Josh Siegel

NYC is losing young technical founders to SF — and it’s not about vibes. It’s about cost of entry. SF has far more entry infrastructure than NYC: i.e. the housing, community, and early support (financial and otherwise) that lets founders start building before they raise capital. This is widening the gap between the two cities' tech sectors. We are specifically calling for ideas (and hopefully action) to address NYC’s dearth of hacker houses: physical spaces that combine housing, workspace, community, and early peer support. I’m convinced that seeding hacker houses, if done right, is a low-cost, high-impact way to attract more young technical founders to NYC — and critically, something this community can actually do. And we should. The data is stark. Venture investment in NYC is ~19% of SF’s total — the lowest since 2017 — and the biggest, most innovative companies (especially in AI) are overwhelmingly being built in San Francisco. People who want to be entrepreneurs tend to work where those companies are. Unsurprisingly, many students and young builders assume they must go west. But do they actually want to — or is it just easier to get started there? I spent significant time in the Bay last year, and one difference stood out immediately: SF is dense with hacker houses and founder residences that help people get from 0→1. These resources are especially critical for recent grads and first-time founders who might lack capital or built-in networks. NYC may have long-term pull, but at the earliest stage, higher upfront costs and friction (recent Economist data suggests ~50% higher rents than SF) push many founders away. Hacker houses may sound anachronistic, but they’re real centers of gravity. We estimate SF has at least ~10x more active hacker houses than NYC, and that these houses have helped foster hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. I’m an NYC tech evangelist. I’ve worked on tech ecosystem development at New York City Economic Development Corporation, helped design national innovation programs for the Obama White House, and now invest in early-stage companies as a GP at Max Ventures. From a dollars-to-impact perspective, seeding hacker houses in NYC is one of the most efficient levers the city can pull. We wrote an overview doc (linked below) that explores this concept — and we'd welcome feedback from the NYC tech community. We are also hosting a small series of conversations — starting with a dinner in February co-hosted with Tech:NYC, Keel (Brent J. Smith), Company Ventures and Inspired Capital — to bring together leaders across tech, real estate, and policy. 👉 If you’re a founder, operator, VC, student, or have built / lived in a hacker house: • Does this resonate? • What would make this work in NYC? • Who’s already doing something adjacent we should talk to? Would love to connect if you’re interested in contributing or joining the conversation.

473

163 Comments

Every #VentureStudio GP knows some portfolio bets won’t hit. That's expected - and it's one of the reasons studios are such a powerful vehicle for innovation. And while a venture's failure might be what's visible to the outsider, what keeps them up at night isn’t failure at the venture level — it’s failure at the systemic level within the studio. One bad entity design. One IP misstep. One governance gap. That’s how studio operations fall apart. We break down how to spot (and fix) these cracks before they turn into fault lines in our latest paper, "The GP Dilemma" - DM me and I'll send you a copy!

4

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

71

3 Comments

I’ve spoken to over 2 dozen MDs at PE firms I can confidently say that the arb of figuring out how to implement Vertical AI at portfolio companies is very real right now It will fundamentally change underwriting for those who can do it predictably and unlock generational returns. Most are aware they need to act. Very few have.

454

64 Comments

🚨 Founders: If you're not exploring cross-industry alliances, you're playing the wrong game. Some of the biggest breakout companies didn’t scale by outspending the competition they scaled by out-partnering them. 🚀 Think Figma embedding into dev workflows. 🚀 Calendly riding the rails of Zoom and Salesforce. 🚀 Zapier integrating with Trello and Slack before raising big money. 💡 The playbook? Fuse your solution with another industry's infrastructure and unlock distribution, data, or demand without burning capital. Cross-industry alliances do 3 things: 1. Collapse time by borrowing someone else’s audience. 2. Unlock non-obvious use cases that give you strategic moats. 3. Increase your valuation before the first funding conversation. If you're a startup founder and you’re stuck thinking, “We need capital to grow,” you’re asking the wrong question. Ask instead: 👉 “Who’s already serving my customer in a different way and how do we win together?” That’s how exponential growth actually happens. 💬 Founders: Which alliance would double your reach in 90 days? #Startups #GrowthStrategy #VC #EarlyStage #FounderTips #Platform #AI

2

5 Comments

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

21

2 Comments

Zynga sold for $12.7 billion. Its founder says startups fail due to this: They try to innovate too early (unless its deep tech). Mark Pincus calls it the “All new fails” rule: 1/ Don’t start with “new”: Start with what’s already proven to work. Copy it legally, study it deeply. 2/ Proven means 10 out of 10 users say: “Yeah, that works.” If they don’t, it’s not proven. 3/ Founders fail because they skip the proven phase: They chase novelty before they’ve earned the right to innovate. 4/ The Zynga story began with poker: Same table, same felt, same gameplay, nothing original. 5/ Then they made it better: No downloads. Just click and play. Friction cut in half. 6/ “Better” means 10 out of 10 users agree: Not your team, not your investors, real users. 7/ Only after proven and better do you earn “new”: That spark that surprises and delights users emotionally. 8/ Zynga’s “new” was showing your friends’ faces: It made games social, not solitary. 9/ Forget MVP, build a minimum viable idea: A concept that hits emotional resonance before metrics. 10/ Seek true signal: You’ll feel it viscerally before you can measure it. 11/ Silicon Valley worships originality: But originality without resonance is noise. 12/ Better founders are great students first: They copy what works before they try to change it. 13/ Most products die from founder ego: They’re “new” before they’re useful. 14/ Users don’t care about novelty: They care about ease, trust, and delight. 15/ “Proven → Better → New just works. And it built a $12.7B company. 📩 Get ai + vc intel in your inbox via my newsletter Startup Riders, link under my name ☝️ 📌 Source: Mark Pincus on Why Most Startups Fail a16z #ai #llms #agent #startups #founder #vc

40

4 Comments

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

144

14 Comments

Fun fact: Brendan, Adni's technical co-founder, was in the second batch of Y Combinator ever. YC S06! He also has a previous successful exit (sold to UnitedHealthcare), patented an AI algorithm before it was cool, and is a published author... NBD! How has the startup ecosystem evolved over the past 20 years? Brendan shares his wisdom below. 💭 #startups #startupfounder #ycombinator #entrepreneur

16

1 Comment