Welcome to issue #33 of our ongoing newsletter series, News From the First Row.
Thanks to Chris Deutsch & Sara Lindquist for sending some startups our way this month. That said, no intros are required - any startup can share their investment opportunity here.
Breaking News!
🔥 First Row Partners announces The Ensemble Event Fund this fall as a “Back to Funding” opportunity this fall for early stage founders and funders. Open to all technologies, sectors and limited to US C corps.
Over 6 weeks, a group of 15+ experienced, individual investors will use our arts-based framework and processes to screen and diligence startup investment opportunities across the US and determine a group investment of $150k - $200k in early December.
Startups — Apply by October 12, 2023
Apply here for Ensemble Fund investment consideration by October 12, 2023 at 5p PDT.
Learn more about The Ensemble Fund investment criteria, key dates, founder resources offered, and our diligence process here.
The decision and diligence process will be swift + thorough, with learning, networking opportunities, and resources on all sides. And, we hope to ignite lots of new connections. The Ensemble Fund investment will be managed and advanced by First Row including portfolio company engagement and resources. Companies can elect to apply to both our main funds (thematic thesis) and/or the Ensemble Fund (broad thesis) via the application.
Register here for the founder info session on Wednesday October 4th from 12 - 12:30pm PT. We’ll share a recording of the Zoom call to registered participants, but we encourage you to attend and ask questions.
Questions not covered on our Notion page? Drop us a note: ensemble@firstrowpartners.vc
First Row Partners | Highlights
🌊 Minda was part of a fantastic panel discussing managing capital and fundraising in turbulent times. Hosted by Clark Nuber, CIBC and DLA Piper at The Collective in Seattle, the panel had a wide ranging and detailed discussion about debt and VC financing, changing market for the benchmarks to access venture capital, and lots of commentary how SAFEs and Convertible Notes are being negotiated in this market and at various stages.
Great to see some familiar faces in the crowd from our other events and First Row community!
📚 Workshops for WTIA Cohort 10 - Minda & Yoko led their Fundraising 101 workshop to kick off programming for the new cohort of WTIA Founders (Read the full announcement about Cohort 10). The following week, Yoko led a panel of angel investors to provide insight to the founders on what to expect and how to prepare for their earliest funding stages. Thank you to Waverly Swinton, Ron Theis, Karin Kidder and Louis Huynh for sharing their wisdom and advice.
🍻 A First Row Partners Happy Hour — Thanks to those of you who braved the rainy fall weather to raise a pint with us at Fremont Brewing on 9/26! We enjoy opportunities to get together with our community and LOVE seeing the unexpected and enthusiastic (note all the excited mid-discussion hand waving) conversations that emerge.
After torrential rain earlier in the day, not a drop fell during our time there, and we consider that a good omen for surviving turbulent times.
⚾ Techstars Seattle Mentors Night at the Mariners — Tuesday, September 12 at T-Mobile Park. Admittedly, Minda did not pay close attention at the Mariners game hosted by Techstars Seattle for program mentors. The people and conversations were just too engaging at Edgar’s Home Run Porch. The mentor group has expanded to meet the larger cohort size. Thank you Techstars leaders Marius Ciocirlan & Sarah Studer for hosting and organizing this fun evening.
🤝 UNMET Conference. Yoko attended the UNMET Conference put on by Stout Street Capital, a Colorado-based VC firm. This conference aimed to make connections between VCs and companies in different regional ecosystems. Following 2 stage-focused panels, investors and founders were thrown into a full day of 30-min meetings. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet founders and VCs from Colorado, Washington DC, Arizona, Idaho and more!
🛠️ Our portfolio companies are hiring! Please let us know if you or anyone in your network is interested in these opportunities:
Lyric Studio / Wave AI is hiring across marketing and engineering
Prisms VR is hiring for many roles, from technical through customer experience
Velt is hiring founding engineers and a founding brand/community manager
Kickplan is recruiting Elixir engineers and product designers
First Row Partners | What we've been reading
💰 The Fundraising Wisdom That Helped Our Founders Raise $18B in Follow-On Capital. Sharing from the Pitch Assist playbook at First Round, there are many reminders for founders about running a tight and focused fundraising process. The tip to “systematically surface all of the burning questions” sounds a lot like the Rude FAQ we at First Row recommend founders create - it’s a way to be in the driver’s seat of your narrative and build confidence around your intellectual honesty and credibility. As with all fundraising advice, as you read through these tips, we encourage you to use them as yet another data point to build your own framework and system for fundraising.
🏳️ How to Fail Well. No one likes to fail, and as entrepreneurs, we don't embark on this path with the intention of failing. However, failure is an inevitable part of the startup journey. In a conversation between Guy Kawasaki and Dr. Amy Edmondson, they discuss different types of failure, including bad failures (isolated incidents), intelligent failures (deliberate exploration leading to new discoveries), and complex failures. Dr. Edmondson emphasizes that success, like complex failures, often results from a confluence of factors. She advocates for a systems thinking approach and the importance of psychological safety to navigate the uncertain terrain of failure.
🧠 Practical Deep Learning for Coders (Video series). This video series from one of the cofounders of Fastmail and now founding researcher at fast.ai is intended for people with some coding experience keen to apply current deep learning & ML to practical problems.
Venture Funding News | The Big Picture
Funding news around our thematic investment areas: ⚡️Tech Elevating Human Potential (AI gives superpowers to the makers, teachers, and brand builders creating our unique world) & 🔀 Media and Commerce Converge (New modalities blur the lines between entertainment the consumption of goods and services)
⚡️ AI Startup Cohere Locks Up $270M At $2.2B Valuation. What is driving the valuation of this LLM company? The enterprise market plays a significant role, along with Cohere's belief that it can avoid the pitfall of LLMs becoming commodities. Inovia Capital, the lead investor in this round, is backed by NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, and other tech company venture arms. They believe that Cohere can create sustained value by offering a "responsible LLM" that meets enterprise demands for accessibility and control. This raises the question for each new enterprise customer to assess how Cohere fulfills its social responsibility in delivering on their promises of equity and transparency.
The availability of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud options, as well as resource constraints related to supercomputer access, provide opportunities to increase long-term value with this capital.
The eye-popping valuation indicates another high water mark for tech company venture funds and the significant amount of venture capital flowing into AI. The question remains, where will the AI winners emerge? Will it be in hardware, cloud infrastructure, LLMs, or applications? Large funders are making significant bets on potential winners like Cohere.🔀 Transfr, a VR platform for workforce training, raises $40M. Remember the VR hype cycle? Transfr's $40M Series C funding brings their total investment capital to $90M. Their platform is designed to address workforce and skills-based training by creating proprietary training through consultations with experts in the field.
Their target customers include educational institutions, community organizations, and workforce development agencies. However, two of these segments face potential challenges in sustained growth for Transfr. These challenges arise from limited budgets, cyclical decision-making, and under-resourced IT teams. The concern here is slower feedback loops and delayed implementation. How successful is Transfr's go-to-market approach in overcoming these challenges?
Furthermore, content development poses challenges in a horizontal play like Transfr's. They need a large and potentially ever-changing set of courses, making it difficult to recover their investment per course as quickly as a focused STEM curriculum platform like Prisms, a First Row portfolio company. Refactoring and updating content libraries also becomes a cumbersome task over time.Transfr's future is worth keeping an eye on as it unfolds.
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.
Practicing the skill of separating out your data points and observations builds the expertise to develop and articulate a point of view. We challenge you (and ourselves) to examine the composition and consider our observations, the patterns and conclusions.
Join us for our monthly 'Deals & Drinks' workshop events! We created this fun, exploratory workshop to bring a founder together with a group of investors (a mix of VCs, prospective angels, students, angels) to present their 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. It is an object lesson. Much like looking at a piece of art, everyone remembers and sees things differently. Use this short form to join the email invite list.
Talk Soon!
Please reach out to us — We can share more about our investment strategies, pipeline, and our fund portfolio.
Minda Brusse & Yoko Okano | Minda@firstrowpartners.vc & Yoko@firstrowpartners.vc