Lawrence Lerner

🚀 Verif-y is redefining digital record management. With 9 State DOE contracts, 200+ institutions onboarded, and 90%+ margins, this AI-powered SaaS platform is solving a $20B+ global problem: fragmented, insecure, and outdated education and credential systems. Now raising $5M Seed funding to accelerate U.S. and international growth. 👉 For VCs and institutional investors: this is defensible, AI-driven SaaS with regulatory moats — the right product, right time. See www.verif-y.com Then DM me for more info. Join us on this funding round? Follow me on LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/e8bZ8srt

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🚀 Verif-y is redefining digital record management. With 9 State DOE contracts, 200+ institutions onboarded, and 90%+ margins, this AI-powered SaaS platform is solving a $20B+ global problem: fragmented, insecure, and outdated education and credential systems. Now raising $5M Seed funding to accelerate U.S. and international growth. 👉 For VCs and institutional investors: this is defensible, AI-driven SaaS with regulatory moats — the right product, right time. See www.verif-y.com Then DM me for more info. Join us on this funding round? Follow me on LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/e8bZ8srt

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Two articles I've been thinking about together this week: Amir Kabir at Overlook VC on "the defining tension of 2026: extraordinary concentration at the infrastructure layer, extraordinary democratization at the application layer" Take a read: https://lnkd.in/gyaFg-nB And Isaac Arnold's framework for what actually makes an application layer company durable: workflow entanglement, domain specific knowledge, and data that compounds from usage rather than just intelligence. Take a read for yourself: https://lnkd.in/gSDXA-vH Amir identifies where the opportunity is, Isaac identifies why most companies building there won't capture it durably and what separates the ones that will.

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As AI workloads eat up global computing supply, DRAM prices are surging like never before—creating major challenges for teams trying to plan out their data center spend. One of my portfolio companies, Mext, is addressing the largest cost component in the datacenter: server memory (DRAM). From being on the board of Redis for the last twelve years, I’ve learned a lot about the various aspects of this problem and approaches to solving them. Mext found a breakthrough, using new AI techniques, for dramatically reducing the amount of server-DRAM required to run applications, all while maintaining performance. It intelligently manages the server’s memory, keeping hot pages (i.e., those in use by applications) in fast DRAM and offloading cold pages (i.e., those less used) to a much less expensive memory tier (e.g., NVMe Flash). Key to the approach is ensuring cold memory pages that are about to be accessed by an application are back in DRAM before the application needs them or notices that they were gone. This is done without modifications to the application or the OS – so it can run in the cloud or on-premise. Mext thus allows applications to either run using less DRAM or keep their DRAM footprint but do more with it. They're hosting a webinar along with Fred Weber (former CTO of AMD) on Jan 22nd at 10am pacific time. You can register here: https://lnkd.in/gXe9GCeE

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Excerpted From the Stanford Closer Look Series paper titled: "THE CEO SCORECARD: HOW DIRECTORS SELECT A CEO WHEN THEY HAVE REAL SKIN IN THE GAME" "In this Closer Look, we consider the perspective of ValueAct Capital, an institutional investor with extensive, direct experience serving on the boards of directors of portfolio companies during multiple succession events. Through an analysis of these events, ValueAct has identified common deficiencies, including the manner in which required skills are identified and framed and the process by which they are evaluated. "ValueAct has also observed that many companies do not use rigorous scorecards built on quantitative metrics to guide the CEO evaluation process. Instead, the qualifications for a replacement CEO are often expressed as a list of vague qualities or adjectives, such as “leadership,” “vision,” “customer-centricity,” “communication skills,” “operational excellence,” and others. "Why are scorecards not more rigorous? Part of the problem lies with the board. All too often, board members lack a clear consensus around a company’s strategy and priorities and struggle to define the company’s future success in terms of specific outcomes. Without consensus, it is not possible to develop a rigorous and objective scorecard by which to evaluate potential internal and external candidates." Think about what ValueAct is saying. Boards (not sometimes but all too often) have difficulty defining the future success of a company in specific outcomes. This is obviously a huge problem in regard to defining what is needed in a new CEO in terms of experience, skills and track record. But it is also a huge problem in regard to: 1. Holding management accountable for results. If there is no consensus on outcomes, how can there be clarity in regard to what is expected of management? 2. If the board has a lack of consensus or clarity in regard to what the value creation drivers are how can there be any assurance that the board is doing its job well in allocating capital and driving operating performance and longer-term shareholder value? Said another way, how can shareholders have any degree of comfort that the board is focused on the development of the full potential of the company? Without major value creation initiatives with measurable results there cannot have been a deep dive diligence process designed to identify the full potential of the company. If such a process is absent, then there must also be the absence of a value maximization governing objective. And if that is absent, what is the role of the board? #valuemaximization #corporategovernance #boardofdirectors #governance #shareholdervalue

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Why "Do No Harm" is the gold standard for Responsible Innovation. Great to hear "Crypto Dad" ex CFTC Commissioner Chris Giancarlo at the Grayscale breakfast in Chicago. It was a pleasure hearing him detail the environment, political climate and approach in this pivotal 2018 testimony to the Senate Banking Committee, where he earned his nickname by stating: "We owe it to this new generation to respect their interest in this new engine of savings and investment." There is a generational divide today in how financial wealth is built over time. - Millennial IG digital natives embrace experiences, renting, digital currencies and financial investing. - Boomer MTV generations grew up on materialism, home ownership, commodities and dollar cost indexing. Crypto Twitter nicknamed him "Crypto Dad" in his defense of Bitcoin. But that misses the bigger lesson. He showed a masterclass in Responsible Innovation. My take - Innovation can't be about "moving fast and breaking things" and leaving the implications unknown, esp in the world of AI. it’s about moving with vision, values and purpose. Responsible Innovation requires: - Empathy: Understanding why the next generation is gravitating toward decentralized, digital-first systems, similar to how my generation embraced the open dotcom internet. Rather than older generations know best. - Balance: Providing robust consumer protections without dismantling the "engine" of growth itself. This balance is very subjective in a democratic society. - Humility: Acknowledging that legacy technologies may not be the optimal solutions for a 2026 digital economy that is fast changing by AI. If we dismiss emerging technology simply because it is unfamiliar, we aren't protecting our future generations. We're simply putting them at a disadvantage over other societies willing to innovate faster and bigger. Thanks to Bob Harazin, Zach Pandl, Laurie Katz the Grayscale Investments team for hosting the thoughtful conversation with other investors and asset allocators. They continue to lead the important work of clarifying how these innovations shape institutional and mainstream adoption.

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At the #FortuneInnovationForum, Monk's Hill Ventures Principal Arun Pai predicted that in the next five years, crypto will see increased innovation. “I do think that in five years, utilizing blockchain, there’s actually going to be a real-world use case that comes out, and that’ll be within the spectrum of stablecoins married to tokenization,” he said. See more coverage here: https://lnkd.in/eErU4nve

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Is PE & VC AI Governance Theater? Many PE & VC firm leaders believe they are governing AI adoption, yet in reality, they've never transferred their own expertise to an AI system. Governance without internal AI proficiency is theater. Ops2AI helps PE & VC leaders codify their diligence, value creation, and judgment criteria, enabling Associates to learn fifty percent faster. This, in turn, allows firms to guide portfolio AI adoption for the right business value levers and build leadership succession engines. Without capturing and sharing internal intelligence at the firm and Leadership level, you're just acting. Firm-to-Portfolio AI = IP Capture >Training > Execution > The AI Lifecycle

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If you care about out-innovating China in the AI war, you need more efficient chips, not just brute force buildout for hot, inefficient chips and architecture. That’s why DCVC backed Mythic — up to 1000x the SWapC of NVIDIA’s 2028 roadmap for real time embedded and datacenter compute. Oh, and by the way, *made on American fabs with zero Taiwan supply chain dependency*… We can’t pour more concrete than China, and our grid interconnect workers don’t slave away under threat of being murdered for their organs. We need smaller, cooler, faster, smarter, more power efficient chips. Mythic is proving that *today* with live silicon.

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My review of Pablos Holman's seriously probing (yet occasionally witty) book, Deep Future, about the core technologies that can transform key industries, in CTech by Calcalist. A must-read for any DeepTech investor or entrepreneur.

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One of the most important conversations I heard in Davos today wasn’t about more AI. It was about whether we trust the systems we’re building enough to deploy them at scale. At a Rethinking Risk session at Davos 2026, leaders from media, government, multilateral institutions, and global finance kept circling the same concern: the erosion of trust. The conversation included Ravi Agrawal, Editor-in-Chief, Foreign Policy; Rebeca Grynspan, Secretary-General, UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD); Amer Bisat, Minister of Economy and Trade, Republic of Lebanon; Amb. Yusuf Maitama Tuggar, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Federal Republic of Nigeria; Stephanie von Friedeburg, Managing Director & Global Head of Public Sector, Citi. Across very different vantage points, the message was consistent: misinformation, selective or low-quality data, and a growing post-truth environment are undermining consensus, multilateralism, and sound risk analysis. When trust erodes: — due diligence weakens — uncertainty rises and risk premia increase — fact-based decision-making breaks down for governments and businesses alike The key takeaway: AI doesn’t fail at deployment because the models aren’t powerful enough. It fails when the systems around it aren’t trusted. Rebuilding trust isn’t just a technical challenge. It requires rigorous verification and higher-quality data; transparent analytics and governance; and inclusive, cross-stakeholder consensus-building. As the World Economic Forum continues to emphasize, trust isn’t a soft value layered onto innovation. It’s a prerequisite for scale, resilience, and long-term economic coordination. If we want AI to reduce risk rather than amplify it, we have to start by designing systems people and institutions can trust. That may be the hardest work ahead. And also the most important.

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A few weeks ago, we brought the Origin Ventures community of LPs and 80+ portfolio company executives together in Park City for our Annual Meeting and CXO Summits. In our annual meeting, we covered the Origin Ventures VI investment themes: ⚡🖥️🔒AI Infrastructure (e.g. compute, power, quantum, language models, security) 📦💿🔗AI-Native Software (e.g. logistics, supply chain, sales, operations, consumer) 🤖🛰️🚀AI Frontier Tech (e.g. robotics & autonomy, defense, electrification, space, materials & manufacturing) We featured Origin Ventures VI CEOs from: Torus fresh off its $200M financing led by Magnetar Voze integrating AI into its sales enablement roadmap for field sales AudioShake scaling 5x YoY with enterprise partners across AI and media & entertainment The next day, portfolio company leaders exchanged ideas in three forums in three iconic locations:  - CEO summit  - Builders Summit (engineering and product) - GTM Summit (sales and marketing) The highlight is an unforgettable dinner at Blue Sky Ranch—an evening of conversation, connection, and community with our LPs and execs together. We are grateful to our LPs and our execs who make it a great week of learning. 👨‍🏫  

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Questions over how much growth will actually capture an investor's attention are coming up more than ever these days, largely because vertical growth charts have become the norm for AI companies, making the old "triple, triple, double, double" framework feel entirely unimpressive. Connie Loizos recently interviewed Stacy Brown-Philpot on a StrictlyVC Download episode to ask what makes a company exciting from the perspective of her firm, our friends at Cherryrock Capital. Stacy emphasized "quality revenue", businesses with truly high retention, real enterprise customers, and perhaps slower but more sustainable growth that can stand the test of time. We've touched on this topic before on the podcast, and Charles and I talked through the challenge founders face in both building that type of revenue and finding investors who prioritize it in a world where growth spikes attract a lot of eyeballs. We also discussed the widely shared Citrini Research piece, comparing it to "Something Big Is Happening," and worked through which components felt compelling versus which felt like a stretch. Needless to say, it got everyone talking, including the public markets, which was fascinating given that it was a hypothetical scenario. I appreciated Noah Smith's response on his Substack, Noahpinion, which fleshed out thoughts similar to ones we had on the pod. We also discussed a LinkedIn post by Alex Pall exploring a situation that's becoming more common: founders who have built strong businesses feeling less motivated to continue down their original path, given how quickly the current market is evolving each day, and wrestling with whether it makes more sense to stay the course or break off to build something new. Links in the comments to catch the latest episode of The Learning Corner by Precursor Ventures!

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