Aihui Ong (i-we)

Don't Build a Better Wheat Farm" - Why Defensibility Stakes Are Higher in Deep Tech Just published a new piece on my "Ignore the Confusion" blog, building on thoughtful insights from Eric Ver Ploeg at Tunitas Ventures about startup defensibility. Eric's core thesis: Too many startups pitch like wheat farmers - "huge TAM, slow incumbents, growing market, domain expertise" - but fail to think through long-term defensibility until it's too late. From a deep tech perspective, the stakes are even higher: ** Unlike software, deep tech founders must commit to defensibility strategies from day one - their funding depends on it ** Patent vs. trade secret decisions are often difficult to reverse and shape your entire competitive strategy ** Even "picks and shovels" providers (the tools that make industries more efficient) become commodities without proper moats The key insight that resonates: Defensibility can't be retrofitted. Whether you're building software or deep tech, your moat must be architected into the business model from the start. Thanks to Eric Ver Ploeg for sharing these insights on startup strategy and letting me build on his framework from a deep tech lens. Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/dEj_iF-Q #DeepTech #StartupStrategy #Defensibility #VentureCapital #Innovation

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Seed fundraising hasn’t gotten easier. After reviewing thousands of early-stage companies, one pattern is obvious: most founders don’t fail at seed fundraising because their idea is weak — they fail because they misunderstand how seed rounds actually get done. 👉 That’s why we put together the LvlUp Ventures Guide to Seed Fundraising. It’s not a hype piece. It’s the exact mental model we see strong founders use when they raise efficiently and get back to building. Some of the core takeaways: 🔹 Raise when you have momentum you can explain, not just a polished deck 🔹 Size your round to buy 12–18 months of real progress — not optionality theater 🔹 SAFEs and notes are tools, not shortcuts; understand how they compound dilution 🔹 One committed investor changes everything — momentum beats perfection 🔹 Speed and clarity matter more than squeezing every last point of valuation 🔹 The goal isn’t “winning the round” — it’s setting up the next phase of the company This is the guide we wish more founders read before starting outreach — not halfway through a messy raise. 👇 Question for founders raising right now: What’s been hardest for you — getting in touch with investors, structuring the round, or keeping momentum once conversations start? 👇Want the Full LvlUp Ventures Guide to Seed Fundraising? 👍 Like this Post 💬 Comment “Fundraising” ✅ I’ll DM you the guide and share next steps to get reviewed by LvlUp’s Investment Committee and our 25+ VC partners. #Fundraising #VC #Startup #Seed #EarlyStage #VentureCapital #StartupFounders #Founders #RaisingCapital #Startups #SaaS #Tech #CPG #B2B #Entrepreneurship #BuildInPublic #FundraisingTips #VCInsights

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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I recently sat down with Josh R., Co-Founder & CEO of Gusto, for a fireside chat at Afore Capital's Pre-Seed Summit.   Gusto is a testament to solid fundamentals. We partnered at the Series B over a decade ago (Jason Green). Since then, they've steadily built a business that's amassed more ARR than Cursor, Lovable, and Harvey combined, is executing profitably, making accretive acquisitions and integrating the latest in GenAI to improve their stack.   Here are 5 tips Josh shared for early-stage founders with similar goals:   1. Start with co-founder selection, not the problem   Unlike most founders who begin by identifying a problem to solve, Josh prioritized finding co-founders based on relationship quality and complement. The investment in those relationships has paid dividends—their families are so close that the founders' moms have a group text thread.   2. Problem authenticity accelerates product-market fit   Josh and his co-founders had experienced payroll pain firsthand at previous startups. I've observed this same pattern repeatedly with portfolio founders who reach PMF fastest. Austin Hughes at Unify knew the GTM space from his work at Ramp. Eric S. Yuan was VP of Engineering at Webex before founding Zoom. Authentic problem experience creates both passion and expertise that compound over time.   3. Sequence your biggest risks first   When Josh started Gusto, he took a methodical approach to de-risking. Before burning cash on frontend or go-to-market, they built the backend systems—tax calculations, payments, and all the complex infrastructure. Then they manually tested these systems at friends' companies to validate that they worked before building front end. This sequential risk management helped proved technical feasibility before they committed resources elsewhere.   4. Don't trust surface-level competitive analysis   Payroll looked terrifying from the outside. ADP, Paychecks, and Intuit all dominated SMB, while Zenefits was an aggressive upstart. But when Josh dug deeper, a different picture emerged: the incumbents combined only had 50% market share, and 40% of SMBs were still doing payroll manually. Markets often have more white space than initial analysis suggests.   5. Find why you can win the untapped market   Identifying opportunity is one thing. Capturing it requires a superior go-to-market motion or a better product than incumbents. Josh developed both over time. The question every founder should answer: "Why can we tap the market segment the established players have left behind?"

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Over the past few years, fundraising has become significantly tougher, especially for smaller funds. This, unfortunately, is the case even for VCs delivering solid returns. In my recent Crunchbase piece, I talk about how emerging managers can survive (and even thrive!) in a challenging fundraising environment. I discuss why the process today is more about familiarity than performance, and highlight places where managers should look for capital that others ignore. Check out the full column via link in comments. Curious to hear from other managers who have recently raised successfully. Which part of this rings true?

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Boards are supposed to help founders. Over the past 19 years, I've watched many trap them instead. As companies scale, many boards turn from insight to oversight and stop doing what founders actually need: Help making big, hard decisions. Early boards tend to be small, the board members are close to the business and highly invested in it. They argue from first principles. They help founders think. Later-stage boards often look more impressive on paper - they have more independent directors, committees and process. Somewhere along the way, collective problem solving gets replaced with oversight. The board shifts from helping the CEO make better decisions to monitoring decisions that have already been made. Strategy discussions get safer, real debate gets rarer and meetings become more about risk management than judgment. This usually coincides with the introduction of more professional board members. For better or worse, they often optimize for governance, optics, and liability management. That’s their job. But it’s not always what the company needs in moments of real uncertainty. Then, CEOs stop using them as thought partners. That’s a problem. So what should founders do? A few principles that help: • Keep the board as small as you can for as long as you can • Add directors for new insight they bring, not what boxes they check • Treat board seats like senior hires, not trophies • Design meetings for debate rather than reporting • Be explicit about when you want input vs approval Good boards should improve decision-making. If your board isn’t making you think harder, it’s probably not doing its job.

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Huge news for CattleOS ! We are beyond excited to announce that we have been selected as part of Cultivator powered by Conexus’s 5th Cohort for the Agtech Accelerator. One of CattleOS’s biggest focuses is a customer and community centric product which is something this program will help us achieve. Excited to share more updates as we go on this journey! 🎉 #agtech #TechTo

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I’m thrilled to officially announce our $3M seed investment in Propel People, a company we built inside the 1848 Ventures studio to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing the #construction industry today: the skilled #labor shortage. For small and medium-sized contractors, hiring isn't just a challenge. It's the number one threat to their growth, profitability, and safety. With 94% of contractors struggling to find qualified workers, it’s clear that traditional hiring methods aren't built for the trades. That’s why we built Propel People. It’s a mobile-first, AI-powered hiring platform designed for how construction actually works: in the field. By leveraging smart candidate ranking, instant #SMS-based screening, and a fully #bilingual interface, Propel helps contractors build great crews faster and more efficiently. I’m also thrilled to formally announce that industry veteran Dexter Bachelder is at the helm as CEO. Having worked with Dexter and the team over the last few months, we've already seen the impact of his leadership. His 25 years of experience scaling construction tech companies will be instrumental as Propel People enters this initial stage of growth. This investment reinforces our core thesis at 1848 Ventures: building AI-native companies that solve fundamental pain points for the #SMBs that form the backbone of our economy. A huge congratulations to Dexter and the entire Propel People team on this milestone. We are incredibly proud to partner with you to support the people who build our world. Read the full announcement below. #constructiontech #venturecapital #seedfunding #ai #skilledtrades #smb

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In an ecosystem flooded with service-first startups chasing scale through funding, Urban Company stands out by doing the hard (and right) thing—building a real business. Their recent shift from being a pure-play service marketplace to developing tangible, monetizable products is a playbook more entrepreneurs should study. Too many service startups stop at aggregation—thinking scale alone will drive defensibility. Urban Company went a step further: ✅ Leveraging deep consumer insights ✅ Creating integrated solutions ✅ Building new revenue lines rooted in real-world usage This is what scaling with purpose looks like. Instead of chasing round after round of capital to keep the engine running, they’re creating sustainable value by aligning product innovation with the trust and access they’ve already earned through services. For founders building in services: 💡 Don’t just deliver the service. Understand the gaps around it. Own the value chain. Monetize where others overlook. Urban Company is showing what it means to evolve with intent. A solid reminder that great businesses aren’t built on burn—they’re built on depth. #Entrepreneurship #Startups #Innovation #BusinessStrategy #ServiceBusiness https://lnkd.in/dzNHtpBS

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Today we’re sharing some big news. Ando raised a $4M seed round, led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Blitzscaling Ventures, Zero Capital, Monochrome Capital, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Fireroad, and additional investors. Hourly work powers a huge part of the economy but scheduling is still a mess. Too often, staffing doesn’t match real demand, shifts change at the last minute, and workers are left trying to juggle childcare, commutes, school pickup, and second (or third) jobs. That chaos is expensive for businesses and brutal for workers. Ando exists to make hourly work more predictable. We use AI to forecast demand for each location and help teams build schedules that fit real people. We’ve been in the field with enterprise customers for over a year, and the early traction is encouraging: - 90%+ daily demand accuracy  - 100% conversion from presentation → pilot → paid platform - 100% retention so far In some locations, customers have seen $60K–$80K in incremental revenue (results vary and aren’t solely attributable to Ando) Most importantly, this is about treating workers’ time like it matters. If you’re working multiple jobs, a last-minute schedule change isn’t a small inconvenience, it can blow up your week. This funding will help us expand our forecasting and scheduling platform and scale deployments with enterprise customers. Grateful to our investors, advisors, customers, and team. And if you’re an operator or leader living this problem every day, I’d love to connect. Full release below. https://lnkd.in/gyYjqmts #Ando #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #WorkforceAI #FutureOfWork #LaborTech #RestaurantTech #RetailTech

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