John Sears

Tembo is leading in the 'Postgres as a Platform' movement. Their most recent blog post(s) below do a pretty good job of explaining why 'Postgres as a Platform' is rapidly becoming an anecdote for database sprawl.

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“Be quick, but don’t hurry.” John Wooden, the great UCLA basketball coach coined that phrase, and this week will offer interesting opportunities to watch pros applying it: the NBA Playoffs, yes, but also SF Climate Week. I’ve been thinking about how to apply the proper balance of patience and urgency to the climate fight. First, what does Wooden’s advice mean? Prolific basketball scorers will often talk about the need to “let the game come to you.” In other words be aggressive, move with purpose, probe for openings… but not to the point where you are hurrying into the teeth of the defense and in so doing making careless mistakes or missing the right play. The notion of patience also applies over time. Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers famously talked a few seasons ago (in a very impatient sports town) about trusting “The Process” in turning the league’s worst team into one of its enduring best. Back to climate. While hundreds of functional technologies/approaches are being deployed in thousands of ways across all industries to draw down emissions, it will take time we don’t really have — maybe a generation — to scale up these new methods enough to keep us under the warming levels above which really bad things happen. It can be depressing, and I’m certainly not alone in wanting to push harder. But it occurs to me that some of that urgency could qualify as hurrying in Coach Wooden’s sense. This (possibly contrarian?) perspective comes in part from an executive coach who once reflected that I sometimes struck him as having “both the gas and brake pushed down all the way.” He—and my team it turned out—experienced a grinding between my inner drive to quickly usher everything from decisions to workstreams through to conclusion and a desire to gather more information and make the perfect set of moves. Both “pedals” represented an exertion of control; and the solution to this inner tension was actually to practice patience by easing up with *both* feet. Point being this: amidst our ever-increasing incentives to ramp up velocity with decreasing margins for error, I wonder if being a bit more methodical each day could significantly improve the end result. In a realm as complex and fraught as climate, with so many entrenched defenses, could daily 1% improvements to our patience compound our effectiveness over time? Taking the extra breath to be more present in a conversation and learn more about another perspective. Sitting with the discomfort of ambiguity while waiting on more information. Trusting in the flow of things, the skills of colleagues, the angles that will appear and allow us to make outsized impact with more leverage than if we hadn’t allowed the game come to us. Think about it this week. As a hoops fans or climate warrior, a connector or caretaker — where and how could a little more patience help improve your part of the game? #ClimateChange #Sustainability #EarthDay #Improvement https://lnkd.in/gmyV3DYt

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Seed VCs are turning to new ‘pro rata’ funds that help them compete with the big firms Alpha Partners, SignalRank and now SaaS Ventures help seed VCs pay for shares when big VCs try to price — or push — them out Lee Edwards, partner at Root VC, has a saying at his firm that “pro rata rights are earned, not given.” That may be a bit of a stretch since pro rata refers to a term that VCs put in their term sheets that gives them the right to buy more shares in a portfolio company during consequent funding rounds to maintain an ownership percentage and avoid dilution. Still, while these rights are not exactly “earned,” they can be expensive. One of the latest trends in VC investing these days are funds dedicated to helping seed VCs exercise their pro rata rights. https://lnkd.in/dRM3RvdA By Christine Hall

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What areas in the data layer have the most immediate opportunity to be re-invented due to AI? 🤖 We’re seeing innovation across: •unstructured data extraction and pipelining •RAG •data curation •data storage •AI memory Check out our Felicis deep dive at the link in the comments Eric Flaningam #data #AI #infrastructure

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It's not just late stage companies that are taking longer to raise subsequent rounds. Even seed and early-stage median time between rounds has increased with lower/no step-ups and the benchmarks (while that data is not openly available) having been raised on companies seeking funding. What is also true is that the AI-gold rush has increased the distance between median and mean round sizes for companies at all stages. #AI #VC #startups #fundraising

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We’ve already seen that software eats the world. Ali Ghodsi predicts that, in the next phase, AI eats software. During a conversation on the B2BaCEO podcast, Ali, the Co-founder & CEO of Databricks, said AI will not just be a feature; it will be the foundation of most platforms, as we move toward a world where AI is seamlessly integrated into nearly every tool. Imagine every piece of software evolving from static code into an autonomous decision-maker, as intelligence and automation are built into all data architecture underlying enterprise software. Our full conversation on the B2BaCEO podcast here: https://lnkd.in/gXvSSf_C

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