Mark Troughton

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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I’ve spoken to over 2 dozen MDs at PE firms I can confidently say that the arb of figuring out how to implement Vertical AI at portfolio companies is very real right now It will fundamentally change underwriting for those who can do it predictably and unlock generational returns. Most are aware they need to act. Very few have.

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Every hire, product feature, and GTM experiment is a capital allocation decision, most teams just don’t call it that. I’m kicking off a 3-part series on capital allocation for founders, operators, and finance leaders with a simple question: ➡️ Will the next $1 you deploy become worth more than $1? Series overview Part 1: defines the core concept + the math Part 2: where capital goes + how to measure whether it’s working Part 3: AIMS framework for communicating allocation decisions to management teams and your board Part 1 (attached here) lays the practical foundation: 🔹 The $1 invested test and ROIIC vs. hurdle rates (scoreboard vs. decision lens) 🔹 A lightweight “investment brief” to evaluate bets (GROW / BUILD / BUY) 🔹 The small metric toolkit that translates finance into operating decisions (NPV / payback / ROIIC / incremental margin) 🔹 Early-stage proxies when DCF inputs are unknowable (burn multiple + revenue quality) 🔹 Operator “vital signs” to spot drift early (profit engine, leverage, cash conversion, optics) Series Roadmap ✔️ This series (Parts 1–3): breadth-first. shared, lightweight framework to define value creation, choose decision-grade metrics, and communicate tradeoffs clearly ✔️ Next series: depth-first. momentum drivers + operational decisions that need near real-time measurement to spot drift early and course-correct fast Read Part 1 here and Part 2 and 3 on substack. Next Series will be out next week. 💰 What’s one bet you’re funding right now, and how will you prove it’s working?

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Here's a problem we see all the time in early studios: they copy-paste a VC fund's operating cadence and wonder why nothing feels right. Weekly deal flow reviews. Portfolio monitoring calls. Valuation-focused LP reports. All borrowed wholesale from a fund playbook. But a VC fund's primary activity is deal selection -- source, evaluate, check, board, wait. A studio's primary activity is venture creation -- generate, validate, recruit, build, launch. Those are fundamentally different jobs. When you run a studio like a fund, things break in specific ways: Your meetings are wrong. You're reviewing deal flow instead of venture build progress -- milestones, blockers, resource allocation. The work is building, not sourcing. Your team is wrong. Studios need builders at every level -- operators, designers, engineers. Not just investment professionals. You can't build companies with a team designed to pick them. 📉 Your metrics are wrong. Entry valuations and markups don't tell you anything useful. Cost-to-build-a-venture, time-to-market, and venture survival at 18 months -- those are the numbers that actually measure whether the studio is working. Your LP reporting is wrong. Report operational progress -- what's building, what's launching, what's been killed and why. Not just portfolio movements. Here's the lesson -- the studios that struggle most are the ones that adopted VC templates without modifying them for fundamentally different work. The portfolio companies don't exist until the studio creates them. Not a fund that happens to build things. A builder that happens to have a fund. The operating rhythm should reflect which one is primary. 🎯

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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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Proud to support Esusu as it enters its next phase of growth with a new $50M Series C fundraise! Wemimo Abbey, Samir Goel and team continue to lead the industry in credit building and economic mobility for millions of renters nationwide. Esusu (Founder Institute San Francisco portfolio company) is setting a new standard for combining economic and societal impact. By helping renters get credit (literally) for paying their rent on time, they are increasing financial access and empowering more people to become homeowners - in fact, they have already empowered over $30BN in new mortgages from renters across their system. I'm especially excited about how they plan to leverage their massive dataset to create even more impact. By making rental payment data a more prominent feature in mortgage underwriting, Esusu will be able to increase the number of people that can buy homes and build generational wealth. This is a truly inspiring company 🙌 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/guUKsGtY

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Dayna Grayson is a leading VC who has “sat in every chair” at a young age. She founded Construct Capital with Rachel Holt, an early leader at Uber. Together, they are tackling the digitization of industry. Dayna will discuss macro trends, what it takes to be a founder, and the potential for AI. She is one of the few who have successfully blended a career of operations and investing.  Check out our discussion at: https://lnkd.in/eYBUGjbW #leadershipdevelopment

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As a founder I too am a big fan of writing investor updates - it's hard when you're just a few people to keep track of time - some days it's absolutely bonkers crazy, and other days you're waiting for leads to mature. Your constantly changing/pulling in new information until you get to PMF and Investor updates gives you a trusted audience to reflect and synthesize with and for.

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