Ilya Grigorik

Hi everyone! I don’t share too often on here, but we’re at a very exciting moment at AptDeco, and I wanted to let you all in on it. AptDeco opened a community investment round and the response has been incredible. We’ve raised over $2M so far from institutional investors, customers and supporters. Nothing is more validating than customers doubling down with their own capital. And now, I’m inviting you, my network, to be part of our journey. When we started AptDeco, we set out to make buying and selling furniture easier. Over the years, many of our competitors have come and gone, but AptDeco continues to thrive. Why? Our technology, logistics and branding continues to set us apart and that's why major retailers including West Elm, Pottery Barn, La-Z-Boy, Article and 30+ more have partnered with us. The beauty with this investment round is that anyone can be an investor. Learn more and invest directly at wefunder.com/AptDeco.

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Ever since we launched SHAKTI, every quarter we write a letter to our LPs = Each letter includes an update on the portfolios, the GP's (our) view on the zeitgeist, an interview with a portfolio CEO and an interview with a TITAN = So far, we have 16 such letters = it's been on our "to do" list to share these publicly (i am lazy) = then Google comes along to save lazy people like me (thank you NotebookLLM) = here's a 10 min podcast summarizing our journey since Dec/2020 with the 16 LP letters as source = if you wanted to know what we are about, this is a pretty good place to start = https://lnkd.in/db7K2TrT cc SHAKTI

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Instacart is a market leader when it comes to leveraging AI tools to boost productivity at work. I had an amazing conversation with JJ Zhuang, Instacart’s Chief Architect, who has shepherded over 50 AI-driven initiatives to market across the org. We explored what catapulted Instacart to the forefront of AI integration, supporting radically diverse use cases across various functional areas. One striking insight (echoed by Ethan Mollick and others elsewhere) is that you often don't need specialized tools for specialized work. Frontier models like GPT-4 can seamlessly adapt to a wide range of functions and use cases. They're not just for engineers; they're incredibly versatile tools used by marketing, comms, and legal teams. From generating code to proofreading and ideation, GPT-4 empowers every department to leverage AI for enhanced productivity and innovation. By integrating LLM’s like GPT-4 into their workflows, teams can streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and unlock bandwidth for new creative possibilities. How can you harness the power of AI in your own work to boost productivity? Share your thoughts below 👇 Want to hear more insights from JJ? Check out the full podcast episode by clicking the link in the comments.

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It’s eye-opening to see how AI model businesses are dealing with tight margins despite big investments. 🤯 Aidan Gomez’s comments about the “zero margin business” highlight the fierce competition and price cuts in the industry. 💸 With giants like OpenAI and Anthropic lowering prices to stay ahead, it’s a tough time for startups. The future of AI might depend on finding new ways to make these technologies profitable. 🚀 #AI #MachineLearning #TechTrends #Startups https://lnkd.in/ejkDu_wT

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To all my British friends, this intro looks like the #LoveIsland Villa. But disappointingly, I only speak about the very unsexy topics of data hygiene, values, and the nitty gritty of how your team preps to use your company's data as the foundation of AI. If you want to talk about how data governance as team effort, DM me or just heckle me in the comments. "I've got a text!"

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🌸 Exciting Spring 2024 Product Updates! 🌸 Super proud of our team for all of their incredible work! A few highlights! 📍 New communities in North Dakota & San Francisco ✨ Improved location-sharing & directions 🚩 Report conditions & hazards in-app 🎉 Personalized onboarding 📊 Easy access to challenge reports for staff Check out our blog for more details: Spring 2024 Product Updates. #OutdoorRecreation #ParkManagement #SpringUpdates #VisitorExperience #OuterSpatial

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~40% of Frec’s customers are engineers working in tech, many of whom expect frequent and large capital gains. They also prefer to self-manage their money, which makes Frec an ideal platform. Meet Evan: an engineering leader who upgraded from investing in ETFs to direct indexing. Direct indexing appealed to Evan because it offers comparable returns to his ETFs while saving him money on advisory and ETF fees. “ETFs are true and tested, and giving folks a different way of investing in the market while saving more money is really appealing.” He’s used many other robo-advisors and other fintech tools, but “Frec seems to maximize tax loss harvesting opportunities better than any other product that I’ve used.” He also likes Frec's transparent fee structure.  “I feel like with a lot of other companies, that’s muddled in with the cost of investments,” he told us, “and you don’t really know how much you’re paying or how much you’re not saving as a result. I think Frec does a really good job of laying all of that out and giving you a true understanding of the cost of these investment products.” Read more about his Frec journey here ⬇

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Here's my commits/week vs. customers added. Not a perfect metric for total product effort, but a decent proxy. I get so excited about building products because, compared to consulting, there is unlimited upside. A fixed amount of product effort can make unbounded money while you sleep. (And yeah, I'm not factoring in time spent on customer support. Obviously that's rising with customer count and at some point requires hiring staff. But you get the point.)

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Today, Upshift is reinventing car ownership. This is the day I’ve been looking forward to for years. Today, Upshift is reinventing car ownership with a PERSONALIZED fractional car subscription. Now you can create your own plan uniquely tailored to your needs. Choose 4, 8 or 12 days/month. Pick 250, 500, or 750 miles per month. Opt-in for delivery - or pick it up yourself from a central San Francisco lot. It's all up to you now! And we have a new signup flow that helps you choose what’s best for you. Best part? Plans now start at just $149/month for 4 days/month of car access! That's HALF the price of our former plans! Perfect for a hybrid work commuter driving into the office 1-3 days/week or a weekend warrior getting out of the city regularly. With Upshift car subscriptions, everything is included in one monthly plan - even insurance. We do everything for you- we refuel, clean and handle service and repairs. And we guarantee availability. Your car can be conveniently delivered and parked near your home- clean, gassed, and ready when you are. Unlock and drive via our app. When done, park legally anywhere in our San Francisco service zone. We eliminate the worries of car ownership and leave you truly free to enjoy the ride. Imagine having a hybrid Toyota Corolla or AWD Honda CRV hybrid SUV that appears when you need one and disappears whenever you're done. Now stop imagining. Click here to build your personalized fractional car subscription and have your new car at your doorstep today! #carsubscription #carleasing #carrental #carshare #mobility #transportation #EV #AV #autonomousvehicles #autotech #startups #vc #venturecapital #climatetech #insurtech

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Some context from the #Founder perspective. As liberal as Seattle is as a city with policy and politics, it's incredibly conservative from an investment standpoint. One of the reasons you may not hear big "home-run" type pitches or pitches with sizzle, is simply because investors in Seattle don't like those types of pitches and Founders have been ingrained to not present in that manner. They may say they do, but ask any Founder and they'll tell you how they have been told to size down their pitch or talk about MVPs, first customer, first revenue, etc. or how what matters more is what you can do first couple years rather than the home run. Those early metrics are important by the way, but different from the big home run. Do you know who is receptive to homerun pitches? Investors in the Bay, NYC, Miami, Hong Kong. Seattle is not great for early-stage Founders with many prioritizing raising outside the city. We will be raising capital in the fall and as of now, have no plans of reaching out to Seattle-based VCs. I should also add that our company has a blockchain component and sadly Seattle VCs have not embraced crypto or blockchain. Welcome to #Seattle, Kyle Lui! Hopefully, you can help change the narrative! GeekWire

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🚰 VODA.ai is building software to make one of our scarcest, most important resources safer and more cost effective to manage🚰 It's W13 / Q2 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got VODA.ai, an AI startup helping analyze our nation’s water infrastructure at a local level to deliver better service for utilities and local populations across the country. Co-Founder & CEO George Demosthenous was working in product management at a utility technology vendor that builds metering & network infrastructure for utilities. George consistently heard that while the technology Mueller was selling was effective, the external pipe detection equipment and sensors they were purchasing didn’t necessarily stop leaks. There are 2.2M miles of drinking water pipes across the U.S. In Jackson, MS more than 65% of their processed water does not make it to end customers. In Detroit’s Highland Park neighborhood an estimated 70% of water is lost from 120 year old pipes. Imagine if Apple shipped 100M iPhones stateside and 50M were littered across the Pacific Ocean floor on their way over from Asia. Crazy, right? VODA.ai is building a software company that uses existing data to assess the condition of pipes that cannot be seen and determine which ones will have the highest likelihood of an event, like a leak or a break. VODA.ai created an AI engine dubbed “daVinciTM” here in Boston that uses pattern recognition in the way that LLMs probabilistically identify the next word in a sentence. daVinciTM has been tested head-to-head with other alternative models and has always outperformed! No pressure.. Since COVID they have grown both revenue & customer count by 200%+ y/y, continuing to leverage AI with both their product & team. AI’s emergence has helped VODA.ai’s sales cycle fall from a full year to three months as utilities broadly want to leverage best in class AI software. This Seed-stage startup has already analyzed over 1M miles of pipe (almost 50% of America!) and over 2M miles of service lines with customers from Boston to San Jose, CA. They are planning to more than 2x revenue in 2024, becoming the go to decision support platform for water utilities across the country in the next five years. VODA.ai is backed by local Boston investors Innospark Ventures and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. MassCEC has named VODA.ai a top carbon reduction emission leader, the team has twice been voted (by water utilities!) the Best Smart Water Solution at the Smart Water Summit, and VODA.ai plans to continue to grow their team in Boston in the quarters ahead. Operators to Know: -Kyra Dubinsky, Chief of Staff -Cory Sides, SVP Sales -Dan Hack, EVP of Operations and International Sales -Lowell Rust, MBA PMP, VP of Customer Success If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments! And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you next week, will you?? #bostontech #startups #AI

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It is so exciting to witness so much innovation at TechCrunch this week in SF! Spending time learning as well as reconnecting with fellow investors, acquaintances and friends. If you are around, please drop in a DM. Would love to catch up. 🙂 #innovation #techcrunch #startup #learning #founders

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TL;DR Check it out 🥧 https://www.potpie.ai/ Today I am excited to share that we are launching potpie out of beta. 🥧 Potpie helps engineers like you build purpose-driven, context-specific, high-precision agents on top of your codebase that can perform engineering tasks like onboarding, debugging, testing, system design and a lot more. We started building potpie to help engineers use AI meaningfully. We're not aiming for moonshot ideas to completely replace engineers, but rather developing something that assists them in tangible, task-specific ways. ⭐️ Get started with agentic software development with Potpie AI!

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👩‍🚀 Fellow Tech People, we're exploring moving away from our custom API/websocket LLM interfacing at LEAGUES in favor of ELL. 🤔 The potential for streamlined API interactions, simplified prompt management, and reusable functions is really appealing. That said, I’m reaching out to the community: has anyone implemented ELL in production yet? I'm curious if ELL is the way to go for long-term scalability and maintenance reduction when interacting with LLMs. And what about Langchain—why choose one over the other? I'd love to hear your experiences and thoughts! #LEAGUES #ELL #Langchain #AI #TechInnovation

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Is this the end of embeddings? Hear from Josh and Tashrish on the pros and cons of using embeddings-based RAG for document data extraction and our experiments with switching to completions-only RAG.

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🪄✨🤖 Magical AI Experiences 🪄✨🤖 In yesterday’s Stratechery Daily Update, Ben Thompson describes his magical first ride with Waymo: “The ride itself was, on any objective basis, pretty uneventful…What was really surprising to me, though, was how I felt about the entire thing. After Waymo greeted me by name, explained the process (which only happens on your first ride), and dropped me off with a cheery “Happy Friday”, I felt a twinge of — what is this?! — sadness as it drove away. I felt like I had just made a new friend, and now my friend was driving away after too short a time together.” Later in the update, he comments, “What was the most striking was how this experience made me think about Google: I felt a genuine surge of affection for the Internet giant.” ^^This is what we strive for at OfOne (YC W23). With voice AI, restaurant brands have a unique opportunity to rethink and deliver a differentiated brand experiences. When done correctly, AI can be delightful and immersive. We’re working really hard every day to enable our partners to provide this to their customers. The technology is there, and it's getting better every day. The brands that lean in and execute on this well will win customers hearts. Link to article below. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, you should be!

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The newest issue of The Pragmatic Engineer found a surprise uptick in eng hiring in the typically slow summer season - I'm curious to see how the macro environment impacts this uptick as we head into the fall, but I remain hopeful. I asked Gemini to give me the tldr of the article to share with my team (sorry, Gergely Orosz) and found it missed one of the most interesting pieces of the article. Gemini's highlights - Unexpected surge: Tech recruitment has seen an unusual spike in June and July, contrary to typical trends. Increased demand: Startups, especially AI-focused ones, are driving the hiring uptick. Global phenomenon: This trend isn't just limited to the US; Europe is also experiencing increased recruitment activity. Reasons for hiring: Companies are backfilling positions, investing in growth due to improved financials, and responding to increased VC funding. Challenges remain: While the job market is improving, finding qualified candidates and offering competitive compensation remains difficult for many companies. What I found most interesting - The nature of the backfills: the article finds that a lot of new headcount are actually backfills of folks that were "over-slashed" during rounds of layoffs. Not entirely surprising with the "trim the fat" and "rebuild lean" mentality, but interesting nonetheless. Either way, the uptick is encouraging (and don't always rely on Gemini's tldrs). #hiring #startups #VCbacked #softwareengineering

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Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

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Do you know your customers journey from A to Z? If yes, have you gone through the effort to map, diagram, define, or write it down? Chances are many have not because they THINK they know the customers journey but they have not fully DISCOVERED their journey through observing, following, listening to, or interviewing their customers. Check out the User Clock Sketch example shared by Teresa Torres which is a simple 360 circle view of each step of a customers journey. Add the important effort of discovery and customer journey definition and refinement to your product repertoire. This step is especially important as part of a Product Operating Model where it is important to do a thorough discovery before determining what to build or not to build as part of the effort to deliver the right product outcomes. #customerjourney #journeymapping #productdiscovery #productmanagement #productdesign #productoperatingmodel

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