CM Weekly: Automating Services, BaaS woes, Product Market Fit
Chris McCann's weekly newsletter on technology, startups, and venture capital.
Excited to share that our Race Capital Summit is a wrap! We hosted a private tour at the Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab and then hosted over 100 investors and founders in the afternoon including a: fireside chat with Matei Zaharia the CTO of Databricks, demo’s with a handful of our portfolio companies including Vectara, PlayHT, Scarf, and GoodNotes, and discussed AI, Web3, IPO, M&As and everything else in between!
-------------------------
Written by Chris McCann, General Partner @ Race Capital. More about me.
🗞️ Interesting Reads
AI startups have their sites not just on improving productivity, but also automating services as well.
Facebook released their latest open source AI model, Llama 3, which is currently #5 on the LLM leaderboard, and the #1 open source model by quality.
A huge market report about AI trends by the Stanford HAI group. A few high level takeaways: AI beats humans on a small subset of tasks, foundational models are getting more expensive to train, US the home for AI innovation but regulation is coming
Synapse, the once dominant banking as a service (BaaS) provider is now bankrupt after their main banking partner cut them off their platform.
A story on one founder's journey to find product-market-fit in her vertical.
The founder of AppDynamics recounts the mistakes he made when trying to get to product market fit.
A data driven analysis on what revenue level it takes for a company to go public in today's market. TLDR companies at $250M+ in ARR growing at 30%+ is about the range to start considering an IPO.
🔥 Startup Jobs
By Company: Databricks, GoodNotes, Zeet, Polysign, Opaque, Lightning Labs, OtterTune, and more
By Role: Engineering, Data Science, Product, Design, Operations, Finance, Legal, and more
By Location: SF Bay Area, New York, London, and Remote
Browse more open roles across our portfolio at Race Capital's Portfolio Job Board.
This newsletter goes out to a wide membership base of founders, technologists, investors, and operators. Feel free to share with others, sign up here: Substack | LinkedIn Newsletter