Rao Cherukuri

Founderville believes one of the most significant opportunities is emerging in legacy system applications. We look for manual tasks to leverage AI for efficient automation. Rather than chasing massive TAM, which will be addressed by larger VCs, we focus on smaller market domains that won't be chased as hard. Think of "boring" processes that require human intervention or manualized tasks. Those are opportunities. Keep your eyes open if you have deep domain expertise in a non-automated and fragmented industry. #entrepreneurs #venturecapital #startups #saas

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This is just incredible. Neal Ghosh's demonstration of how #VentureIQ takes deeply technical and complicated content across a range of industrial use cases and ages/stages through an AI-generated conversational podcast (a la #notebookLM) is really mind-blowing. Check out his post, below, and if you haven't seen VentureIQ, yet, let's get you set up to learn more. You can visit VentureIQ.ai or DM any of us over here to book a demo!

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This is quite a piece on accusations of unethical pay-to-play within the #cyber #VC ecosystem. -Guaranteed first-year sales for portfolio companies -Formal loyalty program for CISOs -Points awarded within the program for CISO commitment level to portfolio companies (meetings, PoCs, product purchases) -Share of GP fees for CISOs in the loyalty program https://lnkd.in/gDta7Gp7

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Why IBM's Acquisition of HashiCorp is a Game-Changer for Investors IBM's $6.4 billion acquisition of HashiCorp significantly bolsters its hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities, positioning it as a leader in the AI era. HashiCorp’s expertise in cloud infrastructure, lifecycle management, and security automation complements IBM’s strengths, creating an end-to-end cloud platform. This strategic move enables IBM to offer enhanced solutions for managing complex cloud environments and generative AI workloads, providing investors with robust growth potential and a competitive edge in the evolving tech landscape. #IBM #HashiCorp #CloudComputing #AI #InvestmentOpportunity #PINCommunityAdvocate #IBMPartner

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Some additional charts on the aggregate hyperscaler data from Q1. The charts below show 1) The aggregate net new ARR added on q quarterly basis. Q1 is always a seasonal low 2) The YoY growth in net new ARR in Q1. Q1 '23 was the "bottom" with AWS actually adding negative net new ARR (ie they shrunk), so the YoY comp is the "easiest" for the aggregate bucket.

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⚡ Kicking off 🌎 Earth Day with exciting news as we unveil 8090 Industries' latest investment in Exowatt led by Hannan P. along with Sam Altman Andreessen Horowitz, Atomic, Overmatch Ventures, Protagonist, and many more. As the boom in AI heightens the energy demand for data centers, Exowatt is pioneering a fundamental breakthrough in baseload renewable energy that helps makes $0.01 per kilowatt-hour, 24 hours a day a reality for commercial and industrial use cases. 🏗 How does it work? The Exowatt P3, represents a breakthrough 3-in-1 modular system, a heat collector, a heat battery, and a heat engine capable of providing dispatchable power and heat 24 hours a day. Unlike traditional solar panels that convert sunlight into electricity directly, Exowatt uses a unique approach by storing solar energy in a thermal battery, which can retain this energy for up to 24 hours per day. The Exowatt P3 modules are designed to fit the space of a standard 40-foot shipping container. They can be deployed on small and large commercial and industrial projects, linearly scaling with workload size and infrastructure requirements. Best captured by Founder and CEO Hannan P. himself, an industrialist you're going to want to pay close attention to: “You don’t have to go back to fossil fuels to solve the data-center energy problem…That’s counterproductive and unlike traditional renewable solutions that require significant upfront costs and extended setup times, Exowatt's modular system can be deployed rapidly and cost-effectively – and it's available THIS YEAR. Exowatt is built to respond quickly to the escalating energy demands of the modern world, especially those spurred by the rapid growth of AI." 👀 Who Cares? Exowatt has a backlog of demand for OVER 500 megawatts for data centers across the U.S. and plans to begin deployments later this year. With this $20 million seed funding, Exowatt intends to expand its team and deploy the Exowatt P3 with its first set of data center customers. Stay tuned! Lots to come! cc Kerem Ozmen Wes Mendenhall Filip Vurdelja Haluk Sabanci Dincer Grant Brown Ishan Meswani Garuth A. Andrew Irwin Charles Oppenheimer Fatimah Bello #energyabundance #decarbonization #climatetech

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During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth + good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

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When you sell into an existing category, there are known GTM channels and expectations you can play into. Anish Dhar points out that category creation isn't just about messaging or product but you have to discover and define all those GTM patterns anew.

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Exciting to see startups aiming to use AI to discover chemicals, materials, drugs, etc. Semi companies have taken notice: AMD is investing in and Cadence is acquiring them. Semi/EDA companies have broken out by becoming critical path, whether it’s through critical software, packaging, IP, design kits from foundries, or user communities. Aside from just making it easy to make new materials, these “AI for making X” companies also need to articulate a vision as to how they can establish monopolistic positions in their industries.

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Ross Haleliuk posted the fantastic article below. This is the world where I live day-to-day. At TechOperators, we invest mostly in early-stage cyber, but we do things a little differently, and we believe there are ways to invest successfully outside of pure Power Law math. The article argues that many security problems are too small for VC. I agree. I often try to convince bootstrapped founders not to raise venture because doing so can turn a successful, slow-growing bootstrapped company into a failed venture-backed company because, despite a large infusion of capital, it couldn't double every year. VC is not monolithic--not by stage, strategy, or style. Venture is often equated with "Tier 1 Venture". Ross argues that VC is not always great for early-stage cyber--and he is right. Bootstrapping AND VC work when incentives are aligned. Does it work for an early-stage VC with a <$200M fund to invest in several early companies at reasonable valuations, setting up the conditions for reasonable exits that pay off for both investors and founders? Yes. Does it work for $800M funds investing in seed stage at $100M+ valuations? Well, that depends! Power law says it does (for VC), but the unfortunate externality is that these rounds destroy companies and founder equity more often than not. There is a role for patient capital in this ecosystem to fuel successful companies that retain exit optionality as they scale--driving exit value for both founders and investors.

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The experimental "computer use" capability of Anthropic's latest Sonnet model is really something else; if you want to give it a try using simple API calls, managed Model as a Service platform elements like evals, pay as you go, integrated agent building, enterprise grade security and much more, head over to cloud.google.com. At Google Cloud we remain committed to a multi-model strategy and platforms like Vertex that take away some of the pain, time and toil to get you building quickly and responsibly. https://lnkd.in/gCi22ZPy

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ex Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at Stanford this week. Lots of nuggets here, but most interesting for the near term, Schmidt believes in the next year AI is set to make a big leap forward. He predicts AI will combine three important features: 1. Vast knowledge retention (1 million token models) 2. Text-to-action capability 3. Personal AI agent fleets While the full impact is unknown, everyone may soon command their own AI teams. Here's an example: Imagine you're developing new quantum computing algorithms. Your AI assistants could: - Continuously scan and synthesize global quantum research papers - Generate novel algorithm ideas based on this knowledge - Simulate and test these algorithms across various quantum architectures - Automatically document findings and prepare draft papers - Identify potential collaborators and draft outreach emails All initiated by a command like "Advance our quantum algorithm research." This could dramatically accelerate R&D cycles and scientific breakthroughs.. https://lnkd.in/eJbg6cnD #frontiertech #AI #futurefrontier

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In overconnected environments dominant suppliers rapidly emerge and many become monopolies — think Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. When that happens, it is hard to wrestle free of a situation. http://ow.ly/YR5f30prqAF #CloudComputing #data #internet

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Key takeaways from VC Goat - Vinod Khosla podcast. - The firm cares more about working on interesting problems with large technical solutions rather than just maximizing IRR. The team is there because they believe in the mission. - Khosla assumes they've lost the money the day they invest, and then maximizes for the upside opportunity. He calls it "option value investing" rather than IRR investing. - Khosla has contrarian bets in AI (neuro-symbolic computing, probabilistic approaches), biotech, robotics, crypto, and more. - He believes aviation fuels, fusion energy, new transit systems, and other contrarian areas ignored by most investors will be huge opportunities. - Most large innovations come from outsiders, not industry insiders. Khosla looks for founders who can learn a business rapidly rather than have deep domain expertise. The Future Impact of AI - AI will be deflationary and increase productivity growth to 4% annually vs the typical 2% forecast. This will cause great abundance but also increasing income inequality. - Bipedal robots will take over most manufacturing and manual labor jobs within 20-25 years. This will free humans to be more creative and pursue their passions. - Education will shift from job training to creativity. Uniquely human elements like taste and curation will be most valued in an AI-enabled world. https://lnkd.in/gqBsmbks

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We’re thrilled to announce our investment in System Two Security, a company rethinking how security teams detect and respond to threats. For nearly two years, we’ve explored how AI will transform the security operations center (SOC). We’ve met many companies focused on helping teams triage endless alerts, but we’ve been searching for a team tackling the real challenge: improving how we detect threats in the first place. Today, writing and managing detections to novel cyber threats takes significant time and resources, leaving companies vulnerable to emerging threats. And testing these detections? Practically nonexistent. SOCs are stuck with gaps in coverage and mountains of false positives. System Two is a new approach leveraging the latest advancements in AI to automate detection engineering. We’re incredibly pumped to be working with the amazing Robert Fly again, along with Prasanth Ganesan and partners at The Hive, LLC, Runtime Ventures, Webb Investment Network and more. Let’s get to work! https://lnkd.in/gUTsKpYJ

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On Wednesday, GitHub and JFrog announced a collaboration to integrate their platforms, making it simpler for developers and their support teams to handle source code and binaries across both services. This features single sign-on, role mapping, code tracing from source to binary packages across platforms, and a unified project architecture. Later, a unified dashboard will display GitHub and JFrog’s source- and binary-focused security scan findings. #github #jfrog #githubcopilot #eltrys ELTRYS. GitHub JFrog

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𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐈 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 Armon Dadgar 𝐨𝐟 HashiCorp "Solve the hard problems!"  That's just one gem of wisdom from Armon Dadgar, Co-founder & CTO of HashiCorp, in our first Humans in AI episode of 2025! Mayfield Fund has partnered with HashiCorp from its early days, witnessing their incredible journey to success. Armon Dadgar is a role model for today's founders, and we couldn't think of a better way to kick off 2025. In this episode, we delve into: - How are HashiCorp customers leveraging AI to transform their businesses? - Armon Dadgar's vision for the future of human-AI collaboration. - Invaluable advice for AI founders. Don't miss this insightful conversation! What's the best advice you ever got from a fellow founder? Share your wisdom in the comments below! 👇 #HumansInAI #AI #HashiCorp #Founders

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Just finished reading "The Next Giant Leap" by Space Capital - a pioneering VC investing in the emerging Space Economy. The report speaks to how SpaceX’s Starship is more than just the most powerful rocket ever built—it is poised to reshape the global space economy in profound ways. With its immense payload capacity, reusable design, and lower cost per launch, Starship will unlock entirely new industries and transform existing business models. But how should industries and businesses evolve to align with this paradigm shift? 📈 Rethinking Business Strategies & Supply Chains - For businesses, Starship represents an era of mass-production over precision engineering. This means moving away from the focus on mass efficiency toward cost-effective, redundant, and scalable production. - In terms of supply chains, this opens opportunities for new players in manufacturing, materials, and space components. The demand for off-the-shelf parts and non-aerospace suppliers will rise dramatically. 💡 New Use Cases & Opportunities   The opportunities Starship unlocks go beyond launching satellites. - In-space manufacturing of high-value products like pharmaceuticals and advanced materials that cannot be created on Earth. - Mega-constellations of satellites for global broadband, expanding on what Starlink has already begun. - In-orbit assembly and servicing, allowing for larger space structures like telescopes or even habitats to be built in orbit, radically reducing costs. - Lunar infrastructure and resource extraction will become more viable, paving the way for sustainable human presence on the Moon and, eventually, Mars. 📊 What Should Businesses Do Now?   1. Embrace Redundancy & Scale – Instead of focusing on one-off, high-cost solutions, businesses should embrace redundancy and mass production.    2. Simplify Design – With Starship’s payload capacity, there is less pressure to optimize for mass efficiency. Simplified, scalable designs will allow for faster production and iteration cycles, akin to how SpaceX rapidly tests and evolves Starship itself. 3. Develop Strategic Partnerships – Collaborating with forward-thinking space startups, suppliers, and even non-aerospace sectors will be essential to capitalize on the opportunities Starship provides. 🌌 A New Era of Innovation   Starship will democratize access to space, lowering the barriers for businesses to create and scale. The next decade will witness breakthroughs in scientific exploration, energy production, and in-space transportation that we can only begin to imagine today. #SpaceEconomy #Starship #Innovation #SupplyChain #Manufacturing #SpaceTech #Entrepreneurship #FutureOfSpace https://lnkd.in/gNdbwXdq

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