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Courtney co-founded M13 in 2016 with his brother Carter. The duo also started and sold the spirits brand VeeV, and authored the bestselling book “Shortcut Your Startup.” A former Goldman Sachs investment banker, he serves on boards such as Lifeforce, Thrive Global as well as philanthropic endeavors like YPO, US Soccer Federation Foundation, the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office and LA Opera.
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Karl is the Managing Partner at M13. Karl was previously the COO of DigitalOcean, where he helped scale the business from first product over six years and prepared it for its eventual IPO (NYSE: DOCN). During his full 20 year operating career, Karl also co-founded and ultimately exited two other technology companies as CEO.
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Latif manages the overall investing strategy for the firm and has led numerous deals across money and health verticals with a large focus on web3. He was previously the managing director at Virgin Group where he led investing in the Americas including investments in Ring (acq. by AMZN), Slack (NYSE: WORK), Virgin Galactic (NYSE: SPCE), and Virgin Orbit (NASDAQ: VORB).
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A partner at M13, Anna was the managing director of Techstars LA and also a partner in The Fund LA. A certified executive coach, Anna has worked as a corporate lawyer, McKinsey consultant, product exec, and entrepreneur. She serves on the Advisory Board of PledgeLA and is a member of AllRaise.
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A partner and head of legal, Win has served in senior leadership roles at numerous consumer technology companies, including as General Counsel of MasterClass and early-stage startup Vessel (acquired by Verizon), as well as senior legal and business affairs roles at Hulu. A former electrical engineer, he started his legal career as a corporate attorney at Latham & Watkins
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A partner and head of brand/communications, Christine worked with Sir Richard Branson to launch Virgin Group’s North American portfolio and was the first head of communications for Virgin Galactic/Virgin Orbit/The Spaceship Company. She serves on the boards of KIPP NJ and Virgin Unite US.
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As a partner and head of talent, Matt coaches our founders on hiring the best talent and building healthy and high-performing cultures. He leads several of our future of work investments. Matt previously built and led the People functions at DigitalOcean and Return Path (#1 Best Place to Work in NYC and #2 in the US, respectively).
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Brent Murri is a Partner at M13 where he leads early-stage investments in software and marketplaces. Brent joined M13 from Battery Ventures where he focused on growth-stage enterprise software investments. Prior to Battery, he worked in strategy & business development for Samsung NEXT, where he developed and executed strategies around Samsung’s mobile software and services initiatives.
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Rob helps startups strategically build, deploy, fundraise, and go to market. Prior to M13, Rob has been a serial founder as the CEO of BlackSmith Studios and Pecabu, as well as acting in an interim-CMO/CPO capacity at a number of later-stage Bay Area VC-backed companies, including Cala Health, Apnicure, Neodyne & others. He is a recipient of UK Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012.
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John is Partner and Head of Launchpad, the M13 Venture Studio helping founders build companies that define the future of business. Prior to M13, John founded and scaled The Bouqs Company and worked in strategy for The Walt Disney Company and Bain & Co. John continues to serve Bouqs as Chairman of the Board and also teaches entrepreneurship at UCLA Anderson.
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Sarah was previously the VP of marketing and investor relations at Arlon Group and has served in IR roles at StepStone Group and Citi Private Equity. She is a public company board member, co-founded the Sustainability Investment Leadership Council, and has served on numerous non-profit boards.
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As VP of talent acquisition, Loren leads the team that helps our founders build their dream teams. She was previously the director of R&D talent acquisition at Toast (IPO’d 2021), head of talent acquisition at DigitalOcean (IPO’d 2021), head of talent at Yesware, and R&D recruiting lead at VMware.
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Erik is M13's accountant and has a vast background working in tech companies and the applications used in accordance with GAAP for reporting. Erik was previously an accountant at Glamsquad and Stella Connect, which was acquired by NYSE listed Medallia in 2020, which gave Erik the opportunity to oversee the finance integrations of the two companies.
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As the director of Launchpad, Andrew helps to lead the design & execution of our in-house venture studio. Prior to M13, Andrew was the business operations manager for Avantstay, a short-term rental and hospitality startup, and an equity research and investment banking analyst for Dougherty & Co.
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As M13's community program coordinator, Samantha aligns with M13’s commitment to creating an inclusive community through authentic experience, dedication to innovation, and creativity. Samantha was previously the development associate for outreach and programming at Rockefeller University.
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Mariah brings deep expertise in executive search from True Search & Daversa Partners, where she’s helped build executive and founding teams for early-stage venture-backed companies. She's passionate about building diverse, high-impact teams for mission-driven companies changing our everyday lives.
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As Director of Product, Mary brings her experience as a former co-founder to help portfolio companies strategically design, develop, and optimize the user journey. Mary takes pride in building meaningful relationships with founders and sharing her passion for product design, innovation, and creativity. She’s always excited to collaborate with startups and help them achieve their goals.
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Emma manages all things content, from thought leadership, to reporting, to social media. Prior to M13, she was the managing editor at business intelligence startup CB Insights. Other experience includes working at a fintech startup, the country’s third most-circulated newspaper, and a top 5 global insurance company.
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Zach’s focus is on architecting systems and processes that augment the data backbone behind all of the firm’s operating systems. He held multiple roles at Quovo (acq’d by Plaid) and Plaid, including Technical Lead and Product Manager for Plaid’s Partnerships Team. Prior to joining M13, Zach founded a consultancy focused on data engineering and a SaaS platform for B2B Go-To-Market Teams.
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Abigail is the creative director at M13. Prior to M13, she was the founder and creative director of AW Design Studio, a boutique design firm that crafts human-centered brands for fast-growing start-ups and non-profits. She was also the founding art director at KIPP Foundation.
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A senior executive assistant and part of the Mission Control team, Julie was most recently chief of staff at Devacurl. Prior to that, she was an executive assistant at Troika Mission Group and executive assistant + communications/marketing manager at GLO Science.
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As portfolio operations analyst, Amelia supports M13 portfolio companies in their growth and expansion. Prior to M13, Amelia was corporate partnerships and marketing manager at Stampede Ventures, where she built and led marketing launches for new companies developed from joint ventures. Amelia also worked for CAA, HBO, and NBCUniversal.
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Cassaday is the personal assistant to our two co-founders, Carter and Courtney Reum. In addition to this role, she is on the Mission Control team as well as the People team at M13. She previously worked as an assistant property manager and personal assistant.
Meet Anna: How the Dot Com Boom Shaped Her AI Investing Strategy—And Which Founders Get Her Attention
{{expertise}}
Anna Barber spent the first months of her life living in the Chelsea Hotel across the hall from Janis Joplin—possibly an early sign of the bold, fearless path she would take. From contemplating a life as a backcountry guide to founding a book publishing startup, Anna’s eclectic interests laid the groundwork for her eclectic career.
Anna’s initial foray into the corporate world as a lawyer and McKinsey consultant provided a solid foundation in understanding the inner workings of large companies. Transitioning to Hollywood, she spent six years as a talent manager, refining her storytelling prowess—a skill that she now leverages to help founders articulate their visions compellingly. And as a former founder herself, Anna has navigated entrepreneurship firsthand, so she understands the resilience and creativity required to succeed in the startup world.
As a venture investor, Anna champions a philosophy that combines deep support with high expectations, believing that this duality drives the best outcomes. She also sees beyond the frothy valuations and bubble talk, understanding that even in that environment generational companies will emerge. In an industry often dominated by short-term gains, her long-term vision and holistic approach to venture capital stand out.
We sat down with Anna to learn more about her career journey, what kind of founders she wants to work with, and what innovations she’s interested in right now.
Q&A with venture investor Anna Barber
Many believe AI is at peak hype right now. Does a founder have to have AI in their pitch deck to get your attention?
AI is all about efficiency gains—it makes things faster, cheaper, and better. It’s not a trend, it’s a paradigm shift that is improving efficiency. So if you’re a founder that is not using AI. I want to know why.
What are people getting wrong about AI right now?
There's a notion right now of we're in an AI bubble, and then the conclusion that some people draw is nothing that's getting funded today is going to work out. I think that's the wrong frame.
People see that we're undergoing a massive platform shift—similar to what happened in 1999, similar to what happened in 2008 with cloud computing—and so people are excited to invest behind that thesis. As a result, valuations have maybe gotten a bit frothy, and people are getting ahead of their skis in terms of backing things that might not have an actual market.
“The fact is there will be generational companies that are getting funded now, even though there will also be a lot of companies that don't succeed.”
I think both can be true. While we're in a bubble and undergoing a major, exciting platform shift, it's also a great time to be investing. When you look backwards at 1999, you see evidence of that in companies that not only survived that period, but thrived, and become some of the largest companies in the world (like Google and Amazon, and infrastructure companies like Cisco).
What is exciting to you about AI right now?
I’d say there are three big areas I’m really interested in:
I’m also interested in companies building AI agents. I believe that yesterday, AI was all about data structures, algorithms, and machine learning. Today, the focus is on generative AI. And the AI of tomorrow is the world of agents.
What is not interesting to you about AI right now?
As an early-stage investor, it’s challenging to invest in large foundational models. This is where big tech companies are focused on investing.
{{appearances}}
As an investor, what makes a founder stand out to you?
There are a few types of founders that stand out to me.
- Founders with a lot of courage, who aren’t afraid of contrarian thinking
- Founders who see venture capital as a tool, not the end goal
- Founders with deep perspective on the market they’re building in because of prior experience—it’s probably not a coincidence that I tend to be drawn to older founders
- Founders with a deep conviction about their purpose and the business they’re trying to build
You were a founder and worked at a startup that went bust in the 2000 dot com boom. How has that shaped the way you make decisions as a venture capitalist?
I learned from the early 2000s dot com boom, that in every hype cycle, there will still be generational companies made. Apple, Amazon and Google were considered startups that many called “hype” back in 2001. I look at startups today as the future Googles and Apples. Regardless of the hype, a handful of startups today will be the biggest companies in the world in 2035.
You’ve also been a lawyer, a consultant, a talent manager, and more—how have these other career paths shaped you as an investor?
Starting my career as a corporate lawyer and a McKinsey strategy consultant gave me a real foundation of understanding how large companies work. That experience was valuable to me as I transitioned into the startup world, because I didn't harbor any illusions that things were somehow easier if you were a large company.
I also spent six years as a talent manager working with writers and directors, which really helped me hone my storytelling skills. The time I spent in Hollywood has really informed both my ability to craft a great story and my appreciation for storytelling as a leadership skill. I believe founders are only as good as the story they tell. What attracts capital? What attracts people to work for you? Stories.
Finally, I founded a company called Scribble Press: I raised money, ran that company for a while, and sold it. So I went through that entire trajectory of inventing something completely new, bringing it to the world, pivoting it, trying to sort out how to make the unit economics work, trying to iterate quickly in a physical retail environment where quick iterations are really, really hard. That experience taught me a lot of humility and insight into how tough it is to be a CEO and how lonely it can be.
What’s a daily habit of yours?
Every morning I write down five things I’m grateful for and text them to a friend. It’s my gratitude practice. And I say “practice” because it doesn’t always come naturally—but I’ve found that when I do it, it puts me in a more positive mindset and helps me be more creative throughout the day.
To close out, let’s do a quick lightning round:
First job?
Photographer’s assistant. Once during a cosmetics catalog shoot, it was my job to make the perfect swirl in the cold cream. Today that job doesn’t really exist anymore; you can create the swirl with AI.
Favorite app?
The New York Times games app.
Guilty pleasure?
Elin Hilderbrand novels—they always feel like the beginning of summer to me.
Book, movie, or music rec?
Right now I’m reading This Is How You Lose the Time War. It’s fantastic.
Hidden talent?
I used to be a pretty serious triathlete, and I can change over from the swim to the bike in record time. The secret is laying out your outfit in exactly the right way, for maximum efficiency.
If you weren’t working in tech or venture, what would you be doing?
I think my alter ego lives in the Adirondacks and teaches kids to rock climb.
Anna dives into common misconceptions about AI; the power of storytelling; and how being a lawyer, talent manager, and founder has made her the investor she is today.
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M13’s RocketGuide to Early-Stage PR and Communications
✨ Highlights from this RocketGuide✨
- The brand flywheel — An overview of how all the pieces of a scalable brand comms function fit together, even at the early stages. This includes your website, social channels, visual brand, earned media, and more.
- Fundraise announcement example — An example of a traditional fundraise announcement, what information is in there, and why. This is useful for crafting both a press release or a blog post announcement.
- Fundraise announcement timeline — Announcing a milestone takes time and prep work. Use our activities timeline to get the most out of an announcement—and learn why you should start earlier than you think.
- [Template] Fundraise announcement timeline — Download our timeline to start planning now.
According to a recent study, the number two leading reason startups fail is poor marketing strategies and execution. In today's competitive landscape, brand marketing is more important than ever.
Brand communications touches every aspect of your business. Brand at the early stage includes PR (or "earned media"), social media, thought leadership, and events, and strong branding improves investor decks, product marketing, and internal comms. Done right, with a commitment to iterating quickly, the function keeps your startup top of mind, impacting customer purchase decisions, talent hires, fundraising, and more.
Whatever your experience, our comprehensive RocketGuide to Early-Stage PR will help you announce your near-term company news and, more meaningfully, activate your brand comms flywheel to achieve business goals going forward.
For more seasoned brand managers, today you may have fewer resources and more audiences to reach in a fragmented media landscape. You may also not be getting feedback that translates into traditional metrics. Our RocketGuide may spark coordination for greater consistency across your available channels, make your assets work harder for your brand, and help you iterate faster to improve engagement. The way we consume content is ever-charging—so let’s go!
The brand flywheel
Even at the early stage, you’re already building the daily habits of a scalable, effective brand comms function. And you’re probably already getting feedback that shows that content matters.
In a media landscape where news and social media are weighed equally, publishing your own content is essential. According to Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer, B2B buyers prefer “digital discovery” over a sales call, with 75% of respondents saying a specific piece of thought leadership content led them to research a product or service they were not previously considering.
Learn where your content can be amplified by checking out the brand flywheel.
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/65d4f8a1a62c18a502877cfe/66859500cf99c86de3397864_Flywheel_Animation.gif)
Who is this for? Defining your audience
Brand comms involves a range of activities, but its overall purpose is to connect your audiences with a memorable narrative about your company.
Narrative + engagement = brand reputation, built over time.
Understanding your priority audience(s) helps you build relevant content and an execution strategy to reach them. Audiences to engage at the early stages are:
Customers: Understanding what matters to them helps shape helpful educational content that demonstrates your expertise, boosts sales, and builds trust.
Talent: Brand communications can attract and retain talent. Top talent is drawn to exciting, well-funded startups, and momentum—fueled by content, press, and awards—builds excitement around your brand. Encourage your team to share your story with their own networks and acknowledge them when celebrating milestones.
Investors and partners: Effective brand communication helps raise capital. Research from Hard Numbers shows companies with the highest media coverage see a 35,635% increase in funds raised from their first event to Series B. Yes, investors are people too, and they’re checking out your social.
Media and opinion-makers: Unlike ads, earned media can’t be bought. An article from a trusted outlet that mentions your company can boost both awareness and credibility. Build relationships with reporters by following their work and engaging genuinely. Don’t just pitch—nurture reciprocal media relationships.
Crafting “sticky” messaging from the get go
Your investor decks, sales decks, job descriptions, and social posts are starting to tell the story of your company. To reach a wider audience, it’s time to dig deep and craft a compelling narrative, which starts by objectively answering the question: Why should I care?
Consider additional questions to uncover compelling stories that can be authentically told by you in person or on a call (without slides!).
Company messaging: Spend time with your leadership team to create your company messaging. Unique stories matter, so pick concrete anecdotes that help you stand out.
- Why does your startup exist?
- What is most compelling about what you do?
- What is a memorable compliment from a customer?
- What’s an ideal headline (8 words or less) for a news story about your company?
- What will a journalist find most interesting about your company right now?
- How has your product or service disrupted an industry norm?
- What unexpected insight have you/your company discovered that will impact the future?
Founder messaging: Your audience and reporters want to know your reasons for being an entrepreneur and what it took to get your business off the ground.
- What is your personal stake in the problem you are trying to solve?
- What is your founder origin story?
- What or who inspires you?
- What unexpected quality about you makes you the right person to innovate in your specific area?
Mistakes are made to learn from. As you practice sharing your story out loud and activating the flywheel, your narrative will get even more precise—and stickier.
Early-stage PR: announcing your first fundraise
Let’s now prepare for your first news announcement, which for early-stage tech founders is often your first fundraise.
Explore two Rocket Guides templates to help you get going. First, our interactive fundraise announcement timeline—and the accompanying template you can download—will help you identify what to start doing ahead of your announcement.
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/65d4f8a1a62c18a502877cfe/668599004eeb0dfe4a353ded_Timeline_Animation%20(1).gif)
Our example fundraise announcement identifies the basics you should cover for either a traditional press release or a more personal blog.
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/65d4f8a1a62c18a502877cfe/66859debc8840f5ca351fdcf_AnnouncementTemplate%20(1)%20(1).gif)
Three basics every startup should do
Even if you’re not quite ready to draft your first announcement, here are three things you can do to activate your brand flywheel:
Keep your social channels active. When reporters and investors look you up, they will look to social for signs of life, traction, and to see who’s on your side. Build a trust-based relationship with your community with a consistent cadence of insights, partnerships, educational tips and news. Save time by reposting content across multiple channels. (And if you absolutely don’t want to get active on social, don’t set up “zombie” channels with no followers that make it look like you have nothing to say.)
Win hearts and minds, starting with those already on your side. Activate your network of stakeholders so they get emotionally invested in your team’s progress. Get them excited to receive interesting content from you to post on their own social channels (they’re influencers too).
Relationships matter—and not only when you need something. Stay informed and get to know reporters and experts who cover your industry. Nurture these relationships, learn what matters to them and what they’re writing about (and what’s overlooked), and see what events they’re planning where your insights can be useful. Be brighter together.
The road ahead
Our RocketGuide may make you reconsider engaging earned media: It’s a lot of work. You may also start thinking about how to resource for brand comms. At the early stage, you may have people on your team already doing adjacent work. Other options are to hire an agency or consultant on a project basis or ask your investors for help. If you're an M13 portfolio company, reach out to us—that’s what we’re here for.
Whether it’s now or later, you will need to scale brand comms as your company and responsibilities grow. A brand comms executive who has a seat at your table from the beginning will help you anticipate public perception risk early, before it’s too late to identify and address structural problems.
Whereve you're at, knowing how brand comms works is a great first step and will establish realistic expectations.
Ready to learn more? Check out our full RocketGuide to Early-Stage PR.
Our comprehensive guide gives lean teams all the early PR tools to shine like the best.
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/65d4f8a1a62c18a502877cfe/66861b81d87d6672e60c1c5b_Flywheel_Thumbnail_3x2%20(1).png)
Forging Private-Public Relationships Across the State, Country, and Universe
At our Future Perfect conference this year, we brought together three innovators with a unique and important skill set: getting private and public companies to work together.
As co-founder and CEO of Prepared, a company building the next generation of public safety, Michael Chime knows the importance of meeting government infrastructure, systems, and budgets where they’re at. As President and CEO of nonprofit organization Tech:NYC, Julie Samuels understands how different entities can work together to support New York City and State. And as Chief Technologist of NASA, AC Charania is ushering in a new era of collaboration between the private tech industry and the nation’s storied space agency—including literal moonshots.
Here’s what our panelists shared about their experience navigating the overlapping worlds of public and private stakeholders.
Meeting public entities where they’re at
Michael Chime’s interest in public safety came early, when an active shooter event in a neighboring town became a catalyst for his interest in helping make schools safer. Years later, he and his co-founders built Prepared, an AI-powered assistive 911 tech company. Today, 30% of the American population is protected by Prepared’s tools for operators that reduce call process times, translate caller audio from 140 languages, transcribe calls in real-time, and equip first responders with live video that helps save lives.
Building a solution for a public entity like the National 911 Program brings unique challenges for a tech startup. “For your regular SaaS company, if you can provide 10x better technology, you have a good chance of success. That’s the bar: 10x better tech,” says Michael. “When we were building Prepared, we walked into 911 dispatch centers and realized they had technology that was from the 80s. So it wasn’t only a matter of better technology being available; it was a matter of financial constraint, government procurement processes, and switching costs.”
Drawing inspiration from companies like Slack and Yammer, known for championing a bottom-up business model, the Prepared team decided to offer their solution to dispatch centers for free or a low initial cost. Only after the center was up to speed on Prepared did they start to have procurement conversations.
“You have to meet any market where it’s at,” says Michael.
Julie agrees: “For a long time, we saw startups and tech companies come in and be like, I can fix this, it’s so easy to fix tech in government. But it’s actually not the technology that’s hard to fix, it’s all those other things Michael talks about. Meeting government where it is, especially at the local level, is key.”
Empire AI: A case study for successful private-public projects
Julie Samuels’ organization Tech:NYC sits at the intersection of the tech sector and civic space in New York City. As the landscape shifts and technology becomes the largest sector in New York, Tech:NYC works to make sure the tech industry is supporting the city, and vice versa.
One recent noteworthy win is the Empire AI project, a $400M public and private consortium to promote responsible research and AI opportunities focused on public good. With a new expert-designed supercomputer being built in Buffalo, universities will have access to the level of compute needed to compete with the private sector and do cutting-edge research across computer science, climate tech, astrophysics, and more.
The massive project was made possible only through collaboration between public, private, and philanthropic entities, and is a shining example of what can happen when these entities work together. “We got this through the state budget process in a matter of months,” says Julie. “This kind of thing just does not happen that quickly, so it has been amazing.”
These collaborations can yield transformative results. Julie shares, “I fundamentally believe that the Empire AI project will spur the kind of broader economic and tech growth that we saw centered around Stanford and Silicon Valley for 20 years—becoming a new center of gravity for the best faculty, post-docs, students, employers, and startups.”
NASA's new era of partnerships
AC Charania spent much of his career in private space and aviation companies like Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and Reliable Robotics, describing his job as “taking ideas from the back of a napkin and turning them into reality.” Today, he is NASA’s Chief Technologist and oversees meaningful partnerships between the private sector and America’s premiere space organization. According to AC, “My job is to take 20+ years of public-private partnership and technology development at private companies and translate that to working for the government.”
One major project at hand? Returning humans to the moon. The Artemis Program will include an expedition around the moon and later a week-long stay on its surface, and it will bring the first Canadian, woman, and person of color to this kind of lunar exploration.
“We’re going back to the moon,” says AC, “but this time we’re doing it with commercial industry, in a way that would have been incredible for those thinking about a lunar return 20 years ago. The way we’re going about it contractually, and the architectures and collaborations we’re doing with commercial industry, are incredible.”
NASA works with private entities through licensable technologies, contracts, and collaborations, as well as by publishing its list of technology gap priorities it is searching for other organizations to close. For example, there is solar arrays technology that was built by a startup and is widely used by NASA now: “It started with a small business idea that we incubated, and now we’re using it all over the solar system," says AC.
He concludes, "The wave of commercial industry collaborations with the government is probably an unstoppable force in the 21st century, because of the talent and capital that industry can bring to the table." Simply put, "Industry can innovate more rapidly."
NASA Chief Technologist AC Charania, Tech:NYC President Julie Samuels, and Prepared Co-founder Michael Chime share their perspectives on building effective tech partnerships as public servants.
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5 Lessons for Founders from NBA All-Star Shane Battier
Shane Battier is regarded as one of the most successful—if unusual—basketball players in history, known for his data-driven approach to basketball and teamwork. Michael Lewis famously dubbed him “The No-Stats All Star,” a nod to the fact that Shane’s strengths aren’t captured by traditional basketball metrics, but by the fact that his presence on a team made them significantly more successful overall.
In other words, Shane's presence on a team helps the whole be greater than the sum of its parts—or as we say at M13, to shine brighter together.
According to Lewis, “The game tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group…. Morey has come to think of [Shane] as an exception: the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he has ever seen. Or rather, the player who seems one step ahead of the analysts, helping the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his own personal interests.”
Shane joined M13 Partner & Co-founder Carter Reum at our annual Future Perfect conference to talk about leadership, teamwork, and his unique approach to winning. Here are some of the top lessons—for business and for life—from their conversation.
1. Embrace unseen, ‘unsexy’ contributions
Winning teams win as a team—not as individuals. It’s important to acknowledge that some of the most important work may not be immediately visible or celebrated.
“Kobe Bryant is the toughest competitor I’ve ever had to guard against. But even the great Kobe Bryant had strengths and weaknesses,” says Shane. “I knew when Kobe Bryant went to his right hand, he had a 62% shot of scoring. (That’s legendary, by the way—that’s what makes him one of the greatest players of all time.) But if I sent him to his left hand, and I kept him from the basket, it was only a 42% shot. You don’t have to be a math major from MIT to know that if I’m guarding Kobe, I’d rather him have the 42% chance of success than the 62%. If I can get him to do the 'bad thing' every single time, I’m creating positive expected value for me.”
Armed with this data, Shane memorized every spot on the basketball court where he could get that edge. “And so even though I wasn’t sexy, I couldn’t jump, I was slow, I didn’t score—I still knew how to create value on every single space on the floor,” he concludes. “That’s why when I was on the floor, my teams magically played better.”
2. Obsess over process
In both sports and business, you simply can’t control outcomes—they depend on too many factors outside of your control. What you do have control over is your own contribution.
“I became obsessed with process,” says Shane. “I cannot control the result. I cannot control whether the ball goes in or not. But I could affect where Kobe took his shorts from. I became detached from the actual result, because that’s something I can’t control—so I can’t worry about it.”
This mindset helped him reframe success for himself and his team, and to focus in on the things he could influence instead of the things he couldn’t. “Carmelo did kick my butt,” Shane laughs, recounting guarding 10x NBA All-Star Carmelo Anthony. “But the process was pure, so I didn’t worry about it.”
“I always talk about that with founders,” Carter agrees. “Respect the process. And if you just do the right things enough times over a long enough period of time, the results should follow.”
3. Trust and mission focus are the most important factors for success
“As much as I love data, it still comes down to people,” says Shane. “In my work, running analytics in Miami for five years, we produce a lot of research—but maybe the most seminal piece of research that we produced was about the power of teams. There's two factors that determine your team's trajectory and success: trust and mission focus.”
Championship sports teams are made up of teams that have high trust in each other and a strong, united focus on the team’s ultimate mission. Similarly,
“It’s the same for investing as it is for basketball,” says Shane. “It’s what makes us human.”
4. Learn from worthy competitors
To encourage your own growth, seek out and respect worthy opponents who challenge you to grow and improve. Identifying and learning from people at the top of their game forces you to elevate your own strategy.
“Kobe and I have played this meta game-within-the-game-within-the-game, the only he and I knew we were playing,” says Shane. “And he knew that I knew that he knew that I knew. As a competitor, I hope all of you find a worthy foil and a worthy competitor that you play a meta game with that only you know.”
Your cheerleaders will boost you up, but sometimes it’s your competitors who build you up the best.
5. Evaluating founders
In closing, one attendee asked Shane about his experience talking to founders. His response came back to the main theme of the day—that winning teams requires more than just successful individuals. The whole must be greater than the sum of its parts.
“I love talking to founders,” says Shane. “There are a lot of founders that have amazing ideas, have the passion, have the drive. But if they can’t get the right people to go along with them on their journey, they’re not getting my money. At the same time, I’ve invested in people whose idea might be subpar, who might not be very charismatic—but they are amazing at building a team that can execute, around that framework of trust and mission focus.”
The “No Stats All Star” joined M13 Co-founder Carter Reum on stage at Future Perfect 2024 to talk building winning mindsets and winning teams.
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4 Lessons on Mental Wellness for Founders
Being a founder is an incredibly stressful role, and at M13 we recognize the need to focus on mental wellness for all of our founders. “It is undeniably true that a healthier founder leads to a healthier company,” says Matt Hoffman, M13 Partner & Head of Talent.
A key feature of M13 is that we are made up of former founders and operators who have been there before. “Investors should acknowledge and support the mental health challenges faced by founders,” says Matt. “As investors and board members, we need to own our part in creating stressful conditions for founders—and take responsibility for providing safe mechanisms to discuss and treat mental health issues."
Community is vital to mental wellness—which is why we held an event to connect our founders not only with our experts, but each other.
During mental wellness month, we hosted a conversation about mental wellness featuring Matt, Bonobos founder and venture investor Andy Dunn, Bouqs co-founder and M13 Partner John Tabis, and executive coach Golbie Kamarei. Here are some of the highlights.
1. Remember: You are not your company
“What do founders call their companies? Their baby,” Andy points out. “It serves companies well because we do everything to make it work. But the founder suffers.”
JT agrees: “The self-fulfilling prophecy of your belief can be your downfall: If something doesn’t work out, it’s all on you.” Belief in one’s unique capabilities can lead to severe personal repercussions when those expectations are not met. JT suggests that founders treat their role not as their identity, but as a job for which they were hired—which can provide a healthier perspective and reduce stress.
Golbie’s clients regularly work to disentangle their identities from their work roles. One way they do this is by acknowledging the roles we each play at work and catching when we’re using language that equates one’s “beingness” with the role they play in an organizational system.
For example, just adding the phrase “in my role” when describing a job can help create separation between the human and their job. Golbie highlights that we each play a collection of roles, and by disentangling ourselves from them, we can better manage stress.
“People conflate who they are with what they do, especially in this country, where we don’t have social safety nets.” says Golbie. “You are working for your healthcare, basic security, and livelihood, so we treat companies and our jobs like life and death.” Viewing life as a collection of roles rather than being wholly defined by one's work can help manage stress and maintain mental health.
2. Find the right language
“You can’t address and harness and control that which we don’t discuss,” says Andy, who has written extensively about his mental health journey as a founder. He emphasizes the importance of accepting mental health diagnoses and using language that doesn't equate individuals with their conditions.
"Use language that separates the person from the condition. Imagine if my doctor said, ‘You have cancer,’ and, ‘Oh also, you are cancer.’ Now notice and hear the difference between saying ‘Andy has bipolar disorder' and 'Andy is bipolar.'”
JT has undergone his own journey of recognizing and accepting mental health challenges, which manifested as anger and frustration during times of stress, rather than what he viewed as a more “typical” feeling of sadness. He says, “I had no idea that mental health disorders could take such different forms until I spent time with a mental health expert and got the help I needed.”
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3. A culture of “high performance” can be a self-imposed trap
It’s common for high achievers to sacrifice their well-being for success—and startup culture can glorify the sacrifices founders make for their goals, normalizing suffering in pursuit of success. It’s no secret that this attitude can be a detriment to overall well-being.
“It’s quite common with founders I work with to not realize the trade-offs they’re making while in pursuit of a goal,” says Golbie. “High performers are used to working under duress. Making sacrifices and pushing through physical and mental boundaries is common.”
What helps us be happy and well varies by person—and for founders, it can also vary by company stage. JT saw the impact of changing dynamics of leadership as the Bouqs team grew beyond his preferred leadership sweet spot of managing a small, collaborative team. “I was happy with 20 people and miserable with 110,” he says. “I ran into personal fears and imposter syndrome as the company got bigger.” Today, he highlights the need for self-awareness to understand where mental health challengers are coming from—and what help is needed to navigate transitions.
“Survivor bias is real. We often only tell the success stories of founders who have defied the odds,” says Matt. Obscuring common struggles and failures can exacerbate our own high—and unhelpful—expectations. Andy additionally notes, “We should not lionize entrepreneurs as much as we do.”
4. Build a portfolio of mental health support
“The founder experience is extremely stressful and unique,” says Golbie. “Some founders have found the experience traumatizing. If you’re struggling with aspects of your role, you’re not alone.”
Goldbie encourages building a portfolio of support which may include coaching, therapy, or both. She differentiates between coaching and therapy: Coaching is often more future-oriented and goal-focused, while therapy is often more past-oriented and focused on deep, foundational healing related to core beliefs, habitual patterns, and trauma.
“Invest in your self-awareness and self-management, and seek professional help early, ideally before a crisis occurs,” she adds. “It may be hard to know if coaching or therapy is right for you. Both coaches and therapists offer complimentary consultation sessions. Meet with several to see if any individual’s offerings and style meets your needs. Trust your intuition."
Listening and talking with other founders willing to speak candidly about their mental health journeys can also be a good start to building strong support systems. Andy notes the importance of real listening and empathy: “Listening makes a world of difference for someone to unburden themselves. Don’t shift the spotlight. They may be making a small bid that took an ocean of pain to bring this to your attention—so don’t make it about you.”
JT’s advice? "Give yourself some distance from day-to-day stresses and prioritize self-compassion. Recognize that maintaining your mental and physical health is crucial for long-term success.”
"As investors, we at M13 acknowledge the mental health challenges founders face and seek to support their well-being,” says Matt. “We need investors to encourage founders to seek professional support when they need it."
Recommended reading
Want to hear more from our experts? Learn more at the links below.
Watch
- Andy’s TED talk: Lessons from Losing My Mind.
- Golbie’s TED talk: Success at What Cost?
Read
- Andy Dunn’s memoir, Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind
- JT shares his thoughts about navigating isolation and stress as a founder
- Article: Trauma May Explain The Suffering of CEOs, Leaders, & Startup Founders (Arzhang Kamarei)
- Quick read: The Station (Robert Hasting)
M13 connects our founders with career coaches. If you’d like to get in touch with Matt about coaching offerings at M13, please email him at matt@m13.co.
In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, we hosted a conversation around the mental wellness challenges and solutions that founders specifically face.
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Introducing RocketGuides by M13
M13 RocketGuides are interactive masterclasses in building your startup, from crafting an investor-impressing pitch deck, to strategic conference selection, to writing clear and actionable investor updates.
Written by our expert operators, investors, and former founders, these guides include in-depth insights and best practices to help your company shine. Dive into our guides below.
M13's Guide to Early-Stage PR
Brand communications touches every aspect of your business. Brand at the early stage includes PR (or "earned media"), social media, thought leadership, and events, and strong branding improves investor decks, product marketing, and internal comms. Done right, with a commitment to iterating quickly, the function keeps your startup top of mind, impacting customer purchase decisions, talent hires, fundraising, and more.
Whatever your experience, our comprehensive RocketGuide to Early-Stage PR will help you announce your near-term company news and, more meaningfully, activate your brand comms flywheel to achieve business goals going forward.
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Highlights:
- The brand flywheel — An overview of how all the pieces of a scalable brand comms function fit together, even at the early stages. This includes your website, social channels, visual brand, earned media, and more.
- Fundraise announcement example — An example of a traditional fundraise announcement, what information is in there, and why. This is useful for crafting both a press release or a blog post announcement.
- Fundraise announcement timeline — Announcing a milestone takes time and prep work. Use our activities timeline to get the most out of an announcement—and learn why you should start earlier than you think.
Our AI workflow automation tool experts:
Christine Choi, Partner & Head of Brand Comms; Mary Lara, Director of Product; Emma Miller, Content Manager; Abigail Snodgrass, Creative Director
M13's Guide to AI Workflow Automations in 2024
There are seemingly endless AI tools out there to help you do your job more efficiently, and you might not have time to test them all. So we did it for you.
Welcome to your new go-to resource for the latest in AI workflow automation. Dive into our curated selection of the top AI tools, carefully selected to meet the needs of startup founders—from AI meeting assistants to content generators to customer prospecting and more.
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Highlights:
- AI code co-pilots: Assisting engineers in writing code has been an key early use case for generative AI. Various tools are attacking the problem from different angles, with the goal of enhancing the output of very expensive engineering resources. When done right, implementing these tools can multiply the impact of teams large and small.
- AI image editors & modifiers: Kate Middleton unfortunately made headlines for using AI to retouch and edit images of her and her family—but these tools can greatly reduce the time and money needed to make edits. The real power of these platforms is that now, even relatively unartistic people can make changes to existing photos and visual content directly. It's usually no more complicated than drawing the area a user wants edited and writing a quick prompt. Some of these workflows are finding their way into mainstream tools as well, showing promise for the space.
- AI for resume sorting & filtering: Job postings can attract hundreds of applicants, and manually sorting through them can take hours if not days. Now, emerging solutions can cut that time down to minutes. Particularly in high-growth situations where you are hiring dozens of positions with a small or non-existent HR team, these tools can help you avoid needing to put other founder duties on hold while hiring, hugely saving time and money.
Our AI workflow automation tool experts:
Mary Lara, Director of Product; Zach Naglieri, Data Operator; Carter Reum, M13 Co-founder & Partner; Rob Smith, M13 Partner & Head of Product
M13’s Guide to Investor Updates
Investor update emails are a crucial part of effective communication to help you leverage your investor network. They’re your opportunity to share your progress, celebrate your wins, and ask for help where you need it.
In this interactive guide, we cover everything from deciding what metrics to include to finding the sweet spot between under-sharing and oversharing—so you can transform your updates into irresistible must-reads.
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Highlights:
- "Investor updates can be just as important for potential investors as they are for current investors. If we meet a founder in between fundraising, we will often ask to be included on their investor distribution list. It’s a great way to stay top of mind for potential investors and give them some sizzle to get excited about." —Brent
- "Be transparent about challenges your startup is facing and the steps you're taking to overcome them. Acknowledging risks shows that you're realistic and proactive." —Rob
- "End with an action. Consider adding a CTA at the end (i.e. schedule a meeting, review a document, etc.) so it’s clear what action investors should take next." —Mary
Our investor letter guide experts:
Mary Lara, Director of Product; Brent Murri, M13 Partner; Rob Smith, M13 Partner & Head of Product
M13's Guide to Strategic Conferencing in 2024
Conferences present a huge opportunity for networking, fundraising, showcasing your product, gleaning insider insights, and much more. They can also be chaotic, overwhelming, and expensive.
If you’ve wondered: Should I be going to conferences? Which ones? How do I find them? How do I make the most of my time there? Then our RocketGuide to Strategic Conferencing—featuring M13’s Conference Finder Tool—is for you!
Highlights:
- “Pitching investors? Consider creating a data room specifically for the conference, with links to your deck, product demos, and testimonials. Prospective investors you meet can share the link with anyone on their team and you can set up unique link tracking to understand views and engagement." —Amelia
- “Be a good (and strategic) host. Identify great partners and sponsors to add to the network you can bring together, and keep close track of the overarching event schedule—both the conference and offshoot events—to choose an optimal time for your own event." —Melissa
- “Introvert? You’re not alone! Up to 40% of the population needs some solo time to energize. Figure out the 1–3 things that will re-energize you while you’re in the thick of it. AM meditation? 30-minute workout? Favorite B-vitamin supplement from home? Plan these in advance so you know your cup will be filled." —Lizzie
Our conference guide experts:
Lizzie Francis, M13 Partner & Head of Propulsion; Mary Lara, Director of Product; Samantha Hughes, Community Program Coordinator; Melissa Montan, Director of Propulsion; Rob Smith, M13 Partner & Head of Product; Amelia Zack, Portfolio Operations Analyst
M13's Guide to Building Your Early-Stage Fundraising Deck
Raising a seed or Series A round? Our comprehensive guide walks you through every. single. slide. your potential investors will want to read, from introducing an interesting problem you’re solving, to a strong product roadmap, to defining key metrics for your startup’s success.
Or check out the full deck below:
Highlights:
- “Investors can be lazy. If they only read the titles of your slides, that should be enough to tell your startup story.” —Rob
- “Twist the knife on your problem slide. Start with a problem, then highlight what makes it even worse. Use action words; be declarative.” —Anna
- “Financial projections should be optimistic but realistic. Make sure you understand what “good” looks like, and highlight that on your financial forecast slide.” —Karl
Our fundraising deck experts:
Karl Alomar, M13 Partner; Anna Barber, M13 Partner; Rob Smith, M13 Partner & Head of Product
Stay connected
Sign up for exclusive early access to future M13 RocketGuides
Our interactive M13 RocketGuides are built by founders, for founders, to help you learn from experts who have been there before.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About AI
Artificial intelligence is on everyone’s mind.
And with good reason. We are currently in an AI technology innovation wave similar to the dawn of the consumer internet, the advent of mobile technology, and the rise of cloud computing. New businesses are emerging to provide AI models, developer tools to build them, and infrastructure to host them. Existing products and services will be enhanced by AI capabilities, while entirely new offerings will upset incumbents with AI as a key competitive advantage.
At the same time, we also recognize that we are at the peak of a hype cycle—a moment that inflates valuations and calls for caution when it comes to investing in this market.
At M13, we value clear-eyed evaluation of the emerging technologies reshaping the future of work, money, health and commerce. Below, dive into some of the key subjects we talk about when we talk about AI.
Get in touch with our investors
Perspectives
Recent investments
Below are select investments from our AI portfolio. These are not inclusive of M13’s total investments; for more information, check out our portfolio.
The M13 investing team shares our approach to the AI wave.
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AI, Crypto, and Riding Hype Cycle Waves with Brad and Latif
M13 partner Latif Peracha brought his friend and colleague, Union Square Ventures (USV) co-founder Brad Burnham, to M13’s Future Perfect 2024. Brad shared his insights on the challenges and transformative potential of crypto and AI, as well as on investing in these rapidly evolving technologies.
USV successfully raised its first fund in 2003 by focusing on the application layer of the internet, a contrarian move during the post-dot-com crash period. With this history in mind, Brad acknowledges the importance of timing and of understanding the hype cycles that technologies move through.
Today, two major hype cycles on investors’ minds are those of AI and crypto. Below, check out some highlights of a sweeping discussion that took our audience from the Industrial Revolution, to the year the Internet broke, to Turkey’s stablecoin adoption (4.3% of its GDP), and even to sound advice from Brad’s mother.
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But first, hype cycles: A history
History repeats itself. Carlota Perez, author of Technical Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages, points out that there have been hype cycles around every innovation since the Industrial Revolution. Perez’s book reviews innovations such as steam and railways; steel, electricity, and heavy engineering; oil, automobiles and mass production; and information and telecommunications.
The cycles that have accompanied these major technological shifts created the necessary financial bubbles to drive experimentation, infrastructure development, and ultimately sustained growth. Carlota lays out a few key phases of these cycles:
- Capital mobilization: Bubbles help to rapidly mobilize large amounts of capital needed for infrastructure and innovation.
- Experimentation and innovation: Speculative frenzy encourages a wide range of experiments and innovations, many of which fail (the process of “creative destruction”) but some of which succeed spectacularly.
- Market creation: Bubbles create markets and industries that did not exist before, laying the groundwork for sustained growth during the synergy and maturity phases.
On hype cycle challenges
The unusual crypto case: “We've seen, for the first time, real volatility within a hype cycle,” Brad explains about the crypto market. He compares crypto today with where the internet was in 1995, “the year the internet broke” with the first browser, the first web application, and the first search engines.
“[With crypto], there’s this hint that something really important is going on. A bunch of people have been working on it and thinking about it for a while. But the broader population is unaware of how important it is. You talk to people at cocktail parties and they ask, ‘What’s it good for?’ It’s the same question we used to get in 1995. The underlying architecture does make a difference, and we're about to see real applications.”
The problem with overfunding: Latif describes the difficulty in distinguishing between the financial aspects of crypto projects and the actual technological innovation and development due to their market-driven nature and resulting noise.
Brad acknowledges the unique challenges of investing in publicly traded tokens, including that token offerings result in managing excess funds. "If you happen to do a token offering at a moment in time when there's significant momentum, you could raise a ton of money,” he says. “And it turns out to be really hard to run a company with too much money. You end up over-investing, building big organizations that become unwieldy and you're not actually delivering as fast as you used to.”
In other words: If you've raised so much money that you never have to go back to your investors, the drive to deliver can be diminished. Investing rounds can be a useful framing checkpoint where the decision to reinvest demands disciplined dialogue among investors.
Now for the bright side: Opportunities
An environment of innovation: Technologies need the chance to mature and become useful. Similar to information technology on the internet, crypto and AI are experiencing similar rapid innovation.
"Without that financial bubble, without that enthusiasm, you don't get the experiments that you need in order to put the infrastructure in place to build real systems,” Brad says. "[At USV] we made the argument that we were through the initial crash of the information technology hype cycle, and that we were going to be building now into what Carlota Perez called the deployment period. That’s when a lot of the technologies that were first introduced in the crash actually became important."
Adaptation: "It's our job to figure out how to live with these new problems. It's not the job of the technology or the market to make it easy for us,” says Brad.
Implications: Both investors encouraged looking at the implications of a technology, not just the technology itself. Thinking beyond the infrastructure or core technical pieces brings a huge number of opportunities.
Advice to live and invest by
In closing, Latif asked for advice for investors and founders. Brad offered these two parting insights.
First, “Doing the right thing is a lot harder than doing things right. Doing things right is available to everybody: just keep plugging away. Keep paying attention to your customers, and you can build a business. Doing the right thing is sometimes a matter of luck."
The other piece of advice comes from Brad's mother: "If you marry for money, you pay for it for the rest of your life. Why is that relevant in a venture capital context? Well, if you take the highest offer for your company, if you recruit people using money instead of your mission, you’ll end up paying for it in lots of subtle ways.”
Get in touch
If you are building in crypto and AI and want to talk, please reach out to our investing team: Latif Peracha at latif@m13.co and Mark Grace at mark@m13.co.
Union Square Ventures co-founder Brad Burnham in conversation with M13 Partner Latif Peracha about lessons learned from decades of venture investing.
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Investing in Maven AGI: Leveraging AI to Fix Customer Support
Customer support is notoriously hard to deliver well and at a reasonable cost. At our 2024 Future Perfect conference, Maven co-founder and CTO Sami Shalabi noted that the average support ticket today costs companies $40 in English—and $120+ in other languages.
Innovations in customer support over the past few decades have centered on ticketing systems and offshore call centers, with the focus squarely on delivering the same support at a lower cost per ticket.
But we believe artificial intelligence is changing all that, allowing companies to deliver world-class customer support at a fraction of the cost—with AI in the loop both to replace and to empower human agents. Not only does AI have the potential to drive down CS costs dramatically, but AI-native CS platforms can also generate revenue by capturing customer input that comes through the CS channel, providing valuable insights to product and marketing teams.
Venture dollars have poured into AI-native customer support disruptors, as incumbents like ServiceNow and Zendesk invest in their own homegrown AI solutions. Now, all eyes are on AI for enterprise, and we believe customers have a strong appetite to try new products.
In this environment, a new product that can resolve 90 percent of customer inquiries out of the gate can grow quickly.
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David Doyle, Head of Strategic Support Programs at ClickUp, a current Maven customer, reports that Maven increased rep solves by 25% in week one, freeing up the team to invest in more proactive retention activities.
Ultimately, the Maven team has its eye on the larger “business AGI” opportunity. The Maven system ingests any customer data in any form and allows customers to build agents on top of that data—so these agents can help with not just customer support, but also product research, sales, and customer onboarding. At every point, Maven has designed its architecture for both performance and ease of use, such that customers are coming up with new ideas about how to use Maven, on their own.
In a recent case study on Maven, OpenAI noted, "Maven AGI aims to unlock the human potential trapped in input/output tasks. Customer interactions extend beyond support, and combining the technology of Maven and OpenAI will improve the coordination of customer-facing functions like support, sales, and marketing."
“Maven AGI is transforming how we engage, interact with, and support our customers. It autonomously handles 90% of incoming queries, significantly exceeding our initial expectations.”
—Rahul Todkar, Tripadvisor Head of Data and AI
As investors, seeing such a well-executed product so early in its life cycle seriously impressed us. And when two portfolio companies we introduced to Maven promptly became customers, it confirmed that we wanted to invest! The potential of Maven is clear even in a first sales call.
In a competitive and fast-moving space, having the right team is everything, and rarely does a team come along that impresses us as much as the MavenAGI founding team. The combination of Jonathan Corbin, Sami Shalabi, and Eugene Mann is another key reason we were excited to back Maven. Each brings deep leadership experience over decades at companies like Adobe, Marketo, Stripe, Google, and Hubspot, and they’ve previously worked together and known one another for years. This team understands the opportunity in front of them, and they understand how to build a world-class team and company.
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“Creating a better customer experience has been an obsession, and it’s why I’ve spent time at so many industry-leading companies in the CX space,” says Maven CEO Jonathan Corbin. “Organizations spend billions of dollars on people and technology to create personalized experiences, but siloed data structures, lack of training, and disparity in tools across functions meant that we could never achieve success. That’s why I left Hubspot—to build the customer experience of the future.”
We’re proud to have partnered with Maven AGI on this journey, leading their $20M Series A and investing alongside our peers at Lux Capital and E14 Ventures.
M13 leads the $20M Series A for Maven AGI, a pioneer in artificial general intelligence (AGI) for business, starting with customer support.
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The Rise of AI Agents
Key takeaways
What is an AI agent?
While generative AI has dominated conversations in the past year, the real change to come is autonomous AI agents that not only generate information but orchestrate action. At our recent Future Perfect conference, M13 partner Anna Barber and three M13 founders—Norm Ai’s John Nay, Niural’s Nami Baral, and Maven AGI’s Sami Shalabi—discussed AI agents and the impacts on their respective industries.
Compliance: Norm Ai, which built the first regulatory AI agent platform to help companies stay in compliance, thinks of AI agents across three levels.
- Level one is a system that can autonomously assess if a document or action is out of compliance, flag it, and then pass a full legal review to a human.
- Level two agents take that assessment, then autonomously suggest what actions to take to become compliant. (This is where Norm Ai is at today.)
- Level three, the future state, will be systems that don’t need to hand documents off to humans at all in order to implement changes needed to become compliant.
Human resources management: Today, an AI agent may be able to respond to a request like, “Help me hire this person in the Netherlands.” The agent can create an employment contract, figure out whether this person needs a visa and the requirements to get that visa implemented, get all of the documents in order, make sure that all of the payment methods are aligned, handle taxes, and so on. “That kind of AI agent has a limited scope, where it’s trained on certain kinds of high-precision actions,” says Niural co-founder and CEO Nami Baral.
Tomorrow, an AI agent could respond to a request like, “Here’s our headcount plan, now execute that.” “Then whether you hire in the Netherlands, China, or Kentucky doesn’t really matter,” says Nami. “That’s the level of autonomy that agents should be able to take. Obviously, there are different layers of autonomous action that can happen with HR because HR is so sensitive—but this could create a whole other level of efficiency for the company.”
Customer service (and pizza): Maven AGI co-founder and CTO Sami Shalabi explained his take on agents as he innovates in customer service.
“It's about ultimately giving AI outcomes,” says Sami. “For a non-business use case: Today you can tell an agent, ‘order me a pizza,’ and a pizza arrives. But at the next level, you tell an agent, ‘I’m hungry,’ and it knows from your overall history that you like pizza, and so it orders you one. We’re looking to create that in the business setting. So if you’re a marketing tech company, you can say, ‘I want 100 leads.’ There's a lot of potential value in that, because it's fundamentally 100x-ing human productivity.”
In short, the AI agent technology of tomorrow is about being able to take actions and putting those together in a way where humans aren't in the loop.
What are the benefits? And how does it impact us humans?
John highlights how AI agents can transform regulatory compliance from a burdensome task to a more efficient process. By fully automating compliance tasks that are neglected due to complexity and time-consuming manual compliance, AI agents can help organizations become more compliant than ever before, ensuring higher adherence to regulations.
Sami describes customer onboarding that brings human experience into deciding where to use AI agents in a way that results in ROI:
“It’s a journey to get there on the human side—s opposed to a capability. We typically start with the human in the loop, and when we present that as part of all of our experience, people are able to see the value. Then this unlocks the next phase, and the next phase. When it's not performing, we tell you why. We're hitting about 93% efficiency where our AI agents are able to answer questions without human intervention.”
Where is the line?
As Anna points out, the future of AI agents won’t only be about technical innovation but also a willingness to accept agents that are truly autonomous on an emotional level. “On a societal and cultural level, where are we ready—or not ready—to accept true agents?” she asks. “For example, right now we are more accepting of human error when it comes to driving than of self-driving cars making errors. But people are getting comfortable faster than I thought.”
High precision and rigorous testing are essential for AI agents, especially in sensitive areas like payroll and compliance. Nami points out that Niural does not deploy AI agents until they achieve over 90% accuracy, and for financial transactions, Niural requires 99% accuracy. This high standard ensures that the AI agents can be trusted to handle critical tasks without errors, which is crucial for gaining client confidence and ensuring compliance with various regulations.
“Acceptance of AI agents is about trust, and it’s about stakes,” says John. “I don’t necessarily think stakes are the blocker. If you have a way to build a lot of trust, you can handle higher-stakes processes.”
Get in touch
If you are building in AI and want to talk, please reach out to our investing team: Anna Barber at anna@m13.co and Morgan Blumberg at morgan@m13.co.
What's the future of artificial intelligence? AI agents that can autonomously carry out complex tasks.
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3 Myths About M&A and Innovation
As a venture investor, I find myself thinking a lot lately about the shifting M&A regulatory landscape and its impact on the innovation my industry seeks to support. Last year, worldwide M&A volume fell 17% YoY, reaching a 10-year low. The abandoned $20B Adobe-Figma deal is just one of the latest tech mergers to be squashed by regulators in the name of preserving innovation.
While multiple macroeconomic factors are contributing here, it’s worth paying attention to how regulation has impacted this space.
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Notably, as AI has exploded, calls for regulation have also reached a new fever pitch, with FTC Chair Lina Khan recently noting, “There’s no AI exemption from the laws on the books.”
I agree that, to preserve competitive markets, some transactions shouldn’t happen. However, I also believe this should be the exception, rather than the rule. And lately, it seems to be the rule.
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Generally, the story is, large mergers reduce the consumer benefits that result from a competitive environment, necessitating regulatory bodies to intervene and block them. But does that argument hold up to scrutiny?
When people in my world—venture investors and the founders they support—hear this argument, we heave a collective sigh. The fact is, M&A deals are a crucial part of supporting innovation and the investment ecosystem needed to foster it. Squashing M&A transactions doesn’t protect innovation; it restricts it.
That’s why I get concerned when I see a lower proportion of investigated M&A deals being approved. In 2022, more than half of antitrust investigations led to a complaint or abandoned transaction. By 2023, that ticked up to 92%.
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Innovation is at the center of the entire venture capital industry—and venture is uniquely positioned to support it. That in mind, there are a few misconceptions about the relationship between M&A and innovation that I would like to debunk.
Myth #1: Innovation is fed by competition, which is protected by M&A regulation.
Counterpoint: Innovation is fed by investment—and investment is driven partially by returns from M&A.
Creative innovation is hugely driven by the venture investments that support disruptive founders. But while VC firms like M13 are inspired by innovation, it’s important to remember that we are also accountable to our investors. Ultimately, we need to make sound financial decisions.
VCs generally create returns for their investors via two key routes:
- IPO: A portfolio company goes public.
- M&A: A portfolio company gets acquired.
(It is also possible for private companies to become cash flow positive and share dividends to shareholders—but it’s uncommon, and for our purposes, a fairly negligible source of returns.)
While IPOs generally create better returns, M&A is by far the likelier outcome. In 2022, M&A transactions outpaced IPOs by more than 30x.
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While M&A deals generally drive smaller returns, the difference isn’t that vast. One survey found that IPO returns to VC firms averaged 9.7x, vs. M&A returns of 7.4x. M&A transactions also generated returns more quickly, averaging a median 4.7 years between first VC funding and exit, vs. 6 years for companies that IPO.
When regulation takes M&A off the table as an avenue to create returns, VC becomes a less compelling investment category. In turn, Limited Partners (investors in venture funds) become less likely to invest. The end result is that less capital goes to innovators that are feeding the market with new technologies and businesses.
Myth #2: Large mergers discourage founders from innovating in a space.
Counterpoint: M&A not only encourages founders by offering a “finish line” to work toward, but also brings them back to innovating again more regularly.
Venture firms aren’t the only players interested in financial returns from startups; founders and their teams are too. Because it’s difficult for more entrenched firms to truly innovate, more nimble startups are able to monetize on new ideas. As the far more common exit path than going public, M&A creates an invaluable incentive for founders to work toward.
Moreover, founders that successfully exit through M&A often get back the time and freedom to innovate again. For example, after Spencer Rascoff’s Hotwire was acquired by Expedia in 2003, he went on to become co-founder and CEO of Zillow (2011 IPO), in addition to founding myriad other companies (dot.LA, Pacaso, Recon Food, heyLibby, and more). Today, Rascoff continues to feed the innovation ecosystem as an educator, PledgeLA Board member, and General Partner at the VC firm 75 & Sunny.
I believe an ideal outcome of our industry is to allow the world’s greatest innovators to cycle back regularly and innovate a number of times over their careers. M&A deals are one way to release great founders back into the ecosystem so they can build over and over.
“Undue and disproportionate regulatory hurdles discourage entrepreneurs, who should be able to see acquisition as one path to success, and that hurts both consumers and competition—the very things that regulators say they're trying to protect.”
—David Zapolsky, Amazon SVP and General Counsel
Myth #3: Large mergers block consumers’ access to innovative technologies.
Counterpoint: Acquisitions give consumers more access to innovation.
FTC Chair Lina Khan and others often argue that large companies should be innovating on their own, rather than acquiring innovation solutions through M&A deals. I couldn’t disagree more.
Large companies—especially public ones—are terrible at organic innovation. They are limited by short-term performance expectations and restrictive existing technical infrastructure. Moreover, no matter how good a technology is, when it goes to market, over time the uniqueness and the ubiquity of that technology diminishes. This creates an opportunity for smaller, more nimble companies to compete.
In fact, there are many companies that have flourished and provided value to the consumer only because they were acquired by a larger firm that has the ability to continue to fund their operation—such as Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, or Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn. In both cases, tech giants acquired companies that were adjacent to their core business, rather than directly competitive with it. Facebook bet on VR, while Microsoft expanded into business social media.
Because it was acquired by Facebook, Oculus was able to launch its VR product and bring this new technology to millions. Even companies with an existing user base can attain new reach through M&A; Instagram was acquired with fewer than 90 million users, but today boasts more than 2.2 billion.
In short, acquisitions give these smaller companies the resources and reach to offer their innovative solutions to more consumers.
Looking ahead to a better system
I believe the stated goal of regulation is sound: prevent monopolies, enhance competition, and push for new innovation in the market. However, the practices in place today are losing sight of this goal. A few key issues:
- High fees. Antitrust investigations can be costly for the companies being investigated, and increasing scrutiny of M&A transactions can deter companies considering sizable acquisitions.
- Retroactive reversals. Transactions can be overturned even after the deal is finalized—sometimes long after. One extreme case is Axon's $13M acquisition of VieVu in May 2018: the FTC challenged the deal in 2020, sparking a multi-year litigation process.
- Lengthy timelines. It can take months or even years to complete M&A investigations, leaving companies stuck in long holding patterns. Amazon's acquisition of iRobot was abandoned in January 2024 after eighteen months of litigation went unresolved.
Together, these factors discourage companies from entertaining acquisitions and hinder healthy M&A activity in the industry. Many companies are becoming apprehensive about M&A. And many deals that could bring new tech to the market aren’t even being considered, or are being rejected for the wrong reasons.
Knowing the shortcomings of the current system, I think a better system would isolate regulatory assessments to a question of monopolies. Most major acquiring firms should not be able to merge with their major competitors. However, the acquisition of adjacent offerings or smaller extensions to existing products should be allowed, as this drives more distribution, further innovation, and more disruption over time.
Let’s really focus on driving innovation in our world. Let’s give high-risk early investors a chance to establish strong returns and cycle their money back into more innovation. Let’s let the best founders find homes for their companies, so they can move on to build the next major disruptor. Finally, let’s allow the consumer to benefit from allowing disruptive offerings to improve the services and value they receive every day in the market.
M&A is a vital part of the innovation ecosystem, offering a financial incentive for investors and founders to work toward. Here are some common myths we’d like to debunk.
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AI Fundamentals: What AI Really Does and Where We’re Looking to Invest
After a banner year for new AI applications, companies, and ideas, it’s almost impossible not to talk about artificial intelligence in this moment. While specific news stories come and go, there are a few fundamentals that won’t be changing in the near term.
At M13, we believe AI represents a true paradigm shift. As with the dawn of the internet, the rise of mobile, and the rise of cloud computing, this technology will usher in a fundamental change in the way software products are built and how we do our work. While to the average consumer AI may feel like an uncertain landscape, in ten years, it will just be another part of how we live our lives.
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At our most recent annual general meeting, M13 shared our point of view on the AI wave: what it does, why it's having such a moment right now, and where we aim to invest.
What does AI actually do?
To anticipate how AI will change products and services we currently use, it’s useful to review AI’s core functions.
First, it predicts, looking forwards. AI is very good at parsing complex datasets to figure out what is most likely to happen next. The implications here span underwriting, investment management, inventory management, pricing, hiring models, and more.
Second, it infers, looking backwards. AI can assess complex data to answer questions about why something happened. We can apply this to areas from business intelligence (why did a customer make a certain purchase?) to medical diagnosis (why did a patient exhibit certain symptoms?).
Third, it generates. Especially in this era of widespread generative AI use, AI can create art, text, and video, with tremendous potential impact on marketing, sales, education, training, new product design, and more.
When you put these three functions together, you get automation. This function looks like AI agents that work alongside humans on things like customer services and sales, outreach, coding, personal CRM, and other exciting applications.
Why now?
AI is not a new technology, but 2023 did mark a new inflection point. There are a few reasons for this.
One is that foundational models have become usable out of the box for lay users. Open-source models trained on a large volume of information can accept real language queries, and we’ve seen the release of APIs built on top of these models that developers can use to more easily build new applications.
Technology advancements have also accelerated, making it cheaper to train models—according to Ark Invest, the cost of training a new model is declining each year by 70%. Training a new model is now within reach for your average company, or even your average independent developer.
Continued strong investment has also driven the AI wave. During a difficult time for fundraising, AI has remained a bright spot in the venture world. As a result, there’s been a steady stream of new AI product launches, keeping AI at the forefront of our attention. One year out from the launch of chatGPT, 6 in 10 US adults report being familiar with the technology.
News cycles have also played a role. Scott Belsky, who spoke at our 2023 Future Perfect conference, pointed out that if you’ve used an Adobe product in the last 15 years, you’ve already used artificial intelligence—you might just not have been thinking about it. Today, we see stories of AI plastered all over our newsfeeds, making it top of mind for consumers and CEOs alike and further driving trials for AI products.
Finally, large enterprises are taking notice and prioritizing AI in their strategic planning. Earnings call mentions of “generative AI” alone jumped 75X from Q4’22 to Q3’23 as executive interest in the area skyrocketed. Across Fortune 500 companies, 80% of surveyed CEOs said that they believe AI will increase efficiency and 75% said they believe it will automate manual operations in their business in the near term.
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We’re seeing measurable economic impact of this technology. It takes developers 50% less time to code when they use GitHub Copilot. Knowledge worker productivity is projected to increase fourfold with the use of AI. These are real bottom line impacts. While there may be some speculation involved in how AI investing is rolling out, the excitement is driven by real impact.
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Our approach to investing in AI
The AI tech stack includes infrastructure, orchestration, and application layers. We’re most interested in investing in the latter two.
Generally, we're looking for areas where AI technology offers a massive performance boost—10X improvement, not 10%. Where does it hugely surpass human performance? Where can business be built using proprietary access to data? And what new infrastructure companies will be needed to support the development of this entire ecosystem?
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We believe this shift in technology positions startups at the application layer to compete with incumbents as they have the opportunity to build from the ground up on genAI. We are particularly excited about companies that can interact with end users using natural language and act as an interaction layer on top of traditional data structures. In time, we believe focused vertical solutions, especially those with access to proprietary data, will have the capabilities to fully automate workflows.
We have invested behind this thesis in the relationship management category with Hearth.ai, the document interaction category with Humata, and tax automation category with Workmade.
We believe for certain use cases developing a smaller, proprietary foundational model has advantages when coupled with an end-to-end customer solution. One such company is our portfolio company Norm Ai, building AI legal guardrails starting with regulatory compliance. Norm’s AI agent presents context-aware compliance checks that determine what marketing materials and disclosures may be problematic with which regulations. We believe that eventually Norm will be able to interact with AI agents conducting financial transactions, ensuring those agents comply with all relevant laws, policies and guidelines.
We realize the shifts in the way technology will be built will require new developer tools to support data curation, model training, fine tuning and observability. We are excited to watch this landscape evolve and support the tools that will build the software of the future.
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As early-stage investors, the quality of a team is one of the most vital things we assess—and one reason we’ve been so excited to invest in AI is that this space draws some truly amazing founders. We’re seeing top minds coming out of universities teaming up with serial successful founders because they’re so excited about this technology, and former founders are getting back in the ring to see what they can build.
We’ll continue to share our perspective on particular aspects of the AI technology wave, and would love to talk to founders building at the application and orchestration layer.
A venture investor’s point of view on the AI wave.
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Investing in Code: Building a Platform for Seamless Global Micropayments
When I first met Code founder and CEO Ted Livingston, in addition to his hearty laugh, the thing I was most impressed by was his ability to keep his same core team of nine together for a decade across multiple companies. It is a testament to Ted's leadership and vision as well as to the power of enduring relationships.
Ted has often been early. As a college student at Waterloo, he was part of the early days of BlackBerry (then known as Research in Motion). He went on to found Kik, the first chat app to reach over 100 million users. The messaging app had 40 million monthly active users at its peak and many consider it to be the predecessor to WeChat.
Since selling Kik in 2019, Ted and team have been working on their next act, in a space that’s been discussed for decades: micropayments.
Code is a new global payments platform that allows creators to earn money on anything they put online. The experience for both sender and receiver is seamless and instant, and Code allows people to charge as little as 5¢ per transaction. The system leverages self-custodial blockchain technology and is built on Solana.
Existing payments apps are fragmented by use case (e.g., Venmo focuses on P2P, Stripe focuses on internet B2C, Square focuses on in-person B2C) and geography (e.g., Stripe in the US vs. Adyen in Europe). They are also subject to regulatory complexity that limits global functionality and leads to high fees.
We believe that Code has the opportunity to build a payments network that reaps the benefits of crypto—global by default, low fees, self custody, modular developer experience–while maintaining the benefits of traditional payment channels, such as privacy between parties and ease of use. We also think it has the team to execute.
For people that say crypto has not reached product-market fit, it’s worth noting that stablecoin volumes are outpacing Mastercard and Paypal, with a market cap of more than $135B. But it is true that there is not a magical product experience. We believe Code can provide that experience in payments.
Code has built its own L2 on top of Solana to ensure performance and security even when the network is most congested. This should give developers and their end users the most consistent, seamless experienceM13 has been actively investing in crypto and in the Solana ecosystem for several years, and our latest investment in Code fits squarely in our thesis.
Code is live today; download it at getcode.com. The team has also released a developer platform and will soon be launching a new blogging tool to empower anyone anywhere to get paid for their writing.
On the note of enduring relationships, it is always a great sign when your previous investors sign up for your next act. In this case, we’re thrilled to partner with Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures as well as angel investors Balaji Srinivasan, Roham Gharegozlou, Anatoly Yakovenko, Raj Gokal, Mert Mumtaz, and more.
M13 leads a $6.5M seed round to a Solana-based payments platform by a seasoned team of Kik alumni, with participation from Union Square Ventures.
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How to Make the News: The Dos and Don’ts of Pitching Reporters
Recent studies have found the number one reason startups fail is improper product-market fit. The second leading cause? Poor marketing strategies and execution—meaning that your brand communication strategy is a vital part of any go-to-market plan.
How you communicate with your customers, partners, and the media is crucial to establishing your brand reputation and community. For founders interested in sharing a fundraise announcement, amplifying their startup’s accomplishments, or sharing their expert opinion on a trending story, reporters are a vital part of that community.
“Phrases like ‘get us PR,’ ‘secure placement,’ or ‘place a story’ are misleading and outdated ways of thinking about the brand comms flywheel,” says M13 Partner and Head of Brand Christine Choi. “It really starts with humans and the stories that interest us. Reporters are people too—and tech media are important stakeholders to build relationships with as you build your brand.”
At our recent Ask a Reporter Anything event in New York City, Christine sat down with TechCrunch reporter Dominic-Madori Davis to talk about best practices for founders interested in building relationships with reporters.
Here are some of the takeaways from the conversation—starting with some missteps to avoid.
Don't
Pitch reporters who don’t cover what you’re pitching. Before you pitch someone, you need to know what types of stories they write. A reporter who never writes funding announcements probably isn’t going to start with yours. Notably, it’s rare for reporters to cover product announcements (vs. fundraising announcements). Help the reporters in your network by only sharing relevant, newsworthy stories.
Overlook social media. Many reporters are active on social media and find sources and stories through channels like LinkedIn and Twitter. Follow reporters who cover areas relevant to you on their social platforms and engage when you see something interesting. Communicating over these platforms can also help you avoid getting lost in someone’s busy inbox (Dominic shared that she has 71,000 unread emails). And keep your own social media channels up to date—reporters will check out your product and ideas on social as part of their research.
Cross boundaries trying to get ahold of a reporter. Communication is positive; badgering is not. Don’t spam journalists with messages or reach out through inappropriate channels. “I had a founder contact my family,” says Dominic. “That’s really scary. Reporters get harassed a lot too, especially women journalists—someone will send hundreds of messages across multiple platforms. Don’t do that.”
Request headline changes or edits after publication. If you do have a reporter write a story about you, be generous about the final piece. Generally, reporters don’t write headlines; editors do—and arguing over a published headline is a waste of time. It’s also rare to update a published story unless there’s been a flagrant error, so best practice is not to bombard reporters with edit requests for a published story. “When we issue a correction, it has to be updated on news wires all over the world. Something has to be absolutely incorrect. If a story isn’t incorrect and you just don’t like it, that’s not enough to tell Apple News about.”
Do
Remember that reporters are real people. If you haven’t worked with the press before, the stereotypes around the media can be daunting—and it’s important to remember that reporters are also just regular people doing their jobs. “We treat the media as a relationship, because reporters are real humans,” says Christine. “We chose to host this event partially so founders could have the experience of meeting a real reporter who they will likely have to pitch.”
Build social relationships. You don’t need to have a fundraise to announce or story to share in order to engage with reporters; you can start these relationships just by reading their work. “A lot of the founders that I’ve taken note of weren’t pitching me—they were just people engaging naturally with my work. And when you do that over and over again, you put yourself on the radar, so when you do have a story, I want to know what it is.”
Offer to be a source. Even if a reporter passes on a pitch or can’t cover your company specifically, they’ll still often use you as a source. Offering to weigh in as an industry expert can give you a different type of coverage, while also helping out the reporter as they write their story.
Stay informed. “I like to follow what’s happening in Congress and seeing how that relates to startup founders,” says Dominic. “When Roe v. Wade was overturned, I wondered: what does that mean for women founders in certain states? Those are the stories I find interesting.” Staying on top of developing news stories and trending conversations can help you shape your own story to be timely and relevant.
Grow together. Just as your company will grow and develop over the years, reporters’ careers grow across outlets and coverage areas. It’s important to remember that these are ideally long-term relationships, not just one-story interactions. Dominic explains, “I’ve been covering one founder’s company for years now, at two outlets: Business Insider and now TechCrunch. I think that’s the best part about working with early-stage companies: you get to grow with them over the years.”
At our ‘Ask a Reporter Anything’ event, TechCrunch reporter Dominic-Madori Davis shared insider tips for founders looking to build meaningful media relationships.
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Here's What Makes M13 a Great Place to Work
Today, Built In honored M13 in its 2024 Best Places To Work Awards. As a bicoastal firm, we’re proud to share that we rank in both Los Angeles and New York City.
At M13, we believe that we’re brighter together—and that our people are at the center of our success.
“Many VC firms don’t focus on culture in the way we do at M13, and so it’s fairly unique for a VC to be recognized for that,” says Matt Hoffman, M13 Partner and Head of Talent. “We credit much of our success in this area to the operating experience our partners bring to the team, where we’ve learned the value of a strong developmental mindset in driving performance.”
In turn, our strong culture propels our strategic vision. “Nobody wakes up at M13 not wanting to achieve great things,” says Carter Reum, M13 Partner and Co-founder. “We want to create a new, innovative model that is talked about for decades to come.”
We asked the team to weigh in on what makes M13 a great place to work, from their favorite parts of M13 culture to how they feel supported in life beyond the office. Here’s what they had to say.
What is the best part of working at M13?
A culture of teamwork, learning, and gratitude
Community beyond M13
Support at work and beyond
About M13
M13 is an early-stage (seed and Series A) venture capital firm that invests in visionary founders building disruptive software businesses. Established in 2016 with offices in Los Angeles and New York, the firm is a full-stack partner that brings its deep bench of full-time operators to help founders outperform and build category-defining companies. M13’s portfolio includes more than 200 direct investments, with 25 exits to date. The firm has seeded seven companies and been in the Series A of five others that went on to achieve unicorn status.
About Built In
Built In determines the winners of Best Places to Work based on an algorithm, using company data about compensation and benefits. To reflect the benefits candidates are searching for more frequently on Built In, the program also weighs criteria like remote and flexible work opportunities, programs for DEI, and other people-first cultural offerings.
Our team shares what makes M13 special, from a culture of gratitude and experimentation to support that extends beyond the office.
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Our 2024 Predictions
2023 was a year of juxtapositions, as bleak macro signals contrasted with bounding optimism around tech breakthroughs. Exits slowed, generative AI skyrocketed, and startups navigated a knotty fundraising landscape.
Below, M13 partners share the industry trends, investment areas, and pendulum swings we’re paying close attention to in 2024. Highlights include:
Read on for more predictions and in-depth insights into the year ahead.
Artificial intelligence trends
The year of guardrails
Anna Barber, Partner
While 2023 was the year AI adoption and experimentation exploded, this year I’m watching what we call AI guardrails—platforms that help companies and consumers use AI in a safe way. Whether it’s protecting personal data, understanding how a model produced an answer, or ensuring compliance with laws and regulations, this will be a big area for investment in the next year.
AI transforms healthcare
Latif Peracha, Partner
AI will be the technology that finally gets us to the promised land of digital health and value-based care, improving outcomes and ripping inefficiencies out of the system. In 2024, we will see major breakthroughs in areas such as improved diagnosis, early detection, and personalized treatments. Notably, while a lot of people think the ultimate AI hub is San Francisco, we are seeing a nexus of great founders in New York building in AI.
Infrastructure & orchestration layers become interesting investment areas
Karl Alomar, Partner
AI has already begun changing the world but, as with web3 and other disruptive technologies, we are being cautious as to how we find strong foundational businesses that fuel this market. By segmenting the category, we are able to move down from the obvious application layer and focus on infrastructure and orchestration layers to identify where the tooling for this industry will live. We seek solutions that allow for the widespread use of AI across the developer ecosystem or within specific industries as the technology leap continues.
AI doesn’t mean job loss
Matt Hoffman, Partner & Head of People
I do not predict a significant loss of jobs due to AI in the near future. In fact, most similar technological trends are usually accompanied by a net gain of jobs.
Right now, the best use cases for AI still seem to be in the “copilot” role, rather than fully owning tasks. That means AI works best when it is guiding humans to do their work better, more efficiently, and more thoughtfully. As the technology gets smarter, it will free up time working on rote tasks and create more space for complex creative work. I expect peoples’ jobs to be safe for at least a little longer—and they are likely to be more engaging and satisfying to boot.
Two sides of AI-powered marketing
Brian Carroll, Partner & Head of Finance
As companies leverage generative AI for localized, multi-lingual, and demographic-specific images and ad copy, mass personalized ads will provide a major boost, especially to DTC brands.
At the same time, as AI-generated content and algorithmic feeds continue to flood social media, there will be a backlash in favor of authenticity and human curation. Generative AI tools made it easy to produce content, and speed and quantity of content are no longer meaningful differentiators. Consumers will increasingly value personality, realness, and the stories behind a piece of content. There’s a reason that Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2023 was “authentic.”
AI markets self-regulate
Win Chevapravatdumrong, Partner & Head of Legal
AI development significantly outpaces governments’ ability to regulate, and that will be particularly true in an election year. Since we don’t expect regulation or court decisions to make any noticeable impact on AI markets or progress of innovation, we expect the markets to find ways to self-regulate. Examples include responsible AI development, continued innovation in AI privacy and security, and startups focused on IP monetization in AI environments.
The creative community will also begin to embrace AI through partnerships and innovation. Similar to how the relationship that the creative community had with UGC platforms evolved in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the creative community will begin to find ways to work with AI (establishing new norms around market pricing and structures along the way) and move on from the fear and lawsuits that we saw in 2023.
Proactive care meets AI
Courtney Reum, Partner & Co-founder
Last year we saw a big focus on the impacts of AI on productivity in the workplace. In 2024, we’ll see the impact of AI at a more personal level, as people leverage AI to proactively take care of their health and wellness.
AI assistants can help lighten the cognitive load of daily administrative tasks, while AI-powered tools like fitness trackers can continuously collect data (e.g., sleep tracking, heart rate) to help consumers make more tailored decisions about their health. For care providers, healthcare AI companies like Carenostics will use AI to prompt more effective interventions earlier.
Authenticity beyond GPT
John Tabis, Partner & Head of Launchpad
LLMs have become all the rage in 2023. But text, image, and video creation will become table stakes for all businesses in 2024. Differentiation will come when companies and brands learn to harness the power of these tools in an authentic manner to deliver value beyond the GPTs of the world—that will be the real proving ground for AI in the medium term.
Investment & exit trends
Focus on profitability over fundraising
Brent Murri, Partner
In 2024, the traditional venture path of Series A to B to C will look very different. Founders will abandon growth at all costs, stretch their dollars further, and consider the trade-offs between breakneck growth and reaching profitability.
We're already starting to see founders deciding between getting to profitability and raising a new round of capital, a luxury many startups have previously not had. Companies may grow more slowly, but raising less aggressively means being less beholden to investors—and more in control of their own destiny—when it comes time to exit.
A recent example of this new profitable growth blueprint is Klaviyo. It debuted on the public market at a $9B market cap, after having burned only $15M net cash to get there. It took the company 11 years to IPO, but shareholders didn't experience the same dilution as other tech IPOs.
M&A activity recovers from recent lows
Win Chevapravatdumrong, Partner & Head of Legal
M&A activity slowed down considerably in recent months due to the high cost of capital, macroeconomic uncertainties, and, to a lesser extent, heightened regulatory scrutiny. As we start the new year, activity will pick up. This feels like the end of the rate hiking cycle, leading to less uncertainty in the debt market. PE investors and larger companies have dry powder waiting to be deployed, and smaller startups that have struggled to fundraise the past few years may see M&A as their only alternative.
AI acquihires on the rise
Rob Smith, Partner & Head of Product
M&A—and specifically AI acquihires—will pick up in 2024. As AI talent needs skyrocket and supply lags, acquihires for good AI teams will start to happen more frequently and competitively. This mirrors the acquihire booms that followed approximately 1–3 years after rises in machine learning and mobile apps during their ensuing talent shortages.
Venture trends toward “barbell investing”
Anna Barber, Partner
Right now, we are seeing our VC peers commonly employ two strategies: (1) investing earlier than they normally would, given public market multiples that make Series B or even A rounds challenging; and (2) paying a premium for a quality team in a big market. This results in a “barbell effect” in the early-stage funding market.
In 2024, we expect to see the seed market stay strong and healthy, with lots of competition, and we anticipate high prices for companies with large markets, strong teams, and true Series A traction.
Efficient growth > raw growth
Rob Smith, Partner & Head of Product
Growth has become secondary to unit economics and paths to profitability. In 2024, a new, revamped "efficient growth" metric will become the new holy grail for early-stage startups. A stat like 3X year-over-year efficient growth will be looked at more favorably than capital-intensive 5X growth in many sectors, including AI.
Workforce trends
GenX’s unique leadership style enters the C-Suite
Christine Choi, Partner & Head of Brand
GenXers (currently 43–58) are now aging into leadership roles. As the smallest and often overlooked generation, GenXers possess the resilience, responsibility, independence, and some of the baggage (rebellious, doesn’t like to let anyone down) of the middle child.
As self-aware architects of Web 1.0 and 2.0, GenXers are at once tech-forward leaders of the digital native workplace and cautious about unintended consequences, and will find ways to keep humans in the loop without slowing down innovation. GenX leaders will also adopt a pragmatic and unfussy integration of social responsibility, ESG, and sustainability, unceremoniously integrating diversity and inclusion initiatives to achieve measurable business outcomes.
As the original latchkey kids, GenX had to be adaptive, resourceful, and productive without supervision—and expects this from others as well. In turn, this generation balances listening (an essential skill for leaders) with pragmatism, which translates to an inclusive culture and flexibility as long as teams meet their high expectations. GenXers are used to highly dynamic times and paradoxical demands. There is no better time for GenX’s excellent adventure in the C-suite.
More hiring, more hybrid, less office space
Matt Hoffman, Partner & Head of Talent
We’ve seen the worst of the layoffs wave, and across our broader portfolio, we are seeing many more companies hiring than reducing headcount. My expectation is that most of the new hires for 2024 will be focused on building to start—engineering and product primarily—with sales and marketing to follow.
As companies navigate return to office, the clear winner is hybrid working. Most companies are actively encouraging their employees to work out of a central location 2–3 days a week. This allows workers to have the flexibility they need to manage the balance between personal and work responsibilities, avoid unnecessary long commutes, and still find ways to connect with colleagues and clients in person.
Similarly, I am noticing more companies significantly decrease their office footprint as leases come up for renewal. I expect this trend to continue, with the office environment continuing to move towards purpose-built use cases.
Industries to watch
Growing investment in carbon markets
Karl Alomar, M13 Partner
I have taken a keen interest recently in carbon economics and the carbon industry as a whole. It seems increasingly necessary for humanity to take stock of our impact on the planet, and governments and corporations alike seem to be moving more towards carbon-neutral solutions. Technology will likely fuel this current, and investment appetite here is growing. At M13, we have invested in and continue to look for businesses that will contribute to this carbon economy.
Crypto’s quiet comeback
Latif Peracha, Partner
We’re already seeing quiet recovery signals in the crypto market (regulatory changes, asset pricing) post the 2022 crypto apocalypse. In 2024, we will have our first breakthrough crypto app launch that will be used by tens of millions of users—except we won't recognize it as a crypto app, as it will rival the user experience of any current web2 application.
Cybersecurity rules
Win Chevapravatdumrong, Partner & Head of Legal
2024 will see continued focus on and innovation in privacy and cybersecurity. The combination of recent regulatory focus (e.g. FTC, SEC, new state legislation) on privacy and cybersecurity and a heightened need to maintain privacy and security standards in a rapidly changing AI landscape will continue to place additional demands on these functions. In turn, we’ll see more investment and hiring in privacy and cybersecurity, as well as continued innovation and an expanding vertical SaaS industry focused on these areas.
From the maturing AI market to the workforce’s new normal, M13 partners share their top predictions for 2024.
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Our Guide to Creating a Great Internship Program
At M13, we’re really proud of our intern program. Our interns get to do meaningful, hands-on work with partners, work directly with founders, help source and close core investments, and hang out with celebrities.
It’s a pretty good gig.
As we’ve refined our internship program over the last few years, we’ve learned a lot about what makes for a good experience on both sides. Below, we highlight some of the best practices to set up a successful program.
I can't recall the last 10-week period where I've learned as much as I have [at M13]. From my very first day, the investment team armed me with the tools, mentorship, and support to succeed.
Antonio Calderon, MBA Investment Associate Intern
Before the internship
Align on the details. Recruiting for an intern program is different from most hiring processes, which are more flexible about start date and location. Before jobs are even posted, align with hiring managers, recruiters, and internship facilitators to agree on salary, location, and program dates.
Consistency makes for a better experience, both for interns and employers. Our Diversity & Inclusion Recruiting Checklist can help you integrate diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging into your hiring processes early on.
Decide: graduating vs. non-graduating? As part of the alignment process, determine the profile of intern that best fits your program’s goals. Do you want to hire students who will be returning to school at the end of their internship, or do you want to hire graduating students?
While students who will be returning to school won’t be immediately able to join in full-time roles, they can help spread your employer brand within their network, organically growing your talent network. Even if your interns don’t end up joining your organization full time, a positive experience can prompt them to share your brand with their communities, universities, and personal networks.
Students who are graduating are more likely to desire a full-time offer at the end of their internship. If you know there will be no possibility of a full-time position later on, make sure to be transparent with the candidates during the hiring process. If there is potential for a more permanent role down the line, an internship could provide a good trial period and exposure to your company.
Post jobs early. Many students begin looking for summer internships as early as December or January. The earlier you post, the more competitive your program will be—and the more talent you’ll have available to you!
Pay your interns. These days, it’s more common than not for interns to be paid for their work. It’s a competitive landscape for talented people, especially MBA interns. Competitive payment can make your program enticing to top talent.
It’s important to create a similar compensation experience across your intern cohort; having some interns be paid and others getting course credit can result in an awkward dynamic. Align on compensation and communicate about it early in the recruitment process.
Being part of an intern cohort was so special—we were able to really bond, get to know other teams even better, and learn so much more than on our own.
Mimi Pham, Talent Operations & Analytics Intern
During the internship
Set up core projects. At M13, we’ve had success in centering internships around a Core Internship Project—a long-term impact project that interns present at the culmination of their internship.
These projects help interns focus their experience and help employers structure interns’ time into key deliverables. It also gives interns something tangible to include in their own portfolio, resume, and future job interviews.
Some projects may be apparent before an internship begins, while others will start to take shape in the first few weeks as hiring managers better understand interns’ strengths and interests. We recommend looking for cross-functional projects that allow interns to work with as many people as possible.
Some of our recent Core Internship Projects have included deep dives into investment thesis areas and creating a module for go-to-market product launches for our portfolio companies. We’ve also had interns write blog posts, such as From Web2 to Web3: What E-commerce Founders Need to Know and 9 Common Hiring Bias Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them.
Touch base regularly. Even if interns are part of different teams, it’s useful to have them come together as a cohort. Set up regular touch bases for interns to ask questions, share what they are working on, and raise any struggles or roadblocks.
We highly recommend offering in-person time in the office where possible. If no office is available, try to have an in-person event—ideally a couple days long—with hiring managers and the full intern cohort. This will let you give interns the full cultural experience of your team and get to spend time with each other in a non-work environment
Some of our “extracurricular” activities with interns have included floral design classes, hikes to Los Angeles monuments, Benihana-esque hibachi dinners with Paris Hilton, and tours of some of our portfolio companies’ headquarters.
For me, intern dock-in week was the highlight of the summer. I loved the opportunity to deepen relationships with the other interns and the rest of the M13 team through thoughtful, fun activities.
Andrea Moreno Zepeda, Launchpad Intern 2023
Support career development and mentorship. Allow interns to connect with senior leadership, even those they don’t work with directly. This will help them broaden their network and access to future opportunities, as well as to gain new career perspectives.
Internships offer invaluable time for career exploration. Setting aside dedicated time to discuss career paths and opportunities is time well spent, both for interns shaping their careers and for companies assessing interns’ skills and interests.
Mentorship pairings are a great option for supporting interns’ career growth and for helping full-time employees gain valuable people management experience.
Stay in touch. At the end of the internship, encourage your interns to add employees on LinkedIn and keep in touch with the people who have shaped their experience. An internship is often the start of a long-term relationship that can span companies and careers, and it can prove valuable to both employers and interns long after the experience has ended.
Thank you to our many wonderful interns who have made M13 a special place to be!
Join our community:
Interested in internship opportunities with M13 or our portfolio companies? Keep an eye on our careers page for the latest openings across our galaxy! We will begin recruiting summer 2024 interns in Q1 2024.
Interns can have a huge—but too often overlooked—impact on your company culture, productivity, and talent pipeline. Here’s our approach to setting up a meaningful intern program.
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AI Guardrails: How Enterprises Can Safely Adapt to the Generative AI Wave
The abrupt and headline-making removal then reinstatement of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—falling around the one-year anniversary of the release of OpenAI’s defining product, chatGPT—makes now a prime moment to reflect on the whirlwind past year of AI innovation.
In that time, we’ve witnessed a Cambrian explosion of AI tools, companies, and conversations, with generative AI projected to add $4.4 trillion to the global economy as automation boosts productivity.
Alongside this feverish activity, there is a deep need for guardrails built on legal, security, technological, and ethical considerations surrounding AI. As both new and established players enhance their AI offerings, companies with thoughtful guardrail strategies will be better positioned for long-term success than those flying fast, but blind.
At M13, we seek to understand the mechanisms, benefits, and risks of this technology, and to balance these perspectives in crafting our AI portfolio. Whether it’s protecting personal data, understanding how a model produced an answer, or ensuring compliance with laws and regulations, AI guardrails are a major consideration for us—and we see it as a key investment area today and in the future.
What will it take for enterprises to successfully adopt this new wave of generative AI technology? Below, we highlight some of the topics we’ve been thinking through—and the questions companies should be asking—as we navigate this bold era of AI.
The stakes are higher for enterprise
The use of AI comes with higher stakes for enterprises than for individuals, and for companies using this technology, proper guardrails will be crucial.
We like to compare AI adoption to the example of self-driving cars. Culturally, we ask for perfection from self-driving technology, and we can’t accept anything less, even though we do accept that human drivers will make mistakes. While we can accept that humans are fallible, there’s a feeling that technology can achieve perfect adherence to rules and guidelines.
Similarly, it makes us uncomfortable to accept a known failure rate from an AI agent—even if the failure rate is lower than what we typically see with human actors.
When a human employee makes a mistake or creates a bad outcome, that error is often seen as unique to that person and limited in impact radius. If an AI agent creates a bad outcome—mismanages a client’s money or recommends a poor treatment plan to a patient—it becomes a systemic issue, one that can implicate an entire company. The company as a whole is deemed responsible.
Consumers, regulatory bodies, and public opinion are less tolerant of AI failure than human failure.
Market map: AI enterprise requirements & guardrails
Below, we identify some of the startups and incumbents that enterprises are turning to in order to protect their data, ensure regulatory compliance, and better understand and optimize safe model outputs.
As investors, we are very interested in meeting companies focusing on end-to-end solutions to enable safe, flexible, and accurate usage of generative AI capabilities. We are also interested in how enterprises will solve concerns around IP infringement, especially in the creative world.
Are you building in this space, or do you want to be included in our market map? Reach out to anna@m13.co and morgan@m13.co.
Data security & protection
There is a core risk in managing the inputs to generative AI applications, and it’s important to consider the data security of confidential customer data. Already, many companies—including Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Apple—have created strict policies against sharing any customer data with outside genAI tools.
OpenAI is working to create data safeguards around the use of its tools. Still, it is likely that companies in highly regulated industries will need to employ data masking strategies by leveraging systems like Liminal.ai, Kobalt Labs, Credal, Presidio, and others, in order to use external models to generate AI outputs.
At M13, we’ve experimented with AI tools to create images for blog posts, take notes for certain meetings, and draft social and marketing copy—but our policy cautions against uploading sensitive proprietary information to genAI tools or using them to write content that requires deeper fact checking.
Questions companies should ask:
Levels of risk
Accuracy of output is an important consideration when it comes to generative AI tools, and soundly analyzing the level of risk that automation poses at large is crucial for developing a reasonable AI strategy. Within an industry or even within a type of task, different circumstances and processes will carry different levels of risk.
For example, take AI identification of images. Societally, we’re generally accepting of a photo app that fails to perfectly identify every picture of our friend in our camera roll—but we have low tolerance (and high penalties) for self-driving cars that misidentify pedestrians and potentially put them in harm’s way.
Below, we highlight some higher- and lower-risk processes to consider across industries. While this list is far from exhaustive, it does help illustrate how companies can begin approaching risk categorization:
Questions companies should ask:
Navigating the legal & regulatory landscape
Government and regulatory oversight of AI is heating up. In October, President Biden issued a landmark executive order calling for “safe, secure, and trustworthy artificial intelligence,” and last month the United States joined 30 other nations in agreeing to set guardrails for military AI in the first major international agreement of its kind. The EU also recently agreed on a draft for the AI Act, the first major piece of AI legislation.
In the prelude to Biden’s executive order, top AI companies—including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—met and agreed to protect users through a series of cybersecurity and data transparency commitments. These voluntary commitments have so far focused on informing users about how data is used and keeping personal data secure, rather than commitments not to use data to train models or any warranties about the quality of outputs of AI models.
Regulatory concerns are not preventing the use of AI. A recent liminal.ai survey of workers across five heavily regulated industries (banking and finance, insurance, biotech and life sciences, manufacturing, and healthcare) found that two-thirds of respondents used generative AI tools on a weekly basis, and 90% agreed generative AI was at least somewhat valuable in helping with their work. Only 26% reported being fully prevented from using generative AI tools at work.
We expect to see significant movement in these results as more companies implement AI policies and roll out AI security tools.
Questions companies should ask:
Ownership & copyright
Ownership and copyright are crucial issues when it comes to genAI output, and we are a long way from resolution.
It’s certainly a topic on many creators’ minds: the tentative billion-dollar contract to end the months-long SAG-AFTRA strike includes provisions to “protect members from the threat of AI.” The deal that ended the Writers Guild of America strike prohibits studios from using generative AI to write or rewrite literary material or to require writers to use the technology.
Do the original authors of works used to train AI models have a stake in what those models generate? If so, how should that ownership stake be calculated? Do the prompt generators own the outputs that they generate, and how would such ownership be claimed?
One can imagine the US Copyright Office and USPTO being overrun with registrations, claims, and challenges to copyright as well as patent and trademark claims. An author might be satisfied seeing their name in a footnote or the acknowledgements section of a book or research paper without expecting compensation. But with AI, there’s a different calculus.
Going forward, we'll require an entirely new way of thinking about intellectual property in a world where the tools for creation are so widely available. This is an area that urgently needs regulatory or judicial guidance—if ownership of AI outputs is clouded, many people will simply stop using the tools.
Questions companies should ask:
Get in touch:
Are you building in the AI guardrails space? We want to talk. Reach out to our investing team by contacting anna@m13.co and morgan@m13.co.
As AI adoption has exploded, companies are under more pressure than ever to figure out how to use this technology safely. We dig into key considerations and what questions companies need to be asking to prepare.
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Investing in Polimorphic: Easing the Burden on Local Government Workers
Local government is arguably the most impactful layer of government in terms of daily living, overseeing fundamental services from public transit and snow removal to EMS and fire departments.
Despite overseeing such invaluable services, the sector is struggling. Local governments have seen over half a million job losses since the beginning of the pandemic three years ago, while more than one-third of remaining government employees are considering quitting their jobs—largely due to stress, fatigue, bureaucratic overwhelm, and burnout.
Polimorphic is looking to change that, harnessing the power of AI to ease government workers’ administrative load so they can focus on the human-driven work they do best. In a notoriously manual and paper-heavy space, Polimorphic integrates with governments’ existing tools and websites to digitize manual processes and help constituents more easily navigate local services.
“I’m sure a lot of folks have seen the TV show Parks and Recreation, and it’s not an entirely inaccurate depiction,” says Co-Founder & CEO Parth Shah. “Municipal government is full of your local Leslie Knopes and Ben Wyatts—folks trying to do the best work they can for their community. By automating hours of busywork, we’re helping them do just that.”
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Polimorphic is already in action in cities like Danbury, CT, St. Albans Town, VT, and Prospect Park, NJ—and it’s adding a new city or county every two days. Since launching its AI-powered search solution last month, its waitlist has grown to 40+ cities across the country.
The company’s raise comes on the heels of an executive order calling for safe, secure, and trustworthy artificial intelligence solutions, as well as several pieces of AI legislation circulating around the Capitol this session—signals of the government’s increasing readiness to understand and make the best use of AI technology.
"Inefficiency is an expensive pain point in any bureaucracy, and this is particularly true for government,” says M13 Partner Latif Peracha. “Polimorphic’s solutions digitize every facet of the constituent-to-city relationship. Parth, Daniel, and their capable team are helping constituents and departments spend less time on inefficient paperwork and focus on enhancing their communities, removing trillions of wasted dollars and time out of the system.”
The company also has a personal connection to its mission.
“My grandfather worked in local government as a utility director—managing water, utilities, sewage—and I saw the lengths he would go to to provide people with these fundamental needs,” says Parth. “And when I worked at a smart city startup, I saw how these tech advancements were sort of overlooking the needs of local governments. At Polimorphic, we are bringing these advancements, such as AI, to cities and counties across the United States in a way that is built specifically for their needs.
He adds, “It's a big motivator, knowing that this is something that my grandfather would be excited about.”
We’re proud to lead the $5.6M seed funding round to Polimorphic, investing alongside our peers at Shine Capital and Pear VC.
M13 leads the seed round to a GovGPT solution to better connect local governments with the constituents they serve.
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Highlights from M13's Office Hours for Underestimated Founders
From our attendees:
Many founders today are overlooked and underestimated, regardless of their talent. Too often, the spaces where founders can connect and grow cater toward a narrow type of founder. Data from Diversity VC finds that VC-backed startup teams are disproportionately men (89.3%), white (71.6%), and Ivy League educated (13.7%).
We believe that all talented founders should have access to the advice, networks, spaces, and communities they need to refine their ideas and build stronger companies. That’s why at LA Tech Week this year, M13 partnered with our friends at BBG Ventures and Everywhere Ventures (The Fund) to host our first “Office Hours for Underestimated Founders” event at our Los Angeles office.
“We want to be accessible to a wider audience than the ‘traditional’ founder pipeline,” says M13 Partner & Head of Propulsion Lizzie Francis, a former founder herself. “We’re inspired by creativity and bold thinking, and we know that underestimated founders can also be some of the strongest founders.”
She goes on, “We also know founding and operating companies is hard, and every day founders are expected to wear a lot of hats. That’s why we decided to team up with other firms to offer our time, expertise, and connections.”
“One of my first jobs was in finance, and I was the only female on our investment team—so I've experienced that kind of underrepresentation firsthand,” says Claire Biernacki, Principal Investor at BBG Ventures. “Having access to mentors outside of my day-to-day role has been really helpful for me throughout my career.”
At the event, we hosted 39 pre-seed and seed founders who sat down one-on-one with mentors from M13, BBG, and Everywhere, meeting in 30-minute sessions to get concrete advice from people who have been there before.
One of the hardest parts of being a founder is not having personal experience in the many different areas where you’re expected to operate—and VCs can help fill the experience gap, so founders can focus on the things they do best. Alongside mentors from BBG and Everywhere, our M13 mentors included several former founders, like Partners Anna Barber, Lizzie Francis, and Rob Smith and Director of Product Mary Lara.
“We’re giving these founders the best advice we possibly can, with no strings attached,” says Rob. “A lot of events talk through best practices. But I prefer this style: sitting down side-by-side and practically talking through the toughest challenges and most exciting ideas, with the freedom to give really raw feedback.”
LA Tech Week also marked M13 Partner Anna Barber’s announcement of PledgeLA’s “50 in 5” commitment—a pledge to support investing 50% of all LA VC dollars in underrepresented (Black, Latinx, and female) founding teams by 2028.
“We believe strongly that in order to build the future that we all want, we need to include everyone, we need to include the full community, and that future has to be built by founders that look like everyone,” says Anna.
We partnered with BBG Ventures and Everywhere Ventures to offer candid one-on-one mentoring to founders during Los Angeles Tech Week.
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