Michael Jones

Closing out Season 2 of Embracing Erosion with Alena Morris, VP of Product Marketing at Kargo 🙌 Alena has spent 15+ years in ad tech and media, leading product marketing across the publisher, DSP, and SSP sides at PubMatic, Quantcast, and now Kargo. Few people have seen this ecosystem evolve as closely (or as practically) as she has. In this episode, we go deep on where ad tech is actually headed. How AI is unlocking creative intelligence - surfacing patterns, themes, and performance signals that were never accessible before, and turning creative into a true optimization lever. We also dig into: - The blurring lines between SSPs, DSPs, and retail media - Why competition in ad tech is more aggressive than ever - What it takes to lead product marketing and sales teams through real transformation and much more! A fitting way to wrap 20 episodes in Season 2... and 66 total since we started🤯 🎧 Full episode: https://lnkd.in/gwv7JhmW

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Every #VentureStudio GP knows some portfolio bets won’t hit. That's expected - and it's one of the reasons studios are such a powerful vehicle for innovation. And while a venture's failure might be what's visible to the outsider, what keeps them up at night isn’t failure at the venture level — it’s failure at the systemic level within the studio. One bad entity design. One IP misstep. One governance gap. That’s how studio operations fall apart. We break down how to spot (and fix) these cracks before they turn into fault lines in our latest paper, "The GP Dilemma" - DM me and I'll send you a copy!

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ZEC on Solana can be private again. Quick primer: Zcash is a privacy coin. Wrapped ZEC on Solana acts like a normal token, not the private coin people expect. Attention has jumped. ZEC is up 380% recently, so bridges rushed to bring it to fast, cheap rails. The catch: most wraps show balances and history to the whole world. That breaks the point of ZEC. If everyone can see balances, the asset feels foreign on Solana. Privacy should travel with the coin, not stop at the bridge. Encifher offers a fix. It re-wraps ZEC into an encrypted asset, eZEC, so balances and transfers stay hidden while still working with Solana apps. FHE means compute on encrypted data. Here’s the simple model. Your eZEC balance lives as ciphertext held off-chain in a data layer, while Solana keeps small pointers on-chain. Math proofs confirm each move without revealing amounts. Keys are split across a group, like a treasure chest that opens only when trusted parties agree. No single party can peek, and single-use accounts break linkability. Private swaps already plug into a leading DEX. My take: asset-level privacy will beat wallet-level tricks on big chains. When privacy sits inside the token itself, it composes cleanly with DeFi and keeps UX simple. Here’s my quick check for a “private” token: 1. Are balances hidden on-chain. 2. Can you swap it in normal DeFi apps. 3. Is linkability blocked with single-use accounts. If I’m wrong, it’s because wallet UX or compliance rules force teams to water this down and users fall back to public wraps. For newcomers: think of eZEC as ZEC’s privacy, restored on Solana’s speed. Same coin, but with secrecy that survives the bridge. That blend is why I’m watching this space closely.

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A 2-year-old AI adtech startup just acquired the U.S. operations of a 19-year-old company. Rembrand (an Aperiam portfolio company) has acquired Mirriad’s U.S. business, expanding its AI-powered product placement into premium Hollywood content. I think this kind of acquisition is a signal of what’s to come, which is a generational handoff in media and advertising. In this case, traditional VFX - manual, slow, and expensive - is being reimagined by generative AI. What once took months and a team of artists can now be done dynamically, programmatically, and with context-aware intelligence. With this move, Rembrand: - Absorbs deep media relationships and licensing rights (think Modern Family) - Can enter the world of high-end TV and film integrations - Unlocks new, personalized programmatic ad inventory Love Omar Tawakol’s example in the article: You’re watching a scene and see DoorDash. Someone across the globe sees Deliveroo. Same content, different context... rendered by Rembrand’s AI with physics-aware realism. Congrats to Rembrand (Omar, David Wiener, John Sedlak, Cory Treffiletti & co.). The future is AI-native and it’s unfolding quickly! Link in comments.

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🌱💲Affordability is a turning point. New data from ProVeg shows that a plant-based grocery basket is now about 5% cheaper than one with meat, dairy, or seafood across 7 of Germany’s 8 largest grocers — flipping last year’s price premium. That’s a major signal for mainstream adoption. Price signals + better product experiences compound over time. We expect more retailers to sharpen private label strategy, improve availability, and use pricing levers to grow share of plant-forward baskets. #altprotein #consumertrends #foodsystems #grocery Great reporting by Green Queen Media 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eTY9c9Tc

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The Headline family is experiencing incredible momentum, and today our portfolio company DeepIP is announcing a $25M Series B, bringing total funding to $40M.  This is the kind of company that doesn’t just add AI to a workflow, but it sets the standard for an entire category. The momentum speaks for itself: 1️⃣ 10x ARR growth in < 18 months 2️⃣ Trusted by 400+ law firms and leading corporate IP teams globally 3️⃣ 2M+ chats on the DeepIP platform We’ve had the chance to back FX (Francois-Xavier) L. and Edouard D., leading their Seed round with Headline. Watching them take on a problem as complex and high-stakes as patent work has been genuinely impressive. And working with them has been an absolute pleasure: these 2 are coupling very high ambition and humility. Tech built in Europe, but opening the US office very early and FX starting a life in NYC with his family with 0 hesitation in order to build a global category leader in the IP industry. What convinced me early is still what stands out today: patent teams don’t need another standalone AI tool. They need something that fits the way the work actually happens: documents, long-running matters, multiple stakeholders, and zero room for sloppy context handoffs. Big congrats to the whole DeepIP team + Korelya Capital, Balderton & Serena Proud that we’re doubling down at Headline and continuing the support for what’s next!

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