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.

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.

Lessons from The Solana Foundation at SXSW

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

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

​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. 

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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!

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

The news is that Arize AI, a Foundation Capital portfolio company, has raised a $38 million Series B, led by TCV. It’s the largest round ever raised by an AI observability platform.

I advise startups on how to prepare for the coming hard times. I interview a B2B whiz kid. I introduce you to my wonderful, world-conquering partner Lauri. Plus, 8 life lessons from the founder and CEO of Zoom.

Full, detailed analysis of all security breaches and fraudulent activities involving cryptocurrencies over the last 10 years.

BCB Group, a crypto-dedicated payments services provider, has closed a $60 million Series A funding round.

Binance.US raised over $200 million in its first external funding round, putting its pre-money valuation at $4.5 billion as it builds out a roadmap for an initial public offering (IPO), its CEO Brian Shroder told TechCrunch.

The whole block is flooded in purple lights as the warm Miami breeze fans the palm trees. It’s a little after 10:30 p.m. in Wynwood, an artsy neighborhood known for its murals. Small groups of people pass under a big purple archway, and then through a stringent security check. On one of the street light poles outside, there’s a purple flag with “Solana Miami” on one side, and “vibe. mint. build.” on the other.

The fundamental security limits of bridges are actually a key reason why while I am optimistic about a multi-chain blockchain ecosystem (there really are a few separate communities with different values and it's better for them to live separately than all fight over influence on the same thing), I am pessimistic about cross-chain applications.

When opportunity knocks, do you answer the door? As someone who is insatiably curious, I find myself opening many doors. That’s why I ended up using my bioengineering background as an entree into the world of technology startups. I went from researching biofuels at NASA Ames, to building bioengineering startups, to investing in emerging tech (AI/BIO) and fintech at Canvas Ventures, to building teams at Forethought.ai. One of the perks of being an early investor in AI startups, including Luminar (LAZR) and Lambda Labs, is that every day I meet other curious enthusiasts.

We fingerprinted nearly 500K code repositories and 160 million code commits across Web3 to create the 2021 Electric Capital Developer Report.

When we first led Platzi’s Series A back in 2018, we believed in the company’s mission to deliver effective online education to anyone in Latin America to help prepare them to succeed in the digital world. More than 20 years into the internet revolution, and over a decade since the introduction of the iPhone, the long-term trends toward the world becoming ever more connected are indisputable and the wisdom of investing in tech literacy is undeniable. But we never could have imagined that a couple of years after our initial investment, the world would come to a temporary stand-still due to a global pandemic, which would supercharge these trends and cram 10 years of tech adoption into a few months. Tech literacy suddenly became a matter of survival for much of the world, and I now believe Platzi holds the key to transforming Latin America’s future.

The ideal for venture investors is finding and partnering with a startup that combines a deeply held investment thesis with a strong pre-existing relationship with the founders. Arize AI, which Foundation Capital was the first firm to back and which just announced their Series A, landed right in that sweet spot. For the better part of a decade, my thesis has been that AI/ML will reinvent the enterprise. I arrived at this viewpoint after more than a decade of experience with machine learning, beginning with deploying it for behavioral targeting when I ran Microsoft’s online ads business and later as an early investor in Conviva, Aggregate Knowledge, and Databricks. At Foundation Capital, my partners and I all share the conviction that we are in the early stages of artificial intelligence and machine learning. While one in 10 enterprises now use 10 or more AI applications, we expect that number to grow dramatically as new technologies emerge that automate and augment existing workflows and human tasks.

We’re happy to share the news that another Foundation Capital company has debuted on the public market. Rover, the world’s largest online marketplace for pet care, is now trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker “ROVR”! This is a significant achievement for the company and a win for the pet parents and pet-care providers of the world. Kudos to Rover CEO Aaron Easterly and the entire Rover team for walking the rocky, unpredictable road it took to reach this point. Foundation Capital joined the path to this milestone in 2013, when we led the Series B for DogVacay, which was founded a year earlier by its CEO Aaron Hirschhorn and his wife, Karine Nissim. The company was brought to our attention by Benchmark's Bill Gurley, who led the Series A and was our co-investor in the B round. For Foundation, the investment sprang from our longstanding passion for finding and backing promising marketplaces. DogVacay was growing rapidly and expanding globally, adding more and more pet sitters and dog walkers to keep up with increasing demand. It was already breaking out of the pack (Beware of Dog Puns) as an early digital leader in connecting pet parents with pet caregivers.

Eightfold AI, in which my Foundation Capital partners and I are early investors, is on a tear. It just raised a $220M Series E. And since the announcement of its Series D in October 2020, the company’s valuation has more than doubled.

At Foundation, we believe that agents will continue to thrive and to play a key role in the future of insurance distribution. This is in sharp contrast to the predictions that many in Silicon Valley and even McKinsey, made over a decade ago*.

I’m happy to take the lid off of Hatch, a digital bank for small and medium businesses. Foundation Capital led Hatch’s Series A because of the massive opportunity it represents, its team — beginning with founder and CEO, Thomson Nguyen — and the impressive progress that the company has made in a short period of time. My partners and I believe that Hatch has the potential to be one of the next great fintech companies, and we’re excited to partner with them and to help introduce them to the rest of the world.

I am excited and amazed to share the news that, a little more than four years after starting States Title in our San Francisco office, Max Simkoff, founder and CEO, and his team are changing the name of the company to Doma and taking it public via a SPAC merger with Capitol Investment Corp. V.

Success in venture capital is determined largely by finding and funding outliers well ahead of other investors. Funding a startup typically requires conviction on achieving and scaling product-market fit. Data and metrics are often crucial to developing such conviction.

For enterprises, the price tag for mismanaging the personally identifiable information (PII) of their consumers is considerable and growing. Equifax’s data breach has cost the company close to $2 billion so far.

Foundation Capital has co-led Cohesity’s $250 million Series E. As an early stage investor, it’s unusual for us to take part in funding at this phase of a company’s development, but we’re doing so for two reasons. First, the founder-CEO, Mohit Aron, is extraordinary and not to be underestimated.

Our longstanding thesis at Foundation Capital is that all companies of scale are undergoing a self-reinvention, transforming themselves from software-assisted businesses into automated enterprises. For the past several years, enterprises have been trying to integrate artificial intelligence into nearly every business function, from marketing and finance, to ops and customer service.

The CFO role is in a period of evolution, as its responsibilities shift past traditional finance, accounting, and reporting duties and toward a mandate of strategic, forward-thinking leadership. As financial executives balance these responsibilities, the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that support finance teams must evolve as well. This is happening at the same time that artificial intelligence is transforming large-scale companies, and turning them, function by function and stack on top of stack, into automated enterprises. Finance is next.

In our statement on the killing of George Floyd, we said that our firm and our industry “have a long way to go towards fully living our values.” Indeed, we, the partners of Foundation Capital, have been having hard conversations among ourselves about how we can better foster inclusion, especially of black Americans. We’ve decided on some initial concrete actions to take, and plan to do more in the coming months.

The world is broken. Everything is wrong. That’s what it’s felt like for the past two-and-a-half months, as we’ve sheltered in place, drinking our daily tonic of melancholy and anger. Those feelings were spiked into despair and rage last week with the murder of George Floyd and the widespread civil unrest in response. You shouldn’t have to fear for your life anytime you want to go for a jog, or birdwatch, or drive, or take a breath of air in America simply because you’re black. And you don’t have to be black to be outraged at the sight of a police officer blithely pressing the life out of another human being.

The enterprise stack is constantly evolving—cycling from simplicity to complexity and back again—until, every few years, it is utterly transformed. In the enterprise stack’s current form, IT and developer functions have converged, laying the foundation for present-day DevOps. However, the speed at which these changes have occurred has created a fundamental challenge: the absence of all-purpose DevOps engineers.

Taking the risk of trusting you doesn't prevent you from being wrong, but not trusting yourself does guarantee that you never win the bet. Making decisions is not easy, failure not only implies failure, but also the loss of confidence in yourself, and yes, many times your credibility in front of other people. That is why very few people dare to do it, even knowing that going the unknown path could take you to an incredible place where no one has ever set foot.

Following Splunk’s acquisition of SignalFx last year, the obvious question for many venture investors has been, What’s next in the application-monitoring (APM) world? As an ex-operator, I decided to spend time with developers, IT teams, founders, and industry practitioners to understand firsthand their unmet needs.

In October 1957, Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, was launched into orbit. The achievement provoked a crisis in the U.S. and sparked the Space Race with the Soviet Union. In 2017, six decades later, and with much less international incident, Loft Orbital, a “satellite as a service” company based in San Francisco and operating globally, was founded by three experienced engineers and business operators, Antoine De Chassy, Pierre-Damien Vaujour, and Alex Greenberg, who came out of Spire Global, a microsatellite imaging company. Today I’m thrilled to announce that Foundation Capital is leading Loft’s Series A round.

I’m excited to announce that Amperity has acquired Foundation Capital portfolio company Custora, to build the next generation of customer data platforms.

Hackers stole information on as many as 500 million guests at Marriott. Two-thirds of those victims—330 million people, in other words, the size of the total US population—likely had their addresses, phone numbers, and passport details stolen.

I want to extend our congratulations to our friends at Lennar, and to Max and his newly enlarged States Title team!

There will soon be more software engineers outside the US than in it. Deploying their talent effectively will change the startup landscape.

In my most recent conversation with Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, we spoke at length about how he was able to develop an entirely new industry category: customer success.

As a firm co-founded by a woman and whose partnership is comprised of men and women, immigrants from four continents, and Americans from each part of the country—our notion of what an entrepreneur or an investor might look like is expansive.

Mike Hoefflinger, author of Becoming Facebook, shares lessons for enterprise marketers from the social network's rapid-growth days.

In the past decade, costs, capabilities, and talent have finally arrived at a point where it is finally practical to deploy this tool across the tech economy.

Moreover, as our track record shows, I think we’ve gotten pretty good at identifying which startups have the “secret sauce” to become a great fintech company. Which is why we’re excited to have led the Series B for CoverWallet, an online insurance broker for small businesses which is upending the industry.

QuanticMind works with sophisticated digital marketers to help them build a unified view of their customer data, and then applies AI to optimize key elements of the customer journey including search, shopping channels, and social.

It’s in the company of women such as these that I feel the most optimistic. Institutional sexism can’t and won’t be fought with just words.

Foundation is proud of what Skycure has accomplished, gratified that we were able to help, & excited for what comes next. Congratulations & upwards!

For the past year, Ambuj and Anand have incubated Fortanix at Foundation Capital, building a solution to a critical security problem: encryption during runtime.

Congratulations to Tubi on completing their Series C! Joining us in this round are Jump Capital, Danhua Capital, and Cota Capital LLC.

It's been a long road getting from there to here, but without further ado, allow me to humbly present … The Way to Design.

The Way To Design is the first guidebook to this new world and this new understanding of design.

Super excited about Cohesity and congrats to the team on raising their Series C! We are thrilled to be part of it.

I'm very pleased to share the news that DogVacay will be joining forces with Rover.

Now, LendingHome is turning its attention to the Mount Everest of mortgage lending: consumers. And I couldn’t be more excited.

Let’s start with the big news: Pocket is being acquired by Mozilla, and will continue on as a wholly-owned, independent subsidiary.

The recent executive order suspending admittance of all refugees and banning immigration from select countries is odious and ill-considered.

I unlocked an achievement earlier this month: 10 years of attending CES. They even gave me a badge to mark the milestone.

What follows is a conversation between myself and DreamBox’s President and CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson.

A whirlwind tour of our whirlwind 2016. Many thanks to everyone in the FC community for a "good busy" year.

TubeMogul's acquisition by Adobe is an exciting moment for both companies, and a proud one for all of us at Foundation Capital.

At our third annual CMO Tech Tour, we discussed today’s best-in-class marketing practices and attempted to uncover tomorrow’s brightest MarTech innovations.

Today, we encounter this technology whenever we watch Netflix or talk to Siri. Even the ads we see on Google are powered by AI.

Twenty-five years ago I met Neil Hunt, now Chief Product Officer at Netflix, when I joined him and Reed Hastings at Pure Software

Congratulations to Inderpreet and the entire team. We’re excited about what Azure is doing and will do.

At our third annual CMO Tech Tour, we discussed today’s best-in-class marketing practices and attempted to uncover the brightest MarTech innovations.

Just a few years ago, it seemed as though everyone from TechCrunch to Wall Street was predicting that manufacturing as we knew it was over.

Indeed, 71 percent of students fund their college education by taking out student loans—debt that now totals $1.3 trillion.

Rebecca Ward is the CEO of Moxie, the leading provider of digital customer engagement technology.

The Financial Services incumbents will develop against four key consumer trends: Simplification, Transparency, Analytics, & Reduce Friction.

Security attacks today, unlike in the past, tend to focus on businesses rather than consumers

There are 70 million Americans who do not have a pension, who do not have a 401(k), and the vast, vast majority of whom do not have an IRA.

I’ve worked in male-dominated industries for my entire career— in engineering, on Wall Street, as a founder, and in venture capital investment. As I think about my journey, I owe a significant portion of my success to the handful of women who were my mentors – encouraging me when I needed a hand, and providing honest feedback when I needed a reality check. They gave me opportunities to succeed, chances to move forward, and a network of support to catch me when I stumbled.

On a rainy Saturday, last weekend, I attended TiECon 2016, one of the largest entrepreneurship conferences. I’ve been going to TiECon for more than a decade—before it was cool to go to TiECon—and it remains one of the highlights of my year. It’s just so fun to be awash in a sea of entrepreneurs. And I always leave inspired by the unjaded enthusiasm of so many first-time founders.

When I was asked to speak on a panel about marketing for startups at TiECon, a conference for entrepreneurs, I thought that the best way to prepare would be to pick the brains of some of the smartest, most experienced minds in the industry—and then steal their brilliance. I wrote to Josh Todd, the CMO of Localytics; Stacey Epstein, CEO of Cotap; and Keith Eadie, TubeMogul’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer asking them all the same five questions on the subject.

I’ll spoil the ending for you—it’s a happy one—Nasdaq has completed its acquisition of Boardvantage, a company of long standing in the Foundation Capital family. And the theme of this story is perseverance.

When I first met David Kelley many years ago, the “design thinking” movement that he was leading at Stanford and IDEO — the notion that design principles are critical to every aspect of organizations, to creating products and experiences, to analyzing and improving the world — was still an insurgent idea. He was trying to enable designers to solve meaningful problems —indeed challenging them to do so — at a time when design was an afterthought for most companies.

In 2010 one of the most auspicious events in Foundation Capital’s history happened. This wasn’t a liquidity event—it was a familial one. Gene Trainor joined us as an administrative partner. Prior to Foundation, Gene was already highly respected in the venture capital world, having spent 10 years as COO of NEA. And we could not have been luckier that he agreed to become part of the FC family.

Thanks to the Internet of Things, experts predict that by 2020, the “digital universe” will hold up to 44 zettabytes of data.[i] To give you some context, a single zettabye contains one trillion gigabytes of data.[ii] That’s approximately 250 billion full-length DVDs!

Some have an office dog. Bolt Threads used to have office spiders. Why? Because David Breslauer and his fellow co-founders believed that synthetic silk inspired by spider silk could turn the textile industry on its head. And they’re on their way to proving it.

On March 13th, at SXSW, Foundation Capital and Product Hunt are going to be getting tangled up in protein silk inspired by spider webs, and seeing the technology that comes pretty close to allowing you to build a Terminator T100. No, it’s not Spider-Man or Skynet, but it is science fiction becoming science reality becoming business reality.

Today, we are thrilled to celebrate the acquisition of Cliqr by Cisco. Foundation Capital was an original seed investor in Cliqr and from the start we believed in the distinct vision of the company’s two founders, Gaurav Manglik and Tenry Fu.

We first met Andy England at Foundation Capital’s CMO Tech Tour Summit last fall, when he had just wrapped his time as EVP/CMO of MillerCoors. We found him to be incredibly insightful, so when he was recently hired as the CEO of National CineMedia (NCM), we thought it was the perfect time to have him back to chat about the future of video as it relates to the theater-going experience, and the opportunity for startups.

We recently wrote of Millennials that “it’s easy to see why entrepreneurs are so interested in them.” Given that the costs of starting a company are now lower than ever, it occurred to me to explore the inverse: Why aren’t more Millennials becoming entrepreneurs?

Before I came to Foundation I worked in Marketing at Facebook. And there, in those hallowed halls hung many a poster. Posters to inspire. Posters to challenge convention. Posters with no greater ambition than to spruce up the place.

CES has always been notable for iconic product launches—the first VCR in 1971, Nintendo in 1985, Tetris in 1988, and Blu-Ray in 2003. This year, however, wasn’t a year of iconic product launches—it was a year of incremental progress, including more advances in drones, virtual reality, healthcare, and robotics than we’ve seen any year before.

In the last 20 years, the Internet has changed just about everything—and marketing is no exception. One unfortunate byproduct of this (r)evolution is that it’s all too common to hear someone in the startup world say that “brand doesn’t matter anymore.”

Technology is changing the world around us—from the way we communicate to the way we collect data, even the way we shop.

We’re pleased to officially open the investment period of Foundation Capital Fund 8 (FC8), a $325 million early stage fund.

To truly understand the current challenges of some of the world’s most impactful organizations, you have to talk to them. That’s just what we set out to do when we organized our first CMO Tech Tour in 2014––inviting a cross-section of top brands and marketing leaders to share their biggest challenges and needs to create a larger conversation around the support startups can offer to these big industry players.

When it comes to entrepreneurship, I am constantly in awe of the creativity and spirit I see in the eyes of UC Berkeley’s young founders. Some of our most exciting investments have come from students emerging from the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology and the Berkeley Haas School of Business-based Lester Center for Entrepreneurship.

People just hearing about FinTech for the first time could be forgiven if they mistook it for a trendy new club, since commenters these days have been so eager to describe it as “hot,” “sexy,” and “wildly exciting.”

I’m an investor at Foundation Capital, and in the last 14 months, I have met with hundreds of companies. Of those companies, we’ve invested in exactly one. The takeaway from this is that even if your company gets a foot in the door of a traditional VC firm, the chance that you will be funded is extraordinarily slim. So how do we decide which few lucky companies we will invest in? Diligence.

At Foundation Capital, we are lucky enough to have amazing entrepreneurs, friends and colleagues swing by our offices on a regular basis—and by the nature of our business, many of these same people are executives and leaders in their fields. But we had a serious ‘geek out-freak out’ recently when one of those visitors was the LEGO Group’s Vice President of Marketing and Customer Experience, Conny Kalcher.

The Confer team, whom I met this past summer, is the answer to the prayers of many a CISO who has been looking for a converged antivirus, endpoint detection and response solution that enables advanced threat detection, prevention, remediation, forensic investigation, and incident response across a network of endpoints—all in real time.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve read every headline about Millennials that you can get your hands on and found only one consistent takeaway: America is confused.

ERIC WESOFF, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, GREENTECH MEDIAFirst in a series of conversations with the veterans and insiders of green tech investing.

“When you know the beginning and the end, it’s very comforting,” says Lending Club founder Renaud Laplanche in our new Startup Story video. It’s the middle where the tension builds and where no entrepreneur wants to be stuck.

It’s become increasingly fashionable for entrepreneurs to start every presentation with slide after slide of metrics. In fact, as investors, it’s normal to assume that if you don’t see metrics in the first few slides, then the business either isn’t doing very well or is still pre-launch.

During my time at Foundation Capital as an EIR, I will be writing about every partner meeting I attend. As often as possible I will be providing a takeaway for entrepreneurs. This is the fourth part in the series..

In February 2014, I sat down in the Genius conference room at our offices in Menlo Park with two of our Entrepreneurs in Residence, Ajay Gulati and Kiran Bondalapati.

When it comes to data, we are all enamored. We track our steps and our packages. We let algorithms suggest our playlists. And IBM will tell you that it’s allowing us to create a smarter planet. But is it creating stronger enterprises?

During my time at Foundation Capital as an Entrepreneur in Residence, I will be writing about every partner meeting I attend.

Every quarter, Foundation Capital, alongside our partner, Product Hunt, brings together the best product minds in the Bay Area for a night of good food and conversation.

Over 20-year history, two-thirds of the investments we have led are the first institutional investments our portfolio companies have received.

Last week was my first post in a series I will write during my time at Foundation Capital, where I document my takeaways from partner meetings. My goal is to shine a light on a process that is typically opaque and unavailable to entrepreneurs. Here is a link to last week’s post. Each week I’ll try to come up with a takeaway that’s relevant to early stage tech entrepreneurs.

The open source movement is made up of developers publishing free source code for others to use—and as a result, open source is eating software, redefining how technology companies build products, and operate their businesses.

In 2013, time spent consuming digital media among US adults surpassed time spent watching TV for the very first time.