Pritaa K., Pavel Vinitsky, PhD, Joon-sang Lee, Gina Levy, Anto Patrex, Mike Zayonc, Jeyla Sadikova, Anna Yuan, and Michelle Shocron. We love bringing insights and connections from the Bay Area back to the Pacific Northwest and our founder community.
First Row hosts a Backstage Tours with Adauris & Variata | December 12 2024 & January 29 2025
Thank you to Logan Underwood (CEO and Cofounder of Adauris) and Denise Kutnick and James Lee (Cofounders of Variata) for joining the First Row Partners’ investor community for two recent Backstage Tours. The goal: increase the quality of founders’ decisions. During these invite-only calls, our investor community listens to a founder present on a current strategy question. Yoko and Minda facilitate a constructive group discussion aimed at discovering possible avenues for the founder to explore. Through our questions and related experiences as an investor community, founder feedback is quite positive. Rather than focusing on ‘advice giving,’ we expand their considerations and open doors.
Both companies are using the outcomes of the discussions to launch incremental experiments. One is improving their time-to-value for customers and building towards a more complete platform experience and greater defensibility / stickiness. While the other is optimizing their sales strategy and conversions along each stage of the sales funnel. The Backstage Tour discussions show how the diversity of experiences and perspectives of our investor community lends to a depth of opportunities and creative solutions. We look forward to seeing how these founders continue to iterate on their early successes.
Seattle-based AI leaders speak at “Seattle Startup Now: AI Leaders Panel & Happy Hour” | January 30 2025
Minda attended Tola Capital & Foundations “Seattle Startup Now” panel and happy hour, which featured Denise Kutnick (Cofounder and CEO of Variata), Salman Paracha (Cofounder and CEO, Katanemo), David Tepper (Cofounder and CEO, Pay-i), and Steve Krenzel (Cofounder and CEO, LOGIC).
This panel of deeply technical founders shared how they select what to build while keeping an eye on the rapid advances in AI. A discussion around margins and pricing focused on how to align the best with the customer value they are creating. A key takeaway was their shared belief that agent and AI margins will increase and can be optimized over time.
📰 What we've been reading
Andrew Ng explores the rise of AI agents and agentic reasoning
In his keynote session from BUILD 2024, Andrew Ng, Founder and Executive Chairman of Landing AI, explores the rise of AI, agents, and the growing role of unstructured data.
He emphasizes the importance of focusing on the application layer (the top layer), which holds the greatest opportunities for generating value and driving user experiences. He also introduces the concept of a new layer, the agentic orchestration layer, which makes it easier for developers to build applications on top.
Of the four AI trends that Andrew calls out, we are most excited about large language models (LLMs) being fine-tuned at the agentic level. Agentic workflows are a pivotal shift in how systems are designed and deployed and allow for AI to be used in more complex, nuanced processes. They can deliver significant performance gains compared to traditional models because of their iterative workflows, where the AI agent drafts, critiques, and revises its own work. Emerging large multimodal (LMMs) can also leverage agentic workflows to process diverse inputs from images, to text, to video. We encourage you to check out Andrew’s VisionAgent to see the power of capturing meta data and video indexing.
Clara Shih, Head of Business AI at Meta, refutes the “death” of SaaS in an AI World
Although SaaS is undergoing significant changes and facing new challenges in the current technological landscape, Clara Shih argues it is not dead. The SaaS industry remains a substantial market that is a vital part of the software industry.
“Structured data still matters for accuracy, access control, and latency. Deterministic workflows are needed for repeatability and control. I actually think SaaS systems of record and workflows may be more important than ever, needed for agent RAG and tools.” - Clara Shih
In the face of slowing growth, compressed valuations, and disruptive AI competition, the SaaS companies that evolve will remain vital in the tech ecosystem. They can do this by:
Bolstering the role as the source-of-truth and the system of record.
Adapting the business mode to market conditions - as exemplified by Salesforce’s Agentforce.
Becoming truly AI-first and evolving into “AIaaS” (Artificial Intelligence as a Service).
🖼️ Practice | Observing Art
Art & Critical Thinking. We see a bold line connection between the intuitive and critical thinking skills practiced in the arts and the work of evaluating innovation ideas and opportunities.
Looking at art with abstract and complex themes is an opportunity to slow down your thinking and reflect on how you form a point of view (metacognition). Use the self-guided questions provided below to walk through this image:
Take a closer look. It takes a moment to slow down your thinking and gaze to really examine this piece. Start by describing the ‘elements of art’ in this piece (color, lines, shading, forms, texture, space.) What different choices could the artist have made? Next, decide which if you want to analyze the piece as a narrative/story vs. idea/abstract. By choosing a narrative, you’ll examine it like a book – setting, characters, themes, actions and storyline. To view it from the abstract perspective, you’ll interpret how the the elements of art create meaning or suggest concepts. As you look at the composition as a whole, consider what it could mean - and generate as many possibilities as you can before deciding on one. What evidence supports your conclusion?
As you conclude your viewing, consider these questions – “Would I want to have this in a place where I can view it everyday and over the years? What makes you bored or uncomfortable? What makes you interested in seeing more? The NYT challenge is to spend 10(!) minutes looking at a piece. Give it a try!
👋 Talk Soon!
Please reach out to us so that we can share more about our investment strategies, pipeline, and our fund portfolio.
Minda Brusse & Yoko Okano