I've had a setup like this since the start of covid and it's what inspired me to seed https://opalcamera.com/ (because they built a pro-sumer webcam for $300)
I want more stories from Loopt. It was ahead of its time and I know he learned a lot from his time as a startup CEO (before joining YC) that we rarely hear about.
> But it should be okay for me to express what I saw and how I perceived it.
I get that you have a reaction to stuff that you see on TV, but so does everyone. This kind of weird celebrity gossip just has no place on this site and so we need you to please stop now. We're not here for that.
I would love to know this, but also how often VC firms build their own tech to improve their daily processes and workflow, as well as develop their community of founders.
I built one of the first in-house VC research platforms at Index Ventures back in 2012 (+am now starting a new early-stage VC firm in Europe where we're building our own tech to aide sourcing/workflow).
Since 2012 most of the top VCs (or at least those with the management fees to afford it) have evaluated/experimented going down this route to some extent with varying degrees of success.
Some like Social Capital have been relatively open about it (at least in parts) but generally most have kept a low profile to avoid giving away techniques they use to get a competitive edge.
Why? I think the real issue is that historically small VCs don’t make enough in management fees to support engineers, no one wants to sell part of the GP to invest in growth and scale, and large VCs make so much money from management fee and carry that they don’t care about the complexity. I’d be surprised if a16z didn’t have a few engineers in staff, but I know several of the big firms definetly don’t. It’s going to take a new commer stealing away their LPs to get them to change.
Could you enlighten me on your thoughts on what the engineers at a16z would do if not for focusing on getting better insight to vet deals?
Agreed on what you said, change doesn't come unless there's a burning bridge. If the firms have a current process that gets them to where they are today, they will just keep doing what they are already doing.
Perhaps a business opportunity to target the small VCs to help give them an edge.
And we ship. It's hard to unlearn solving problems via software when you've done it, especially at scale successfully, and it makes everyone at the org (and soon in the founder network) more effective and frankly happier doing their jobs.
I wrote about this Guilded update for the Initialized blog, because I'm so enamored with this product that probably would have saved me from needing to learn a lot of HTML two decades ago. It did serve me well, though... but I'd have rather been playing Q2CTF
This post is especially awesome to me because Guilded was launched on reddit, and a majority of our continued feedback comes either directly from reddit or from users that found us initially through reddit.
The most fun thing about this project so far has been how all the things I spent tons of time on just for fun (reddit, gaming) ended up showing their worth later, like the superhero movies where the useless power ends up being useful in a really contrived way at the end.
