Ideas from our partners,
founders, and industry experts

Joanne Chen on going from zero to one, and why early-stage investors need to have conviction in futures that others may not believe in.

Advice for those graduating into the world AI is shaping

We’re excited to share that our portfolio company Tonkean is joining Coupa.

Designers doing more, owning more, and shipping more.

Tennr co-founder and CEO Trey Holterman joins Joanne to talk about what it takes to make AI work in healthcare, and why the answer is not simply "better models."

From the outside, Cerebras is a ten-year company that's gone public. From where I stand, it's a nineteen-year relationship that finally gets to ring the bell.

I’m proud to announce that our portfolio company Ikigai, creator of a foundation model for structured data and time-series forecasting, has been acquired by Celonis.

The difference between the models we had in mid-2025 and the models we have now is hard to overstate.

When selling software, which tactics actually move the needle?

What’s holding enterprises back from going all in?

Lessons from Framer at SXSW

Lessons from The Solana Foundation at SXSW

Why decision traces will reshape B2B the way behavioral data reshaped B2C

At Foundation Capital’s 8th annual RSAC Happy Hour, we brought together over 90 CISOs, CIOs, and senior security leaders, alongside 30 early-stage founders and 30+ M&A leaders and GMs, for an engaging fireside chat with Aanchal Gupta (SVP, CSO at Adobe) and Hilik Kotler (SVP, CISO & IT at Expedia).

I share what founders need to hear from the people who make the buying decisions.

Will humans be managed by agents or be the managers of agents?

Ashu unpacks what this month’s software selloff is pricing in, and who stands to win as the seat model breaks.

If you’re building in fintech and don’t consider implementing blockchain infrastructure somewhere in the stack, you’re missing out. 

Aaron Levie has been on the podcast twice before. After we published our context graphs thesis, he wrote a response, so we invited him on to continue the conversation.

A month ago, Jaya and I published our p.o.v. on context graphs. Since then, it’s become one of the most-discussed – and, in our opinion, most important – ideas in AI this year.

Fulcrum has raised $25M to transform the insurance industry. Foundation led their seed round two years ago. Today, CRV is leading their Series A, and we’re thrilled to double down on a company that embodies everything we believe about the $4.6T services-as-software opportunity.

High performance used to be a differentiator for L1s. Now it's table stakes. The chains that win will compete on apps, users, and opinionated design.

As agents move into production, the bottleneck isn't intelligence: it's context. A conversation on context graphs, decision traces, and where value will accrue.

Enterprise AI finally hits production. Decision traces become the new moat. An AI lab goes public. Eight predictions for AI and tech in the year ahead.

By building context graphs from decision traces, AI agent startups are capturing the "why" behind the "what"—and gaining a structural advantage in shaping what comes next.

For more than 30 years, Foundation Capital has backed founders at inception, long before the rest of the world believed in them. Our Build Accelerator programs extend that tradition.

I’ve been working in AI since 2006. Back then, we were using it to build ad recommendation and speech recognition systems. Today, no one thinks of those things as AI anymore. They’re just... software.

We invest in "zero billion dollar" markets: opportunities that don't exist until a founder steps in and creates them. Here's what that thesis looks like in practice.

Steve sits down with Katie Dill, head of design at Stripe, to discuss what changes when AI enters design and what skills matter most.

OpenAI and Anthropic are moving up the stack fast. How do you build an enduring app-layer startup when your platform might become your competitor?

There’s a narrative in some corners of Silicon Valley that engineering skills have suddenly become less important now that AI can write code. I believe the opposite is true: engineering knowledge matters more than ever.

I've known Ashutosh Garg for nearly two decades. We share the same name (he goes by Ashu) - a coincidence that's led to more than a few confused introductions over the years.

Compute and storage have scaled exponentially. Network performance hasn't. DoubleZero is building new internet rails to close the gap.

Finance leaders are at the heart of their business’s strategic conversations, tasked with forecasting the future, advising the CEO, and shaping major business decisions. Yet behind the scenes, their teams are trapped in a mess of manual processes and outdated tools. 

Startup CEOs today are caught between two realities. On the one hand, investor expectations for AI startups are sky high.

With Jonathan Siddharth, Co-founder and CEO, Turing

Today, AegisAI emerged from stealth to announce its next-generation email security platform and the $13M seed round Foundation Capital co-led alongside Accel.

When intelligence becomes abundant, we won't use less of it: we'll find exponentially more things to do with it. Welcome to the age of $100B startups.

Ken Goldberg is a professor of engineering at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Ambi Robotics, a company applying AI-enabled robotics to the logistics industry. Ken has spent over four decades working on one of the hardest problems in robotics: how machines perceive and manipulate the physical world. We spoke about why tasks that seem effortless to humans - like picking up a glass or folding laundry - are still incredibly difficult for robots.

Every summer, I set aside time for self-reflection and reading. This summer, I've been thinking a lot about the idea of purpose. 

What if research wasn't a quarterly project but an always-on network? AI is closing the gap between "what we learned" and "what we do."

Last year, one of our portfolio founders casually mentioned what might be the most illuminating observation we’ve heard about fintech in years. "You know what I finally figured out?" he said. "Banks don't actually run on software. They run on humans pretending to be software."

The best technical founders don’t build for obvious trends: they build infrastructure for the problems those trends will create. When we led PlayerZero‘s $15M Series A, we recognized a pattern that’s defined our most successful investments: a founder who sees what’s coming before everyone else.

I explore why forward-looking AI builders have moved from RAG to reasoning + RL and share the roadmap they’re charting for others.

The story of software is one of layered recursions. First, we wrote explicit code: line-by-line instructions for computers (software 1.0). Next, with the rise of deep learning, we trained neural networks to learn how to achieve objectives directly from data (software 2.0).

Our largest CEO gathering of the year where we brought together leaders from across Foundation’s 30-year history, from IPO veterans and serial entrepreneurs to our newest pre-seed founders.

The real prize isn't the $200B SaaS market: it's the $4.6T enterprises spend on salaries and services. What we've learned a year into the services as software era.

Moving money can now cost fractions of a penny and settle in under a second. What that means for financial services at scale.

I explore how the data needed to advance AI has changed, and what it will take to push AI to the next frontier.

In this episode, I sit down with Ion Stoica, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Conviva, Databricks, and Anyscale. Over the last two decades, Ion’s research labs - the AMP Lab, the RISE Lab, and now the Sky Computing Lab - have seeded a generation of category-defining companies.

The regulatory winds have shifted. There's never been a better time to build for and with crypto in the U.S.

Ramesh Srinivasan, senior partner at McKinsey, shares how great leaders build empathy, resilience, and purpose

A year ago, nearly all the focus in AI circles was on the models themselves: how large they'd grown, which benchmarks they were saturating, and whether their impressive leaps in reasoning capability could continue scaling.

Startups are adopting AI twice as fast as large companies. What we learned from surveying 400+ designers on AI in their workflows.

At Foundation Capital’s 7th annual RSAC Happy Hour, we had a record-breaking turnout for an engaging fireside chat featuring Subra Kumaraswamy (CISO at Visa), Mike Elmore (CISO at G

Bear markets create perfect conditions for building. Raj Gokal on Solana's rise, going direct to users, and how crisis forces focus.

In January, DeepSeek surprised the tech industry by releasing a model - R1 - that matched GPT-4-level performance at a fraction of the cost. The initial reaction was loud, but for anyone paying close attention, it shouldn’t have been.

We've backed Lending Club, Stripe, and Solana. Now we're launching an accelerator for the next generation of AI-native fintech founders.

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Karan Goel, co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, a company pioneering the use of state space models (SSMs) for AI applications.

I break down NVIDIA’s push to own the full AI stack - from silicon to software - and explore what it means for startups building in the era of agentic AI.

I reflect on Foundation's three decades of conviction-based investing, and why our Fund 11 marks our deepest commitment yet to early-stage founders.

We share a legacy of constant reinvention, of standing alongside singular individuals who pull the future into the present. As a 30-year-old firm, we've lived through - and helped shape - the Valley's most important inflection points: the dot-com era, social media's rise, cloud computing, mobile, crypto, and AI.

AI is changing how financial institutions handle risk and compliance. We talked to execs across the industry to map where startups can win.

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Rohan Taori, a researcher on Anthropic's multimodal pre-training team.

The shift from brute-force AI spending to smart, systems-level design is here.

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi speaks to Chris "Tito" Sestito, the co-founder and CEO of HiddenLayer.

BabyAGI creator Yohei Nakajima on the opportunities and challenges of self-building agents, and why developing them is a lot like managing an intern.

In this episode, I spoke to Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean. After helping build Google's search infrastructure and co-founding Rubrik (which recently hit $1B in revenue), Arvind launched Glean to solve the problem of enterprise search and help employees enhance their work with AI agents.

I reflect on tech's 2024 milestones and chart what lies ahead in 2025.

I am thrilled to announce the successful sale of Foundation Capital Fund 9 and Leadership Fund 3 portfolio company EvolutionIQ. This is a huge moment for co-founders Mike Saltzman, Jonathan Lewin, Tomas Vykruta, and the exceptional team at EvolutionIQ, and we’re proud to have played a part in their journey. 

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital General Partner Joanne Chen speaks with Melody Meckfessel, the CTO of Jasper.

Exactly two years after ChatGPT’s launch, AI is reshaping every industry.

More than 100 researchers, founders, and builders gathered for small-group discussions about the biggest ideas in AI.

SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce, beware. Systems of agents are eating four decades' worth of enterprise tech.

On the eve of ChatGPT’s second birthday, I examine the fault lines in one of the field's most powerful assumptions.

Today, AI is marketing's copilot. In the future, two interacting agent systems—one for content creation, one for distribution—will put marketing on autopilot.

Over the past few weeks, we've explored how generative AI is transforming every stage of the banking lifecycle. We began with customer acquisition and onboarding, examining how AI is helping banks convert and serve new customers more efficiently. We then turned to customer engagement and collections, where AI is deepening digital relationships and making traditionally costly processes into opportunities for relationship recovery.

The digital profitability gap is one of banks' most pressing challenges. AI offers a path from shallow transactions to deeper trust.

Frank Slootman, former Snowflake CEO, shakes up the ‘Founder Mode’ debate

With Frank Slootman, former CEO of Snowflake

80% of banking data is unstructured and sitting idle. AI can now unlock it for richer customer profiles and personalized experiences at scale.

Software is no longer a tool for organizing work: it's becoming the worker itself. How builders can tap into the $4.6T services as software opportunity.

Banks today struggle with two seemingly incompatible realities: stubbornly low customer satisfaction and high service costs. They've invested massive amounts of time and capital in technology to help. Has it worked? Will it?

I break down the logic behind the company's towering price tag and why I think the most valuable AI companies have yet to be built.

Welcome to AI in the Real World! I'm Andrew Han, a partner at Foundation Capital, and I'll be your host today. I work closely with technical founders who are building software to solve hard, valuable problems.

Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, has guided the cloud content management platform from a dorm room project into a publicly traded company with over $1B in annual revenue. In his second appearance on B2BaCEO, Aaron reflects on his founder journey, sharing how Box capitalized on cloud computing and their recent push to integrate generative AI.

LLMs and computer vision will knock out manual logistics tasks, from price quoting to packing automation. 

Today, Prime Security emerged from stealth to introduce the public beta of its Prime Product Security Platform and the $6M seed round led by Foundation Capital. We were the first investor in Prime Security, and I’ve personally been on the board of directors since inception, working closely with the founders for several months before incubating the company at the beginning of this year.

I recently wrote about founder-market fit—where a founder must authentically understand themselves, their company, and the market conditions in which they’re building. Success here comes from knowing yourself and how you want to (and need to!) run your business given the situation your company is in. 

I weigh in on the recent debate and outline a third path - “owner mode” - that allows startups to scale without losing what makes them special.

Recently, I was listening to a podcast from the Yale admissions office where the hosts discussed the importance of students expressing their authentic selves in applications. In many essays, students try to represent themselves as what they think the admissions office wants—but application reviewers are able to sniff this out pretty clearly, and that can lead to an unsuccessful outcome. 

With core segments of the supply chain technologically underserved, we see massive potential in three areas.

Foundation Capital’s investment in Acuvity combines two of the firm’s most deeply-held convictions.

As summer draws to a close, a familiar debate has reignited with renewed intensity. Are we witnessing the dawn of a new technological era? Or are we caught in yet another tech bubble?

I met Darius Lam for the first time over ramen in Mountain View. Within minutes of meeting him, it was clear that he was a razor sharp technologist and had an endlessly enthusiastic, infectious energy about him. 

We've inadvertently created a maze of complexity and cost in observability. How did this happen?

 We've seen countless buzzwords come and go. "AIOps" is the latest in a long line of catchy but ultimately misguided terms that fail to capture the true potential of AI  in the world of IT ops and observability.

Welcome to "AI in the Real World." I'm Steve Vassallo, a General Partner at Foundation Capital. In this series, we talk with leading AI researchers about their groundbreaking work and how it's being applied in real businesses today.

Goodbye AIOps: welcome AgentSREs—the next $100B opportunity

A serendipitous meeting with a serial entrepreneur led to a bet on Docket, one of Foundation's speediest investments to date.

I talk with Recursal AI founder Eugene Cheah about RWKV, a new architecture for AI.

AI advances have converged with a massive global demographic shift to lift senior health tech.

3 breakthroughs driving AI forward, from Regie.ai founder Srinath Sridhar

I explore the competition between these two data powerhouses and what it says about where enterprise AI is headed.

These 3 innovations will drive the next wave of AI.

With Mohit Aron, Founder of Cohesity

A product and GTM strategy discussion with Kumar Saurabh and Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi in Palo Alto.

We’re partnering with Turing to look for startups that can truly enhance engineering productivity with AI—not theoretically, but today. 

Andrew Feldman explains an extremely difficult problem in relatively simple terms. He’s the Co-Founder and CEO of Cerebras, which develops specialized hardware and software systems to advance AI workloads. 

Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi, with Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu on their first Stacklet trip to San Francisco in July 2021.

I unpack the second phase of startup growth: scaling from $1M to $10M ARR. I break down its two main steps: evolving from founder to founder-CEO and transforming GTM into a well-oiled machine.

In this post, I share learnings from my conversation with Chi Wang, a principal researcher at Microsoft and the creator of AutoGen.

San Francisco felt more like NYC as over 50,000 attendees descended downtown for the RSA Conference.

Sanjit and I discuss his journey from grad student researcher to the founder of two major startup successes: Samsara, which recently hit $1B in ARR, and Meraki, acquired by Cisco for $1.2B.

It’s no longer just about training bigger and bigger models. I chart the growing shifts toward inference and compound AI systems and explain what they mean for founders.

AI's push into the services market represents a $4.6 trillion opportunity.

Cybersecurity startup Anvilogic faced plenty of hurdles. Thanks to a tenacious founder and pointers from Foundation Capital, the company is set to break out, announcing a momentous $45 million in Series C funding.

​Financial services businesses are particularly sensitive to the macro environment—when the raw material is capital, the engine can shut off in a flash. In 2023, interest rates rose, inflation increased, and general economic uncertainty led to a correction of valuations and a general feeling of caution by most investors. 

Bringing a startup idea to life is rarely a linear journey. Instead, it’s an iterative process of discovery, validation, and refinement—less like following a neat roadmap and more like trying to find your way to the center of a tornado. 

My guest today is Doug Winter, the founder and CEO of Seismic, a leading enterprise sales enablement platform. Today, Seismic has a team of 1,500 people and nearly $400 million in recurring revenue.

At its core, every business is a collection of processes. From lead generation and customer acquisition to financial planning and procurement, these processes are interconnected, with the outputs of one providing the inputs for another. As a business grows, so does its number of processes, creating an intricate network of data flows and dependencies.

Foundation Capital invests in amazing founders. Over the course of eight months, we watched Tennr’s founders iterate, learn, and execute—resulting in us leading the company’s $3.25M seed round.

I revisit the storied "unicorn" status, now a decade old. I propose a more rigorous benchmark for startup success, $100M in ARR, and outline the concrete steps that founders can take to reach it.

If 2023 was the year of large language model (LLM) training, we believe 2024 will be all about LLM inference — developers taking models and putting them into production for real-world applications.

In the coming months, I’ll be hosting a series of in-depth conversations with leading AI researchers where we’ll explore how state-of-the-art models are being applied in the real world.

Cohesity announced its intent to merge with the data protection business from secure, multi-cloud data management platform Veritas—giving enterprises a unified platform to manage and extract insights from data using AI.

With large sums of venture money pouring into anything “AI” (just check out YC’s winter 2024 batch), we have a growing number of copilots, agents, APIs and foundational models serving any given vertical. Name the point solution and you’ll likely find a swath of options promising to improve efficiency and insight.

Advances in Generative AI have unlocked an explosion of AI use-cases, making shiny-object syndrome a real concern for founders. This challenges founders to filter through a mountain of ideas to identify the use-cases that align with business goals and constraints.

I journey through the B2BaCEO archive and surface ten AI learnings from some of my most influential guests.

Today, Neurelo emerged from stealth to announce the general availability of its cloud data API platform and the $5M seed round that we led.

At our Fintech x AI PortCo Summit, Trey Holterman, co-founder and CEO of Tennr, shared a practical framework for thinking through exactly these types of challenges. Drawing on the team at Tennr's expertise in leveraging AI to automate complex tasks, Trey's framework empowers founders to evaluate and select high-value AI use cases.

Today, we are excited to announce Infield’s $3M seed funding, and the general availability of its dependency management platform across Javascript, Python, Typescript, and Ruby (with Java coming soon)! Infield is solving a complex and growing (but often overlooked) problem for software engineers — and we're thrilled to lead its seed round and share Infield with the world today.

I explain why we need to understand this technology before we rush to regulate it. I share insights from my conversation with AI pioneer Naveen Rao on the path to achieving it.

My guest this month is Naveen Rao, the co-founder of MosaicML and current head of generative AI at Databricks.

In the previous installment of our three-part history of blockchain innovation, we explored how Ethereum introduced programmability, Proof of Stake, and a flurry of new energy to blockchain. In the last part of the series, we’ll discuss Solana’s origins, accomplishments, and our expectations for it as the leading next-generation chain. We’ll then wrap up the series by weighing Solana versus Ethereum and reflecting on the space as a whole.

In the first part of this three-part series on blockchain’s evolution across networks, we dove into what influences these evolutions, what technical innovations led to Bitcoin’s broader market adoption and dominance as a store-of-value L1, and what Bitcoin’s hallmarks mean for its future. In this part, we’ll do the same for Ethereum. Specifically, what distinguishes it from Bitcoin, the trade-offs to its technological leaps, and the implications this has for builders in its ecosystem.

This historical analysis helps new founders decide where to build by exploring each network’s technical innovations in their historical context. Foundation Capital has been investing in — and rooting for — this space for ten years. Our deep, long-term involvement means we’ve developed a time-tested view of how major L1s have achieved their current dominance and how their initial technical accomplishments will define them going forward.

Just over one year has passed since the release of ChatGPT. In the intervening twelve-odd months, it’s become abundantly clear that generative AI represents a fundamental platform shift.

Today we celebrate Rover's acquisition by Blackstone for a remarkable $2.3 billion. It is not just a victory for employees and shareholders but a testament to the vision and resilience of an outstanding management team combined with the power of a high-functioning marketplace.

This weekend was one to remember for those actively invested in the future of AI. In this special edition of B2BaCEO, I’ll summarize what unfolded (as of Monday, November 20 at 5 pm PT).

As the market tentatively rebounds from rate hikes and inflationary pressures, a major opportunity is emerging in LendingTech—a field that many of you, our readers and partners, have been journeying with us. Lenders today face a new reality—one where innovation isn't just a buzzword but a survival kit. 

I explore the debate over who benefits most from generative AI—incumbents or startups—and share where I think startups have an edge. I then dive deeper with a leading AI founder, Robert Nishihara.

In this episode of B2BaCEO, I speak with Robert Nishihara, co-founder and CEO of Anyscale. Anyscale’s aspiration is to build the fastest, most cost-efficient infrastructure for running LLMs and AI workloads. When it is successful, Anyscale will be to the AI era what Microsoft was for the PC era: the underlying operating system on which all AI applications are developed and run.

Over the past decade, the term “modern data stack” has come into prominence with the rise of cloud-native software and an increasingly smart, connected world.

This fall, I had the honor of speaking at TEDx about the immense promise I see in artificial intelligence.

Mention generative AI in a crowded room, and reactions fall somewhere on a spectrum from worry to wonder. Venture capitalists—particularly those like me who work with founders at the very first stages of company creation—are fond of saying that we’re still in the “early days” of a technology’s life cycle.

I advise founders on planning for 2024 amid intensely troubling world events. I recap my discussion with Matei Zaharia of Databricks at our Enterprise CEO Dinner. I spotlight our NY Tech Week event.

Since the start of the year, a common question has come up in our conversations with portfolio companies: “I know that I should be using AI, but how do I get started, and where should I focus my efforts?” To address this, we organized our first “Fintech x AI Portco summit” this summer.

My guest this month is Tracy Young, the co-founder and former CEO of PlanGrid, a productivity tool for construction companies. From going through YC and losing a cofounder to cancer, to being acquired by Autodesk for $875 million, Tracy has picked up many valuable lessons that other founders and CEOs can learn from.

I explain why the enterprise software industry will revolve around two poles—Silicon Valley and Bangalore—by 2030. I podcast with Tracy Young, co-founder of TigerEye and PlanGrid. And more!

On June 28th, 2023, we hosted our Fintech x AI PortCo Summit to help executives across the Foundation Capital Portfolio answer the question “What should I be doing about AI?”

For the past two decades, search engines like Google and Bing have been our primary gateways to the internet. Yet, over time, their signature “10 blue links” have been increasingly buried by advertisements and algorithm-optimized content. Driven by ad-based revenue models, these sites often feel more like auctioneers of users’ attention than trustworthy guides to the World Wide Web.

I share anecdotal learnings and unpack three industry reports on the state of generative AI adoption. I plug my latest post on the enterprise LLM workflow. I introduce our new EIR, Mahmoud Arram.

Today we’re announcing our investment in Momento Seguros, a new full-stack auto-insurance carrier for Mexico. Memento is bringing the digital-first offering that consumers in other emerging markets already enjoy and expect across verticals. 

We’ve announced our investment in Momento Seguros, a new fullstack auto carrier for Mexico. Here, we share more about our investment thesis on the market landscape for others considering building / investing in this exciting space.

When it comes to generative AI, the only thing that’s constant is the speed at which this technology is changing. Over the past few months, we’ve spoken in-depth with a diverse range of builders and technologists who are exploring generative AI.

Dear Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Congratulations on your recent launch of the FedNow System for instant payments! Government support has been an important component to the success of faster payments across the world, including India’s United Payments Interface (UPI), Brazil’s PIX, and the UK’s Faster Payment System. But merely lending your support is insufficient. 

Sign up here to request an invitation to our hush-hush fintech dinner series. Each month — at different, cool locations in SF or NYC — we’ll be hosting a small, curated gathering of founders and operators who are redefining financial innovation.

I weigh in on the contest between Databricks and Snowflake, as each vies to own the end-to-end enterprise AI workflow. In short: It’s data all the way down.

Our strategy for investing in LatAm is defined by two core ideas: (1) backing the most ambitious founders, and (2) backing projects leveraging the rapid penetration of Internet-connected smartphones to build massive user bases via tech-driven business models.

In early May, we hosted our inaugural, invite-only Generative AI “Unconference” in San Francisco. The event convened over eighty of the top (human!) minds in AI, including founders, researchers, and industry experts, for an energizing afternoon of group discussions about building successful AI companies

Blockchain and artificial intelligence: the two most era-defining technologies of our time. Each has been a mighty, groundshifting force in its own right, like Godzilla and King Kong in their respective domains. But from time to time, Kong and Godzilla have teamed up when facing a monster that neither could take down on their own.

I share takeaways from FC's inaugural Generative AI "Unconference." I announce our Generative AI 25 list! I share my latest pod with AI pioneer Matei Zaharia. I debrief our event at AGI House.

If you’re not hardcore about AI, then stop the podcast now — because this episode for real technology nerds. Ashu’s guest is Matei Zaharia, CTO and cofounder of Databricks, and a professor of computer science at Stanford University.

When Lloyd's of London faced the unique challenge of insuring a million-pound reward offered by a Scottish whisky firm for the capture of the Loch Ness Monster or protecting the precious legs of 1940s starlet Betty Grable, they turned to their underwriters to assess the risk and determine an appropriate premium to charge.

On May 10th, 2023, we hosted our inaugural, invite-only Generative AI “Unconference” in San Francisco. The event convened over eighty of the top (human!) minds in AI, including founders, researchers, and industry experts, for an energizing afternoon of small, group discussions about building successful AI companies.

I explore two major AI reports and weigh in on a leaked Google memo. I offer three takeaways from this year’s RSA conference. I share my conversation with Microsoft’s Chief Strategy Officer.

On May 10th, 2023, we hosted our inaugural, invite-only Generative AI “Unconference” in San Francisco.

This year, RSA, the world’s leading cybersecurity conference, was back with a bang. Over 40,000 people attended: a more than 50% increase from last year.

What the heck is this in my inbox, you might be asking, yet another piece of content marketing? Why yes! This is the first installment of Foundation Capital’s new quarterly fintech newsletter. Our aim is for this mass mailer to be roughly 19% more nutritious and to the point than the usual flotsam. 

As everyone listening to this podcast knows, the release of ChatGPT last November ushered in a new age of AI and catalyzed a wave of AI startups. For this episode of B2BaCEO, Ashu goes deep on AI with Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, former serial entrepreneur and investor, and current Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft.

Software ate the world. Now AI is coming for software. I chart three implications of this paradigm shift. I give a primer on large graphical models (LGMs). And I recap my partner Sid’s SXSW discussion with cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch.

Last month, amid the chaos of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, my friend Dmitri Alperovitch and I found ourselves preparing to take the stage at SXSW. Our topic was another mounting, yet rarely discussed, threat: digital warfare. 

One of my childhood heroes, the legendary Gordon Moore, passed away at the end of March. Moore, who co-founded Intel and developed the eponymous law on microchip innovation, was among the most influential builders and thinkers in Silicon Valley. His contributions to semiconductor technology helped give the Valley its name. In many ways, I have him to thank for where I am now. 

The events of March 2023 will change the way many startup companies think about managing their cash. Our recommendations are simple, and they are not unique.

Over the past five years, everyone could—and did!—make money in fintech investing. When valuations are skyrocketing, and seed to Series A graduation rates are approaching 100%, even the greenest investor can look like a genius.

Late last year, we published our framework for the enterprise AI stack and gestured toward the potential of foundation models to advance innovation at each of its layers, from AI-optimized hardware, compute, and cloud on up.

In 2019, only six percent of workers in the U.S. worked from home, and 75 percent had never done so. By fall 2020, around 54 percent of employed Americans were remote at least some of the time.

At Foundation Capital, we’ve long had conviction that AI will be one of the defining technologies of our time: the catalyst for a new generation of software and, with it, a new generation of businesses.

Having been on DevZero’s board of directors since day one, I wanted to offer a few thoughts on their product, why we invested, how we partnered, and the road ahead.

I share AI predictions from CEOs of AI companies. I interview the one and only Frank Slootman. I introduce you to my partner Angus, a born entrepreneur. And I lay out Foundation Capital’s new enterprise AI stack.

Beerud Sheth is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gupshup, a leading platform for cloud messaging. Prior to that he was the cofounder of what is now Upwork, a pioneer of online freelancing and remote work. Beerud took the slow and steady pace to winning the race, building two unicorns over 25 years.

I’m happy to share the news that Regie.ai, which we invested in over two years ago, has raised a $10-million Series A, led by Scale Venture Partners, and I will be joining its board of directors.

Jonathan Siddharth is Co-founder and CEO of Turing, the platform that helps companies source, vet, match, and manage the world’s best software developers remotely. Jonathan started Turing in Foundation Capital’s offices four years ago and he’s since grown it into a $4B company.

I give you a brief overview of our enterprise investing strategy. I podcast with the CEO of Deel. I introduce you to my partner and futuristic daydreamer Jenny. Plus: Was design just a fad?

In 2022, after decades of traveling along an exponential curve, AI has reached its own “new world” moment.

As we approach the end of this year and cautiously inch towards the post-Covid era, I wanted to provide an update on the cybersecurity landscape (which was dramatically reshaped by the pandemic), share three key trends my partners and I are seeing in the market, and elaborate on the themes Foundation Capital is tracking this year and beyond.

I’m thrilled to share the news that Jasper, an AI content platform, has raised a whopping <a href="https://www.jasper.ai/blog/2022-customer-letter">$125M Series A</a>

I’m happy to share the news that Regie.ai, which we invested in over two years ago, has raised a $10-million Series A, led by Scale Venture Partners, and I will be joining its board of directors.

Alex Bouaziz is the guest for this edition of the show. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Deel, a global payroll solution that helps businesses hire anyone, anywhere. Founded in 2019, Alex and his team have grown the company into a unicorn with almost a thousand employees in just three short years!

When Ambuj Kumar and Anand Kashyap started Fortanix in our offices in 2016, I knew it was the start of something special. From our very first meeting, I was struck not only by their formidable backgrounds in cryptography, but also by their bold vision for strengthening cloud security and protecting customer privacy.