Justin Helmig

I’ve been talking with founders about how painful enterprise customization still is — even in 2025. David Dworsky and Gordon Ritter just put words to what we’ve been seeing: the age of point-and-click configuration is ending, and the next category winners will make customization conversational. For early-stage founders, this is the wedge: - Own one painful workflow - Capture the data - Build toward becoming a system of record If you’re building in this space, I’d love to hear how you’re approaching it. Link to the full article on this in the comments. 

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Dashboards don’t create accountability. They create meetings. Charts get shared. Everyone nods. Action items get “noted”. Same problems. Next quarter. Accountability doesn’t come from visibility. It comes from systems — where ownership is clear and decisions can’t be ignored. I wrote a short note on why dashboards feel productive but rarely change behaviour — and what actually does. If your org has great dashboards but the same issues every review… this will sound familiar. Dashboards Don’t Create Accountability — Systems Do: https://lnkd.in/gCGpm-VU

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Demand response participation is increasing as a result of increased DER adoption due to resiliency needs and long interconnection queues. The lost revenue due to not being powered is a bigger driver than capturing demand response revenue. I don't think there's an argument that demand response works. I do think there's an argument to be made that it's difficult to capture value from demand response alone. For that reason, I've argued that demand response products will have to be features of larger platforms. https://lnkd.in/gueF2QnK

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For the GTM-obsessed: here’s a tool that can give you a bucket load of insights. If there’s a data point, there are at least ten ways to interpret it. One way: inform how you deploy strategies in similar cities. Say a GTM strategy worked in Birmingham, AL. By identifying the most crucial indicators (GDP per capita? industry clusters? population density?)you can adjust these visualizations to find similar cities where that strategy is likely to succeed again. Birmingham mirrors Shreveport, Des Moines, and Worcester across key economic metrics: familiar customer profiles, likely similar pain points. Use it as a gut check for where your business goes next. How would you slice this data to uncover new GTM opportunities? Tool: Metroverse by Harvard (link in comments)

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What’s old is new. Funny to watch VCs flood back to out-of-favor business models—hardware-enabled software, marketplaces, consumer tech—which are now viewed as more defensible because AI can't easily replicate physical infrastructure, network effects, or brand.

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A Computer for Every Agent: Announcing Daytona’s $24M Series A When we first invested in Daytona, we saw an exciting opportunity for a new infrastructure company that would bring cloud developer environments to the masses. The initial thesis of the company was nearly right. There really was a compelling, even generational, opportunity to build a new infrastructure company for the inner loop of software development. But what we didn’t see at the time was that the largest source of demand for CDEs would come from a novel population of developers: AI agents. This is what Daytona’s founders, Ivan Burazin, Vedran Jukic, and Goran Draganić, figured out at the end of 2024. They realized that agents would need their own computers and radically transitioned the company from serving people to serving agents. One way of thinking about the market is that sandboxes are essential infrastructure for agents doing software development. For instance, an agent tasked with contributing to a software project might use a sandbox to edit files, run tests, and push new commits. This use case has exploded in the past year with the parallel rise of vibe coding platforms and autonomous coding agents. But while coding agents are massive consumers of sandbox compute, we think the demand for sandboxes extends far beyond traditional software development. Sandboxes are computers for agents–as instrumental to agent work as laptops are to modern knowledge workers. The agent that designs circuit boards needs a sandbox. As does an AI scientist running simulations or an agentic financial analyst building a financial model. It turns out that agents executing code to solve problems is a nearly universal and token efficient way for agents to reliably do their work. This is what sandboxes enable. And we believe Daytona is the best in the world at managing this kind of infrastructure. Upfront Ventures is thrilled to double down in Daytona’s $24m Series A and welcome new partners Matt Turck from FirstMark, Tina He from Pace Capital, Datadog and Figma. It’s been an incredibly exciting two years working with Ivan, Vedran, Goran, and the rest of the Daytona team. They operate at a relentless pace with developer experience as the top priority; just look at the hum of activity on the Daytona Slack, X, etc. We couldn’t be more excited to see them continue to push the frontier of agent-native infrastructure.

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Just read a piece from the team at Camber Creek portfolio company Proof on the evolving state of authentication…and it hit home. For years I’ve been thinking “passwords are dead,” but also lamenting the difficulty navigating the labyrinthine world of advanced security. This blog lays out exactly what’s replacing passwords in a way that’s practical, not just theoretical. Five methods stood out: - App-based authenticators finally killing SMS (good riddance, SIM-swap nightmares) - Continuous authentication that watches behavior during the session (the “someone stole the cookie but can’t act like you” protection we’ve all been missing) - Adaptive authentication that doesn’t treat grandma on her usual iPad the same as a login from a Tor exit node in a new country - MFA done right (and then taken further with verified digital certificates) - Biometrics with actual liveness + document tying, so it’s not just “a face” but your verified face What really resonated was the reminder that the strongest systems aren’t about piling on more factors; they’re about using the right factor at the right moment. Risk-based, context-aware, and (crucially) user-respecting. I’m biased but Proof’s angle of anchoring everything to high-assurance digital certificates feels like the missing glue. It’s one thing to authenticate someone at login; it’s another to carry that verified identity forward through the entire session, signature, or transaction. This one is worth the read. Link in comments. #venturecapital #cybersecurity #fraud

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Thrilled for OVNI Capital to be backing RIFT in a pre-seed round led by AlleyCorp (Luc Ryan-Schreiber). Rift is building the first real-time aerial intelligence network, a new layer of infrastructure for persistent, on-demand visibility where it matters most. This funding will scale production of their autonomous stations, accelerate deployment in high-stakes environments, and expand the team leading the next phase. 🗞️ Explore the full story: - StartupMafia: https://lnkd.in/dARrg25N - BFM Business (FR): https://lnkd.in/eADSUsn7 - Les Échos (FR): https://lnkd.in/eFG3zAy5 👨‍🚀 Join the mission → https://lnkd.in/erm_SrTG

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Here’s why Claude’s recent progress has unlocked the next leap forward for Canvas Medical. Claude’s tools, combined with our Deep Unified Architecture and SDK, are enabling new use cases for automation while simultaneously making us exponentially faster in shipping customer specific enhancements. It's a double win. Said another way, Canvas is an EMR built to provide context and tools for automation. And now we can enable AI driven development for any user or customer, whether technical or non technical, to build their own custom workflows in Canvas. Just in the past couple of days our team has shipped: For Brigade Health - a customized panel management dashboard for high-risk patients For Vida Health - ability to parse unstructured lab results from a fax into the chart as structured clinical data For Radial - improvements to the provider onboarding experience to accelerate the rapid scaling of their medical group operations For Doctronic - in-workflow evals for clinicians to submit structured feedback on the performance of their AI-driven note generation The best part? All of this work was done without software engineers 🤯 We used the Canvas Plugin Assistant, powered by Claude Code and the Canvas SDK. We’re living in the future. Here’s a graphic from Anthropic’s presentation yesterday with a couple of annotations to explain. Sometimes a picture is worth a few hundred words.

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Seth Levine nailed it! The concentration problem isn't just a GP pain point... it's choking innovation. When capital pools around the same 20 funds, emerging managers and founders get shut out. Love that he's using his platform to call this out. Foundry has backed 50+ emerging managers. That's the diversification the ecosystem needs. This is exactly why Carta exists — making capital allocation visible and accessible. Capital Evolution hits at exactly the right moment. Thanks for having us Daniel Dart. Team Carta loves the community of FUTURE TITANS you have built 🚀

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