Tom Petit

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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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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Occupier - We ❤️ Leases! is building software to help commercial tenants make better real estate decisions to drive the operational needs and growth of their businesses. It's W7 / Q2 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got Occupier, a growth stage startup building a platform where all commercial real estate decisions are made, facilitating access to data and collaboration required by all the stakeholders who require it. Andrew Flint & Matt Giffune teamed up with technical co-founder 🏔 Erik Pearson on nights & weekends to work on their project before signing their first customer: DraftKings. Occupier was born in 2018 to solve tenant real estate portfolio management administration. The commercial real estate market in the U.S. is a $25T market. With a T! Real estate is typically the second largest company expense (historically) after payroll and there are more than 20,000 employers with 500 employees. These companies have sprawling office & retail footprints to go along with their large employee bases and customer responsibilities. Let’s say you’re a large restaurant chain with 500 global retail locations. If you don’t have a sound system to track certain dates throughout your lease portfolio, you might miss a renewal option. Occupier is still growing through the post COVID commercial real estate contraction because they help customers more rapidly abstract data out of their lease documents. As employers have needed to get a tighter grasp on their real estate expenses (and strategies), they’ve helped customers centralize their data & workflows to make better decisions. Occupier is in a fortunate spot to not need to raise capital right now and can patiently grow in 2024. Like many startups that raised in 2021, they had an ambitious operating plan and have responded to market changes by continuing to grow as efficiently as possible in this new environment. They still grew revenue over 100% in 2023 relative to 2022 and hope to double again in 2024. One third of their employee base sits in Boston, one third of the team sits in New York, and they have the remaining third remote. Occupier is backed by Stage 2 Capital, OMERS Ventures, MetaProp, Alate Partners, & Second Century Ventures Operators to Know: -Mia Arrieta, Account Executive  -Jerry Aviles, Software Engineer -Lauren Bahr, CPA, VP Finance -Morgan Beard, Director of Marketing -Noah Cate, Account Executive -Krishan Taylor, Principal Software Engineer -Clement Titsworth, Senior Account Executive -Lisa Gaffney, Senior Product Manager -Jessica Kurz, VP Customer Success -Vrajesh Patel, Senior Solutions Consultant -Amber Perez, Senior Customer Success Manager -Leah Prescott, Head of Design If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments! And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you next week, will you?? #bostontech #startups #proptech

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If you ask a PropTech founder what they most need help with today, introductions to qualified investors with capital would be No. 1, 2 and 3 on their list. With that in mind, I’m excited to share the news that Venture Connect from CRETI · Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation officially launched this week to help better connect PropTech founders with investors focused on the space. Props to CRETI managing director Ashkán Z. for spearheading this initiative and getting it live for the betterment of the entire PropTech landscape. With the platform live, founders can get matched with more than 200 venture capital investors (angel to Series A) based on their investment profile and thesis, including Alpaca VC, Era Ventures, Fifth Wall, JLL Spark, Navitas Capital, Nuveen Green Capital and many more. As I told Philip Russo of the Commercial Observer, I believe the CRETI platform will be a game-changer for the industry, which sorely needs new avenues helping founders succeed in bringing new ideas to market faster and more efficiently capitalized. Thanks to Philip for including my comments in the story. Details on Venture Connect below. https://lnkd.in/efpxDQkR #proptech #venturecapital

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Interesting concept to rename rounds by milestones. But "Series Client Expansion Extension" just doesn't have the same ring to it 😋 . Maybe we can start incorporating it into a descriptor to add context, "Series Seed Extension: client expansion." #startups #venturecapital

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Doing Loby’s Y Combinator application for W25. Any YC Founders want to give it a review (or if u know a YC founder who's down)? Would help a loooooooot. #ycombinator #yc #ycw25

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Rolling into another day of the Primary Summit. Hit me up if we should connect onsite. Kudos to the Primary Ventures team so far, as yesterday’s Pre-Seed Summit was on point. Mar Hershenson, Benjamin Sun, Chris Douvos, Zach Weinberg, and Graham Pingree all dropping helpful nuggets for fund managers. Some paraphrased highlights: - Chris Douvos (AHOY Capital) - Most fund decks are terrible. Start with your people (not your strategy) and know you have about 6 slides of his attention. - Zach Weinberg (Curie.Bio ) - beleives SF’s AI talent is a significant advantage over NY, wouldn’t build AI in NY. Also questions if VC exits can keep up with VC expansion (generally hilarious and smart Twitter follow) - Mar Hershenson (Pear VC) - VC is so much more competitive now. It’s not enough to be an ex-founder with a great network and domain expertise. Have a better “why you are different” or do something else! - Benjamin Sun (Primary Venture Partners)- still sees arbitrage in going long NY venture (vs. SF). Do the work to keep various influential networking nodes aware of what you’re doing and how you think.

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Thrilled to announce the launch of our inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks at Emergence Capital. This comprehensive report dives deep into the metrics and trends shaping the early-stage enterprise cloud market. A huge thank you to our VC partners and contributors for making this possible! Here's a sneak peek of our findings: --> 60% of companies have already integrated GenAI into their service offerings, with another 20% planning to do so this year. --> While most companies use OpenAI as their primary LLM, many are experimenting with multiple models. We’re seeing a trend toward intelligently routing GenAI inference requests based on cost, performance, and security. --> Companies that have implemented GenAI are showing promising results, with a 7% higher NDR compared to those that haven’t. Beyond Benchmarks goes further with more GenAI trends, insights on the current fundraising environment, and key performance metrics. Our goal is to provide founders and their teams with valuable benchmarks to help them make better-informed decisions. At Emergence Capital, we're committed to helping founders build iconic companies. Dive into the full report here: https://lnkd.in/g6bnvAZM

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