boldstart ventures

Congrats Ed Sim! Clearly a testament to the amazing founders in the boldstart ventures portfolio representing the latest in developer tooling, cybersecurity, and infrastructure software!

Thanks Vishal Persaud for covering the Supersizing 🍟 of seed rounds or what I call "Inception Rounds" or the idea stage well before founders have written any code. The fact is that seed rounds >$5M or in my language "Jumbo Inception rounds" now make up over 20% of all initial funding vs 10% in 2019 (from Pitchbook) This has huge implications for seed investors in terms of fund sizing, opportunities and for founders who choose to go Jumbo in terms of setting huge goals for next rounds. Read the Business Insider article here: https://lnkd.in/e-AwW6T7 Here's a quote I shared: Things are pretty much playing out as Sim predicted back in October when he wrote in his Substack newsletter about "the new race to be first" and a novel way to define this stage of check-writing called "inception investing." For Sim, this first stage of investing can be broken down into three round types: the "discovery" round — typically less than $2 million and reserved for first-time startup founders; a "classic" round of funding ranging from $3 million to $5 million for first-and second-time founders; and then the "jumbo" round, usually over $6 million for repeat founders (this stage is where the larger multi-stage firms tend to get more involved, Sim said). "I don't think this is going away," Sim said. For more context, check out my weekly newsletter What's 🔥 IT/VC and edition #365 here: https://lnkd.in/eJhEsZ4s

Huge congrats Gal Sagie, Dan Caspi and the entire Hypernative team on its $16M Series A solving a massive pain to stop all of the security hacks in Web3/crypto BEFORE they happen using its AI/ML platform So awesome to experience the magic 🪄 as the product is 🔥 + scaling w/over 120 customers! boldstart ventures is a proud investor since inception

Some advice for VC managers starting new funds...👇🏼

My entire 30 minute conversation with Ed Sim, founder and managing partner of boldstart ventures, felt like 30 seconds. Great storyteller. I enjoyed hearing how he became a TOP seed investor specializing in early-stage enterprise tech startups like Snyk, BigID, and Blockdaemon. He had to hustle his way to the TOP to be the first to ever do it. He calls it his own approach as "inception" investing -working with founders to help shape and form a new startup. He talks about the importance of selling yourself, telling stories and his story started by selling knives while at Harvard. Full episode in comments. #boldstart #VC #TopOnePercenter

Ed Sim says it best! Founders and investors alike: grit is your best friend. It's about real-time decision-making, bouncing back from setbacks, and an unwavering commitment to your passion. #Entrepreneurship #Grit #Resilience #Leadership

🎙️ Listen in - so enjoyed this wide-ranging conversation with friend Steve Brotman tracing back to early days in NYC Enterprise tech ecosystem in mid-90s 👴🏼 to why we started boldstart ventures, the evolution of what a first check means from seed to pre-seed to #Inception and what we look for in founders... Oh yeah, we are as 🔥 up as ever about the current platform shift powered by AI (just a tech infused in all enterprise software) and have 💰 to deploy!

Let's not overthink an investment at #Inception. We can spin wheels dligencing until death but at end of day it comes down to the founders and what unique insight they are bringing to this new company that gives them an unfair advantage and right to win. 9,999 things can go wrong but if 1 goes right, how big can this be? Investors esp. with new markets that don't exist can get hung up on TAM (total addressable market) but what I find is that for many of these new markets there is what I call "intuitive TAM" or just using your common sense that if a product like this were to exist, how many folks would use and what would they pay. Keep it simple and focus on what matters - founder market fit. Founders, if investors keep asking for more and more references to convince them that there is a there there, they are not the ones for you and move to the next Forgot to add, it's goes without saying that the unique insight has to be paired with our confidence in your ability to conceive, build, and ship product and to understand and zero in on the end user, have the empathy of a day in the life and how your product/service makes their lives 10x better with vs. without your product Knowing who your first 5-8 hires, usually all engineers and builders, also indicates your ability to tell a story, to sell and recruit talent, to show a history of leadership and best sign is folks following you from last company

Let's not overthink an investment at #Inception. We can spin wheels dligencing until death but at end of day it comes down to the founders and what unique insight they are bringing to this new company that gives them an unfair advantage and right to win. 9,999 things can go wrong but if 1 goes right, how big can this be? Investors esp. with new markets that don't exist can get hung up on TAM (total addressable market) but what I find is that for many of these new markets there is what I call "intuitive TAM" or just using your common sense that if a product like this were to exist, how many folks would use and what would they pay. Keep it simple and focus on what matters - founder market fit. Founders, if investors keep asking for more and more references to convince them that there is a there there, they are not the ones for you and move to the next Forgot to add, it's goes without saying that the unique insight has to be paired with our confidence in your ability to conceive, build, and ship product and to understand and zero in on the end user, have the empathy of a day in the life and how your product/service makes their lives 10x better with vs. without your product Knowing who your first 5-8 hires, usually all engineers and builders, also indicates your ability to tell a story, to sell and recruit talent, to show a history of leadership and best sign is folks following you from last company

Hot off the press 🎉 Gen AI is progressing at an astonishing pace. Just look at OpenAI's Sora – the ability to create high-quality, lifelike videos and images via prompts is opening up many creative opportunities for individuals and enterprises alike. I'm thrilled to present my piece on Stable Diffusion, a cornerstone of this advancement. Stable Diffusion is revolutionizing how we think about marketing and security. For marketing teams, it challenges traditional methods, offering innovative ways to engage audiences with dynamic visual content. On the opposite spectrum, it pushes security teams to adapt and develop new strategies to keep up with the evolving capabilities of AI. I'd like to thank our team at boldstart ventures for helping me put this piece together. Please feel free to reach out if you found this interesting. I would love to connect with thought leaders and builders working on infrastructure solutions to help drive innovation in AI! Read it here: https://lnkd.in/ebDr7KAH #AI #Venture #Sora #OpenAI #EnterpriseInfrastructure #stablediffusion #Security