Carla Bourque

Project Vend reads less like a capability story and more like a governability story. Phase two improved because institutional scaffolding (tools, procedures, role separation) reduced predictable judgment failures—persuasion, compliance blind spots, boundary confusion, values drift. The board-level question isn’t “can an agent run a business?” but “what governance primitives must exist before we delegate authority.” Until incentives, escalation rights, and refusal boundaries are structurally enforced—not merely prompted—agents remain high-performing managers, not autonomous executives.

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It's an analogy I hear often: VCs have the same high-risk, high-reward DNA as gamblers. From the gold seeking 49ers at Sutter's Mill to the naming of the largest podcast in our space (“All-In”), there's an undeniable connection between gambling and venture risk-taking. There's a certain "go west" or gambling spirit inherent in building a company from the ground up and backing lots of early startups. Sometimes, you do have to shoot blind, relying on gut instinct about a founder's compelling vision and little else. But here’s where the analogy breaks down: in venture, we aren't simply throwing chips on a roulette table. Our "adventure capitalism" is governed by structure: A Clear Target: Even when we have few signals to evaluate at an early stage, we are aiming at a fast-growing market and/or a proven founder profile. We are not shooting wildly; we're aiming in the right general direction. Due Diligence: We conduct market sizing, reference checks, financial modeling, etc. This is the opposite of blind faith. Fiduciary Responsibility: This is the ultimate check on the "gambler" impulse. This is not our money. We are custodians of other people's money—funds entrusted to us by LPs (current and former Fortune 500 CEOs, successful founders, etc.). Our job is to be disciplined allocators of capital, not reckless adventurers. We are risk-takers, but successful VCs are calculated ones as well. #VentureCapital #VC #Startups

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Big milestone for Firmable. We’ve raised $14m Series A led by Airtree. Sales has moved through a few big waves: intuition-led, CRM-led, data-led. We’re now entering the next one – intelligence-led sales. The opportunity isn’t just better data. It’s turning that data into clear direction and action, without adding more work for sales teams. That’s what we’re building at Firmable: a foundation of trusted external data, layered with intelligence that helps sellers know who to focus on and when. Led by Airtree, this round supports our expansion across Asia and into the US – and accelerates the build-out of AI agents that take the admin work off sales teams so they can focus on what they do best. Proud of the team, grateful to our customers and investors. We’re just getting started. Read the exclusive in the AFR. https://lnkd.in/gr66uknb Leigh Jasper | Tara Salmon | Karthik Venkatasubramanian| Chester Thompson| Chath Widanapathirana

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There’s a lot of conversation about how AI is concentrating capital. That’s real. But I’m also seeing how it’s expanding what small teams can build. At ThriveLink, AI has allowed us to move faster, reach more patients, and build technology that helps families navigate systems that were never designed to be easy. We’ve been able to do with a small amount of capital what used to require entire teams and millions in funding. The tools are changing. The mission isn’t. Thankful to the Los Angeles Business Journal and Plug In Ventures for highlighting the changing venture landscape and what founders like myself are navigating right now.

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Vision without values fails to launch. Strategy without belief buckles under pressure. Missions without systems perish. What works? Conviction. And conviction can be engineered. At Decasonic, we believe conviction is engineered through top execution, AI-native talent, and system-level thinking across the key technologies of today: Web3 and AI. Blessed to be working with some great people across our ecosystem who engineer with sustainable conviction. Sustainable conviction encompasses: 1- Alignment that endures and flourishes with stress testing. 2- Execution that cuts through noise to build for signal. 3- Systems thinking that compounds with AI building AI. In markets defined by uncertainty and unknowns, conviction comes from disciplined design of humans and AI working together in systems that drive outcomes. "Full Speed Ahead" reflects these conversations around conviction. Excited to showcase this theme next week at our Fourth Annual Web3 Investor Day.

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Calendar → Planner → Projects → AI employees. Motion is rebuilding the SMB productivity stack for an agentic world.  Stacey Bishop and I are thrilled to share our investment in Motion. They raised $60M, powered by an oversubscribed $38M Series C led by Scale Venture Partners. Harry Qi, Ethan Yu, and Omid Rooholfada are at the heart of it, driving the change every SMB has been waiting for. AI is reshaping business at a speed we've never seen. But for most SMBs it’s still out of reach: too complicated, too expensive, and way too much overhead. The Motion team is breaking down those barriers by replacing the productivity suite with a set of out-of-the-box AI employees, ready to work on day one. A 25-person accounting firm in Kansas City can now have AI teammates handling client follow-ups, prepping docs, updating records, scheduling meetings - the tedious, time sucking stuff that gets in the way of actual work. The team has built a single platform where humans and AI genuinely collaborate. Motion is following a GTM playbook that has led to some of the most significant business outcomes in SaaS: start with a wedge, win the SMB market, then expand across categories and upmarket. We’ve seen this across SaaS giants and within our own portfolio. Box defined content, HubSpot defined inbound marketing, and BILL defined Accounts Payable. They all began with focused products that evolved into comprehensive suites. Motion’s agentic productivity platform is already reaching 10k+ SMBs and is just getting started. The future of agentic work is here, and I can’t wait to see what this team accomplishes! Read more about the story here: https://lnkd.in/dvwkazfK

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A few weeks ago, we spent time in the San Francisco Bay Area meeting founders, operators, and investors who are building at the frontlines of this shift. Across conversations with people like Aliisa Rosenthal, former Sales Head at OpenAI, Emily Cohen, Head of Operations at Cognition, Malte Ubl the CTO at Vercel, and Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia Capital, one theme kept coming up in operating discussions: The real AI advantage is not intelligence. It is reliability. Teams are no longer asking, “Can AI do this task?” They are asking, “Can this system run every day, without supervision, and still deliver predictable outcomes?” That shift changes how products are built. In many of these companies, the conversation has already moved beyond models and prompts. The focus is now on: • How decisions flow across systems • How data moves in real time between teams • How errors are caught before they become operational problems • How workflows keep running even when conditions change In other words - AI is becoming part of the operating layer, not an add-on feature. That lens resonated strongly with me because construction has always been an execution-heavy industry. If you’ve spent time on live sites, you know the challenge isn’t a lack of effort or intent. Contractors, engineers, and site teams are professionals who manage enormous complexity every day. The friction usually comes from systems that don’t reflect how projects actually run - fragmented information, delayed visibility, and decisions that arrive too late. Small gaps compound quickly: • A material delay turns into idle labour • A missed update turns into rework • A cash timing mismatch turns into project stress None of these are intelligence problems. They are system coordination problems. What I saw in the Bay Area conversations was a clear direction: AI is being used to close these coordination gaps: quietly, consistently, and at scale. Not as a mere feature. As operational infrastructure. Over the past few months, we’ve been taking these ideas and pressure-testing them against the realities of the Indian construction ecosystem: across projects, teams, and workflows that run every single day. The goal is simple: - Build systems that reduce surprises - Improve predictability, and - Help teams focus on execution instead of firefighting On Thursday, we will share the next step in that journey for Powerplay. More soon.

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