Andy Hung

Talking to users and thoughtfully integrating their needs and wants was woven through everything we did at IDEO—threaded through every prototype and product decision. Reading my colleagues Joanne and Leo's latest work brought that to mind. They describe a future where research runs continuously, with AI agents recruiting participants and instantly surfacing insights. Synthetic personas, carefully trained on consumer signals, mirror human behavior closely enough to extend live studies and compress timelines from weeks to hours. Today user research mostly runs in fits and starts, prohibitively expensive and locked away in dedicated project cycles when it could be a constant companion, seamlessly integrated into the product development process. Joanne and Leo lay out the full vision here: https://lnkd.in/gEUBSG_J

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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My First AI Post @2025 (and thank you to the Aperiam AI Fellows and to Dawn West and Alex Netelkos for making that happen!): If viewability was the training wheels of digital measurement, attention is the carbon-fiber racing bike we’ve just learned to ride. Erica kicked us off by pointing out the obvious: “viewable” doesn’t mean “seen,” and certainly doesn’t mean “engaged.” McKinsey’s neat formula — time × focus × intent — resonated as a starting point, but the real magic is in using that across channels and across the funnel. Why does this matter now? Because omni-channel is no longer a buzzword — it’s the messy, lived reality. CTV, digital out-of-home, mobile gaming, social feeds — each has wildly different engagement norms. An attention metric gives marketers and publishers a lingua franca, a Rosetta Stone to compare value and outcomes without pretending a click on a banner is the same as leaning into a big-screen spot. Publishers want credit for premium environments. Marketers want to normalize buys across hundreds of brands, countries, and media types. Attention-weighted CPMs (ACPMs) start to solve both. Even a global CPG can look across Meta, YouTube, stadium signage, and print — and make sense of it. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than a stack of inconsistent KPIs and gut feel? Absolutely. And yes, AI is in the wings — not as the protagonist, but as the stagehand making the hard stuff easier. It can normalize messy data, connect attention signals to outcomes, and embolden teams to try bolder experiments. Which brings us to the closing provocation: What if a few brave brands and publishers agreed to really transact on attention — rough edges, no gaming, shared responsibility for outcomes? The moment feels right to test whether attention can become not just a metric, but a currency. Marc Guldimann Adelaide David Zapata AB InBev Michael Shields Cory Treffiletti Rembrand McKinsey & Company

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Excited to share that Aperiam has invested in Newton Research’s oversubscribed $9M Series A, alongside Greycroft, Bessemer Venture Partners, S4S Ventures, and LiveRamp Ventures. Newton is redefining what agentic AI can do for marketing analytics, enabling brands and agencies to: - Run customer 360 journey analysis across touchpoints - Segment audiences and build predictive models - Automate attribution, incrementality, and media mix modeling - Generate dynamic, natural language-driven reporting - Save up to 126 hours/month and achieve 10x analytics output Their pre-built “blueprints” let non-technical teams securely run advanced analytics on their own data with just a few clicks. John Hoctor, Matthew Emans, and Steven Bennett have successfully built and exited multiple companies. We love to back repeat founders on their most ambitious ideas, like Newton Research. Link to more in comments.

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I'm happy to announce that Founder Institute is bringing on Paul O'Brien as our first Head of Public Affairs. Paul joins FI with decades of experience tackling the systemic reasons startups and local ecosystems fail due to misaligned policy, underperforming startup programs, or institutional neglect of the realities of launching endurable businesses in today's economy. From Austin to Silicon Valley and beyond, Paul has championed the idea that education is infrastructure, and that cities should treat entrepreneurial development as essential as roads, broadband, and water. At FI we couldn't agree more, and as AI transforms our economy I believe the future of our society will be found at the convergence of how we teach, how we govern, and how we serve entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, I speak to government and economic development officials every week that are completely neglecting the education and development of new entrepreneurs in their regions. In his new role, Paul will help us push FI's mission to empower communities of entrepreneurs forward through Policy Engagement, University and Civic Integration, and Ecosystem Accountability. If your city, university, or organization is ready to integrate structured entrepreneurial incubation and acceleration with policy and capital strategy, now’s the time to connect! 🔗 Read the full announcement - https://lnkd.in/eenwHujW (and welcome on board, Paul! 👏 )

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Every CMO I talk with right now is juggling AI pilots, brand risk, compliance drag, martech sprawl, and relentless ROI pressure. The experimentation phase is over. The operating model is changing. AI is table stakes. A creative multiplier is the edge. The real shift is moving from platforms with AI bolted on to an AI-powered creative operating system that helps teams actually create, ship, and scale work faster. This is the future Canva is building toward. On March 11, we’re bringing AI Vision to Spring Studios in NYC. 🗽 Join a room full of the people building what modern creative and marketing teams will run on next. Cameron Adams — Co-Founder & CPO, Canva Ashley Kramer — VP Enterprise, OpenAI Stefano (Stef) Corazza, PhD — Head of AI Research, Canva Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz — Co-Founder & CDO, Runway Jenny Wen — Product Design Lead, Anthropic …and more. If you’re rethinking how your team creates and operates in the AI era, this is the room to be in! Spots are limited: https://lnkd.in/dHsGhahU

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Love this - AI is the Oppenheimer moment for marketing. It fundamentally collapses the time and cost of production. A $2.5 million campaign that used to take four months can now be delivered for $500,000 in four weeks. Legacy firms that charge based on hours with the 'time-driven' model are existentially threatened by this.

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