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Greylock’s Reid Hoffman and Sarah Guo to talk fundraising at Early Stage SF 2020
Early Stage SF is around the corner, on April 28 in San Francisco, and we are more than excited for this brand new event. The intimate gathering of founders, VCs, operators and tech industry experts is all about giving founders the tools they need to find success, no matter the challenge ahead of them.
Struggling to understand the legal aspects of running a company, like negotiating cap tables or hiring international talent? We’ve got breakout sessions for that. Wondering how to go about fundraising, from getting your first yes to identifying the right investors to planning the timeline for your fundraise sprint? We’ve got breakout sessions for that. Growth marketing? PR/Media? Building a tech stack? Recruiting?
We. Got. You.
Hoffman + Guo
Today, we’re very proud to announce one of our few Main Stage sessions that will be open to all attendees. Reid Hoffman and Sarah Guo will join us for a conversation around “How To Raise Your Series A.”
Reid Hoffman is a legendary entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley. He was an Executive VP and founding board member at PayPal before going on to co-found LinkedIn in 2003. He led the company to profitability as CEO before joining Greylock in 2009. He serves on the boards of Airbnb, Apollo Fusion, Aurora, Coda, Convoy, Entrepreneur First, Microsoft, Nauto and Xapo, among others. He’s also an accomplished author, with books like “Blitzscaling,” “The Startup of You” and “The Alliance.”
Sarah Guo has a wealth of experience in the tech world. She started her career in high school at a tech firm founded by her parents, called Casa Systems. She then joined Goldman Sachs, where she invested in growth-stage tech startups such as Zynga and Dropbox, and advised both pre-IPO companies (Workday) and publicly traded firms (Zynga, Netflix and Nvidia). She joined Greylock Partners in 2013 and led the firm’s investment in Cleo, Demisto, Sqreen and Utmost. She has a particular focus on B2B applications, as well as infrastructure, cybersecurity, collaboration tools, AI and healthcare.
The format for Hoffman and Guo’s Main Stage chat will be familiar to folks who have followed the investors. It will be an updated, in-person combination of Hoffman’s famously annotated LinkedIn Series B pitch deck that led to Greylock’s investment, and Sarah Guo’s in-depth breakdown of what she looks for in a pitch.
They’ll lay out a number of universally applicable lessons that folks seeking Series A funding can learn from, tackling each from their own unique perspectives. Hoffman has years of experience in consumer-focused companies, with a special expertise in network effects. Guo is one of the top minds when it comes to investment in enterprise software.
We’re absolutely thrilled about this conversation, and to be honest, the entire Early Stage agenda.
How it works
Here’s how it all works:
There will be about 50+ breakout sessions at the event, and attendees will have an opportunity to attend at least seven. The sessions will cover all the core topics confronting early-stage founders — up through Series A — as they build a company, from raising capital to building a team to growth. Each breakout session will be led by notables in the startup world.
Don’t worry about missing a breakout session, because transcripts from each will be available to show attendees. And most of the folks leading the breakout sessions have agreed to hang at the show for at least half the day and participate in CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s app to connect founders and investors based on shared interests.
Here’s the fine print. Each of the 50+ breakout sessions is limited to around 100 attendees. We expect a lot more attendees, of course, so signups for each session are on a first-come, first-serve basis. Buy your ticket today and you can sign up for the breakouts that we’ve announced. Pass holders will also receive 24-hour advance notice before we announce the next batch. (And yes, you can “drop” a breakout session in favor of a new one, in the event there is a schedule conflict.)
Grab yourself a ticket and start registering for sessions right here. Interested sponsors can hit up the team here.
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EF’s Matt Wichrowski is joining Berlin enterprise and ‘deeptech’ seed firm Fly Ventures as partner
Entrepeneur First, the London-headquartered “talent investor” and company builder backed by Silicon Valley’s Greylock, is losing long-time employee Matt Wichrowski to a career in venture capital.
TechCrunch has learned that Wichrowski, who is currently running EF’s “Launch” programme in Europe and is an angel investor, is joining Berlin-based Fly Ventures, where he’ll be giving the enterprise and “deeptech” seed investor a bigger presence in London.
He’s expected to make the move officially in late February or early March and will split his time between Berlin and London. It is also thought that Wichrowski’s recruitment will coincide with Fly Venture beginning to invest out of its rumoured second fund.
Confirming that he is joining Fly Ventures, Wichrowski provided TechCrunch with the following statement:
I’m extremely excited to be joining the Fly team. While I haven’t started yet it does feel like the perfect partnership for me to join. Their investment focus (enterprise and deeptech seed) aligns very very well with the portfolio I worked with at Entrepreneur First/angel investments. And I’m really excited to build a lot of operational excellence within the fund like global network cultivation and platform support for our entrepreneurs. But for sure the most exciting element for me is the team I’ll be working with. I’ve worked with Fly via EF for a few years now and have always been impressed and now having gotten to know them more in depth over the past few months I’m thrilled to call them my (future) partners.
Meanwhile, I understand that Fly Ventures will still be headed up by partners Fredrik Bergenlid (tech lead) and Gabriel Matuschka (investment lead), and there are no plans to open a formal London office as such — Berlin will remain Fly’s home.
However, the VC firm has already made a number of deeptech investments in the U.K., including Wayve, Bloomsbury AI (exited to Facebook) and Scape. The latter two were co-investments with EF, while the broader thinking is that deeptech investing in Europe requires U.K. coverage, hence Wichrowski’s appointment.
To that end, Wichrowski has been actively involved with the U.K. early-stage tech scene for several years, including angel backing CloudNC, amongst others. He moved over to the U.K. in 2014 (from his home in Chicago), when he studied for an MBA at London Business School. He’s worked at Entrepreneur First since 2016 and built much of the company builder’s seed-stage funding product. Wichrowski also spent 18 months working for EF out of Boston, where he led U.S. investor relations and network building.
Sources at EF tell me Wichrowski is highly regarded amongst the leadership team, while EF itself has come a long way since 2016. A fun fact: He originally joined EF on a three-month contract but has ended up doing a four-year stint at the company builder. Not a bad run, I’d say.
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Entrepreneur First, the company builder backed by Greylock, lands in Bangalore
Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-HQ’d company builder that invests in individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” to enable them to found new startups, is scaling up rapidly, as it promised to so. Already running programs in Paris, Berlin, London, Singapore, and Hong Kong, the so-called talent-first investor is setting up shop in Bangalore, India.
Although referred to as the “Silicon Valley of India,” Bangalore fits the EF bill quite well in terms of being a tech hub with latent potential, especially when measured by the small number of truly international startups it has produced. What’s also interesting — and something EF co-founder Matt Clifford noted on a brief call with me on Friday — is that India has long-been a source for tech talent generally but this has often been an export industry, spanning prominent leaders of major U.S. tech companies, right down to traditional development outsourcing. “It’s out chance to help reverse the brain drain,” is one way that Clifford framed it.
With that said, EF also notes that, according to Startup Genome, Bangalore’s startup ecosystem is valued at $19 billion, with an estimated 1,800-2,300 active tech startups. “The past decade has seen it shift from a purely skill-based factory model to a more startup mindset. There is a genuine interest in tech and an ability to attract highly skilled tech workers,” says the company builder.
To that end, EF will invest around $55,000 in each of the companies developed during its bi-annual Bangalore program, while also providing cohort members a monthly stipend of $2,500 as they develop their startup ideas in the first three months. Segments that EF will primarily focus on include defensible technology, AI, machine learning, and robotics, in addition to any opportunities spotted for deep tech consumer companies in India. Graduating startups from EF Bangalore will pitch to “leading regional and global investors” at Investor Day in Singapore next July, alongside counterparts from EF’s Hong Kong and Singapore programs.
Meanwhile, the latest EF expansion follows a $12.4 million funding round in 2017 led by Silicon Valley’s Greylock Partners, which also saw Greylock’s Reid Hoffman join the company builder’s board. The capital — to be used for operational purposes and separate from EF’s multiple investment funds — was raised to enable EF to scale its program in multiple tech startup/academic hubs around the world, and where it deemed the EF “secret sauce” can bring the most value. (Separately, I’m hearing EF is on the verge of closing a new, quite large investment fund.)
At the time of Greylock’s backing, Hoffman told TechCrunch he could see the company builder expanding to “20 or 30 or 40 cities, maybe even 50“. Having now reached six cities, that is starting to look a lot less lofty, even if it is far from proven how smooth scaling a company builder in the image of EF can be.
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Meet the startups that pitched at EF’s 10th Demo Day in London
Entrepreneur First (EF), the company builder and “talent first” investor, held its tenth London Demo Day this afternoon. This time around the even had a decidedly more international bent as it combined pitches from the London and recently launched Berlin programs.
Once again, the pitches took place in front of a nearly overcapacity crowd at King’s Place in London’s King Cross area, and saw a 24 startups pitch their wares to investors, press and other actors in the European tech scene.
EF stands out from the many other demo days that the U.K. capital city hosts because of the way the investor backs individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” — meaning that the companies pitching only came into existence over the last 6 months and perhaps may never have done so without the founders bashing heads during the program.
Unusually, aside from the upstarts presenting on stage, there were no other EF announcements today, which is in stark contrast to most previous demo days. However, I’m hearing there could be some big EF news coming quite shortly and this is likely a case of EF lining up its PR ducks in a row and choosing to shoot them down one news opportunity at a time. Besides, the company builder has had more than its fair share of announcements over the last twelve months.
In addition to existing programs in London and Singapore, this year saw EF expand to Hong Kong and Paris, as well as Berlin. And almost exactly a year ago, EF announced a $12.4 million funding round led by Silicon Valley’s Greylock Partners, and that Greylock’s Reid Hoffman had joined the company builder’s board. The capital — to be used for operational purposes and separate from EF’s multiple investment funds — was raised to enable EF to scale its program in multiple tech startup/academic hubs around the world, and where it deemed the EF “secret sauce” can bring the most value.
Meanwhile, the themes for EF’s tenth London Demo Day continued to reflect the company builder’s focus on recruiting the best technical and domain expert talent — both recent graduates and also people already working at tech companies. They spanned AR headsets, “massive simulations,” genome sequencing, machine intelligence, and cryptocurrencies.
After tuning in to the live stream and enduring 24 rounds of ‘pitchlash’, my cursory 3 picks this time around are as follows:
With a mission to “empower people to build a new relationship with food, myLevels uses data from Continuous Glucose Monitors combined with its own Bayesian-based machine learning models to measure the impact that food has on an individual’s body and metabolism. This is because the effect different food has on a person’s blood sugar levels — and the sometimes horrible spike followed by craving — varies person by person, and until now it has been difficult to build a personalised understanding of this. Once you have that understanding it becomes easier to lose weight and increase higher energy levels and even concentration.
There’s gold in those microbiome, apparently. Juno Bio is “unlocking the potential of the microbiome” (bacteria that lives in our guts and other places, such as animals and soil), which the startup says has unprecedented potential to disrupt various industries such as the $195 billion fertiliser industry. More broadly, Juno Bio says there is an arms race for understanding and harnessing the information that microbiome hold. To that end, Juno Bio uses machine learning and state of the art bioinformatics to analyse and predict how best to manipulate microbiomes, significantly reducing the time and resources needed to improve their functionality.
Circuit Mind wants to use AI to automate the design of electronic circuits. The startup reckons that every year £40bn and 1.5bn hours are spent globally in “tedious and repetitive circuit board design” work, making building hardware even harder than it needs to be. To fix this, the company is building artificial intelligence that takes in the requirements for a circuit board and outputs the circuit board final design, ready for manufacture. “This means better circuits, designed orders of magnitude faster, at a fraction of the cost,” says Circuit Mind. Chalk this one up as another industry 4.0 play, of which EF already has a promising track record.
The full list of presenting teams (in their own words)
● Nodes & Links is taming the complexity of modern projects.
● CodeREG makes regulatory change in finance as simple as a software update.
● QFlow enables construction teams to track, analyse and respond to environmental
risks.
● Moonsift is the first platform for shoppers to create their own digital twin for product
discovery.
● Homewards is the next generation of home ownership.
● Popsure gives personalised insurance advice.
● Metomic is data privacy made simple.
● Teamflow unlocks the power of human intelligence in organisations to improve
productivity
● myLevels empowers people to build a new relationship with food.
● Phantasma Labs is helping self-driving cars understand humans better.
● Juno Bio is unlocking the potential of the microbiome.
● Magic Sandbox produces world class software engineers at scale.
● Faultless AI eliminates human error in manufacturing.
● Janus Genomics builds AI tools to enable biomedical data sharing while preserving
data privacy.
● Lumenora is the world’s first compact, high field-of-view Augmented Reality
headset.
● Donut enables increased crypto adoption through personalised portfolios. Fully
regulated.
● Juniper uses hybrid deep learning to empower oncologists.
● WILD AI empowers humans to reach their personal best through datalogy.
● Holotron unleashes the true potential of VR & humanoid robots.
● Data Hygge helps companies spot, prioritise and solve experience issues.
● Yo-Da is the personal data management platform making consumer data protection
quick, easy, and profitable.
● Insurami is removing friction in office space onboarding.
● Atlas ML is a development platform for machine learning.
● Circuit Mind is using AI to completely automate the design of electronic circuits.
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Meet the startups that just pitched at EF’s 8th Demo Day in London
Entrepreneur First (EF), the company builder and “talent first” investor, has just held Demo Day for its eighth London cohort, seeing 14 newly-formed startups pitch their wares onstage to investors, press and other actors in the European tech scene. What’s particularly interesting about EF is that it backs individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” — meaning that, as… Read More
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Company builder Entrepreneur First hires ex-Yahoo and Googler as new London head
EF is announcing a “strengthening and restructuring” of its leadership team as it focuses on scaling its programmes in London and Singapore. Entrepreneur First Demo Day: Meet The Nine Startups That Presented (And Read Our Take)
Yesterday afternoon I attended London-based Entrepreneur First‘s fourth Demo Day. EF isn’t an accelerator, co-founder Matt Clifford was at pains to out. Instead, the self-described “talent first” investor sources the best technical talent from across Europe — typically straight out of university but also working at existing tech companies — before they have… Read More
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YC-Backed Taskpipes Is SaaS To Simplify Using Lots Of (Other) SaaS Platforms
If there was a neat label for startups whose raison d’être is to take the strain out of dealing with other startup services then Taskpipes would be wearing that badge proudly on its lapel. The YC backed, U.K. founded b2b startup is attacking what it says is a growing data-management problem for businesses — created by the proliferation and adoption of SaaS platforms. Read More
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