T. A. McCann

Childcare is a movable barrier and the care economy is workforce infrastructure. Siran Cao dropped so much truth on First Builders this week and shared why even capitalists in a vacuum should care.

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I read the 165-page Cut Through Venture 2025 state of startup funding report so you don’t have to. 📉📈 The 2025 report dropped this week, and it is a beast. Kudos to CTV and Folklore Ventures My full article has 9 interesting things from the report, but here's my top 4: 1. If there is a single defining tension in Australian venture capital right now, it is the shift from celebrating paper valuations to demanding actual returns. LPs are demanding DPI (real cash returns), not paper marks. The secondary market is becoming standard infrastructure. 2. The AI pivot is real (and lucrative). If you raised last year, there’s a high chance you had AI at the front of your deck. It accounted for 61% of capital flows. It wasn't just AI wrappers, though. Investment was deployed across the AI layercake across the application layer, infrastructure layer and model layer 3. On the surface, funding for female founders jumped to 24%. But dig deeper: the top 5 female founders hoovered up 79% of that capital (Airwallex). The "leaky pipeline" at Series B+ is still a major issue. I'm confident we'll see more breakout, later-stage, female-led companies in the next several years. 4. Despite quality deal flow being apparently super high quality, VCs are hesitant to lead a round; there is a bottleneck of investors willing to write the first lead cheque. Founders are having to do more work pre-term sheet to build conviction. Check out my full write-up below, and be sure to head to page 131 for the best quote in the entire report. https://lnkd.in/g_i5TBNj

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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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💰That thought that all funding is smashed and gone in these times? Read about LabStart's program and squash that misinformation. Funding, positivity, and progress are here- be part of it-jump in, cuz the water is warm (and needs conservation, but that's a different convo 💧😉 ) TL;DR: SNAPSHOT: LabStart empowers entrepreneurs—including first-time founders—to commercialize breakthrough climate technologies with: 💲 Up to $100K in funding for entrepreneurs 🚀 Access to frontier climate technologies 🔬 Expert mentorship and guidance 🌎 A community of climate innovators Applications close July 7, 2025. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gSAg-KkU Tova Lobatz Kristy Drutman Jennifer Hanke Felix Antonio Padra Emily Alvarez Emily Chu Carolina Larrahona ImpactPHL Sustain SoCal Chloe Rowsell Rebecca Shirey Green Standards Waste Not Consulting Ashlee Baker, TRUE Advisor Tova Lobatz SOCAP Global The Ecology Center Jonathan Zaidman Eliza Baron Kriss Kokoefer Amit Sharma AQUATRAX USGBC California #ClimateInnovation #ClimateEntrepreneurship

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2026 federal funding update for ecosystem builders A week ago I wrote about where federal innovation funding stands for 2026. Here's what's changed in 7 days: What's now signed into law: The Commerce, Justice, and Science bill passed the Senate 82-15 on January 15 and is headed to the president's desk. This locks in: NSF → $8.75 billion (with protection against disproportionate cuts to any directorate) → Regional Innovation Engines: Up to $200 million EDA → Tech Hubs: $41 million → Build to Scale: $50 million → MEP: $175 million What passed the House, awaiting Senate action: The Financial Services bill passed 341-79 on January 14, confirming: SBA → Entrepreneurial development: $330 million (Congress rejected the proposed cut to $150M) → Regional Innovation Clusters: $9M → Federal and State Technology Partnership (FAST): $9M → Growth Accelerator Fund Competition: $9M What's still in flux: Leaders just released a final bipartisan package for Defense, Homeland Security, Labor-HHS-Education, and Transportation-HUD. The House may vote this week, with the January 30, 2026 deadline approaching. SBIR/STTR authorization remains expired. No new solicitations until reauthorization—though there's been some movement here. There's also a bunch of new AI policy I need to dig into still. The bottom line hasn't changed: You cannot build a 10-year innovation ecosystem on annual appropriations battles. The regions that succeed are strengthening their partnership infrastructure now, and leveraging federal funding as a bonus to accelerate outcomes. See the full analysis: https://lnkd.in/euDxDVkZ

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Skilled labor is the bottleneck in industrial ops. Elevāt's platform basically tries to “productize the expert” using machine signals + docs + prior fixes. Now they have $12M to scale. Congrats to them. In industrial AI, the tech is usually the easy part....adoption is the battle. Curious what you think is the real gating factor:  -- trust (techs believe it’s right and won’t get them hurt),  -- workflow integration (it fits into CMMS/ticketing/parts + works offline/on-device), OR  -- incentives (the field team is rewarded for using it vs “just fixing it their way”). Which one kills deployments most often in your experience?

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