Partner @stoutstreetvc , views are personal, invest in pre seed and seed stage startups in US and Canada, building the startup community @ @unmetconference
Joined November 2021
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I'm excited to share a whitepaper discussing a new framework to help startup founders and early stage investors and angels make sense of all the VC industry reports and drive actionable insights.
Read the full white paper here
lnkd.in/gk7RZAtD
meh-case-for-ai.netlify.app/
I wrote something new: "The Meh Case for AI."
Not the revolution case. Not the bubble case. The uncomfortable middle, where the technology actually works, and most of the money still gets lost.
Compute access(session and weekly limits) would be greater hurdle for productivity improvements driven by AI! As a hobbyist, I've noticed that within just 20 minutes of starting my session on Claude(on the Max 20x), I'm already down 34%. After six sessions(last 36hrs), I'm at 65% of my weekly limits. Boot-strappers would have tough time building(looks like the compute subsidy era sponsored by the frontier labs is ending fast). Compute being a governed as Utliites (Energy, Water, Roads) could be a conversation we may need to have soon.
John Francis retweeted
We're back at it again! February 8, 2024, Mark your calendars for VC Day - OKC!
For one day, co-work with VCs in the OKC ecosystem!
Location: Dayclub Modern Workspaces - Downtown OKC
Register below and join us to chat, work, and network!
lu.ma/vcdayokc
John Francis retweeted
i love @cartainc but starting to see a lot of startups move off of Carta because they charge $$$$. anyone else seeing this?
John Francis retweeted
Thank you everyone for making VC Day - Tulsa a huge success!
We appreciate our sponsors @regentbank, @GableGotwals, and @36degreesN for making this happen!
Huge shout-out to @hermitvc, the originator of VC Day. Thanks for allowing me to expand this concept to Oklahoma.
Thank you @AmadeuTolentino for the amazing networking experience with Preneur!
I hope to see you all at VC Day - OKC on January 17th! Save the Date!
Agree! also in LI people are too politically correct to drive any real insight.
John Francis retweeted
Sorry... is this even legal?
You HAVE to book a call to cancel?
I love this company - we just aren't using the service anymore...
But this is crazy... or am I?
Everyone wants to be an VC industry expert quoting datasets from angelist, carta and other services driven sources without acknowledging most of these datasets are a subset , incomplete and mostly just BS . Even the best data sources in VC are mostly self reported and lack predictive power unless it is parsed and cleaned by a data professional
John Francis retweeted
Yeah, to be fair the money in VC has always found comfort in a herd. The redundancy isn’t just with startups ideas/processes/GTM etc.. a vast majority of VC firms and their strategies are indistinguishable from each other.
Finally truth! Using venture capital as a weapon to kill competition isn’t news to us in the industry, what adds insult to the injury is that few Large VC funds backed by largely publicly funded inst. LPs are blatantly using predatory pricing strategies to kill competition, while regulators are sleeping at the wheel. By the way both LPs and GPs are just funding their inner circle of friends and not necessarily the ones with the best ideas.
A new paper titled "Venture Predation" argues the classic Silicon Valley model of venture capital is "anticapitalist. It's illegal. And it should be aggressively prosecuted, to promote free and fair competition in the marketplace," reports Adam Rogers.
businessinsider.com/venture-…
John Francis retweeted
Feel it’s just the beginning, the current state of industry is reminiscent of a pre-regulation oil industry & with the current direction the best outcome is cartelized oligopolies controlling which ideas get funded and who wins, not the best ones!
nytimes.com/2023/04/15/busin…
John Francis retweeted
The issue stems from "redlining in VC" where institutional LPs impose arbitrary and unscientific barriers, like insisting on a 100M fund size before considering investments. These hurdles hinder access to best performing funds and kills new ideas.
Great success story*
Key questions as an investor though are
1. How repeatable is this for a fund?
2. Isn’t propagating a warm intro culture toxic?
3. Would a BIPOC or women founder with no VC connections pull this off?
*assuming but still a lot to be proven
On March 7, 2022 I received an email from a founder/angel investor that read "just met these guys. building Honey 2.0. blew my mind". Got an intro. The team says they are open to chatting but only have a tiny bit of a room left for strategics. We met the next day. Committed on the call for a very tiny allocation. Pre-seed round and a huge bet on the team. No product, nothing.
Over the past year @harryjohndixon @law_and_rorder and I have spent countless hours together in NYC, LA, Aspen and SF. I have watched this team do whatever it takes to bring @CheckmateSaves to life from the sidelines.
Launched in Dec 22 and hit #1 in the app store. 400,000 users, 60k monthly active. Viral brand with a loyal following. Changing the way we shop. All of this was accomplished with a 5 person team.
Was lucky enough to double down on my investment at the Series A and to be joining as a Board Observer alongside GV @fffabulous. Truly still the beginning and happy to even know Harry and Rory. If you aren't a customer, get moving!
techcrunch.com/2023/05/25/ce…
An awesome read for anyone trying to disrupt their industry.
bigthink.com/thinking/bonhoe…
