Michael O.

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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In the San Francisco Bay Area, founders are relentless about growing and scaling their companies. They spot opportunity, scale through uncertainty, and create companies that redefine industries. Recently, we gathered a group of founders and tech leaders to discuss the intersection of company growth and long-term personal success. Eric S. Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zoom Communications, shared the inspiring story behind his company’s growth and eventual IPO. Eric reiterated that the founders who create the most impact don’t just plan for an exit – they prepare for what comes after. Too often, personal wealth planning lags company growth, and that gap can become costly at the most pivotal moments. The rest of the evening was focused on closing that gap. Our colleagues in Goldman Sachs Investment Banking, Pawan Tewari and Nick Giovanni, shared a candid outlook for M&A and IPOs in this environment, along with important steps founders should take to prepare for a strategic exit. We ended with a conversation around the key considerations for maximizing founders’ personal outcomes. Pre-transaction planning isn’t defensive - it’s opportunistic. Your company’s exit strategy and your family’s long-term planning work should not be done in isolation. When investment banking and private wealth work in sync, founders can cohesively optimize outcomes on all sides of the equation. To learn more about the practical “do’s and don'ts” for founders, we are happy to share our ‘Goldman guide’ for navigating wealth planning, business exists, and IPOs: https://lnkd.in/ewhEGjV3. Thank you, Eric, and to all the founders who joined us at The Battery in SF. On behalf of Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management and Investment Banking, we look forward to the next conversation.

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I’m thrilled to share that White Star Capital is backing AMI - Advanced Machine Intelligence in their historic $1.03bn seed round 🚀 - Led by the legendary Yann LeCun and Alex LeBrun. AMI isn't building another LLM, they're building World Models. Why this matters: *Beyond Text: Grounded in JEPA architecture to solve physical-world problems. *Global Powerhouse: A dream team from Meta FAIR, OpenAI, and DeepMind. *Sovereign Tech: A credible European-led alternative to US Big Tech. Excited to be part of this journey along with the rest of the WSC team Eric Martineau-Fortin, Matthieu Lattes, Bérénice Moustial and Victoria Pozzi Rocco Belforti. 🌍✨ https://lnkd.in/eiCKZKSQ #VentureCapital #AI

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Announcing our portco Zeno has raised next round of $25mn with participation from Congruent Ventures Lowercarbon Capital Trifecta Capital ! Advantedge Founders continues to back the team with $2mn additional investment. Its been terrific working with Michael Spencer & Greg Moran to establish the full stack model in Africa. With this raise expansion in new markets and planning for India launch is next steps. https://lnkd.in/gGr6qiBj

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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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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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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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𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗔𝗜 - 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗟𝗠 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 At True Bearing LLC, our first commercial application of generative AI was Exit Camp™ — an AI-driven training program that prepares management teams to navigate the rigors and complexities of a sale process. The generative power of LLMs enabled us to adapt content on the fly, help teams build impactful messaging, and pressure-test that messaging to battle-harden management before they ever set foot in a room with prospective buyers. But in building Exit Camp, we uncovered an application even more powerful. LLMs have been trained on the entire written output of human persuasion. They have internalized the patterns of document construction — the rhetorical moves, the framing techniques, the strategic omissions, the ways narratives get built to lead a reader toward a desired conclusion. LLMs have seen it all. And that is what makes them so powerful when applied in reverse — through 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗔𝗜. Our first deconstructive AI application was built for private equity deal teams — the people who sift through hundreds of inbound Confidential Information Memorandums, all competing for a coveted audience in front of the firm's investment committee. CIMs are carefully crafted marketing documents designed to persuade buyers that they are looking at the one must-own asset that will define their firm's success for decades. 𝗖𝗜𝗠𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗻 will have none of it. Through a carefully governed pipeline, 𝗖𝗜𝗠𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗻 uses the reasoning power of LLMs to deconstruct professionally prepared CIMs into the bare set of hard, operational claims that serve as their foundation. Every claim extracted. Each one gated against defined underwriting surfaces. Interdependencies traced. Thesis pillars synthesized across five dimensions. A detailed diligence plan produced to run every claim to ground — delivered in minutes. Three properties make this work: 𝗖𝗜𝗠𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲. The underlying model has ingested perhaps millions of related documents and developed a deep sense of what a complete operational narrative looks like. When something is conspicuously absent, CIMScan notices — identifying the shape of what's missing, not just what's present. 𝗖𝗜𝗠𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴. Each claim is extracted and pressure-tested on its own merit — not how it is positioned among surrounding claims or narratives. No anchoring. No priming. No persuasion. 𝗖𝗜𝗠𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗲. CIMScan analyzes a document as one complete structure - not a sequential series of pages. Claim 81 on page 200 receives the same rigor as claim 1 in the executive summary. No fatigue. No over-indexing. All interdependencies tracked completely and accurately. Generative AI helps bankers build the book. Deconstructive AI helps deal teams see through it. Learn more in the comments.

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