Yevgeny Dibrov

ISP Strategic Leadership, Engineering, and Operations As an organization scales, there is often a need to separate strategic technology leadership under the CTO from internal execution under engineering and operations management. This allows the CTO to focus on outward-facing duties while enabling streamlined operational efficiency. However, it's crucial to recognize the differing motivations and needs of these distinct technical roles. On one hand, engineers thrive on tackling interesting, challenging projects that push their abilities and knowledge. They value working alongside capable peers, genuine recognition of technical accomplishments, and contributing to products/services that reach the market. In contrast, operations teams should strive for repeatable processes, continual improvement, and driving efficiency at scale. Their priorities revolve around standardizing workflows, minimizing disruptions, and incrementally optimizing existing systems and procedures to maintain consistent service delivery as the company grows. An effective organizational structure acknowledges this dichotomy, fostering an environment that fuels engineering innovation while providing operations with the stability and process-orientation they require. Striking this balance enables the company to stay agile and innovative through its engineering efforts, while simultaneously scaling operational execution in a reliable and repeatable manner. Competitive compensation remains an important motivator across both domains. By properly aligning structural elements, motivational factors, and leadership priorities, a rapidly growing ISP can position itself to attract and retain top talent across engineering and operations, driving sustainable growth and success in the dynamic technology landscape.

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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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We are thrilled to announce that TurboDocx has successfully closed its Angel funding round, raising $75,000. This significant milestone marks a leap forward in our journey to revolutionize smart and modular document and slide deck creation, accelerated by AI. A heartfelt thank you goes out to our friends, family, early supporters and everyone that believes in our vision. Your support is not just appreciated-- but a strong vote of confidence in our mission to innovate and transform how business document creation is created. What does this mean for TurboDocx? We're reinvesting it into the business: - Focusing on Partner/Client Needs - Understanding and addressing the evolving needs of our users remains our top priority. We're here to build not just a product but a solution that truly makes a difference. - Enhanced Solutioning - We're more committed than ever to developing solutions that set new benchmarks for efficiency, re-usability, and innovation has never been stronger. - Innovation, Partner, and Channel Growth - Our investment team and advisors primarily consists of go-to-market (GTM) and implementation professionals that have already provided invaluable guidance on scaling our overall growth. Looking ahead: As we celebrate this achievement, we're mindful that fundraising is not the end goal but a milestone --a means to an end-- to build out a well oiled machine. We're excited to leverage this opportunity to further our mission, drive innovation, and exceed the expectations of our users and partners. With this said - If you'd like to be part of this exciting journey, please reach out! Stay tuned for updates, join our growing community, and let's reshape the future of document and slide deck creation together. -Nicolas https://lnkd.in/e4CGrUVB

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I had an absolute blast with Michel Gagnon and the Stun and Awe crew - THANKS again for having me... Sneak peek of the substance below: > Micro SaaS companies can be just as safe and stable as larger businesses, offering lower valuations and less competition from institutional players. > Founder-product fit is crucial, as founders solving their own problems often create useful products with great retention. > Founder burnout can be a buying signal, indicating a solid business with a founder ready to move on. > The first 90 days post-acquisition should focus on visibility, documentation, transition, and validating diligence assumptions before pursuing growth. > Building transparently and maintaining open communication with users post-acquisition helps preserve the human element and avoid the pitfall of going silent. > Simplicity equals mastery - if it takes a complex explanation to justify an acquisition, you probably don't fully understand the business. > Establishing reasonable incremental growth goals based on baseline performance (systems over goals) is more effective than setting arbitrary targets. > Fostering a culture of care and respect enables honest feedback and allows teams to move faster through a shared commitment to truth-seeking.

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space based data centers are happening

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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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In vertical SaaS, the very best companies landed with a product solving a specific, burning pain point that horizontal solutions solved badly and then became broad product suites over time (ServiceTitan, Veeva Systems, Doximity, etc). My partner Gordon Ritter calls this “layering the cake”. In vertical AI, the landing wedges are much more brittle. While the painpoints they solve are very real (and often unaddressable by SaaS alone), they’re also much more likely to commodotize in the near term as the tech advances. 👀 Therefore, the need to layer the cake in vertical AI is much more urgent than in vertical SaaS. 👀 The best vertical AI CEOs not only recognize the dynamic, but talk about it openly. Helps those around them keep up the speed of innovation and their eyes on the bigger prize.

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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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Next one up, Flagler Health! In an attempt to demystify some of the non-obvious elements we found when we first met the founders of our fastest growing portfolio companies at 186 Ventures, here is the third edition of the "idiosyncratic phenomenon". This highlight will be on Albert Katz, Leon Anijar, and Will Hu and their journey building Flagler Health to bring unprecedented AI enabled patient care to the world of musculoskeletal (MsK) providers. As the healthcare industry shifts to a value based care paradigm, there will be increased pressure on the entire industry to ensure patient outcomes improve, all the while helping providers generate more revenue / become more cost efficient. Since we co-led their March, 2024 seed round with Streamlined, the company has rolled out some of their newest remote therapeutic and chronic condition management features to many patients and providers alike, experiencing high revenue growth in such a short period of time. The company continues to face unmet customer demand as it continues to scale its expansion into 2025. https://lnkd.in/exesTcmC

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chpter. , founded by Tesh Mbaabu and his friends, raised $1.2 million pre-seed last week in a round that was led by former investors in their previous startup, MarketForce. I saw a comment from X, saying that the product that chpter. has out there so far, has so many problems, that it is basically a waiting list with a poorly-designed landing page. Which is true. I went to see the live site myself and the observation was not far off. HOWEVER. I think a lot of people who have never built startups don't really know how startups work. I lead a team of talented individuals building Mentorlst and I have picked up a few lessons. First, chpter. raised pre-seed funding, which means at this point, investors were looking at four things: the team, the idea, the total addressable market (TAM) and the go-to-market strategy. And looking at chpter. , it nails down these four perfectly, except one, which I will explain. The team, led by Tesh Mbaabu has experience running a busy startup operating in many markets, and this experience cannot be substituted for anything else. It is also the reason why even after WeWork failed after allegations of financial misappropriation, Adam Neumann, the CEO and founder, still managed to raise money from investors for his subsequent ideas. It doesn't matter whether a founder fails in his first or nth startup, as long as he has the experience of building products, managing teams and raising funds. Investors value the experience and network above everything else. Second, the TAM. chpter. is building a product to enable e-commerce businesses to automate customer relationship management at its basic. Social/e-commerce is the new zone of commerce and the African market is untapped. I don't know whether customers really need a chpter. like product vs what they are already using such as WhatsApp Business, but it remains to be seen. This is why I have doubts with the product, but products can always grow and even pivot. The market they are after is there, the only challenge is to grab a share of that market from social media giants and existing players. Third is GTM. I won't comment much on this but this is what a lot of founders struggle with, given that many founders confuse GTM strategy with marketing. GTM is the whole strategy of taking a new product to market and driving demand for it, and marketing is just part of it. I haven't seen much activity from chpter. in the socials, and I am hoping that the funding they have acquired will boost their GTM efforts in the coming months. One last thing: When investors give you money, they don't deposit that money in your account and give you a debit card to spend it. Such funding always come with conditions that must be met, which includes figures and milestones you have to hit before you unlock more levels of that funding. It is the same way the IMF works. This is why startups sometimes die shortly after raising funding, because they failed to meet these conditions. #mentorlst

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Today, GTMfund’s is excited to announce to launch of Operator, its first incubated company. Max Altschuler (founder of GTMfund) teamed up with co-founder Adam M. (design engineer and 0-1 builder) and co-founder Mark Kosoglow (Outreach employee #1 and former SVP of Global Sales) to create Operator.ai alongside an insanely talented team Pleasant Middelhof, Jeremy Jonas, Carl Gunderson. We've entered a period called “The Great Ignore”. Spam and irrelevant, poorly-automated outbound campaigns are running rampant.   Operator gives you an easy-to-use Growth Engineer that allows you to build and enrich lists with accurate data, and run experiments and queries using AI to generate highly targeted outreach.    Check out their website to get updates, early access, and see how they are taking the world back to 2 touches meant to attract buyers into conversations that convert, instead of 20 touches meant to make sure you hit your activity number: https://www.operator.ai/

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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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Two announcements re: our upcoming first-of-its-kind-event: a) 70+ Attendees are registered! b) The upcoming SiliconXL LaunchAthon is perfect for Job Seekers, Software Engineers and Boston-based Startups For more info or to register, visit ---> https://lnkd.in/efPxJ6Fk www - launchathons - com/boston The upcoming SiliconXL LaunchAthon is designed to provide job seekers with an immersive, hands-on experience that goes beyond traditional training. Through targeted AI coding workshops, attendees will dive deep into advanced AI tools and coding platforms, equipping them with practical skills that employers actively seek. These workshops allow job seekers to build real-world projects in collaboration with industry mentors, creating tangible portfolio pieces that showcase their abilities and problem-solving prowess. For those looking to enter the tech field, our LaunchAthon is an invaluable opportunity to gain relevant, hands-on experience that will make them stand out in a competitive job market. Furthermore, the collaborative environment encourages networking with potential employers and peers, giving job seekers a head start on forming connections that may lead to employment opportunities. For software engineers already in the workforce, our LaunchAthon’s workshops provide a vital opportunity to upskill and explore emerging technologies that might not be part of their current roles. The hands-on experience in AI-powered coding workshops offers a practical way to stay updated with industry trends, experiment with new tools, and learn innovative problem-solving techniques. These workshops encourage engineers to think outside their regular scope of work, sparking creativity and enhancing their adaptability to new challenges. Attending the SiliconXL LaunchAthon can add value not only to their current skill set but also to their role within their organization, as they bring back fresh insights and advanced knowledge that can be applied immediately to drive innovation in their day-to-day work. or startup entrepreneurs, the upcoming LaunchAthon offers an unparalleled opportunity to bring their ideas to life through hands-on experience with cutting-edge AI tools and collaborative workshops. Entrepreneurs will benefit from an environment where they can test, validate, and iterate on their concepts with the guidance of industry mentors and experienced tech professionals. These sessions are designed to accelerate the development process, providing valuable insights into product design, rapid prototyping, and market alignment. Beyond just building, entrepreneurs will also network with potential co-founders, partners, and investors, creating connections that can support their startup’s growth. LaunchAthon is more than an event; it’s a launchpad for entrepreneurial visionaries looking to create impactful, scalable tech solutions in a high-energy, supportive setting.

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One of my proudest moments as an investor occurred today as Alaffia Health announced its series A because it shows how the Aperture® Venture Capital vision of multi-level, multi-generational #impactinvesting is succeeding in the marketplace. Here’s the model in its most basic form : ✅As diverse fund managers with meaningful capital to allocate, we are changing the VC landscape every day just by doing our day jobs. ✅As Black/Brown investors with ~40 years experience collectively, Aperture GPs have access to talent /excellence that others do not, so our portfolio *organically* is more inclusive by race, gender and geography even while optimizing for financial outcomes (all about the alpha). ✅Our most successful portco’s are using financial #innovation to solve market problems that impact underrepresented demographics and underserved communities. Alaffia Health is a shining example of the impact portion of our overall fund thesis, and we couldn’t be prouder of TJ Ademiluyi and Adun Akanni, MPH, PMP - the dynamic brother-sister founder duo whose vision we have steadfastly supported on their journey. Congratulations to TJ and Adun from William Crowder and myself, as well as the whole Aperture team- Marjorie King Philip McKenzie Yves Louis-Jacques Tanvi Lal Michelle Dhansinghani Lisha Bell Katie Kelly Amy Chung Cindy Chong, CFA Brian Fernandes-Halloran Monroe France Jayden Pantel Darren Herman Evan Wladis Neal Triplett Thomas Scriven Peter Ammon Irina Bit-Babik Tim Milanich Rob Rahbari

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

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Big things are happening at NeuBird.ai From early access trials to general availability - Hawkeye is helping enterprises tackle their IT challenges head-on. Marina Temkin, CFA at TechCrunch has the scoop on their $22.5m funding round led by: M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund—with participation from Mayfield Fund, StepStone Group, and Prosperity7 Ventures Read on here: https://lnkd.in/eCUZpNp5 cc: Kayla Abbassi, John Vollmer, Raven Raines, Statyn Coppage, Rick Liebling, Anne Sophie Hurst

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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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If you’re an early-stage founder, finding out what your customers *really* want so you can build the right product is critical. I’m excited to share some of First Round Capital's PMF Method program with Gagan Biyani on Friday! Gagan has founded 3 companies including Udemy, Sprig, and Maven. We’re hosting this live conversation for product leaders & founders on how to reach PMF. You’ll learn: - How to identify your customers' real problems - How to test demand by selling before building - When to write code vs. build a no-code MVP RSVP to join on June 14th (it’s free): https://bit.ly/3VBAK69

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Big news from Cephable! This team is transforming interactions with the digital world and creating the accessible future we all deserve. There is nothing better than investing in leaders like Alexander Dunn. Congratulations Cephable and thank you for including Hyperplane in your journey! ➡️ See them in action (I still get goosebumps): https://lnkd.in/eHfCp3iD ➡️ Read the full release here: https://lnkd.in/e68MS2CP

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