Jeff Weinstein

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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Don't Build a Better Wheat Farm" - Why Defensibility Stakes Are Higher in Deep Tech Just published a new piece on my "Ignore the Confusion" blog, building on thoughtful insights from Eric Ver Ploeg at Tunitas Ventures about startup defensibility. Eric's core thesis: Too many startups pitch like wheat farmers - "huge TAM, slow incumbents, growing market, domain expertise" - but fail to think through long-term defensibility until it's too late. From a deep tech perspective, the stakes are even higher: ** Unlike software, deep tech founders must commit to defensibility strategies from day one - their funding depends on it ** Patent vs. trade secret decisions are often difficult to reverse and shape your entire competitive strategy ** Even "picks and shovels" providers (the tools that make industries more efficient) become commodities without proper moats The key insight that resonates: Defensibility can't be retrofitted. Whether you're building software or deep tech, your moat must be architected into the business model from the start. Thanks to Eric Ver Ploeg for sharing these insights on startup strategy and letting me build on his framework from a deep tech lens. Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/dEj_iF-Q #DeepTech #StartupStrategy #Defensibility #VentureCapital #Innovation

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Great conversations at our WillowTree Ventures dinner with leaders across fintech and AI. A few themes stood out strongly: enterprises are leaning into AI for real efficiency gains, product and engineering orgs still set the agenda, and the whitespace in “boring” industries is wider than most people assume. It’s clear that the next breakout companies in AI for financial services won’t come from the obvious places. Thanks to everyone who joined - excited to keep working alongside founders building in these non-obvious, high-impact wedges.

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🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg

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🎙️ From Square to Mercury: How Rohini Pandhi became one of fintech’s top product leaders—and how velocity of learning at high slope companies shaped everything. Rohini dropped so many gems in our first episode of First Builders: 💎 Generalist → Specialist: In her early career, she was a generalist and tried everything. This led her to critical discoveries. She specialized in product and fintech when the “time was right” 💎 Follow the Engineers and Designers: Square was a high slope environment for Rohini, packed with talent density and learnings. She finds high slope environments by studying where smart engineers and designers are going. 💎 Fake News about PMs: PMs don’t just “move fast and break things.” Her team runs 30-50 customer interviews per quarter, providing rigor behind every decision. 💎 It’s Usually Too Early to Hire a PM: A top question she gets from founders is whether they should hire a PM. She usually says: “it’s too early.” 💎 Hiring a World Class Team is Like Tennis: When finding a tennis partner, you want someone a little better than you who can challenge you to improve your game. Give us a listen and leave a review on your favorite podcast location (see comments for links)! #FirstBuilders #StartupPodcast #ProductLeadership #TechCareers #Leadership

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Enterprise integrations have long been a tar pit for great software, where months of costly manual work eats margin and kills momentum. Refold (formerly Cobalt)’s agents flip that script, automating the heavy lifting so that tool implementations plug in and deliver value in a fraction of the time. Incredibly excited to see Jugal Anchalia and Abhishek Kumar demolish the most stubborn bottleneck in enterprise software!

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We continue to see fintechs launch their own chains. First Circle with Arc. Now Tempo from Stripe. In today's webinar, folks asked, "Do we really need another payments chain?" The answer depends on where you are in your journey. At Dynamic, we’ve seen this play out across every type of builder (fintechs to consumer apps to onchain infra teams). The truth is: there is no single “right” chain. There are only tradeoffs. - L1s (like Stripe building its own): Maximum control, but higher setup fees. You own the infrastructure and the overhead. - L2s & rollups (like Robinhood's choice): More agile, but built on shared foundations. Optimized public chains (Solana, Stellar, Spark, etc.): Fast, cost-efficient, and ready to go. They're great for teams that want to launch quickly without reinventing the wheel. My recommendation: Start with what’s performant and proven. Chains like Solana Foundation, Stellar Development Foundation, and Lightspark get you to market fast. Once you’ve found product-market fit and scale, then revisit whether spinning up your own chain makes sense. – 🔁 Share this post if you found it helpful. ➕ Follow me (Itai Turbahn) for more posts on stablecoins and crypto.

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AI is changing the structure of most companies we see. Lots more coming from us on how startups can build faster, leaner teams -- and where we see all of this going. Great piece from Pete Flint to kick it off: https://lnkd.in/dcUebcJj

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I’ve come to believe that early experiences carry disproportionate weight - far more than we often acknowledge. For designers and builders, “minimum viable” may suffice for validating core functionality, but it rarely earns trust or sparks genuine delight. While velocity matters, I’ve always struggled with the notion that early versions should be merely viable, especially in a world where attention is scarce and emotional resonance is everything. This extends beyond product. Do you show up as the minimum viable version of yourself in your work, your relationships, your craft? I would encourage you to challenge the conventional MVP framework. Replace it with the Minimum Awesome Product. This doesn’t mean it’s fully-featured or pixel perfect. But it should be worthy of attention. Memorable, even evocative in the way it triggered emotion. The kind of product that prompts someone to say, “I didn’t know I needed this, but now I can’t live without it.” You can refine mechanics over time, but the emotional experience of a first interaction is singular and unrecoverable. Don’t settle for viability. Build something worth remembering… and make it awesome! ❤️‍🔥

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If you know... A 10x engineer Who loves the speed and intellectual challenge of early stage but also Wants job stability and Equity diversification then This is the one job that checks all of their boxes

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Ribbit Capital is leading the Series A for @SafetyKit. Few people in the world are better than David Graunke and Steven Guichard to replace manual risk reviews and trust & safety with AI models. They saw where the world was going in 2023 and already have huge customers relying on them. 🕵‍♀️

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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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I first experienced Hackathon's at Meta and was always blown away by what could be built in 24 hours. Now at Viam, founder and CEO Eliot Horowitz and team are showing how easy it is for software engineers to build any type of robot. What is your dream robot to build?

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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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Investors (esp deep tech investors) generally think about things/bet on "layers": the application, the infrastructure, the model. I think that's becoming the wrong way to look at it? The real opportunity is in the feedback loop *between* the layers. A new social app creates demand for new hardware, which in turn demands a new kind of intelligence - I'm calling it "The Agency Loop". My latest newsletter explores this thesis through three signals: the "weaponized transgression" of Cluey, the AI-driven materials science in Nature, and the architectural critiques of Kenneth Stanley. Bet the loop, not the layer :) You can read the full analysis here: https://lnkd.in/ggdVGEda #vibecap #vibecapital #vc #deeptech #AI #cluely

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Funding: WisdomAI just raised $50M. The message behind it is bigger than the round. Not saying investors always get it right, but I see takeaways for data/AI leaders: 1. Analytics teams to extend from dashboarding to “decision readiness.” The BI/analytics category is moving toward real-time, context-aware decision support and increasingly, automation. Data leaders: Shift KPIs from “time-to-insight” to time-to-decision and evaluate tools on their ability to support agents with semantic modeling, workflows, and closed-loop learning. 2. BI isn’t going away-it's evolving. Dashboards aren't dying. BI/analytics insights are still selling, but insights give way to fast growth in decision loop solutions built on context that can be verified. Data leaders: As analytics move into governance, expect your BI/ Semantics / catalog ecosystems to converge. Plan your architecture accordingly. 3. Context is the make-or-break factor for AI. WisdomAI's Enterprise Context Layer is a key part of how they provide the queries to answer prompted questions. Data/AI leaders: invest in the semantic layer, unify metadata and policy-as-code to govern reasoning. This is where the next competitive gap will open. WisdomAI grew on the bet that context + trust will power the next generation of AI-driven action. The bigger story? We’re moving from AI that answers → to AI that actually understands and acts—safely. That’s why this raise matters. Read WisdomAI's release here: https://lnkd.in/gnkssiFU #DataToDecision #DecisionVelocity #EnterpriseAI #SemanticLayer #BITransformation #CDAO #AnalyticsModernization

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✨ A very fun start to Frameworks for Growth - a new video series from Vanta. "Frameworks" are core to who Vanta is: -We support 40 different compliance frameworks within the product -One of our principles is "Decide with frameworks," and a common question in meetings at Vanta is, "what framework did you use for deciding [x]?" -And now, we're hoping to provide founders and early operators with some frameworks *they* can use for scaling their businesses in the age of AI. Thanks to Garry Tan and Christina Cacioppo for this awesome first conversation. You should watch the whole thing, but tldw - one framework for growth: learn an industry deeply and vibe code towards something people want.

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Three lessons from a second-time founder Husayn Kassai built and led Onfido for 10 years. These are the three lessons he's applying to ollo. 1. Product-market fit is about solving burning problems, not building perfect products. If you're working on something customers desperately need, they'll be patient while you figure out execution. Your first product doesn't need polish, it needs to solve a problem urgent enough that customers tolerate rough edges while you improve. Be scientific about validating this. 2. Hiring determines everything Your ability to bring in people who complement each other and fit your mission is the biggest determinant of success. 3. Trust your gut, especially when you think you've outgrown it. You have three signals as a founder: your head (rational), your heart (emotional), and your gut (instinct). Tech founders have a habit of preferring rationality and ignoring the other two. How your team feels matters. How customers feel about your product matters. And your gut matters most five or ten years in when you’re hiring experienced execs from big companies and think you can finally stop paying attention. Trust the pattern recognition you've built.

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