Dylan Field

Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

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tl;dr: Not every ad channel is going to deliver results. Don’t be afraid to cut the cord on the underperformers before they drain your budget. Ever invested in a channel that just didn’t work out? If you’re a dev marketer, your answer’s most likely yes. At ScraperAPI, Google Ads was a total bust. We tried. We spent. We waited for results that never came. Outside of branded searches, it was a total disaster. It was a stark reminder that not every channel — no matter how popular — is always worth the spend. While I’m a big believer in the idea that growth doesn’t happen overnight, you need to know when it’s time to jump ship before you drain your whole ad budget. Our problem at ScraperAPI was that we were building a product that devs didn’t quite know to even search for yet. Hindsight's 20/20, but I wish we’d poured all that AdWords spend into channels that *actually* helped devs understand our product — like Quora, Reddit, and other dev communities — instead of holding out for a payoff that simply wasn’t coming. tl;dr: Not every ad channel is going to deliver results. Don’t be afraid to cut the cord on the underperformers before they drain your budget.

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About that WSJ story from last week on Amazon’s "Project Curiosity". When I read the headline, I was expecting a juicy tale of corporate espionage, but it turned out to feel more like just a dogfooding project to me. 🤷‍♂️ https://lnkd.in/gzWpP26A "Inside Amazon’s Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Rivals - Staff went undercover on Walmart, eBay ..." Here is the TLDR;  Amazon registered an entity called “Big River Services International”. And built a secret team whose sole job was to sell products through rival market places (Walmart, eBay, Flipkart), and to try out rival logistics services (FedEx) , and compare those to how Amazon’s own services work. Seems like they were just evaluating competitors using publicly available information. I didn’t see much corporate espionage in there. Yes, Amazon was very secretive about this project - they did not want an email trail, and so some information was presented purely in paper printouts etc. And the team attended an eBay users conference without disclosing the Amazon connection. Those parts trigger suspicion. But ultimately it just looks like a dogfooding project done at Amazon scale to me. Did you feel differently about it?

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CAREER ADVICE: BE A FUNCTIONAL SPECIALIST A friend messaged me: "At my startup, I’m technically a product manager but have taken on a much broader, generalist role. I’ve been juggling sales, product, engineering, ops, and more. I’m wondering if I should focus on something specific instead, like honing down into just the product role. Would love to hear your thoughts and advice!" My reply: "Be a functional specialist. As the startup grows, the top change they will make is to hire specialists. As a generalist, you'll almost certainly be sidelined and ultimately exited. You need to choose your functional path - I'd recommend product - and become excellent at it. This is the way to career success and growth." The only situation this advice wouldn't apply is if someone is transitioning from I-Banking or Consulting into an Operating role, where it will likely be into a Chief of Staff role.

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Some news: we at Lightspeed are very excited to be partnering with Dennis Crowley on his new startup, Hopscotch Labs (alongside other great investors Alpaca VC and betaworks). Dennis is one of the great consumer builders of this generation. Through his work as cofounder of Foursquare, he deeply understands how to create magical products built for cities like no one else on this planet. And like all great founders, when they get their hands on new toys (in this case, things that are "recently possible" and "newly ubiquitous" like AI, audio, etc.) magical things happen. Check out the post below to learn more about the company in Dennis' own words, and visit the link to sign up for the beta.

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Half of LinkedIn has already weighed in on Paul Graham's recent essay Founder Mode, which criticized the approach of running large companies with "efficient managers." The discussion was sparked by Brian Chesky, who, during an event at YC, lamented that hired management nearly destroyed his company. Everyone in attendance nodded in agreement. Let’s set aside the fact that guys in Patagonia vests may not be the best sample for assessing the success of "Founder Mode." The success of some of these individuals is hard to replicate, not just in other countries, but even in the U.S. under high-interest-rate conditions. Survivorship bias in action. The key question here is: are motivation and accountability for the company’s mission the critical factors for a startup's success? In my opinion, they come second, right after the ability to continuously learn and adapt to changes in the company. For example, the founders of Instagram stepped aside at the right time (maybe unwillingly), allowing efficient managers to build the second-largest social network in the world and a huge cash cow for Meta. An efficient manager, Imran Khan, came to Snapchat from Alibaba, helping the company make a great IPO and improving a lot as a CSO. Bill Gates handed over management to one of his early employees, Steve Ballmer, who in turn passed it to Satya Nadella, allowing Microsoft to become one of the world’s largest companies. Steve Jobs long resisted the necessity of releasing the iPhone and was ultimately convinced by multiple managers, who saved the company, which at the time was relying on a single product line. My conclusion from the stories above: one must constantly learn and evolve to align with the product's tempo. If you fall short due to a lack of skills, motivation, or health, it's better to let more flexible and competent people handle these challenges. You can't blame failure in people management on an inherent flaw in the hired management system.

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tl;dr: Devs notice every detail. Take your cues from Stripe and GitHub, and keep your design clean and functional to drive adoption that sticks. Design ALWAYS matters. But it matters even more when you’re building a product for devs (speaking from experience here). Whether you’re a developer yourself or just dev-adjacent, you know that nothing gets past these folks. In their eyes, the devil’s in the details, and they’re constantly on the lookout for even the slightest sign to validate their inherent skepticism. Animations, subtle fade-ins and fade-outs, iconography, typography — you name it. These aren't just aesthetics; they're the unspoken language of a tool’s usability. In that way, design is the ultimate double-edged sword. Done right, these kinds of features have the power to oh-so-subtly tell the developer, “Look at how seamless I am to use.” Done wrong, they can create a frustration so powerful it leaves them running for the hills. So, how do you get it right? What I’ve learned from building both ScraperAPI and TLDR is that the easiest way to nail your design strategy is to follow the lead of the best examples. My two personal favorites? Stripe and​​ Github. When they hit the market over a decade ago, they set a new standard for the type of design developers have come to expect. For Stripe, the real showstopper wasn’t just the clean and intuitive dashboard we all know and love. It was things like clear, readable docs and all the little micro-interactions (think button and form field hover effects) that made the interface feel responsive and interactive. For Github, it was also a series of subtle features that made the developer experience smoother — like color-coded syntax highlighting or how merging a pull request would trigger a satisfying (yet not distracting) animation to emphasize the action. And while those are still the gold standard, there’s a whole new generation of companies on the cutting edge of dev design: - Resend - Vercel - Linear - Replicate - render.com So if you’re still in the early stages (or in a re-design phase), don’t be afraid to poke around the market to see which kinds of features are sticking and which aren’t. While us devs are particular, we’re also quite predictable in terms of what we do and don’t like (Hint: save your GIFs and confetti animations for another audience 😉).

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A standard approach to new hire equity for public tech companies is a new hire grant ~2x the refresh grant, followed by annual refreshes, all with 4-year standard vest. The problem with this approach is the big drop off in vesting in Year 5 — in effect, you’re signaling to employees that’s the time to leave. How can we avoid this cliff? A simple way to accomplish this goal is with the combination of a front-loaded new hire grant and ratable refreshes. The key drivers to make this program work are: Front-loading the NH grant — this helps eliminate the cliff in year 5 Reducing the NH grant multiple — this also reduces the cliff, and lowers total spend Moving to 3-year vests — this pulls more vesting value forward Notice this actually saves the company money too. When we lower our new hire multiple from 2.0x to 1.5x, should we be worried it’s less attractive to the candidate? I think no, for a very specific reason: people rationally discount future value. Check out my full post below. 👇 And this isn't the only solution - how else can you adapt your stock comp design to minimize cliffs? #compensation #totalrewards

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Sharing this primarily for markets outside the top 5 in VC as it's a problem I've experienced as well. One can and sometimes should criticize SV founders who have too much ambition in the way some pursue it, but a super serious problem almost everywhere else is not enough ambition, certainly to include NM. It may surprise some to hear that Seattle lacks ambition given headquarters of Microsoft, Amazon, Costco, Starbucks and others, but that's actually part of the problem--golden handcuffs and conformity, versus hungry and competitive when I grew up in WA in business in the 80s. It's also a problem with many VCs around the country now. They have become so focused on flipping to incumbents their (BT) dominance became a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's not the role of VCs -- if that's their goal they should be a CVC. NM has a similar golden handcuff problem to Seattle, but it's worse in some respects. The national labs pay really well relative to the local cost of living, so it's the career goal of thousands to spend entire careers working for the labs. In both markets the level of early stage funding is so low that it's difficult to leave big tech or labs to join a startup. And in both, the experience of big tech and labs doesn't apply well to startups. Very different world. A related challenge is SV rarely invests outside the region in would-be market leaders--most want to see those remain in CA. So we have a problem for certain, and big disconnect in the market.

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Work at a natural pace. In Cal Newport's new book "Slow Productivity" he walks through 3 components to accomplishment without burnout. 1. Do fewer things 2. Work at a natural pace  3. Obsess over quality Working at a natural pace is an area I'm focused on as I transition to whatever is next in my career. Most of my career's natural pace was driven by anxiety, coffee, HIIT workouts and more caffeine - which I'm pretty sure isn't what he means. In my late 40's though, that just doesn't work anymore. Nor do I want it to. It's a tricky philosophy though because if you're in the startup world I don't know how you build something meaningful and work at a natural pace. I've never seen it happen. It appears this is a philosophy that needs to be applied to a specific time and place vs. everyone, everywhere. Anway, I don't have the answers, I'm just exploring different questions. What I do know is working at a natural place seems to be more appropriate for where I am today. 

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For early-stage startups, not building in SF is a competitive disadvantage. Roughly a week ago, I hosted a small private dinner with the most exceptional people I know here. It reminded me—again—what makes this little city so special. There's something here you can’t just copy-paste; a density of talent and ambition that pushes everyone around to go further. And I’m grateful to everyone who made that night possible. You’re all truly special. 🫶 But there was one more thing—I realized hours later that there wasn’t a single American in the group. Instead, we were a bunch of foreigners. Mostly Europeans, each one seeing firsthand that building outside the Bay is like tying one hand behind your back. Sure, if we take on our European hat, we have impressive people too, but here in SF you run into them constantly. In Europe, we have to be so much more intentional about curating those circles. Establishing a extremely high standard, where exceptional people flourish. Not falling for quantity optimized, mediocre meet ups or events. But let's not just do the talking. Back in Paris, I’m setting up something similar—another private dinner with the best people I know in the city. If you’re interested in joining, drop me a message or leave a comment. Seats are limited but I will see what I can do. Love, F 🫶

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Hey folks, I think you might be aware that what we're building at DeepCast includes a podcast discovery and exploration platform for listeners at www.deepcast.fm. We also recently unveiled www.deepcast.pro -- a promotions, marketing, and monetization platform for podcasters (and folks like networks and agencies who support them). "You make the shows, let us help you with what comes after." Shows claimed and processed via DeepCast Pro are also published for listener consumption on DeepCast. High value all around! If you're a podcaster, claim your show at www.deepcast.pro to get started. Free speaker-labeled transcripts for all your episodes as well as generated insights for each (key takeaways, quotes, topic & keyword sets, summaries, and more) plus many more features—and growing daily! We're shipping fast over here! (Thanks to Rachel Perez Hosna Qasmei Kim Burgaard Benjamin Moon Rachel Magana Hari Ramachandran!)

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I'm so proud of this team. Since stepping into my role as CEO at Beni four months ago, we've been hard at work figuring out how to adapt Beni to truly make resale as easy as buying new. Our browser extension does a pretty good job of accomplishing this goal by showing users resale deals while they shop their favorite retail sites. But, we’ve found that while people love the extension once they have it, requiring users to download the extension/app and login to be able to use Beni may have unintentionally made us gatekeepers of our own tech (yikes!) So, today, we’re opening the resale floodgates with a new web-based, un-gated experience that allows anyone to access our aggregated database of 200M resale listings from 40+ leading resale sites, with no download required. MEET CHECKBENI.COM Users can now: 🔍 Search for things directly – whether that’s a specific item like a “Veronica Beard blazer” or more of a categorical vibe like “bright colored sneakers that feel timeless and classic.” 👀 Experience the tech behind the browser extension (without the actual extension) by adding “CHECKBENI.COM/” in front of any product URL to see relevant results for that item. (This is really for you, Android shoppers!) 🤝 AND! Because this experience is completely un-gated, users can also now share results directly with friends who don’t have the app or the extension to help bring more people into the world of resale! We've always believed that sustainable shopping should be simple, affordable and accessible to everyone -- today we take another step towards that goal. HUGE thanks to Celine Lightfoot, Leila Thomas, Timothy Cronshaw, Catherine Sullivan, and Will McCulloch for building checkbeni.com to make that vision a reality.

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Two cool things that happened at Early Stage Labs in November: 1. I met a startup attorney in late October. She told me that one of her clients had great traction, was essentially bootstrapped, and thinking about raising a <$5M round. The company is in the veterinary space. She asked if I had a CFO on my team to support. I brought in one of my CFOs who previously founded and ran (and raised ~$50M for) a veterinary company before exiting. He's literally the best person in the world to help this founder raise a seed. We signed that company and we're already off to the races. 2. I brought a fractional CFO into one of my Jemison Alexander portfolio companies for the first time. This is a thesis I've been testing - can we generate alpha with portfolio companies by supporting on strategic finance and helping them nail their numbers. Tbd, but I'm optimistic! It was a great month. If you're a founder thinking about raising a Seed or Series A (or if you just need finance, accounting, or bookkeeping support on the business), we can help. https://lnkd.in/eddDSWCn

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Casey Winters sharing how he helped Pinterest and Grubhub increase retention and revenue by optimizing their onboarding experience: Contrary to popular belief, onboarding isn’t a marketing or sales problem. “So who should work on this problem? What does an onboarding team look like? This is a CROSS-FUNCTIONAL team: Product designers… Engineers… Product managers… In B2B a lot of times sales will be involved… Sometimes marketing… User research… All of these people have to be working together to figure out how to build the right experience so that people are going to get the value of your product and keep using it.” This begs the next question: "Where does onboarding end and the core product begin? Your onboarding team should be in charge of the entire product experience until people reach the habit moment” Onboarding might just be the most underrated drivers of growth. Don't make the mistake of underinvesting in it. If you're looking to improve your product onboarding - give the full video watch, it's full of powerful and practical advice. Source: Casey Winters’ talk at Slush 2018: Why Customer Onboarding is the Most Crucial Part of Your Growth Strategy

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Team San Diego! I though you may find this as surprising as I did...we are not alone. Read this quick article from Jon Prentice's (Silicon Valley Bank) interview with with James Newell (Voyager Capital), published in GeekWire on Seattle's innovation ecosystem....they lament the SAME issues as we do in San Diego: * Lack of angel investors, (Especially, it calls out, given the local giant tech co's) * "We need low-conviction check writers." * Lack of "cachet associated with being an angel investor" - We have similar efforts (as described in the article) to drum up angel activity: NuFund Venture Group and, Interlock Capital (read the article and you'll see why the Interlock effort is tops as relates to "paying back into the ecosystem") Connect.org strives to 'connect' innovative companies with investors of all types (angel, VC, PE...) - just see "Innovation Day". Their Springboard program provides another great way for experienced entrepreneurs to give back through mentorship...as for the companies going through Springboard: "Ask for advice, and you often get $$" Your thoughts on the article or San Diego innovation ecosystem? https://lnkd.in/gfwq6mfq

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Just spoke to someone who is spending 5 hours/day commuting from SF to South Bay 3x/week by transit. They want to join Upshift to get a car every Tue-Thu every week so they can get another hour of sleep in the morning and get home in time for dinner. Sound like you or someone you know? Our new personalized fractional car subscriptions are selling like hotcakes. Optimize your plan to meet exactly your situation. Need a car to commute 1-3x/week? Want a car to get out of town every weekend? We’ve got a plan for you! Everything is included in one fixed monthly fee, even insurance. Flexible - change how much car you need over time if your lifestyle changes, swap between Toyota Corolla hybrid or AWD Honda CRV hybrid SUV. Predictable - always get the same type of car, clean, gassed and professionally maintained. Convenient - delivery to your door, refueling service, return anywhere in our zone. Learn more and subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/g7cHCjU2 #EV #AV #carshare #transportation #autonomousvehicles #electricvehicles #VC #venturecapital #angelinvesting #mobility

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Engineers aren’t the only team members who ship product—marketers can, too. Let me explain. Last week, we rolled out something big at OpenPhone. A gorgeous monthly stats email that gives our customers a snapshot of their usage. I’m so excited! Here’s why: → It's been on our wishlist forever. One of those "wouldn't it be cool if..." ideas that kept popping up in meetings. → Our Marketing team pulled this off without a single line of code from Engineering. They shipped this. All on their own. → As an OpenPhone user myself, I get to show off just how much I rely on it. It’s not “marketing” in the traditional sense. But it’s going to become a core part of our product experience now.  It adds value. It delights our customers. It makes OpenPhone stickier. Whoever said Marketing can’t ship their own “products”? Huge shoutout to my colleagues, John MacGaffey Carolyne Gardener Brian Sun and Phil Jones for knocking this out of the park. John recently shared some behind-the-scenes of how they built this on his profile, so go check that out. And for all our OpenPhone customers—hope you're enjoying your new monthly stats! ps - we're growing our Marketing, Customer Success and Engineering teams. If you love to ship stuff as much as we do, join us :)

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Kettleborough VC has been active for ~6 years, invested in ~30 companies, gone through ~80 funding rounds, witnessed ~12 exits including ~4 instances of partial principal erosion, seen ~4 seed to $100M journeys, tracking ~29% XIRR across the portfolio. A couple of IPOs from the portfolio surely seem very much in line ahead.

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