The Flowlie Times #44
Paige Doherty of Behind Genius Ventures, fate of YC startups, LLMs for dummies, state of AI by McKinsey, and Flowlie product updates.
Welcome to The Flowlie Times.
Product updates
Founders, your app experience now starts at your brand-new founder dashboard. This is the place where you can see an overview of all your stats and learn about the 6 steps you can take to get you started on Flowlie.
Product demos have been a feature that a lot of you took advantage of to share more about what you do with prospective investors. We are excited to share that now those videos play directly on your one-pager as long as they are hosted on YouTube, Loom, or Vimeo. Check it out by going to "Preview" in your Company One-Pager.
We made a myriad of UI and UX changes around the app based on your feedback to make it easier for you to find what you are looking for. The most obvious one is renaming "Access Manager" to "Track Views" -- all your analytics are in the same place just under a new name.
Last but not least, we revamped our referral system. Founders, refer 3 founders to Flowlie to get a month of Flowlie Pro for free.
Articles we enjoyed:
1️⃣ “On the life and death of Y Combinator startups” - enjoy charts with a breakdown of the current status of YC startups.
The blue bars (active) decline sharply going back in time as more startups reach their ultimate resolution. They don’t really stabilize until the ~12 year mark, by which point ~88% of startups have either shut down or exited. This means that only ~7% of startups from a given vintage reach resolution each year.
2️⃣ “LLMs for Dummies. Plus, 4 Frameworks for LLM Applications”. Great beginner-friendly explanation.
3️⃣ The state of AI in 2023: Generative AI’s breakout year - by McKinsey:
Adoption of generative AI is already widespread, with about one-third of the survey respondents' organizations regularly using it in at least one business function.
Despite the increasing interest in generative AI, the overall adoption of AI tools has remained relatively steady since 2022, primarily concentrated within specific business functions. This indicates that while generative AI might drive the adoption of other AI technologies, its influence on overall AI adoption has been limited.
Companies that have already integrated AI capabilities are leading the way in exploring the potential of generative AI, outpacing others in adopting these new tools.
Podcast highlight
Paige Doherty, co-founder and managing partner of Behind Genius Ventures, joins Vlad Cazacu, co-founder and CEO of Flowlie, to discuss her journey from student of the venture ecosystem to the youngest-ever fund GP. In this episode, we unpack Paige's content creation strategy, the early syndication days, and the first LP check.
Venture announcements that caught our eye:
1️⃣ Vancouver-based startup Hiive has secured $4.2 million in funding for its platform that enables investors and employees to buy and sell shares of privately held venture-backed companies in the secondary market. Founded in 2021, Hiive aims to provide more accurate and real-time valuations for late-stage startups and has experienced significant growth in both transaction rate and volume over the past year. The funding round, led by Uncorrelated Ventures, brings Hiive's post-money valuation to $77 million.
2️⃣ Urban Sky, a stratospheric balloon company, has raised $9.75 million in a Series A funding round to expand its Earth imaging operations and develop data products. The Denver-based startup is using reusable small stratospheric balloons that can be deployed from pickup trucks. Urban Sky plans to create a routine catalogue of data for highly populated areas and other customer interests, primarily serving the environmental monitoring, insurance, and oil and gas sectors.
3️⃣ Warmly, a company that originally offered custom backgrounds and participant information for Zoom meetings but pivoted to providing warm leads for sales departments, has secured an $11 million Series A funding round led by Felicis. The company's new product uses data from various sources, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and others, to help sales teams automate tasks and target warm leads more effectively.
4️⃣ Anysphere, a startup focused on creating an "AI-native" software development environment called Cursor, has raised $8 million in seed funding, led by OpenAI's Startup Fund. Cursor is designed to help developers write code more efficiently by offering AI-powered tools for code generation, answering questions about code, and finding and fixing bugs.
Have a great week,
Mike from Flowlie