Chris L.

Big announcement below! 👇 Let's talk about the current state of GP-LP affairs: 🤯Emerging VC managers have absolutely exploded over the past 5 years. 📈 At the same time, more and more data has surfaced that shows that emerging VC firms tend to outperform larger, established firms. 🤔 All of this has made it intriguing but tough for LPs to know where to direct their attention. 🛍 GPs frequently meet LPs at conferences who are window shopping but not committed to the asset class or emerging managers. 🧾 And both crews get overwhelmed by transactional convos. So Sydney Paige Thomas and I created Abundance. Abundance is a private, nomination-based retreat for active LPs and top emerging GPs to form new experiences together and build lasting relationships. Why Abundance? Abundance is knowing that there is more than enough for more than one to succeed. And a single win within a community is a win for the community itself. The journey of an emerging VC manager from 1st close to final close or Fund 1 to Fund 2 is (1) communal and (2) requires an abundant mindset. LPs look for structure and confidence to feel comfortable investing in early VC firms. Yet many of the feeds we scroll and conferences we attend reinforce inherent power dynamics and transactional thinking, which allows scarcity mindset to creep in for emerging GPs. Some of the best events I’ve attended have been intentionally non-transactional, e.g. Camp Hustle, Recast Summit, and other GPs’ AGMs. The fundraising success stories we see usually involve a community (usually of other GPs & LPs) coming together to support and open doors for the emerging GP. We designed Abundance to be an immersive gathering that fosters these connections. Starting tonight, ~100 GPs and LPs are descending upon Seattle for the inaugural Abundance retreat. This has been under wraps for months and I can’t wait to see it come to life! Thanks in advance to our awesome sponsors who were the earliest believers in this vision: Sydecar, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Gunderson Dettmer, & Zelda Ventures. And shoutout to my dad Ed Illig for logo design & Halle Kaplan-Allen being the first sponsor to say yes 🤩 Presented by The Council Capital & Symphonic Capital.

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Today, GTMfund’s is excited to announce to launch of Operator, its first incubated company. Max Altschuler (founder of GTMfund) teamed up with co-founder Adam M. (design engineer and 0-1 builder) and co-founder Mark Kosoglow (Outreach employee #1 and former SVP of Global Sales) to create Operator.ai alongside an insanely talented team Pleasant Middelhof, Jeremy Jonas, Carl Gunderson. We've entered a period called “The Great Ignore”. Spam and irrelevant, poorly-automated outbound campaigns are running rampant.   Operator gives you an easy-to-use Growth Engineer that allows you to build and enrich lists with accurate data, and run experiments and queries using AI to generate highly targeted outreach.    Check out their website to get updates, early access, and see how they are taking the world back to 2 touches meant to attract buyers into conversations that convert, instead of 20 touches meant to make sure you hit your activity number: https://www.operator.ai/

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Data on emerging VCs shows 2022s are hard for them but they still remain on their feet. Funds in the 2022 vintage have deployed about 43% of their committed capital at the 24 month mark, the lowest share of any analyzed vintage. Prior vintages ranged from 47%-60% after 24 months.    30.6% of companies that raised a seed round in Q1 2018 made it to Series A within two years. Only 15.4% of Q1 2022 seed startups did so in the same timeframe.    Less than 10% of 2021 funds have had any DPI after 3 years.

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Great time on the Embracing Erosion podcast w/Devon O'Rourke! We talked about: 🚀 How to scale a company from concept to 9-figure exit 🔄 How to break away from the traditional consulting model and apply product approaches ⏩ Why it’s important to iterate quickly and often with messaging 💸📈What signals are important to pay attention to when investing in startups and much more!

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LawFi, Inc. is pleased to be highlighted as a start-up customer in Plaid's announcement of their new Plaid Check Consumer Report services. Today, Plaid announced its new Plaid Check FCRA-compliant Consumer Report. We've been working with Plaid to integrate their solution into our legal fee lending platform. LawFi is building the first-of-its-kind Legal Fee Loan decision engine capable of underwriting and making customized legal fee loans at the point of need to close the pervasive Access-to-Justice and Credit Gaps. LawFi will help more than 160 million Americans living paycheck to paycheck, and 30 million small business owners to access the legal services they need by offering meaningful financing options that do not exist today. To bring more financial inclusion to the legal system, we want to develop a credit decision engine that casts a wider and deeper net. We want to make credit decisions based on the true financial health of potential customers, not just a credit score! We want to analyze real-time alternative data sources, not only historic reported credit data. When conducting a personalized assessment, we want to look at employment, income, and alternative non-reported credit and cash flow data, such as how someone pays their rent, cell phone bill, and utilities. The best way to accomplish these goals is to perform a cash flow analysis of the borrower's bank data to help us make decisions. Plaid Check and Prism Data were building the perfect solution to enable the type of reliable and compliant cash flow underwriting we wanted to build into our decision trees and workflows. The solution provides powerful permission-based access to a consumer's bank transaction data without the need for the customer to gather or upload any documents. Data can be accessed, analyzed, and scored in seconds, not days. The service returns more than raw data. It categorizes the transactions and returns valuable insights into employment, sources of income, non-reported payments, and a CashScore to consider in our internal decision models. It will help us make better credit decisions and give potential borrowers the credit they deserve. We are excited to be partnered with Plaid CRA and Prism as we prepare to launch LawFi in the coming months. Please see the Plaid announcement at the links below. https://lnkd.in/eqx_sDFn https://lnkd.in/eQCTm-8r

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