Search results

There’s arguably no technology more hyped than AI right now. And where there are hype cycles, there’s also plenty of opinions, distractions, and misinformation. That doesn’t mean it’s not a great time to be investing in AI (we think it is) or that AI isn’t a fundamental shift that will transform our lives (again, we think it will)—but it does mean there’s a lot of noise in the space.  

Our founders, partners, and collaborators are cutting through that noise. From Union Square Ventures co-founder Brad Burnham’s take that AI agents will kill traditional advertising, to M13 co-founder Carter Reum’s belief that investing in AI technology alone doesn’t work, our community’s perspectives challenge hype cycle thinking and highlight how AI could reshape the ways we work, connect, and build.

1. Ad space is going through a sea change. 

“One of the biggest things agents are going to do is filter the world for you…one of the first things that's going to go is advertising.” — Union Square Ventures co-founder Brad Burnham

Brad believes the future of AI agents isn’t agents acting for you, but agents curating what you consume. Users generally don’t want advertising in their feed. If they’re in control of that feed via an agent who searches for things of interest to them, they’re going to eliminate advertising. 

We dive deep on how AI is transforming everything from SEO and SEM to influencer marketing and connected TV in our latest report on how AI is changing marketing in 2025. 

More from Brad: AI, Crypto, and Riding Hype Cycle Waves with Brad and Latif

2. New York could be the new Silicon Valley for AI. 

“I fundamentally believe that New York’s Empire AI project will spur the kind of broader economic and tech growth that we saw centered around Stanford and Silicon Valley for 20 years—becoming a new center of gravity for the best faculty, post-docs, students, employers, and startups.” —Tech:NYC President & CEO Julie Samuels

A lot of people think the ultimate AI hub is San Francisco—but we’re seeing great founders in New York building with AI. 

Our portfolio companies are building AI-powered futures in finance (Rho), local government (Polimorphic), public safety (Prepared), business intelligence (Zenlytic) and more, all operating in the Empire State.

More from Julie: Forging Private-Public Relationships Across the State, Country, and Universe

3. AI is no longer optional for founders.

“In 2024, if you don’t have AI in your pitch deck, I want to know why.” —M13 partner Anna Barber 

AI is all about efficiency gains: it can make things faster, cheaper, and better. It’s not just a trend, but a paradigm shift that is improving efficiency. So if you’re a founder that isn’t using AI, Anna wants to know why.

Meet Anna: How the Dot Com Boom Shaped Her AI Investing Strategy—And Which Founders Get Her Attention

4. At the same time…don’t just tack on “.ai” after your name and call yourself an AI company. 

“A lot of companies get a .ai domain and assume they’re an AI company.” —M13 Partner Rob Smith

Many AI companies aren’t “really” AI companies; they’re using AI from other firms or planning to implement AI in the future. AI has become a marketing tool for founders, and we don’t knock them for that! But investors need to dig deeper. There’s a big difference between a company that uses AI tools to automate internal processes versus an AI-first company building a product around artificial intelligence. 

More from Rob: AI Company Misconceptions and His Journey from Startup Fixer to Venture Capitalist

5. AI creativity doesn’t move us; human creativity does.

 “Story makes creativity effective, and effective creativity is creativity that moves us. I don’t think what comes out of models necessarily moves us.” —Adobe Chief Strategy Officer Scott Belsky 

When you look at a piece of fine art in a gallery, you're not paying for the paint or the canvas. You're paying for the story behind it. 

Scott believes that in the era of generative AI, consumers will crave scarcity, story, and process more than ever. The story behind an art piece, film, or even a marketing campaign will become more important as AI matures. 

More from Scott: AI Is Coming for Our Work. That’s a Good Thing.

6. It’s not about AI. It’s about the implications of AI.

“Just investing in AI doesn’t work.” —M13 co-founder & partner Carter Reum

We believe AI is a technical revolution, like the internet and mobile phones. Right now everyone’s talking about the technology itself, but that could be just the first ripple. 

Think about companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft: they rose to prominence because the iPhone first made them possible. At M13, we’re excited about the second, third, and fourth ripples of AI: what this technology will make possible in the future of work, commerce, health, and money. 

More from Carter: How to Spot the Tech Unicorn to Invest In

7. The AI agent technology of tomorrow is about being able to put actions together without humans in the loop.

“It's about ultimately giving AI outcomes. Today you can tell an agent, ‘order me a pizza,’ and a pizza arrives. But at the next level, you tell an agent, ‘I’m hungry,’ and it knows from your overall history that you like pizza, and so it orders you one.” —Maven AGI co-founder and CTO Sami Shalabi 

At M13 portfolio company Maven AGI, Sami, Jonathan, and team are creating an AGI platform for enterprises. In the future, a marketing tech company could tell an AI agent, “I want 100 leads.” The potential value is to fundamentally 100x human productivity.

More from Sami: The Rise of AI Agents

8. The Googles and Amazons of tomorrow are being built right now.

“The greatest businesses in history were built during tough economic periods." —M13 partner Karl Alomar

When funding is scarce, valuations are more reasonable, and founders build with efficiency in mind. This combination creates fertile ground for long-term growth.

Karl's not afraid of hype—he believes investors just need to be careful of excitement without due diligence. It takes good strategic thinking and a calm, stable team to navigate through false flags and identify the “needles in the hype haystack” that actually have meaningful potential.

Meet Karl: On Scaling Startups, Founder Red Flags, and Why He’s Not Afraid of Hype

9. Startups have an edge in AI that incumbents don’t.

“This shift in technology positions startups at the application layer to compete with incumbents.” —M13 investor Morgan Blumberg 

The AI tech stack includes infrastructure, orchestration, and application layers. Startups at the application layer have an edge that incumbents don’t: to build from the ground up on generative AI. 

That flexibility can result in fast adoption in the most difficult times. For example, M13 portfolio company Polimorphic saw new use cases when Florida and North Carolina cities and counties used its AI-enabled search to make sure residents got up to date information and disaster recovery packages. 

More from Morgan: AI Fundamentals: What AI Really Does and Where We’re Looking to Invest

10. We shouldn’t take our human uniqueness for granted.  

“Technology isn’t what’s making people better off. It’s actually the impact of the decisions we make and how we use our tools. When we think about future uncertainties and present-day decisions that we have control over, that’s our choice. It’s up to us to make decisions that result in shared prosperity and tools that enable that.” —M13 partner Christine Choi

At a recent A. Team panel on tackling bias in AI development, M13 partner Christine Choi started the conversation by asking each panelist to share something that AI doesn’t know about them. There’s so much to adopt and iterate on with this technology—but it’s important not to take our human uniqueness for granted.

Meet Christine: M13's Head of Brand Communications on Navigating Crisis and The Importance of Storytelling

Wise words from one of the most memorable (if fictitious) advertisers of our time. 

Few industries are experiencing AI’s immediate impacts as much as advertising. AI is upending today’s media landscape, from the way people consume content to the methods merchants use to catch their attention. 

The good news: Marketers are adaptable to change. Looking back over the last 100 years of advertising, marketers have time and time again had to adapt to changing consumer behavior. The ad spend pie in the US has expanded exponentially (digital marketing has grown 7x over the last decade) as ad dollars move to new formats. And as consumption mediums change, marketers find new inventory to meet consumer demand in increasingly targeted and personalized ways. 

Even the largest incumbents need to adapt their marketing strategies. Our investment team has had firsthand experience on the digital marketing team at Google, which constantly tests new channels and strategies to boost their advertising efforts. This involves implementing new search and display ad formats, trialing programmatic retail advertising on Amazon and Walmart, shifting TV media spend from linear to Connected TV (CTV), including YouTube TV, and even running one of the first TikTok ads.

Below, we dive into the changing landscape across digital advertising and the changes coming to every channel from search to CTV, to understand both how consumers are changing buying habits in an AI-first world and how merchants are adapting their strategies to meet them there.   

To write this article, we spoke with industry veterans across advertising and marketing. Thank you to Emily Allen and Michael Carney at Google, Saket Mehta at Block, Tom Triscari at Quo Vadis, Nate Yu at Butter, and Jon Zacharias at GR0.

The changing marketing landscape 

Digital marketing is a $300B+ industry in the US today, making up three quarters of total advertising spend (the remaining is from declining channels like linear TV, radio, OOH, print). 

Today, we’re beginning to see the almost endless use cases for AI in advertising and marketing. It’s transforming how marketers plan, execute, and measure their campaigns. Predictive AI continues to get better, improving targeting, bolstering analytics (both pre- and post-campaign), and optimizing budgets and distribution of spend across channels. 

Walled gardens and ad platforms like Google, Meta, and TikTok have launched new AI products that are optimizing spend, although this only works within their own ecosystems. Marketers are left to find platform-independent tools to maximize spend across digital channels. This feels like a big opportunity for new entrants to own cross-platform spend for marketers. We believe generative AI will have profound impacts on media planning, which has been a highly manual process to date. AI will automate the planning phase with optimized spend allocation to free up marketers’ time to focus on ad creative.

AI creates an opportunity to democratize access to these capabilities across all channels.

With generative AI, we believe marketers will be able to scale content creation like never before across all mediums: copy, imagery, and video. This potentially includes the ability to supercharge personalization, creating more relevant ad experiences for each member of their target audience; rapidly optimize campaigns based on feedback, because there are shorter cycles between ideation and implementation; and do all of this for far less money and at far greater speed. Some agencies we spoke with believe this will be the key to the future of marketing agencies, allowing them to service a far greater number of clients while hiring far fewer people. 

As consumer and enterprise adoption of AI moves from early adopters to the majority, marketers will need to stay ahead of the curve and meet prospective buyers where they are. Below, we address where advertising is having the greatest impact across the major spend categories.

Search 

One of the first areas of advertising being upended is search, including both search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search engine marketing (SEM). 

Google has long dominated the search category, with an estimated 90% market share. But with the spread of LLM-powered chat tools, that market share may be eroding faster than any of us previously thought. A recent survey conducted by Evercore revealed that already 8% of consumers are choosing ChatGPT over Google for their search engine. More remarkably, only 1% of that same group of respondents stated that preference earlier in the year, representing an 8x increase in less than half a year.

Consumers have begun to change their behavior from searching for options to searching for answers. For example, you might ask ChatGPT to give you a list of the best TV shows of this year, rather than clicking through multiple links of editorials and aggregators yourself. Gone could be the days of searching, clicking through blue links, and scrolling sites until you find what you’re looking for. (This will also upend the “open web” as many online publishers monetize via consumers clicking on blue links.)

Instead, we’re moving towards a world where we’ll make a query, and there our answer will be: the machine-consolidated result, nicely packaged. But while this is incredibly helpful for the consumer, it has already created challenges for advertisers who have previously monetized the journey of finding the answer.  

SEO

Specialists have long since cracked the code on how search engines like Google and Bing work, using techniques like EAT (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) and optimizing for backlinks or engaging content that would appear high up in rankings for keywords. 

We believe AI is ushering in two competing forces in the world of SEO. On one hand, co-pilots and LLMs make it easier and faster to write content. Companies like Copy.ai and Jasper have already captured market share with e-commerce marketers, creating scalable content in the company’s voice and style. 

At the same time, in the near future much of this content might not actually be read by the end consumer. Rather, it might be read by LLMs answering queries, which could then surface insights to the consumer. This change could necessitate a completely new type of SEO, one that optimizes content not for the human consumer, but rather for LLMs. 

GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization) are beginning to emerge to help marketers get their companies to be the top answers in AI search results. Companies like Evertune and Daydream are developing new strategies for companies to improve their search results in ChatGPT and other AI search engines. 

SEM 

Changes may be equally profound for search engine marketing. The new dominant search engines in the world of generative AI—ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini (Google’s AI chat)—are already clearing out space for ad inventory in their offerings. 

Perplexity, for example, has launched “sponsored follow up questions,” where brands are able to pay to have their company results surfaced first. We believe there will inevitably be new search ad units created from these developing AI search ecosystems, providing an opportunity for advertisers to creatively influence these new mediums.

AI agent shoppers

We’re also excited to see how marketers transition from targeting human shoppers to targeting the AI agents that are increasingly shopping on our behalf. 

We’re already seeing Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT move towards this behavior, with agents starting to control computer functions and make decisions for us. For example, Google just released an AI agent product that takes over a person’s web browser to purchase a product or book a flight. Companies like Payman and Stripe are building payment rails for agents to make purchases on our behalf, closing the loop of searching and buying.

We believe e-commerce marketers will need a different approach to meet the agentic buyers. What features will increase conversion rates for AI agent shoppers? Visual merchandising and on-site experiences likely won’t matter. Will Shopify allow for faster check out experiences or easily indexable online merchandising for AI agents? Could another website infrastructure leader emerge, focused exclusively on agent shoppers? Companies like Browserbase are already building infrastructure for this new world—and we imagine more will follow suit. 

Tips & takeaways for marketers: 

• Optimize content for LLMs, not just humans—SEO now requires AI-focused strategies.
• GEO and AEO are helping brands rank in AI search results.
• GenAI search engines are opening new doors for ad content.
• Marketers must adapt to appeal to AI shopping agents that make purchases on a buyer's behalf.

Social media & influencer marketing

We believe social media platforms like Google (YouTube), Meta (Facebook, Instagram), and Bytedance (TikTok, Douyin) have been and will continue to be the greatest beneficiaries of AI. 

These ad platforms—which represent three of the five biggest sellers of advertising globally—are at the forefront of AI development for both their advertisers and users. They have already started replacing traditional search engines for Gen Z and Millennial audiences who are using social platforms for discovery. TikTok has long been a leader in the space with its proprietary AI recommendation engine, and Google and Meta have invested billions developing their own LLMs, Gemini and Llama, respectively. 

These platforms understand that content proliferation drives more users to the apps, and LLMs are expanding content creation. For example, AI-powered dubbing features help creators bring in audiences from new corners of the world that might not otherwise be able to engage with a creator’s content. Meanwhile AI tooling allows creators to build digital avatars that can increase their content output exponentially. 

Ad creative

Ad creative—which includes the visual and auditory elements of advertisements—was one of the first areas of social media advertising to be affected by AI. Companies like Adcreative.ai, Motion and Chord are providing tools for advertisers to both create and measure endless amounts of creative content for merchants. 

Analytics and targeting are also paramount. Some marketers are leveraging techniques such as DCO (dynamic creative optimization) to build hyper-personalized marketing campaigns to target specific audiences based on profile, geography, and time of day. While proprietary AI marketing products from Google, Meta, and TikTok can be effective tools inside their respective walled gardens, there remains an opportunity for new entrants to own cross-channel capabilities for merchants.

Influencer marketing

Another area we expect to see outsized gains from AI is influencer and creator marketing (we use “influencer” and “creator” interchangeably here). As social channels become more saturated with AI-generated content, we expect the more authentic and trusted-source of influencer marketing to take a bigger piece of the pie. 

In the US, brands are expected to spend $8B on creator marketing campaigns in 2024. This is creators’ largest share of their income, accounting for two-thirds of dollars they pull in (other areas include ad share from platforms, subscriptions, and tips). 

We believe AI is already creating better and faster matching for creators and brands, using past creator performance, social listening, and advanced analytics to review millions of videos and make the matching process more efficient—but this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to creator marketing efficiency. 

While the $8B influencer marketing TAM is large and growing fast (at 26% CAGR over the last five years), it is still a fraction of the overall digital marketing budget. Why is this still such a small piece of overall ad dollars, even though virtually every brand we speak with wants to substantially increase their influencer marketing spend? One possibility is because spend in the category has been artificially capped due to how campaigns are executed. 

Compare spending on Meta ads vs. hiring creators to conduct an influencer campaign on Meta. With the former, a digital marketer may set a budget, determine an appropriate ROAS, and then scale spend up or down according to performance. If the spend is effective, the next day they could easily increase it 10x. They would be able to target audiences accurately and at scale.

While AI today has allowed better targeting of influencer audiences, there is no scalable ad unit for influencer marketing. In this scenario, a campaign may require weeks or months to execute, and involves finding the right creators, navigating manager and agent relationships, negotiating rates, ideating creative, redlining contracts, measuring results, etc. If a campaign is a smashing success, there is no one-click way to 10x scale the next day: the marketer would have to repeat the time-consuming process.

This process has historically placed an artificial cap on creator marketing—a restriction that we believe can be lifted with AI facilitating the execution of an influencer campaign to make it more like paid digital media spend. Companies like Agentio are already testing this hypothesis on select channels like YouTube. 

Our hypothesis is that creator marketing will become a much larger piece of the overall digital marketing spend in the near future, as AI drastically improves the execution of the ad unit. The gauge of success will not only be increasing influencer marketing spend as a category, but also shifting paid media budgets into influencer budgets.  

Tips & takeaways for marketers: 

• Social platforms are one of the greatest beneficiaries of AI adoption, but marketers need solutions to effectively allocate spend across all platforms.
• Social media is already a go-to search tool for younger audiences, getting even stronger with proprietary LLMs assisting personalized search on these platforms.
• AI has the potential to scale influencer marketing, making it more like paid ads and moving internal marketing budgets accordingly.

Retail media 

For many years, Meta and Google maintained a clear duopoly in the US ad space, representing over 50% of all ad spend through their platforms. Today, retail media is taking market share—and is in fact the fastest-growing digital advertising segment, per ad tracker eMarketer—largely led by Amazon’s dominance in the category. 

Amazon’s ad revenue is expected to surpass $42B this year, representing 14% of all US ad spend. (M13 investor Whitney Hazard experienced this growth firsthand during her time at Google, when she worked on performance advertising on Amazon, optimizing that channel for programmatic ads just like they did with traditional search.) Additionally, Walmart is a distant second at ~$4B, but nonetheless growing quickly. 

These two massive retailers have set a precedent for other commerce providers and marketplaces to maximize their users’ attention: Uber, Instacart, Doordash are all increasing their focus on advertising on their respective platforms. In addition, commerce and payments providers like PayPal and Block are building their own marketing platforms leveraging their first-party data and payments ecosystems.

‍

This should come as no surprise as marketers try to find high-intent purchasers in the post-iOS 14 world. While we believe it’s harder to target specific buyers across social media platforms today, the ad units inside of retail media networks (RMN) tend to be more targeted. For example, if a consumer searches for baby pajamas in their Amazon search bar, brands with sponsored placements will show up at the top of the search results. 

We believe AI will continue to impact retail media beyond the current use cases of personalization and improved recommendations. Arguably, Amazon has nearly perfected its recommendation engine, training ML models on its hundreds of millions of shoppers. It’s been reported that over one-third of its marketplace GMV comes from these recommendations.

Looking ahead, we believe generative AI will democratize access to RMN for smaller retailers as well. These retailers can already harness the power of LLMs to make better personalized recommendations. For example, M13 portfolio company Rebuy gives DTC brands powerful AI-driven personalization tools to help with customer conversion on site. M13 portfolio company Pietra has introduced new tooling for online merchants to use AI to source and contact independent retailers to sell their goods. Meanwhile companies like Topsort enable smaller retailers to build their own ad infrastructure. We believe AI will transform how consumers (or their agents) discover products while shopping on retailers’ websites. 

Tips & takeaways for marketers

• Retail media is breaking the Meta-Google ad duopoly.
• AI is transforming retail media with better personalization, targeting, and recommendations.
• Even smaller retailers can leverage AI to make better, more personalized recommendations.

Connected TV 

CTV is quickly stealing ad budgets away from the linear TV channel: While in 2019 linear’s market share of ad dollars was 30%, it’s projected to be less than half of that by 2026. 

The shift is partly driven by CTV allowing advertisers to move from reach and awareness (historically the purposes of linear TV) towards audience targeting and performance measurement, similar goals of digital-first strategies.

We believe this trend is unlocking opportunities for advertisers to harness the storytelling power of TV, paired with new tools for targeting, measurement, and leveraging programmatic strategies.

For example, AI systems can analyze vast datasets in real time to make split-second optimizations that humans cannot. This can allow advertisers to refine their campaigns dynamically and reallocate budgets to better-performing placements on the fly. 

For targeting, machine learning models can analyze viewing habits and demographics to pinpoint high-intent audiences that are likely to convert, refining segments in real time as behaviors shift. Generative AI takes personalization further by tailoring ad content to individual viewers, creating customized experiences that feel more engaging and less intrusive. 

AI can also streamline creative production, enabling marketers to produce localized, personalized ad variations in seconds to connect more deeply with audiences. Generative AI tools assist with concept brainstorming, narrative development, storyboarding, and video production, enabling marketers to create compelling CTV ads in a fraction of the time. For example, HeyGen and Creatify are AI video generators and have functionality optimized for CTV. This enables production of ads that might incorporate changes like localized voiceovers, store-specific promotions, or personalized messaging, all crafted in seconds. 

Finally, AI-driven analytics offer granular insights into campaign performance, from engagement to revenue attribution. These tools could create a feedback loop that improves every campaign. While it’s still early innings, we believe CTV can become an increasingly valuable channel for advertisers with larger budgets.

Tips & takeaways for marketers: 

• Connected TV is poised to become a key channel for advertisers who have the budget for it. 
• Generative AI can deliver hyper-personalized ads, as AI analytics shift and refine ads in real time.

The road ahead

AI is already having profound impacts on the entire advertising industry as well as the end consumers it reaches. Consumer behavior is changing, and ad platforms and marketers will need to adapt to keep up, just like they have always done. 

We believe that new channels and platforms will gain traction while others fade; creating content will be easier but breaking through will be harder; and targeting and personalization will get even better. We also believe all of this is only just the beginning of AI’s impact on marketing.

This creates massive opportunities for everyone in the ecosystem:

• Disruptive technology startups have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to claim market share in the massive and evolving digital advertising landscape.
• Incumbent ad platforms have an advantage in large user bases and vast amounts of data—but they will need to innovate to make their channels effective and resonant in the changing landscape.
• Merchants will need to evolve to utilize new advertising capabilities to reach consumers on new platforms.

Google and Meta came out of Web 1.0 and 2.0 shifts, respectively. What will come out of the latest technology wave driven by AI? 

Get in touch

We’re excited to continue to invest in companies disrupting advertising and marketing. 

Are you building in this space? We want to talk! Reach out to brent@m13.co and whitney@m13.co.

By 2025, global cybercrime is expected to be a $10T problem—fueled significantly by criminal networks that leverage emerging technologies like cryptocurrency and AI. 

High-tech problems require high-tech solutions. Fortunately, CAT Labs tools are just that. The company is developing tools to help government agencies and private industry fight the misuse and abuse of emerging technologies, with a focus on countering the nefarious use cases of cryptocurrency, AI, and quantum computing.

We believe CAT Labs stands out for its team of experts with extensive experience in cryptocurrency-enabled crime. Founder Lili Infante formerly worked as a DEA Special Agent for the US Department of Justice, where she led numerous major crypto investigations, launched the first Counternarcotic Cyber Investigations Task Force, and led the investigation that took down Hydra—at the time the world’s largest and longest-running crypto-powered dark web criminal organization. 

With this unique background, Lili has assembled a team of technical experts who understand how global criminal networks operate and how to dismantle them. The CAT Labs team includes former investigators, analysts, and technologists from agencies like the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense, as well as academics and researchers specializing in blockchain analytics, cryptography, and artificial intelligence.

We believe CAT Labs meets the growing need for a tech-enabled solution in the cybercrime space. Investigations can take multiple years, many existing solutions are highly manual, and agents are rarely equipped to track crypto crime. As criminals, drug cartels, terrorists, and even hostile nation-states increasingly use cryptocurrency and AI to scale illicit operations and global reach, CAT Labs provides crucial tools to combat these evolving threats.

CAT Labs’ flagship product, Recovery CAT, currently supports multiple federal and state/local government agencies and helps investigators automate and scale investigations involving cryptocurrency, making it easier to find, identify and seize illicit assets. The company is also developing quantum-resistant technology for cryptographic key backup and recovery with support from the US National Science Foundation, helping to address future global threats posed by quantum computing.

We’re proud to lead the company’s $5.4M seed round, investing alongside our peers at Castle Island Ventures, CMT, and Hash3. 

{{expertise}} 

M13 Partner John Tabis is an expert in the business of business-building. He’s cultivated a wealth of knowledge across operations, e-commerce, brand strategy, and more, honed through years of hands-on leadership and time spent at industry giants like Bain & Company and Disney. 

When he pitched The Bouqs Company on ABC’s Shark Tank, he became the first entrepreneur to get a deal from a shark after being rejected on the show. Today, whether it’s a TV appearance or a venture partnership, John approaches every challenge with the resilience of someone who knows how to turn rejection into triumph.

‍

As the head of M13’s venture studio, Launchpad, John is a self-described “people-to-people connection engine.” He helps spark new ventures, bringing together high-quality founders, experts, and investors, catalyzing businesses through relationships, shared vision, and hustle.

In addition to his technical and operational expertise, John places a strong focus on the human side of business, particularly founders' mental health and personal development. Having faced the isolating challenges of entrepreneurship firsthand, he is a vocal advocate for preparing founders for the mental health struggles they may encounter—and a strong believer in Launchpad’s mission to make the founder journey less lonely. 

We sat down with John to talk about Shark Tank, Disney, Launchpad’s approach to evaluating founders and ideas, and more. 

John’s recent publications 

• 4 Lessons on Mental Wellness for Founders
• M13's venture studio: Never build alone.
• Our 2024 predictions 

Growing a venture studio and connecting with founders

You lead Launchpad, M13’s venture studio. Who does Launchpad work with? 

Our job is to meet interesting, high-quality people and then catalyze businesses among them. This means our audience is pretty broad, but a few specific groups include:

• Former and current founders
• Founders-in-waiting, meaning folks with the capability and desire to be a founder who just haven’t made the leap quite yet
• Experts, including operators, researchers, think tank leaders, and academics
• Investors at every level, from angel to corporate 
• Celebrities and people with unique influence in a particular space

In essence, my job is to talk to people. These conversations help us test out our hypotheses for different businesses. 

How do you break the ice to have meaningful conversations with people you’ve just met? 

I almost always use humor. A little joke or observation about the weather or my commute, or a little self-deprecation or over-the-top flattery goes a long way toward creating a connection beyond “Hello, my name is…” 

It catches people by surprise sometimes, but 90% of the time or more, it leads to a more intimate and personal conversation than we would have had otherwise. Now that we’ve laughed together, we’ve shared an emotional moment that goes beyond business business business. That’s when people let their guard down, and the group can really dig in.  

What are green flags you look for when talking to potential founders? 

We’re looking for founders who can engage with the creative process of experiment, iterate, fail, and learn—but there’s no “typical” profile. 

Obviously it’s great to work with someone who has been a founder before and learned firsthand how to build a product, gain traction, attract a great team, fundraise, etc. Being an operator at a scaling startup can also give you that experience.

But more generally, I’d say we look for unique insight, experience, or education in a given space——always paired with grit.

There’s also the more intangible “twinkle in the eye”—a confidence, and an attitude of, I’m going to figure this out. They might not know everything today, but there’s a determination to learn. That’s the founder magic.  

You’ve talked about the differences between being a founder or a CEO—tell us about that.  

I absolutely love building companies. It’s the coolest thing to attempt. But building a company is very different from running a company. 

Being a founder is a very creative and ambiguous job. Your role is to create belief, then try to do things with the limited resources you have so you can attract more resources to that belief. Don’t do the stuff that doesn’t work; do more of the stuff that does. 

The job of a CEO is literally the opposite: it’s to manage processes, people, and resources against a set of priorities and goals at scale. Every company that grows enough reaches a point where the founder transitions to being the CEO. There’s no avoiding it. But it’s strange, because those two roles have very little in common.  

Personally, being a CEO was almost soul-crushing for me, because it was about micro-optimizations and day-to-day management, while I’d always lived in the world of ideas. I used to tell people, “If I could just be a founder over and over, that would be the perfect job for me.”

In a way, that’s why Launchpad is such a great fit for me—I get to be a people-to-people connection engine and support amazing human beings with that same drive to build build build. 

{{appearances}}

Can you shout out some founders you’ve worked with? 

Yes! One I’d highlight is Mike Peregrina, the founder and CEO of Hey, Walt!, a real estate CRM product. He’s an extremely gritty, scrappy individual. He got his realtor’s license; he’s sold homes; and he’s a fantastic salesman, with a real talent for creating belief. Mike has also previously been through the founding journey, and he learned a lot from it—and still wanted to do it again! His determination and experience are a powerful combination. 

Another would be Karan Sakhuja, founder and CTO of Score Travel, a virtual travel agent. He was a founding CTO of a large business in the real estate space, where he scaled an engineering organization to 100+ engineers and helped get the company to a $1B valuation. He has a super relevant skillset in terms of the type of technology he’s built, but he’s also super intellectually curious about the travel space—two factors that made us really excited about working with him. 

Last Launchpad question: You’ve told us about evaluating potential founders. How do you evaluate potential business ideas? 

We have a specific scoring mechanism for evaluating ideas at Launchpad. It involves things like: 

• Problem-solution fit
• Founder and team
• Go-to-market and distribution advantages 
• Co-investment
• Technology

That technology bucket can massively swing an idea between “yes” and “no.” One thing it accounts for is the level of modernity in the tech stack. Having a very modern tech stack, including a strong AI approach, doesn’t just benefit the one company; it benefits Launchpad as an entity, because we can learn from that experiment and apply it to our other projects. A rising tide lifts all boats. 

Career lessons from Shark Tank, Finding Nemo, and beyond 

What was it like to pitch The Bouqs Co on ABC’s Shark Tank? 

Intense! We filmed for a few hours to get to a 7-minute segment, and they just grill you the whole time. Everybody talks at once to try to get you to make that famous “confused face.” And I got totally rejected. Barbara hated the name; Mr. Cuban didn’t want to invest with Valley VCs; and Mr. Wonderful said he’d send Bouqs to my grave, because “you died today.” That was classic.   

But even with that rejection, the impact of Shark Tank was huge. Before the episode aired, we had sold maybe $700K in the last six months. Right after it aired, we did $500,000 in 24 hours. We almost couldn’t keep up. 

The craziest part came months later, when one of the Sharks, Robert Herjavec, called me out of the blue. He was getting married, and said the quotes he was getting for flowers were insane—but he remembered how beautiful the Bouqs flowers were from my pitch and wanted to talk to me about doing his wedding. 

He was so floored by the price I gave him that he took the savings and invested them in our 2017 Series C. That’s how I became the first person to ever get denied a deal on Shark Tank, but still get a deal from a Shark.

Prior to Bouqs, you spent several years working on the Corporate Strategy & Brand Management team at Disney. Can you share some lessons from that time? 

Generally, people think of a brand as a collection of nuts and bolts: the logo, the colors, the catchphrase, the jingle. At Disney, we looked at it through a much more expansive lens: the brand was the sum of every experience you have ever had with Disney. 

This was built on a structure called the “Disney brand promise,” which is a statement of what Disney does, how they do it, and what makes it special. For example, one of the phrases that defines this brand promise is “with heart,” meaning something parents and children agree is cool. Something that kids love, but that annoys mom and dad—that’s not done with heart in the way that the Disney brand team defines it. 

This structure means you have a rubric to evaluate everything, from a franchise property to a theme park ride.

Another tenet we evaluated the brand on was storytelling. I remember the brand team riding the old submarine ride at Disneyland, and observing: there was no storytelling. You went underwater and looked at stuff, and that was the ride. But Finding Nemo had come out a couple years prior, so the team decided to work with Imagineers to build a story around this ride. And now instead of a random underwater adventure, it’s the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage.  That’s how a brand gets codified and then implemented at scale.   

A high-quality brand isn’t a fluffy, subjective thing. It’s built on concrete language and structure that many people can use together to evaluate and improve bit-by-bit over time.  

Now that you work in VC, what’s a misconception about venture you want to clear up? 

Venture news can get very glamorized. We look at these huge winners and gloss over the stories behind them—including the fact that some 90% of companies don’t make it.  

The reality is, even the “overnight successes” are a shitshow most of the way. You’re always trying to stretch your resources; there’s always another fire; it’s always a tough journey. 

On that note: Raising money is something that gets celebrated a lot, but raising money is not an outcome. It means that your company, which early on is losing money, now has the chance to lose more money—in the hopes of eventually losing less money and then, maybe, finally, being profitable.

You’re a major champion of mental health for founders. Can you tell us about your own experience? 

The mental health journey of being a founder can be brutal, especially if you aren’t prepared for it. At Bouqs, I was lucky to have a great co-founder—but he was running the supply chain portion of our business, which was based out of Ecuador, while I was in the US. So even though I had a co-founder, I felt very, very lonely. 

Mental health wasn’t even on my radar until I found myself in a pretty deep depression after a particularly difficult stretch in both the company and my personal life. Broken technology, broken culture, a flooded house with twins on the way. One day I found myself sobbing in my car, looking in the rearview mirror literally and figuratively, wondering what the heck had happened to me. 

I think that ex post facto discovery is really hard on founders. I would love for early-stage creators to be educated around what the journey will really be like ahead of time and to learn what tools can make that journey easier. There’s no reason for people to suffer in confusion.

What can make the founder journey easier? 

You can’t go it alone. But the problem is, your board can be great, your investors can be great, lots of people can try to help—but none of them are going to be in the trenches with you. It can be unbelievably lonely and stressful, and if you don’t have someone to share that burden with, it’s exponentially harder. 

The good news is, with Launchpad, we really are in the trenches with our founders, working alongside them on their companies. We’re taking a leap with founders, saying we believe in the vision, and we’re here to help make it come true. 

You can also find support from a co-founder, a best friend, a therapist, or a coach. Identifying that resource and leaning on them, while also getting educated about mental health, is key.   

Lightning round

First job? 

Around sixth grade I started helping my dad tar the asphalt track at a park near our house. Working with tar was such dirty work that we’d throw our shoes away afterwards. 

Hidden talent? 

I used to be a very good football kicker. I walked onto the Notre Dame football team and was even on the roster for a hot minute.   

Guilty pleasure? 

I wouldn’t say I feel guilty about it, but I really like beer. Mostly IPAs. Something hoppy. 

Favorite Disney movie? 

Toy Story. It was the first of its kind in so many ways—just amazing storytelling about the bonds of childhood. Pure magic.  

Favorite app? 

Clash Royale. It’s like chess meets poker meets a video game.

Least-favorite app? 

X. It can be such a cesspool of terrible conversation.

What is something most people don’t know about you? 

I grew up in a very small town in the hills of Pennsylvania called Rural Ridge—total population 300. I was probably related to 20% of the town.

If you weren’t working in tech or venture, what would you be doing?

Purely hypothetically? I’d host American Idol.

AI is unlocking new opportunities both for solopreneurs and venture capital investors, by changing the economics of operating a small business.

The phenomenon of the solopreneur is on the rise: 84% of American businesses were run by a solopreneur in 2020, up from 76% in 1997, and 2024 figures are looking even higher. This demographic shift dovetails with the ongoing technology shift of new generative AI tools. These tools are automating new workflows, aiming to lower the effort and complexity required to launch and manage a business. 

AI technology can change the margins of these businesses, making it more profitable than it once was to start running your own business. Where it might have been prohibitively expensive to hire employees to help run different parts of a business, now, one AI tool can provide sales, marketing, operations, financial, and other assistance.

In the world of traditional SaaS, investors often believed that businesses had to be fully horizontal to capture a big enough market, because of low revenue per customer (think: Mindbody). We believe that vertical solutions (as described below) represent exciting venture-backable opportunities when powered by AI.  

We’re interested in the opportunity these convergent waves create for “business-in-a-box” solutions that allow small businesses to leverage AI to manage end-to-end operations. We are looking closely at full-stack, AI-powered, vertical-specific solutions that help service professionals run and grow their businesses. 

×

Below, we dig into how we see this area evolving.

From Software-as-Service to Service-as-a-Software

Historically, vertical SaaS platforms provide management systems for operations—but they don’t carry out the execution itself. Generative AI can fill this execution gap, effectively transitioning companies to a “service-as-a-software” model. 

The business-in-a-box category takes this concept to the next level, bundling disparate tools for service workers into one seamless platform. With an advanced business-in-a-box solution, AI agents work together so seamlessly that interacting with a platform feels less like working with a software tool and more like working with a seasoned professional. 

Instead of needing one SaaS tool for payments, and another one for scheduling, and another one for marketing, and so on, entrepreneurs could theoretically manage all their business needs in one place. Machines could perform mundane operational tasks, so business owners can get their time back to focus on what they do best: the real work.

×

We view the business-in-a-box tech stack across a few different layers: 

Administration: Many platforms today are already starting to bundle and handle administrative work, and this is where we’re seeing the most early iterations of biz-in-a-box. Solutions here may handle operational business tasks like payments, scheduling, simple customer communications, forms and signatures, and tax and finance. Given that the average entrepreneur spends more than a third of their workweek on small administrative tasks, the need here is huge. 

Acquisition: Our larger vision of this sector adds a discovery component to the mix, helping entrepreneurs to grow their customer bases. Solutions here may offer solopreneurs tools for marketing, branding, more robust customer communications, prospecting, or sharing services on marketplaces. For example, a tool may help a contractor identify and post across marketplaces like Thumbtack or Upwork. 

Education: An even more advanced layer involves biz-in-a-box solutions that help train or upskill entrepreneurs. For example, a solution might offer a training course that teaches someone graphic design skills. It could then also help them set up their graphic design business, create their website, find clients, project manage, and manage daily operations. 

Unified platform: The most advanced state for a business-in-a-box solution puts all of the above modules together, creating a cohesive system. This could allow business-in-a-box users to achieve a level of performance that would be difficult—if not impossible—to replicate if they were stitching together disparate point solutions. 

×

Verticals of interest 

We are interested in both horizontal and vertical approaches to business-in-a-box solutions. That said, we often find vertical solutions are more differentiated from existing tech, because they can do a larger portion of operational work. 

We believe the best verticals for business-in-a-box solutions are defined by skilled professionals and high rates of sole proprietorship. Some of our verticals of interest for biz-in-a-box solutions include: ‍

Health services: End-to-end solutions for providers such as nurses, therapists, counselors, and other health specialists (dentists, optometrists, chiropractors, etc.). Tools here aim to make the patient management seamless, from scheduling visits, to follow-up communications, to billing and insurance. Players here include solutions like Moxie, a medspa management tool.

Home services: This category serves small business owners offering a range of home services, from electricians and plumbers to interior designers and housekeepers. For example, Topline Pro is a generative AI platform enabling home services professionals to manage and scale their businesses online.

Legal & accounting: Solutions for service providers in law (lawyers, paralegals, mediators, legal consultants) and accounting (CPAs, bookkeepers, tax accountants)—two areas with particularly heavy requirements around time tracking, communicating with clients, and file management. For example, Noodle is an AI-powered automation platform for law practices, supporting both administrative tasks (calendaring, document review, customer support chat) and growth tasks (on-site lead generation, AI-managed CRM).

Personal care & wellness: Solutions here are directed at professionals like estheticians, hair stylists, makeup artists, and nail technicians, as well as service providers like personal trainers, nutritionists, yoga and fitness instructors, and more. For example, Arketa’s platform helps fitness instructors build online businesses.

Creative: These solutions allow creatives—like designers, photographers, writers, web developers, or other content creators—to spend more time focusing on their creative work. For example, Passionfruit offers AI-enabled lower cost SEO optimization for SMBs who don’t want to work with consultants. 

Education: Solutions to support freelance educators, such as tutors, music teachers, life and career coaches, college consultants, and language instructors. For example, AI-powered app Vcita supports professionals across industries, including helping teachers and tutors manage students, classes, payments, and marketing.

This list is not exhaustive—so if you’re a business-in-a-box founder building in a different vertical (auto services? laundromats and tailoring? pet care?), we’re still interested in hearing from you!

Get in touch

We are continuing to dig into the business-in-a-box space and invest across the future of work at large. If you are building or working in the space, drop us a note. We’d love to chat!

Anna Barber, Partner
anna@m13.co

Whitney Hazard, Investor
whitney@m13.co

Consumer experiences in healthcare are hard to navigate and lack the personalization consumers have in other industries—making it challenging to acquire, engage, and retain members.

Healthcare organizations wanting to grow their business need to do better, and patients also desire deeper partnership: 71% say they want stronger relationships with healthcare providers.

RadiantGraph is leveraging the superior power of AI/ML platforms to implement healthcare personalization at scale, generating personalized marketing and engagement tools to fight these issues. The platform helps users ingest data quickly to better understand and interact with patients, modernizing the traditionally manual processes around member enrollment, retention, and engagement.

The result? More personalized engagement, more tailored program enrollment, better clinical outcomes, and ultimately happier members.

The company’s platform includes a comprehensive feature set that delivers personalized communications to patients to boost enrollment and engagement: 

• Health data engine to digest unstructured healthcare data 
• AI/ML models for member populations
• Automated content generation, automated orchestration, and AI voice interactions
• Direct integrations to the marketing stack

While there are many players raising rounds to build healthcare-specific AI capabilities, founder & CEO Anmol Madan and the whole RadiantGraph team understand the limitation is not the AI technology itself, but rather barriers around tech stack implementation, data ingestion/structuring, and data security and compliance.

Today, RadiantGraph’s platform supports leading health plans and healthcare organizations in substance abuse, mental health, chronic conditions, MSK, and other complex healthcare spaces. The platform has grown quickly: RadiantGraph was incorporated in 2023 and is already processing personalization models for more than 3.5 million people.

We also believe the team has found exceptional founder-market fit. Anmol has built previous successful digital health startups as founder of Ginger (which resulted in a $3.5B merger with Headspace) and Chief Data Scientist of Lingovo then Teladoc ($18.5B merger). 

We believe the RadiantGraph team has the AI and healthcare expertise to pull off personalized engagement at scale, and we couldn't be more excited to back them. We’re proud to lead their $11M Series A, investing alongside our peers at XYZ Ventures and True Ventures.

{{expertise}}

As M13’s investor relations leader, Sarah Tomolonius excels at cultivating long-term relationships with M13’s LPs. She believes in partnerships built on trust and nurtured over time, through market cycles and life cycles. 

Her background spans IR, public company board roles, and sustainability, shaping her unique perspective to venture. She acknowledges the evolving nature of the asset class and challenges misconceptions about “overnight successes.” Sarah’s no-nonsense approach has earned her a reputation for being pragmatic and unflappable—and her genuine connection to the people and projects she supports is a testament to her authentic core.

Anyone who’s ever had a video call with Sarah can’t miss her home office background: a credenza entirely covered with framed family photos spanning generations. It’s a visual metaphor for how she sees her work. Anchored in legacy, while still celebrating the potential of the future.

Sarah’s recent publications 

• Here’s What Makes M13 a Great Place to Work
• Our 2024 Predictions
• Paris Hilton and Elizabeth Stark: Crypto and the Creator
• The Future of Capital and ESG
• Our Holistic Approach to Investing: Introducing M13’s ESG Policy
• Future Perfect: What Wellness Means Today—and in the Future
• M13’s Propulsion Model Was Built to Help Execute

Investor relations and long-term relationships 

Tell us about how you approach working with M13’s limited partners. 

Venture is a long-duration asset class, and these are long-term relationships. Having been both an LP and a GP before joining M13, I intrinsically bring both a GP and an LP perspective. I think about alignment all the time. How are LPs assessing us? What are they looking for in their portfolios? How can we be helpful? 

These are very long legal and contractual partnerships, but they’re also human partnerships, and so I approach them with a human lens. 

Who are M13’s LPs? 

We have a range of LPs spanning family offices, foundations, pensions, endowments, and more. Some of our LPs have fiduciary duties to their own investors, and I take that very seriously. I believe there’s a great duty and responsibility when it comes to accepting capital from people working in public service, or from foundations that are providing a social good or helping people retire. 

How do you build trust in these relationships?

In a 10- or 15-year long relationship like this, there will be multiple market cycles. When everything is up and to the right, it’s easy for people to feel happy. But inevitably a recessionary environment will come, and that’s the real test of the relationship. 

At M13, we make sure to have a regular cadence of communications so our LPs feel in the loop, have access to our insights, and feel like they understand what’s going on. I find that open communication helps people weather the less rosy times and feel more supported and comfortable. 

Transparency is important, and building in the process muscle is essential in this role. As an LP in the past, I was scarred by an incident where a hedge fund PM was replaced and the LPs didn’t learn about it until six months later—by which time returns had deteriorated. This further impressed upon me that as a GP, I want to make sure our LPs have the most important material updates in a timely manner.

Are in-person interactions still important post-Covid?

In-person interactions are valuable! In my previous firm, I used to say it took six months before someone got comfortable with you and about two years of meetings to actually formalize a partnership through an investment. Pre-Covid, you would probably see an investor two or three times a year, but now annual meetings are the main venue for face-to-face connections. As you interact with people over the years, every interaction builds on each other.

How have you seen IR evolve? 

Prior to the global financial crisis, there was a very discrete model for fundraising. You’d raise a fund; you’d close the fund; and the investing team would start to deploy it. Only when they’d deployed around 65% to 75%, you’d begin to market the next fund. 

Today, everything is much more continuous.  IR work is less project-based, so there’s no “stopping point” in fundraising in the way there used to be. It goes back to what we were talking about with relationship building: You’re never not building a relationship. But that’s a good thing. These relationships wouldn’t truly be sustainable otherwise. 

What is a common misconception about venture that you’d like to clear up? 

Often when we see stories about unicorns or decacorns, it feels like an overnight success—and it never is. 

There are so many points of crisis, and near-failures, and feelings of catastrophe and agony and anxiety on behalf of founders along the way. We’ve been lulled into thinking that the Cinderella stories that seem to bloom before our eyes are instantaneous, and that’s never the case. There is a ton of work and effort going on behind-the-scenes for founders, investors, and LPs.

{{appearances}}

A ‘heterogenous’ career path 

Tell us a bit about your career path pre-M13. 

When I was interviewing for my previous firm, the asset management arm of Continental Grain Company, I remember the CEO telling me, “You don’t have a straight and narrow background. It’s very heterogeneous.” It can make you a little nervous to hear that in an interview, but I think he meant it as a compliment! 

It was true that I had done a lot of different things. I had co-founded the Sustainability Investment Leadership Council (SILC); I had an MPA in International Finance and Policy; I had worked for Citi Private Equity and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

As a side note, when I worked in money management equity research, the founder of the firm told me his favorite major for employees was English. He said, “I can teach someone equity research, or money management, or trading, but having the ability to really put things together is the most precious asset.” So I’m glad I was an English major too. 

What made you decide to join M13? 

I had no desire to join a venture firm. None at all. I had helped manage Citi’s venture fund-of-funds portfolio which was invested in the late 90s/early 2000s, and those were tough, tough times. I also used to joke that I’d seen an episode and a half of Silicon Valley, so culturally I thought venture was just not the right fit for me. 

When I first met Matt and Latif, I remember telling them, “It doesn’t matter how good of a storyteller you are; you can’t raise a fund if you don’t have returns to show.” I was incredibly bald about it. I remember standing on the steps of the subway after that interview, calling my mom and telling her, “Well, I sure didn’t get that job.” But it turns out, Latif is the kind of analytical thinker who appreciates a no bullsh*t attitude, so he brought me back to meet Christine. 

When we met, Christine and I had a long conversation that ranged from environmental degradation to overpopulation to sustainability—and I remember looking at her and thinking, “This is not what I thought a venture partner was.” I had already liked the way M13 was taking the private equity evolution playbook to create portfolio value through operating expertise and applying it to venture, but that meeting really changed the way I thought about what that could look like in practice. 

It sounds like the early team made a strong early impression.

They did—but it wasn’t just meeting the M13 partners, although they all had exceptional backgrounds. It was seeing that they were all converging on this firm at this time, and thought they could build something truly special, and that they wanted to do this, despite the many other opportunities they had.

I also had come from a firm that was 210 years old and had 100+ year relationships, which had really shaped the way I thought about long-term partnerships. At M13 I saw the opportunity to build those kinds of relationships, which was thrilling. I was impressed that M13 was hiring really different people than I ever expected at a venture firm, but it was also the way the M13 approach to partnerships was baked into the firm that made it a compelling opportunity.

Mentorship and legacy 

Who have been some of your most influential mentors, and what have they taught you? 

When I was about eight years old, I started going to a camp called Something Different, run by a woman named Judi Friedman. We spent a lot of time in nature, and when we’d come across something like names scratched into a tree, she’d always say, Fools’ names fools’ faces often found in public places. The lesson was that we shouldn’t disturb nature, but we also shouldn’t disturb the next person's enjoyment of what we were enjoying. It was also a call to be a good steward, to think beyond ourselves as individuals, and to preserve what is beautiful and worthy for our communities. 

The other mentor I’d highlight is Laszlo Birinyi, who managed Birinyi Associates, an equity research money management firm. While I was getting my Master’s degree at Columbia, I joined their team with no experience in finance, and I sat right next to him. You can read all the books about capital and efficient markets and trading that you want, but there’s nothing like sitting next to someone who’s watching the ticks go up and down. It was amazing to watch him work. 

I remember one interesting thing he said to me was that 80% of the time he wanted me to be doing the work that he gave me, but the other 20% of the time he wanted me to save for my own projects. It impressed upon me that your mind needs to breathe. You need to shift focus and spend time on things that are genuinely interesting to you to be your most successful self. Inevitably, the projects or reading that I focused on during that 20% (one of my main focus areas was emerging and frontier economies) informed the work I did in that other 80%.

Can you describe your own leadership style?

I definitely don’t micromanage. When I see talent and aptitude, I nurture it by giving people more autonomy to help build their confidence. I don’t think you should just toss people into the deep end and tell them to learn to swim, but I do believe in building independence and cultivating a sense of ownership. 

Your home office background is very distinct. Can you tell us about it? 

I have more than 50 family photos sitting on the table behind me. When I was just about seven or eight, I remember staying with my grandparents, who had a whole wall of family photos. My grandparents would sit with me and my brother and tell us who was who. 

I imagine your family members inculcate this kind of thing into you—so now I have my own spread of photos. There’s my daughter, my brother and sister, my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, friends, and other family. It does give this feeling of being buttressed by everyone that came before you, with you, and maybe even after you. It goes beyond your personal legacy; it’s the legacy of people who brought you into this world. 

Lightning round 

First job? 

Babysitting 

Guilty pleasure? 

I asked my 10-year-old daughter what she thought my guilty pleasure was, and she reported, “working and eating chocolate.” 

Book rec? 

The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune, by Conor O'Clery.  Chuck Feeney was the founder of Duty Free, and he anonymously gave away about eight billion dollars during his lifetime. The magnanimity and accomplishment of anonymous philanthropy is really striking to me. His obituary in the New York Times is worth a read as well. 

Movie rec? 

Koyaanisqatsi is epic, almost like a space odyssey. It starts in nature, then zooms out into the industrialized world in such a way that the major highways almost become like arteries or rivers. Beautiful, beautiful movie. 

Hidden talent? 

I’m a good letter writer. I still believe in the handwritten letter. 

Favorite app? 

Photos.

Artificial intelligence is on everyone’s mind. 

And with good reason. We are currently in an AI technology innovation wave similar to the dawn of the consumer internet, the advent of mobile technology, and the rise of cloud computing. New businesses are emerging to provide AI models, developer tools to build them, and infrastructure to host them. Existing products and services will be enhanced by AI capabilities, while entirely new offerings will upset incumbents with AI as a key competitive advantage. 

At the same time, we also recognize that we are at the peak of a hype cycle—a moment that inflates valuations and calls for caution when it comes to investing in this market. 

At M13, we value clear-eyed evaluation of the emerging technologies reshaping the future of work, money, health and commerce. Below, dive into some of the key subjects we talk about when we talk about AI. 

Get in touch with our investors 

‍

Anna Barber, Partner
Interested in vertical AI, SMB workflow, commerce, AI guardrails.
anna@m13.co

Latif Peracha, Partner
Interested in AI for healthcare, vertical AI, AI infrastructure.
latif@m13.co

Morgan Blumberg, Principal
Interested in embedded AI, AI guardrails, productivity tools, AI infrastructure.
morgan@m13.co

Perspectives  

2024 Annual Letter: The State of Venture
_{By Latif Peracha}

The exponential age continues, with the biggest tech innovations occurring gradually—then suddenly. Here's how this informs our investing.

The Rise of AI Agents
_{By M13 Team}

What's the future of artificial intelligence? AI agents that can autonomously carry out complex tasks.

AI, Crypto, and Riding Hype Cycle Waves with Brad and Latif
_{By M13 Team}

Union Square Ventures co-founder Brad Burnham in conversation with M13 Partner Latif Peracha about lessons learned from decades of venture investing.

M13's RocketGuide to AI Workflow Automataions in 2024
_{By Mary Lara, Zach Naglieri, Carter Reum, Rob Smith}

There are seemingly endless AI tools out there to help you do your job more efficiently, and you might not have time to test them all. So we did it for you.

AI Fundamentals: What AI Really Does and Where We’re Looking to Invest
_{By Anna Barber, Morgan Blumberg}

A venture investor’s point of view on the AI wave.

AI Guardrails: How Enterprises Can Safely Adapt to the Generative AI Wave
_{By Anna Barber, Morgan Blumberg}

As AI adoption has exploded, companies are under more pressure than ever to figure out how to use this technology safely. We dig into key considerations and what questions companies need to be asking to prepare.

AI and the Future of Work
_{By Anna Barber, Morgan Blumberg, Matt Hoffman}

How we see jobs evolving in the era of AI—and the questions companies need to be asking to prepare for this sea change.

2023 Annual Letter: The State of Venture
_{By Latif Peracha}

Here are the tectonic shifts we’re paying attention to in the tech market—and how our investing philosophy fits in.

Our 2024 Predictions
_{By M13 Team}

From the maturing AI market to the workforce’s new normal, M13 partners share their top predictions for 2024.

AI Is Coming for Our Work. That’s a Good Thing.
_{By M13 Team}

Adobe’s Scott Belsky digs into what the proliferation of AI tools means for human workers.

‍

Recent investments 

Below are select investments from our AI portfolio. These are not inclusive of M13’s total investments; for more information, check out our portfolio.

Investing in Zenlytic: Unlocking Business Insights with Agentic AI
_{By Karl Alomar}

M13 leads the $9M Series A for Zenlytic, an AI-powered business intelligence platform bridging the gap between natural language questions and the answers buried in companies’ data lakes.

Investing in Maven AGI: Leveraging AI to Fix Customer Support
_{By Anna Barber, Morgan Blumberg}

M13 leads the $20M Series A for Maven AGI, a pioneer in artificial general intelligence (AGI) for business, starting with customer support.

Investing in Norm Ai: The First Regulatory AI Agent Platform
_{By Morgan Blumberg, Anna Barber, Latif Peracha}

Norm Ai agents are empowering compliance teams with autonomous context-aware compliance checks across increasingly complex regulation.

Investing in Polimorphic: Easing the Burden on Local Government Workers
_{By Latif Peracha}

M13 leads the seed round to a GovGPT solution to better connect local governments with the constituents they serve.

Investing in Carenostics: Empowering Clinicians with AI
_{By Morgan Blumberg, Latif Peracha}

M13 leads the $5M seed round for Carenostics, which deploys life-saving AI to diagnose and treat chronic diseases.

Investing in Canvas Medical: Reimagining the EMR for the Future of Healthcare
_{By Morgan Blumberg, Latif Peracha}

Canvas enables startups and established healthcare providers alike to launch new patient experiences and business models faster.

Investing in Pietra: The One-Stop Shop Helping E-Commerce Brands Grow
_{By Morgan Blumberg, Brent Murri, Carter Reum}

Pietra offers the critical infrastructure to start and scale modern e-commerce businesses.

Investing in Rebuy: Supercharging E-Commerce
_{By Jack Gorab, Brent Murri}

M13 is leading the $17M Series A for Rebuy, a data-driven personalization platform helping e-commerce brands maximize cart values.

{{expertise}}

As a managing partner at M13, Karl is a bridge between operations and innovation, drawn to founders who are both teachable and teachers in their own right. He is a dynamic force in the world of venture capital, merging a deep technical background with a thoughtful, measured approach to investment.

Karl’s experience scaling businesses runs the gamut from founding his own tech companies to scaling DigitalOcean from a startup operation to a successful IPO on the NYSE. As an investor at M13, his philosophy emphasizes exciting founders building high-potential categories and active debate among the investment team. 

‍

An economically minded thinker, Karl is a vocal critic of reactive investment strategies, particularly when venture capitalists chase hype without true diligence—but he doesn’t overlook that “hype” stems from true innovation. His investing journey is one of calculated risks and enduring curiosity.

We sat down with Karl to talk about how venture fits into today's macro landscape, building M13 from the early days, green flags and red flags in founders, and more.

Karl’s recent publications

• 3 Myths About M&A and Innovation
• M13’s Guide to Building Your Early-Stage Fundraising Deck
  
• Investing in Zenlytic: Unlocking Business Insights with Agentic AI
• Propulsion, Not Just Platform: M13’s System to Help Founders Build Better Businesses
• M13’s Guide to OKRs‍
• Our 2024 Predictions

The macro economy and hype cycles 

How do you balance investing in new technologies and not getting caught up in hype? 

Hype generally comes from something. It's the result of a new technology or category that people deeply believe will be very dominant in the future. As an investor, you can't ignore that.

What you have to be careful of is excitement without due diligence. It takes good strategic thinking and a calm, stable team to navigate through false flags and identify the “needles in the hype haystack” that actually have meaningful potential. 

How does this play out for VC investors? 

When I say avoid the hype cycles, I'm really talking about avoiding bidding wars on companies that you don't actually know that much about. Sometimes when a sector is really hot, people do less diligence, because everyone’s just leaning on each other’s excitement and fighting for a seat at the table. At M13, we try to be more measured. It’s not about avoiding exciting spaces—it’s about executing in a very measured way, so you're not getting carried away into deals with high price points but little proven success. 

The best venture firms are more thoughtful and less reactive. Venture tends to react on a very short timeline, even though investments have a five- to ten-year time horizon. Sometimes it feels like the only way to compete with bigger firms is by being aggressive and overreacting to waves like AI and blockchain. As a result, valuations and the market become less efficient, and you get people competing on price, rather than people competing on value. 

I think that good venture firms are built on value and helping portfolio companies grow more effectively.

What’s a common misconception about venture or the wider economy that you’d like to clear up? 

I recently shared a blog about my perspective on antitrust and how its benefits to innovation and the wider economy have been misrepresented. I think some of the ideas behind regulations are quite good, but an all-encompassing execution can create massive limitations. It's a mixed bag: Although excessive M&A regulations can be very limiting for innovation and venture, I also believe the lack of formal regulation in blockchain and cryptocurrencies in the US is driving web3 innovation to happen elsewhere, which will be a massive disadvantage for this country. 

What other opportunities do you see that could help the national economy overall?  

The concentration of wealth in the US is a massive economic problem that could ultimately result in the downfall of the US as the leading economy in the world. 

I think the greatest wealth distribution mechanism in US society stems from how venture-backed technology businesses have employed the ESOP across their organizations. It seems to me that a wider-spread application of this methodology of distributed value creation across a large employee base can quickly broaden economic opportunity and help bring real balance into the US economy into the future. 

{{appearances}}

Working with founders as a managing partner 

What is your favorite part of your job? 

As a managing partner, I have responsibilities across the whole business, but I particularly enjoy spending time with innovative, creative, and inspiring founders. 

That can happen at the investing stage, where we’re courting a company and brainstorming how we could work with them. It happens very meaningfully at the Propulsion stage, after we make an investment and are working alongside founders. And it can happen on the incubation side, where our Launchpad team works to help visionary people build exciting projects over time.

Is there a type of founder you tend to work with? 

Ability to execute is table stakes. Beyond that, I really value a symbiotic relationship. I want to work with founders who extend my range of thinking, so I learn and grow with them. I also want them to benefit from my specific experience and support. It’s an important balance to me.

Are there any red flags you’ve seen in founders? 

Hubris. If a founder is too arrogant, or thinks they already know everything, they’re destined to have problems in their business—and they’re going to be difficult to work with. So hubris is a huge red flag right out of the gate. 

Do you have any stories of founders who impressed you within the first five minutes? 

One that comes to mind is Mike Chime from Prepared, which today is disrupting the public safety category across the country. 

I was giving a talk at an MBA class at Yale, and at the end of it, Mike asked if he could walk me to my car. I didn’t realize at the time he was still an undergrad auditing the class. In that short conversation, he presented this idea to me with incredible energy, passion, and kindness. While it wasn’t fully baked into a business yet, it illustrated a true clarity of thought around the public safety problem he was trying to solve. I agreed to stay in touch as a mentor, and about a year later, M13 made our first investment in Prepared. 

Today, Prepared is available to over 180 million people through a partnership with Apple and within the latest iOS update, bridging the real-time data gap to make 911 callers and responders safer. That first meeting played a role in our desire to support his team—although I will say, it’s important to dig in deeper, even after a very impressive first pitch. 

What have you learned about supporting founders? 

When I joined M13 eight years ago, I actually don’t think I was a great investor. Here’s what I mean by that. 

Back then, I led with an entrepreneurial mindset, where I would hear an idea and create the opportunity in my mind of what it could become, rather than focusing on what the founder wanted to make. Since then I’ve learned to never feed a founder what your ideas are. You have to make sure that you're investing in the ideas that they are presenting. 

Maybe an investor has a great idea, but if the founder themself isn’t presenting that vision, then that idea isn’t what’s ultimately going to come to light. 

Lessons on culture, hospitality, and building something different 

Share a valuable career lesson you’ve learned. 

In my early days at Digital Ocean, I observed a lot of cultural volatility, the result of which was the loss of some of our best talent. However, in the process of turning that around, I learned a valuable lesson about how good culture drives great performance and helps you retain amazing talent. As a result, we’ve built M13 with an operational mindset that puts culture at the forefront. 

It’s crucial to surround yourself with good, trustworthy humans that have your back. Personally, I feel like if there is one key highlight  to building M13, it’s that the people who work here are all great humans. Everyone here can rely on each other implicitly.

Your journey spans multiple fields, including hospitality. How does that intertwine with your tech career? 

It’s funny to think about how we survive as we fight to build our early careers. I started my first tech company in 1997, and with no other income I had to figure out a way to make money to live. My partner and I decided to put on a series of events in LA in some extreme locations, like the Disney-owned Masonic Lodge on Hollywood Boulevard. These produced a good income for us for about six to eight months as we experimented and tested the early iterations of building our business.  As we secured early investors, we were then able to focus fully on the company.

History repeated itself a little later, when I moved to New York for business school. Following graduation, as I began to ideate my next startup, I was presented with the opportunity to oversee the build out and launch of three nightclub venues over a period of 18 months in support of a partner that was heavily integrated into that industry. It might seem unrelated to the journey of a technology founder, but it supported me through my build effort, and as with everything, taught me some great lessons along the way.

The irony of the role I played was that although I agreed to oversee the back office and watch the books, I was also obligated to be in the club until at least two a.m. every night. In the meantime, I was building a fintech company with offices in London, New York, and Shanghai, so I had to be up early for international conference calls. I’d sleep for a few hours, get up for calls and a full day’s work, then go back to sleep. It was a journey, but as soon as the company began to show traction, I had to refocus and dedicate myself fully to that.

What is something that most people don’t know about you? 

Over the last 20 years, every company I’ve operated has been co-founded by two brothers. Having grown up in a household with two sisters and a mother, and now living in a household with a wife and two daughters, maybe I’m subconsciously trying to add some brotherly love to my life? 

What is a daily practice of yours? 

I have kids, so my daily hack is I get anything health-oriented done first thing in the morning, early. I’ll usually play tennis or soccer—I enjoy competitive but friendly sports. But I have to do it before the kid responsibilities kick in for the day, because after that, it’s over. 

Lightning round 

First job? 

In-home catering, when I was about 16. 

Guilty pleasure? 

Typical foodie stuff. I like to indulge in a specialty tasting menu sometimes—something that just blows your taste buds away.

Which city has the best food scene, New York, Miami, or London? 

It’s a tough one, but I’d have to say New York. (Though that might just be because I know it better.)

Book rec? 

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch—which is also a TV show now—is fantastic science fiction. 

Music rec?

I like this Belgian artist, Stromae. His last album is fantastic. 

Movie rec? 

I recently watched the HBO documentary Wild Wild Space. It’s about the business battle between companies trying to go to space, and I really enjoyed it.

Favorite app?

…TikTok.

One of the largest differentiators between successful, high-growth companies and laggards is the ability to make intelligent, data-driven decisions in real time. 

Fortunately, businesses today have more data than ever before. Unfortunately, low data literacy continues to plague global workforces. A mere 11% of employees are fully confident in their ability to read, analyze, work with, and communicate with data, per Qlik’s annual data literacy report. 

New AI tools—like M13’s newest portfolio company, Zenlytic—are bridging the gap between human question-askers and the answers buried in companies’ databases. 

Zenlytic’s business intelligence platform combines dashboards, self-serve exploration, and a GPT-powered chatbot. With this platform, data query processes that traditionally require significant engineering and data analysis skills can now be trained onto an LLM, providing efficient answers and opening up a world of data insights. We believe the platform empowers managers across the whole organization—including the other 89%—to make data-driven decisions off a centralized consistent data set.

The platform’s BI tool is built on top of an AI agent, Zoë, that can understand natural language questions, dig in deeper by asking its own questions, read unstructured data, and query a company's data lake to answer business intelligence inquiries quickly and consistently.

According to Co-founder & CEO Ryan Jannsen, "This [fundraise] is a huge milestone for Zenlytic as we advance our mission to democratize data analytics. We’re excited to partner with M13 and other investors to scale our engineering and commercial teams. The world needs an analytics platform that people can actually use."

Zenlytic fits well into M13’s overall investment thesis around AI agents in knowledge work. Along with companies like Maven AGI and Lantern, Zenlytic is bringing data closer to the front lines, so salespeople and product leaders can partner with agents to make better decisions more quickly.

At M13, we are excited to partner with Zenlytic on its journey to redefine how organizations harness the power of data and deliver across the organization seamlessly, and we value the team’s commitment to innovation and user-centric design.

We’re proud to lead the company’s $9M Series A, investing alongside our peers at Bain Capital Ventures, Primary Ventures, Company Ventures, Correlation Ventures, and 14 Peaks, among others. 

M13 RocketGuides are interactive masterclasses in building your startup, from crafting an investor-impressing pitch deck, to strategic conference selection, to writing clear and actionable investor updates.

Written by our expert operators, investors, and former founders, these guides include in-depth insights and best practices to help your company shine. Dive into our guides below.

M13's Guide to New Hire Onboarding

In an employee’s first few months, it is vital to help them connect with the team, frame goals and timelines, and set the stage for future development. This guide will walk you through the transition from talent acquisition to onboarding. While we break down different tasks by owners, smaller orgs often just have one or two people who do it all—and that’s okay! The most important thing is to create an environment for transparency and accountability, especially in the employee's first 90 days. Our guide will help you do just that.

Check out our New Hire Onboarding timeline and download the template for yourself!

Highlights:

• Preboarding before the first day: We recommend sending all preboarding materials at least a week in advance of the new hire's start date. This gives them time to digest the information without it feeling too rushed.
• Use the buddy system: Assign each new hire a buddy, ideally outside of their immediate team. The purpose is to create connections outside of the people they'll be speaking with every day. Think about a buddy who can really introduce them to the norms of the organization—they've been through this before.
• Clarify ways of working: Managers and existing team members should make sure the new employee understand how they each work best. How does the manager like to be communicated with?  How will the employee know when they are doing well or doing poorly? What are team norms around collaboration and deadlines? Think of this like a "user guide for managers" and make sure expectations and styles are completely clear.
• Get the free template: After you check out our interactive onboarding timeline, download the template to use it yourself!

Our new hire onboarding experts:

Julia Daniel, Chief of Staff; Matt Hoffman, Partner & Head of People; Sarah Levine, Talent Operations Analyst

M13's Guide to Early-Stage PR ‍

Brand communications touches every aspect of your business. Brand at the early stage includes PR (or "earned media"), social media, thought leadership, and events, and strong branding improves investor decks, product marketing, and internal comms. Done right, with a commitment to iterating quickly, the function keeps your startup top of mind, impacting customer purchase decisions, talent hires, fundraising, and more.

Whatever your experience, our comprehensive RocketGuide to Early-Stage PR will help you announce your near-term company news and, more meaningfully, activate your brand comms flywheel to achieve business goals going forward.

Highlights:

• The brand flywheel — An overview of how all the pieces of a scalable brand comms function fit together, even at the early stages. This includes your website, social channels, visual brand, earned media, and more.
• Fundraise announcement example — An example of a traditional fundraise announcement, what information is in there, and why. This is useful for crafting both a press release or a blog post announcement.
• Fundraise announcement timeline — Announcing a milestone takes time and prep work. Use our activities timeline to get the most out of an announcement—and learn why you should start earlier than you think.

Our AI workflow automation tool experts:

Christine Choi, Partner & Head of Brand Comms; Mary Lara, Director of Product; Emma Miller, Content Manager; Abigail Snodgrass, Creative Director

M13's Guide to AI Workflow Automations in 2024‍

There are seemingly endless AI tools out there to help you do your job more efficiently, and you might not have time to test them all. So we did it for you.

Welcome to your new go-to resource for the latest in AI workflow automation. Dive into our curated selection of the top AI tools, carefully selected to meet the needs of startup founders—from AI meeting assistants to content generators to customer prospecting and more.

Highlights:

• AI code co-pilots: Assisting engineers in writing code has been an key early use case for generative AI. Various tools are attacking the problem from different angles, with the goal of enhancing the output of very expensive engineering resources. When done right, implementing these tools can multiply the impact of teams large and small.
• AI image editors & modifiers: Kate Middleton unfortunately made headlines for using AI to retouch and edit images of her and her family—but these tools can greatly reduce the time and money needed to make edits. The real power of these platforms is that now, even relatively unartistic people can make changes to existing photos and visual content directly. It's usually no more complicated than drawing the area a user wants edited and writing a quick prompt. Some of these workflows are finding their way into mainstream tools as well, showing promise for the space.
• AI for resume sorting & filtering: Job postings can attract hundreds of applicants, and manually sorting through them can take hours if not days. Now, emerging solutions can cut that time down to minutes. Particularly in high-growth situations where you are hiring dozens of positions with a small or non-existent HR team, these tools can help you avoid needing to put other founder duties on hold while hiring, hugely saving time and money.

Our AI workflow automation tool experts:

Mary Lara, Director of Product; Zach Naglieri, Data Operator; Carter Reum, M13 Co-founder & Partner; Rob Smith, M13 Partner & Head of Product

M13’s Guide to Investor Updates

Investor update emails are a crucial part of effective communication to help you leverage your investor network. They’re your opportunity to share your progress, celebrate your wins, and ask for help where you need it. 

In this interactive guide, we cover everything from deciding what metrics to include to finding the sweet spot between under-sharing and oversharing—so you can transform your updates into irresistible must-reads.

Highlights:

• "Investor updates can be just as important for potential investors as they are for current investors. If we meet a founder in between fundraising, we will often ask to be included on their investor distribution list. It’s a great way to stay top of mind for potential investors and give them some sizzle to get excited about." —Brent
• "Be transparent about challenges your startup is facing and the steps you're taking to overcome them. Acknowledging risks shows that you're realistic and proactive." —Rob
• "End with an action. Consider adding a CTA at the end (i.e. schedule a meeting, review a document, etc.) so it’s clear what action investors should take next." —Mary

Our investor letter guide experts:

Mary Lara, Director of Product; Brent Murri, M13 Partner; Rob Smith, M13 Partner & Head of Product

M13's Guide to Strategic Conferencing in 2024

Conferences present a huge opportunity for networking, fundraising, showcasing your product, gleaning insider insights, and much more. They can also be chaotic, overwhelming, and expensive.

If you’ve wondered: Should I be going to conferences? Which ones? How do I find them? How do I make the most of my time there? Then our RocketGuide to Strategic Conferencing—featuring M13’s Conference Finder Tool—is for you!

Highlights:

• “Pitching investors? Consider creating a data room specifically for the conference, with links to your deck, product demos, and testimonials. Prospective investors you meet can share the link with anyone on their team and you can set up unique link tracking to understand views and engagement." —Amelia
• “Be a good (and strategic) host. Identify great partners and sponsors to add to the network you can bring together, and keep close track of the overarching event schedule—both the conference and offshoot events—to choose an optimal time for your own event." —Melissa
• “Introvert? You’re not alone! Up to 40% of the population needs some solo time to energize. Figure out the 1–3 things that will re-energize you while you’re in the thick of it. AM meditation? 30-minute workout? Favorite B-vitamin supplement from home? Plan these in advance so you know your cup will be filled." —Lizzie

Our conference guide experts:

Lizzie Francis, M13 Partner & Head of Propulsion; Mary Lara, Director of Product; Samantha Hughes, Community Program Coordinator; Melissa Montan, Director of Propulsion; Rob Smith, M13 Partner & Head of Product; Amelia Zack, Portfolio Operations Analyst

M13's Guide to Building Your Early-Stage Fundraising Deck

Raising a seed or Series A round? Our comprehensive guide walks you through every. single. slide. your potential investors will want to read, from introducing an interesting problem you’re solving, to a strong product roadmap, to defining key metrics for your startup’s success.

Or check out the full deck below:

Highlights:

• “Investors can be lazy. If they only read the titles of your slides, that should be enough to tell your startup story.” —Rob
• “Twist the knife on your problem slide. Start with a problem, then highlight what makes it even worse. Use action words; be declarative.” —Anna
• “Financial projections should be optimistic but realistic. Make sure you understand what “good” looks like, and highlight that on your financial forecast slide.” —Karl

Our fundraising deck experts:

Karl Alomar, M13 Partner; Anna Barber, M13 Partner; Rob Smith, M13 Partner & Head of Product

Stay connected

Sign up for exclusive early access to future M13 RocketGuides

{{expertise}}

Christine Choi is not your typical venture capitalist. A veteran of both the corporate and nonprofit worlds, she’s mastered the art of translating the scrappy startup mentality into any environment—be it boardrooms or space hangars. With a reputation for building deep, authentic networks that turn even weak ties into formidable connections, her playbook focuses on the humans at the center of every story. 

As a brand leader, Christine’s passion for storytelling is rooted in a genuine curiosity that turns mundane details into captivating narratives. Whether she’s championing the voices of engineers on the factory floor or navigating a crisis with poise, she remains unwavering in her commitment to authenticity.

‍

Christine has made a career of embracing uncertainty. “Crisis doesn’t have to be scary, and pivoting is not a bad word,” she says. “I've made many career pivots, from public education and arts nonprofits, to music festivals and cannabis, to flying cars and commercial space. These decisions were driven by curiosity and wanting to learn more.”

As someone who values listening as the most important leadership skill, Christine’s not just about occupying the space at the table—she’s about creating space for others, encouraging them to join in the conversation. You’ll find her crafting narratives that celebrate the underdogs, the creatives, and the genuine leaders shaping tomorrow.

We sat down with her to talk about communication, community, and M13’s model of working with founders. 

Christine’s recent publications

• M13’s RocketGuide to Early-Stage PR and Communications
• Startup Comms Strategies from Unlikely Sources: Casey Neistat, Stacy London, and Dan Porter in Conversation
• How to Make the News: The Dos and Don’ts of Pitching Reporters
• 4 Lessons on Mental Wellness for Founders
• AI, Crypto, and Riding Hype Cycle Waves with Brad and Latif

On crisis and communication

What is a common misconception people have about brand, comms, or PR? 

One misconception I see is the idea that crisis is scary. Crisis can be an opportunity to bring teams together and reset an understanding of how we work together, how we communicate, and what it is we know about what we’re doing. 

I often get questions about the crisis playbook I helped build almost ten years ago, when the Virgin Galactic flight test accident happened. This was the early days of the commercial space industry. The accident stirred concern that it would be the end of the industry, because the spaceflight program was being tested, trust was being built, and it was such a tragic event. Some people said, well, commercial space people don’t know what they’re doing. They’re not trustworthy. They’re moving too fast and not thinking about safety. When in fact, none of those things were true. 

This crisis was an opportunity to ask: How can we communicate better with the general public, regulatory partners, and our own community? Especially with new pioneering tech, it’s important to include stakeholders on the journey of vision, process, and progress. Most founders won’t have to face a crisis with such high stakes, but in existential moments, teams will rally around their true mission and why it matters.

I think early-stage companies in particular are well-equipped to deal with the unexpected, because they’re constantly experimenting and responding to change.

Can you share a storytelling tip founders might not have heard before? 

Underdogs have a lot more fun! When you're obscure or not the incumbent, there are more ways for you to be creative and flex your freshness—and not fall back on safe corporate speak.

What’s something you learned from your time in the commercial space industry? 

In new tech movements—like commercial space, AI, or blockchain—there’s inspiration in uncovering the stories of people building industries and adoption that may not yet exist. Spark trust and understanding with fresh voices and authentic stories from “the hangar floor.” 

What’s a comms trend you don’t like right now? 

Quantity over quality. You may have raised a lot of capital, but a movement is energized by the right people.  

How are you thinking about AI and community right now? 

AI is a reminder to flex our humanness. In a time when we are trying to seek even greater efficiencies and answers with the help of AI, I love that people are seeking out other people more than ever. We’re seeking humans to curate experiences, ideas, and information. 

A community expert once told me, “Curation is one inch away from comfort.” I love that idea, and I think at M13 we do that with things like Future Perfect, where our community expects to hear from unlikely pairings of experts to take us in unexpected directions and to insights you didn’t know you need to know.

What makes a founder stand out to you? 

Purpose. If a founder feels a tremendous amount of conviction about what they're doing, it’s infectious. They attract and retain talent, investors, and partners. You can't do anything alone, so it's really important to express purposeful passion that gets other people buzzing and excited to be part of what they’re building.  

Brand sits at the center of so much. Storytelling might start out with something seemingly tactical, but it ends up being so much more than that.

What parts of your experience in nonprofits and commercial space are relevant to the work you do with founders today? 

Communication is more than “get me press” or “make me viral.” It aligns teams by bringing the mission and values back up front to reinforce the why and how—and clarifies behavior that no longer serves the company. 

One thing I appreciate about the Propulsion team is working collaboratively with others, including Matt Hoffman, our Head of People. He has a similar approach to communications, brand building, and focus on people. 

When there are challenges that come up with portfolio companies and their teams, Matt and I encourage founders and their executives to think first about people; make sure that bad news or a change is communicated quickly and with a lot of empathy; and make decisions with respect for the impact they’ll have on people’s lives. We help product leaders become company leaders.

{{appearances}}

M13 and beyond

What made you want to join M13? 

Pursuing deep, immersive learning in a new sector and contributing fresh thinking and transferable skills sums up my career journey. My friends call it “Christine swimming upstream.”  It’s important to work alongside genuinely good people. I got lucky fast on the founding team of Teach for America, and then again at KIPP, and then at Virgin, where I worked with Richard Branson and other leaders to build new Virgin companies and industries like commercial space. When it came to venture capital, I knew Carter and Latif as friends, brothers, and husbands of people I adore. That familiarity accelerated my trust in their vision for M13.

What is something most people don’t know about you? 

I used to be fluent in Swedish. I went to elementary school in Stockholm when the only option for me was French language or Swedish school for diplomats’ kids. People think I still have it in me—but I haven’t been back to test that theory. 

Outside of M13, what’s a project you’re working on right now? 

One of the most frequent questions I’m asked is, "Why did you leave Virgin?" I’m writing a book about change, professional transitions, and saying goodbye, something I’m quite bad at. It was something I had to consistently do as a kid when we moved countries. That might explain why community is so important to me. My friend Sylvia says I’m a translator who understands the different languages of communities and can bridge them. And my relationship with Richard is even better now than when I was at Virgin. 

Lightning round

First job? 

In high school, I sold movie tickets at a local fine arts theater.

Guilty pleasure?

Resting with my cats, watching British procedural crime dramas. 

Daily habit? 

I’ve been getting into strength training at my very non-bro-y gym.

Music recommendation? 

Right now I'm having a renewed love affair with WBGO, the Newark-based jazz radio station.

If you weren’t working in tech or venture, what would you be doing?

I’d be writing a travel blog. 

And as a travel writer, where would you be going? 

Oh wow—where wouldn’t I be going?

‍

{{expertise}}

Seven years ago, Brent Murri was M13’s first-ever investing hire. Today, he’s a partner at the firm. 

This propensity to stick with things over the long term is a theme in Brent’s investing career. He looks to build relationships with founders that last decades, not quarterly reporting cycles. Unlike most M13 partners, he’s had a focused career in venture investing for 10+ years and takes an almost academic interest in the way venture markets function in the broader economy. And as a MasterClass-trained home chef, he has the patience not to open the smoker before a dish is truly ready.  

‍

M13 co-founders Carter and Courtney Reum won Brent over to M13 in 2017, and today, he looks for founders with the same qualities he saw in the Reum brothers back then: grit, a desire to do things differently, and enthusiasm for the second act, not just the debut.

We sat down with Brent to talk about where he’s excited to invest, changes in the macroeconomy and creator economy, and how he helped build M13’s investing team as investor hire No.1.

Brent’s recent publications

• M13’s RocketGuide to Investor Updates
• Investing in the Future of Commerce
• Our 2024 Predictions

Q&A with venture investor Brent Murri

What is exciting to you about AI right now? 

I’m interested in the convergence of AI and marketing/advertising. For B2C businesses, marketing to consumers has been extremely hard. CAC (customer acquisition costs) is rising, data privacy changes are making targeting harder, and many marketing channels that marketers used five or six years ago—like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok—are not the reliable sources of ROI they used to be.

B2B businesses are experiencing the same challenges across their channels: Email open rates are down, attribution is harder to measure, and the proliferation of point solutions make it hard to make sense of all the data being gathered. 

I'm intrigued by how companies are using AI to better target their buyer, better track the end consumer, and more effectively measure their marketing efforts. 

For example, say a brand wants to find a YouTube influencer who’s a natural fit to talk about them. Rather than a human spending hours—or weeks—watching videos to find those influencers, there are solutions that use AI to scrape and understand language in YouTube videos, then identify which users are most aligned with the brand. Using AI to find the right messengers for your product is a really interesting use case to me. 

How is the creator economy changing? 

The creator economy 1.0 was about making it possible for anyone to build an online audience. If someone had a unique or funny take on something, they could gain a huge following using massive distribution channels like YouTube and TikTok. The hard thing about that is that your success is directly tied to the amount of time you spend producing content, and that doesn’t scale. 

Today, I’m looking for businesses that help creators build durable, lasting businesses that aren’t directly correlated with their time spent. These can be advertising platforms that help creators make money, or “business-in-a-box” offerings like Pietra that let creators build consumer product companies that can outlast them.  

What is a common misconception about venture that you want to clear up? 

I think the media often gives VCs way too much credit for having control over exit decisions. As a VC investor, I’m not sitting there with a red button that says, “SELL.” The decision to exit involves a much more complicated system, including founders, shareholders, the board, and most importantly, the buyer (an IPO, M&A, or secondary transaction). 

Obviously, one of the best ways to get liquidity in venture is through an IPO. But if you look at what’s happened to the IPO ecosystem over the last ten years, you see that’s become much harder. In 2018, median revenue at IPO was $90M. Today, the median revenue at IPO is $190M. 

In other words, market requirements for IPOs have more than doubled. That’s not up to VCs, though it does affect the way we return our funds. That’s why we explore all types of liquidity options for our founders and LPs, including secondary transactions when appropriate.

{{appearances}}

As an investor, what makes a founder stand out to you? 

I'm drawn to founders who have a never-quit mentality. Whether they are multiple- time founders or a first-time founder with previous operating experience, I really admire grit and perseverance.

An example of where I've seen this play out well is with founders whose first startup did reasonably well—so they’ve seen what success looks like, and how growth happens—but they aren’t finished yet. Maybe they now feel like they sold too early, or the market shifted, or something happened in their personal life and they got out. So they come back to their next project with a bit of a chip on their shoulder, something more to prove. I like a good sequel. 

Because we invest at the early stages, it’s likely that the idea we originally back will change significantly—so I look for founders who I believe, when the first or second or third iteration doesn’t work out, won’t quit. 

For example, I backed a founder whose first business didn’t work out. We discussed two choices: (1) I take back the remaining investment, or (2) he puts that money toward a new idea that he was passionate about pursuing.

Other investors leapt at option one, but I told him, "We believe in you. Use our investment toward this next idea." The founder appreciated that I was backing him, not just his first idea, and the next idea turned out to be even better than the first.

I value that kind of resilience. It’s a quality I recognized early on in our co-founders Carter and Courtney, which played a role in why I joined M13.

How do you like to work with founders? 

I don’t want to be a blue skies investor. Here’s what I mean by that. 

When I started working with John and James Erck, the founders of Rebuy, I told them, “Every month at our check ins, I’m going to ask, What’s not working? What can we fix this month?” I think knowing that we could have that relationship really gave them a sense of security and has helped us solve problems much faster. 

What is something unique that you bring to the table as an investor?

When a founder shares a challenge, I try to check my ego, listen, and not lean overly hard on past experience. Instead of prescribing solutions, I try to uncover and understand all the symptoms and get the diagnosis right.

If I don’t have the right answer myself, I’ll move heaven and earth to help my founders find someone who does. Recently, I had a founder ask me about API pricing strategies for a new product she is launching. That’s something I don’t have experience with myself, but within 24 hours, I had gotten her the expert she needed to have that discussion. Afterwards, we discussed the optimal strategy together. 

I’d say my superpower is being able to connect people together very quickly and without ego. It's like being the “air traffic controller.” My job is not to fly all the planes, but to point them to where they need to go.

You were the very first investor Carter and Courtney brought on. What made you decide to join them?   

I wouldn’t have joined M13 if it wasn’t for Carter and Courtney's vision of Propulsion. The co-founders pitched me on building a new type of venture firm with more operators than investors in order to support companies early on. That was a completely foreign concept to me. My former firm had about 50 full-time investors, and only two part-time operators to help the portfolio, so it was an entirely opposite ratio. But I knew this was exactly the kind of help founders would want as they scale. 

What was it like to build a venture investing firm from scratch? 

My first year and a half, we didn't even do any investing. It was all about setting up the firm. We formulated our investment strategy, portfolio construction and differentiation in a crowded VC market. We hired our first lawyers, accountants, and fund administrators, the infrastructure a firm needs to operate. I talked to a lot of people to introduce us to prospective LPs, then spent a lot of time traveling around the country pitching LPs. It was an intense first 18 months. 

We wouldn’t have pulled it off without the countless fellow GPs, especially in LA, who graciously offered their time and counsel. I’ll be forever grateful for this.

What is something most people don’t know about you, outside of your life as an investor? 

I’m actually a pretty good cook. I love to grill and smoke. I was constantly on MasterClass during lockdown—I watched classes by Thomas Keller, Gordon Ramsay—and I learned more of the fine techniques of cooking. Being in the kitchen or outside at the grill is my escape. 

What’s a daily habit of yours? 

I try to end my day by spending 15 minutes reading. Not social media, not news—just a book. 

To close out, let’s do a quick lightning round: 

First job?

My dad is a home builder, so my first (unofficial) job, starting around 12 years old, was going to the job site and helping out. I did everything from cleaning up scraps to sweeping to laying gravel. The experience really taught me the value of a hard day’s work early in my life. 

Favorite app?

X. (I’m @brentmurri.)

Guilty pleasure? 

I have a huge sweet tooth, and I’m a sucker for all ice cream. 

Hidden talent?

I’m fluent in Spanish, which I learned while on a Mormon mission when I was 19. I went to Washington, DC, and I worked with a predominantly Hispanic population. I don’t get to use it a lot today, but I do still speak Spanish sometimes when I talk with my Chilean sister-in-law or order street tacos in LA. 

Book, movie, or music rec?

Setting the Table, by Danny Meyer from Union Square Hospitality Book, really teaches you how to be a good host. I try to incorporate that hospitality into my business practice. Asking, How does someone really feel when they’re with you? Did they enjoy their time? Do they want to come back? 

If you weren’t working in tech or venture, what would you be doing?

Probably hosting a cooking show—though my dream is to take over for Guy Fieri and host Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.

Startups are always storytelling. 

From the moment companies start sharing their vision with prospective talent and investors, they are communicating their brand. The startup mentality of agility and iteration can work well in today’s shifting media landscape, as our phones enable every platform, friend, and influencer to become a media channel. In a world where we’re always communicating, the first step in a communication strategy is to rethink how audiences are persuaded to try, buy, change their mind—and to trust. 

At this year’s Future Perfect conference, we convened filmmaker Casey Neistat, TV icon and author Stacy London, and Overtime founder and CEO Dan Porter to talk about the why, what, and how of storytelling. Their conversation challenged the startup focus on growth metrics as brand building—and encouraged a refocusing on authenticity and personal connection.

In a metrics-obsessed industry, I believe in the power of what can’t be measured. The satisfaction of an honest day of work, an epiphany that changes your worldview or direction, a meal with friends, holding hands with your elder parent—these are the things that touch and shape us at a cellular level. And these “unmeasurables” become the acorns of stories that reveal our genuine selves, shape the direction of our teams and business, and open the door for audiences and partners to connect.

“The top of the funnel has never been wider,” says Casey, the OG YouTube creator whose influence is evident in today’s top trending content. “Media and content used to be exclusive, and now it’s wide open. I celebrate the access we all have, but it doesn’t mean everybody gets to be good—and the bottom has not budged.” 

In this noisy landscape, what is the right startup strategy for brand communications—and how can companies leverage tension, curiosity, and authenticity, in their storytelling? Below, our panelists explore some of the key tensions and opportunities that can guide startups as they operationalize early stage communications strategies and brand reputation. 

Authenticity over metrics 

Data can help guide strategic marketing decisions and launch campaigns. But what happens when there is no precedence or data? Embrace the unknown and listen to the people who are in the know. When the engineers of Larry Page’s EVTOL company voiced concerns that our vehicle would be compared to a drone, I invited the biggest content creator known for drone-breaking videos to fly our personal flying car. That’s how I got to know Casey Neistat. 

×

A parent by the age of 16, Casey worked at a seafood restaurant scrubbing pots before getting recognition and awards as a filmmaker. After YouTube launched, his daily vlogs made him the original YouTube creator. 

For Casey, content creation was driven by curiosity, not metrics—putting him at odds with today’s social media and startup cultures, where algorithms and metrics rule.

Casey encourages a focus on making things that can actually change the world, not just get views. “Thinking I need to be like this guy is a huge mistake. Instead of the creative spirit of an individual, it's about creativity by committee. That doesn't speak to me in any meaningful way.”

Today, you're able to literally craft content for social metrics, and it's a race to the bottom with creativity.

——Casey Neistat, Filmmaker

“Metrics are arbitrary, but necessary,” says fellow panelist Dan Porter. Dan has found repeated success as a founder in gaming, social media, and sports media. “They’re a good shorthand.” Before founding Overtime, recently named a Time 100 Most Influential Company, Dan started and sold two tech companies, and before that he and I were on the founding team of Teach For America and worked together in the early growth of Virgin’s North America portfolio. 

As Dan points out, metrics are useful as shorthand for progress—but true innovation comes from passion and creativity that can't be measured. 

Humans > logos

Years ago, LinkedIn EIC Dan Roth told me, “People follow other people, not brands.” 

The ability to convey authentic, human-centered stories is one way to build a brand moat. Personal narratives establish credibility and relatability far more effectively than corporate messages. Stacy London’s long-running fashion show What Not to Wear makes her a beloved personality, especially as she tackles tough topics. As she explains, “Style and self esteem go together.” 

Stacy’s career journey has taken her through grief, loss, shame, stigma, menopause, and education. “A billion people are going to be in menopause next year, and they don’t know anything about it,” she says, “They don't know they shouldn't be ashamed.”

I look for experiences that are hard to talk about, where it’s hard to connect people to each other—but once you do, you can create a community that’s more than extractive consumption.

——Stacy London, TV Host & Author

Stacy’s menopause advocacy highlights how founders can leverage personal challenges to build meaningful solutions in overlooked markets. By sharing real-life experiences in areas she is genuinely curious about, she has deepened connections with new and loyal fans and differentiated her brand in a crowded marketplace.

Casey also brings a human-centric approach to content. He began daily vlogging on YouTube to document what it was like to build a venture-backed technology company. “After three days of watching eight programmers write code, it became more about: What interestingness can I squeeze from my life? You start focusing on minutiae, then you keep drilling deeper and deeper. And I did that for 800 days in a row."

Casey’s focus on compelling storylines and consistent posting resulted in a massive following and influence—and it helped raise capital for the startup.

Focus on community to build product-market fit

To build a company, “you have to know something no one knows,” says Dan. For his third startup, he had the idea to engage an overlooked GenZ market that didn’t watch live sports. 

Creating high-quality, relevant, and shareable content can help attract and retain customers, build brand authority, and drive organic growth. By producing compelling shareable sports highlights on social media, Overtime built a community of GenZ sports fans. As a result, the company has grown community interaction (with over 100M followers across its social platforms) and built the brand credibility to expand into sports leagues. 

No one is freaking out about where to watch Friends. Audience development is about meeting audiences where they are.

——Dan Porter, Overtime Co-founder & CEO

Storytelling as a skill is also vital for building investor trust. Iterating on a business model, with the agility to adjust to market feedback and changing conditions, is a differentiator. Dan credits his ability to explain the evolution of his strategy for his success in winning over investors, partners, and talent.

The road ahead 

Storytelling is at the heart of persuasion. Relationships start with curiosity, and a strong communications strategy must aim to pique curiosity with shared interests, meaningful experiences, and unusual—controversial, fresh, from the heart—insights. 

There’s no silver bullet for brand building. Leaders get better at storytelling with road-tested practice and a willingness to mine vulnerabilities for anecdotes. As Stacy says, “Your attachment to who you were instead of who you are is stopping you from being the best version of yourself.”

What does this approach to storytelling look like? Our brand flywheel is a good place to start.

Balance creative passion with practical strategies and think deeply about your audience. Ask the questions: Where and to whom do they go to be persuaded? How can you be a meaningful part of their daily lives and habits? Finally, say yes to in-person events. In-person experiences open the door for conversation and authentic connections, which over time build cohesive and motivated partnerships. 

The need to reach audiences where they are, with the fullness of their diverse experiences, will not only build a brand function grounded in adaptability and creativity—but also build memorable tech in fast-changing times. 

It has been nearly 12 months since our last letter. In many ways the world has changed, and in many ways it has stayed the same. 

As we think about investing today, this letter will touch on macro factors at play, M13’s investment areas of interest, and how we support our portfolio companies. 

We consistently revisit our investment thesis to evaluate whether we have the right, risk-adjusted exposure to trends. In M13’s early years (2016–2018), we invested at the seed and Series A stages of 14 consumer tech companies that went on to achieve unicorn status including Ring, Lyft, and Scopely. Today, our focus is on infrastructure and applications enabled by B2B and B2B2C business models, with more recent investments including Prepared (assistive AI for emergency response), Form Health (a personalized medical weight loss telehealth solution), and Lightning Labs (building faster, cheaper, global layer-two bitcoin). We’re interested in the future of work, health, commerce, and money—and how emerging technologies like AI and blockchains can open up these markets.  

One observation we’ve made repeatedly is that we are investing in technologies that we believe could take a decade to get to scale (if not longer) and then grow explosively. Just look at the rise of mobile: IBM released the first touchscreen phone in 1994, Blackberry released its 5810 smartphone in 2002…then adoption exploded in the 2010s after the launch of the iPhone in 2007, reaching penetration rates upwards of 80%. 

We believe the biggest sea changes in technology occur slowly, then abruptly. We’re witnessing this in real time with trends like the AI wave that grew slowly for a decade (we’re coming up on the 10-year anniversary of Google’s DeepMind acquisition) then burst into its recent Cambrian explosion.

×

(Inspired by the fantastic Michael Dempsey essay about technology cycles.)

The macro landscape

Global and domestic politics continue to confound amidst the presidential election, while inflation has remained relatively consistent at ~3%. As of this writing, the market expects three rate cuts in 2024, followed by four more cuts through 2025, lowering the Fed funds rate from 5.33% to 3.00%–3.25%, per Morningstar and CME Fedwatch. We also believe there is a strong negative correlation between interest rates and multiples: According to a study by Evercore, this R-squared is 0.86.* 

Liquidity is king, and private investors have waited anxiously as tech IPOs have dribbled out between Klavyio and Instacart in Q3’23 and Reddit in Q1’24. But we need more to circulate money back into the system—and need companies like Stripe, Klarna, Databricks, Virta, and Chime to step forward. Multiple expansion should help.

Government antitrust regulation also has a huge impact on liquidity, as M13 Partner Karl has discussed here. Upwards of 95% of VC exits are via M&A, but we are not seeing the blockbuster deals that truly move liquidity through the ecosystem, as major acquisitions like Figma/Adobe and Plaid/Visa have been blocked. 

Against this macro backdrop, we have a mild obsession with tailwinds and hype cycles, which inform capital formation and talent migration. These factors are critical in any market, and we think this is especially true for exponential technologies like AI and crypto. (I recently discussed this at length with Brad Burnham from USV.) Paying attention to these cycles is important: Many people leave the market when things are low, so it takes courage to invest in a trough.

×

We presented this hype cycle chart at Future Perfect. (Inspired by the Gartner hype cycle.)

‍

While generative AI may be at the peak of a hype cycle, we still believe it is a fundamental shift that will transform our lives—and that the efficiencies created by AI will be the greatest and most steady tamer of inflation. 

Crypto, unlike other technical innovations, is financialized, which presents investment opportunities but also plenty of volatility and noise. I suspect AI would have seen an equally volatile trendline over the last decade if it had a similar tokenization model. Crypto’s financial nature has also led to repeated peaks (of inflated expectations) and troughs (of disillusionment), but we believe that with each cycle these become less extreme.

×

‍

Our belief is that AI is rapidly approaching its golden age of productivity —and that crypto may circle back yet again before we unlock its true potential. The only area we believe has true product-market fit in crypto today is payments.

All of this is to say: let’s exercise patience. These innovations can take time. Sound investing means understanding where in the hype cycles a technology falls, and understanding a trough is not always the end of the line—or a reason to invest just because prices are cheap. And at any point in the hype cycle, we believe it’s vital to find and invest in the most exceptional founders. 

Past & future investments at M13

So far this year, most of our investments were in AI- or blockchain-enabled companies – and made with an eye toward thoughtful investing at reasonable valuations.

Many existing portfolio companies have successfully launched AI products in their respective verticals. Examples include Pietra’s AI-powered tool for generating design concepts and Canvas which leverages AI to write custom EMRs tailored for very specific conditions.

More generally in the last three years, nearly all of our investments have focused on enabling technologies and B2B models. But times are a changin’, and we also wonder out loud: is it time for consumer software to make a comeback? 

We believe AI and spatial computing are driving momentum for new use cases. Below, we dive deeper into some of our areas of focus today.

Theme 1: Jumping on AI’s quantum leap

We believe AI models are improving at an exponential rate, and we’re looking to how these models can be applied and deployed for step change value creation. We’re most interested in the implications and applications of AI—and the meaningful value these create.

It is our opinion that foundational models’ capital intensity make them best suited for strategics. There is also the potential issue of LLM commoditization: Will there be a difference in quality between OpenAI, Gemini, Llama 3, etc.?

With that in mind, here are three areas our AI strategy focuses on:

Really hard data problems.

We’re starting to see wider deployment of workflows built on top of LLMs to solve really hard data problems—like advanced disease detection, inventory planning, insurance underwriting, and complex resource allocation.

In healthcare, we’ve backed Carenostics, which is building AI models to detect chronic disease earlier. We’ve backed RadiantGraph, which leverages AI for better personalization for patients and is already partnering with large health plans. And to support the use of data for these applications, we’ve invested in Ensemble, which enhances model performance across prediction tasks. Focusing on the hardest data problems can create new market opportunities rather than incremental performance improvements.

Leapfrogging into the future.

M13 companies Prepared and Polimorphic are leveraging AI to leapfrog archaic public and government systems into the future. Prepared’s assistive AI technology brings new data to our legacy 911 infrastructure, and its recent integration with Apple means it will protect 150 million US iPhone users with the release of iOS 18 this fall. Meanwhile Polimorphic is leveraging AI to modernize constituent services (such as search, document retrieval, and customer service) and update the notoriously arcane local government tech stack.

Prepared allows 9-1-1 callers to share real-time data with first responders, giving them access to live video, photos, text, location data, and live subscription. Source: Prepared

AI agents in knowledge work.

We have also focused on the introduction of AI agents into enterprise workflows, with recent investments in Maven (customer support), Lantern (sales), and Zenlytic (business intelligence). Maven AGI’s platform is already answering 90%+ of customer support tickets autonomously for companies like TripAdvisor, Rho, Clickup, Hubspot, and others. We believe this is only the wedge into a much wider set of cases toward the creation of “Business AGI” (artificial general intelligence), where Maven’s platform can be used across an organization to drive strategic decision making and improve customer experience.

Like Maven, Lantern and Zenlytic bring data closer to the front lines, so salespeople and product leaders can partner with agents to make better decisions more quickly. M13 Partner Anna Barber spoke with three of our founders about the deployment of AI agents at our spring Future Perfect conference.

Theme 2: Crypto is no longer just for payments 

We believe crypto, a decade into its own cycle, has found product-market fit in payments: more than half of Fortune 500 companies are working on on-chain projects, and stablecoins process more than 2x Visa’s monthly transactions. Today, 4% of Turkey GDP is transacted in crypto (in the form of stablecoins) and almost 10% of all remittances in Venezuela are via stablecoins. The first stablecoin BitUSD was issued a decade ago so this rate of progress is remarkable. It is also our belief that the history of the Bitcoin halving (where the reward for miners securing the network is cut in half) and improved regulatory and rate environments should lead to a promising year end and 2025. 

This year also saw one of the most successful ETF launches ever with Bitcoin ($17B of net inflows after the launch this January) and leading fintechs like Stripe announce crypto payment integrations including for Solana, where we have long been bullish.  

But where is crypto going next?

M13 company Hivemapper is seeking to build a better Google Maps, uniquely enabled through crypto. Hivemapper's solution refreshes maps with a decentralized network that incentivizes contributors with its native honey token. The company has remarkably reached 25% global coverage in just two years.

×

Source: Hivemapper

‍

Ted Livingston at M13 portfolio company Code, a Solana-based payments and messaging company, has been thinking about true consumer use cases in crypto since founding Kik (the predecessor to WeChat) in 2009. The Code experience is pure magic—check out how it works—and is empowering creators all over the world to get paid for what they create online (instantly and with no fees). If Code fulfills its mission, it could usher in a new business model that gives creators more opportunity and consumers more choice.

We are hitting the 10-year mark in crypto. Enough infrastructure already—it is time for applications, UX, and design.

Theme 3: Consumer is primed for its next big thing

We haven’t really seen anything interesting and new in consumer in over a decade, since the mobile platform shift that spawned Uber, Airbnb, and TikTok. Smartphones and apps had become ubiquitous and powerful enough to give rise to these consumer unicorns. 

Today, we find ourselves looking at another innovation wave. Just like mobile did for the Uber era, recent technological breakthroughs—all 10 years in the making—are setting the stage for the next era of generation of great consumer technology companies.

What will be borne out of today’s emergent technology shifts? Here are a few areas we think are interesting.

Leveraging LLMs for consumer use cases: We believe LLMs can drive true curation and personalized experiences like we’ve never seen before. They’ll disrupt search and matchmaking—but will the real sea change be digital companions or AI cloning? Personalized interactions with AI could have a wide range of implications, from disrupting higher education to improving disease detection. Business model innovation could also be significant—and could lead to the end of the subscription model as consumers become conditioned to pay for very specific tasks (and perhaps on much cheaper crypto rails!).  And as fewer clicks go to ads, what will happen to advertising? How will publishers and content providers supplement their incomes? What will become of SEO? 

The remarkable rise of ChatGPT to $1.3B+ in ARR and 180M MAU since launching in November 2022 proves the power of LLMs and the myriad of use cases they enable. We believe the era of true personalization has finally arrived. The largest companies with the most significant network effects have historically sat at the application layer, and we believe this will continue.

Crypto and abundance: “NFTs” have become a dirty word, but as a technology they are still fundamentally interesting. It is important to move on from the PFP (profile picture token) association to a model focused more on abundance vs. scarcity. In our opinion, scarcity models drive trading; abundance models drive more innate behaviors in areas like gaming and social. We think Solana in particular allows for an abundance-based model, and we are looking for interesting edge cases.

Given this golden era of emerging technologies, it is our view that the next $100B+ consumer technology business will get to scale across one of these computing platforms—and we are on the hunt. Whatever the next big consumer software innovation, it probably won’t come in the form of your standard mobile app. In the words of Clay Christensen (as popularized by Chris Dixon), “The next great innovation will start out looking like a toy.” 

Vision Pro and human-computer interfaces: We shouldn’t underestimate Apple’s ability to create markets, attract developers, and build new ecosystems. The Vision Pro experience is magical—but what is the killer use case? Entertainment consumption, gaming, and education are all candidates. 

The road ahead

At M13, our investment focus is on identifying and riding technology waves with the best founders, always cognizant of where we are in a hype cycle. 

We continue to refine and improve our investment framework with an eye on markets, business models, and competition. Most of all, we invest in founders building the next-generation of leading software companies: their motivations, history, and the ability to both execute and communicate a powerful story. We’re proud to offer them the capital and support to execute their vision.

As we circle back to the macro, we believe monetization of our portfolio will be critical. We hope the FTC and DoJ release their stranglehold on M&A—recall that upwards of 95% of VC exits are via M&A, not IPO, and M&A is critical for recycling talent and capital back into the ecosystem—but we’re also not holding our breath.   

Liquidity is king, and we strive to deliver it to our investors and be creative in this pursuit. Through our board positions and Propulsion model, we look to actively manage our portfolio as it matures and seek liquidity in a way that delivers best risk-adjusted returns. This requires a clear understanding of operating performance and markets, especially over long time horizons.

Yes, there is uncertainty at the macro level, compounded by the presidential election cycle. But in our opinion, there is no debate that we are in the exponential age of technology, which always drives us forward with unfettered optimism. 

Do you agree with this letter? Disagree? Have something to add?

I’d love to talk.

Latif Peracha, Partner
latif@m13.co

‍

*Study was performed by Evercore for M13 Fund II portfolio company Rho and was not distributed publicly. 

The climate tech market continues to develop, and commercialization is becoming more real. Renewables are set to surpass coal-powered electricity production for the first time this year, as they become cost competitive with traditional generation methods.

As investors, we recognize that we are at a tipping point in this market. Climate tech innovation is meeting wider demand and driving adoption at scale. Considering commercial advancements—along with growing support from regulators, consumers, and the business community—now is a great time to focus on the climate tech market.

The term “climate tech” encompasses everything from sustainable food and new materials to renewable energy and climate data analytics. While we see promise in several subsets of climate tech, we are most excited to invest in the circular economy, decarbonization, and energy. 

Below, we dig into our interest in that third category, specifically, the shift towards a more decentralized electrical grid.

Investment focus area: Transitioning to a distributed electrical grid 

Electricity is already the largest supplier of useful energy, and demand for it is only rising, projected to increase 27% by 2050. At the same time, the current American grid is becoming more unstable. Climate change, weather issues, and poor maintenance have contributed to a 5X increase in outages in 2021 vs. 2000. The grid will face further strain as the AI boom persists.

Today, the way that electricity is produced, distributed, and consumed is changing. Non-fossil fuel energy sources are increasing, and we’re seeing a shift towards power generation from non-utility sources. 

As a result, we are increasingly moving away from electricity production at centralized power plants owned by large utility companies (e.g., ConEd, Exelon, PG&E) and towards a more mixed generation base of utility players and non-utility players (e.g., independent power producers, end consumers with at-home generation). This transition is already under way: Independent power producers generated nearly half of US electricity in 2022.

This shift towards a more distributed grid largely supports the generation of renewable energy—but there are a host of challenges and opportunities to consider.

‍Our investment focus is on early-stage software and tech-enabled companies contributing to this fundamental shift in our grid infrastructure. We have several areas of interest, ranging from how we better optimize the grid to how we electrify our buildings. 

• Resiliency software: Solutions that help existing large-scale grid players (e.g., utilities, transmission, and distribution companies) identify risks in their operations, with a goal of mitigating future outages.
• Interconnection: The interconnection queue refers to the backlog of new (primarily renewable) energy projects that are unable to connect to the grid and begin producing electricity. Often, the problem isn’t the supply of available energy; it’s connecting it to the grid and making it usable. Software-enabled platforms are alleviating these issues.
• Power purchase agreements software and marketplaces: As electricity volatility amplifies, businesses—led by big tech companies with large electricity expenditures—are increasingly procuring power in bulk through power purchase agreements (PPAs). This allows businesses to lock in longer-term visibility into energy costs and can help them hit net zero goals.
• Building electrification: Consumers and businesses continue to electrify, generate their own power (e.g., solar panels), and support their own energy storage (e.g., home battery systems) for energy backup and to manage energy intermittency.
• Virtual power plants & next-gen utilities: As consumers and businesses electrify and install more distributed energy resources, virtual power plants can become major players in their local markets, providing energy supply back to the grid.

Get in touch

We are continuing to dig into the future of the electrical grid and other areas of climate tech generally. If you are working in the space, drop us a note. We’d love to chat!

Anna Barber, Partner
anna@m13.co

Mark Grace, Investor
mark@m13.co

‍

{{expertise}}

Anna Barber spent the first months of her life living in the Chelsea Hotel across the hall from Janis Joplin—possibly an early sign of the bold, fearless path she would take. From contemplating a life as a backcountry guide to founding a book publishing startup, Anna’s eclectic interests laid the groundwork for her eclectic career. 

Anna’s initial foray into the corporate world as a lawyer and McKinsey consultant provided a solid foundation in understanding the inner workings of large companies. Transitioning to Hollywood, she spent six years as a talent manager, refining her storytelling prowess—a skill that she now leverages to help founders articulate their visions compellingly. And as a former founder herself, Anna has navigated entrepreneurship firsthand, so she understands the resilience and creativity required to succeed in the startup world.

‍

As a venture investor, Anna champions a philosophy that combines deep support with high expectations, believing that this duality drives the best outcomes. She also sees beyond the frothy valuations and bubble talk, understanding that even in that environment generational companies will emerge. In an industry often dominated by short-term gains, her long-term vision and holistic approach to venture capital stand out.

We sat down with Anna to learn more about her career journey, what kind of founders she wants to work with, and what innovations she’s interested in right now.

Anna's recent publications 

• AI Fundamentals: What AI Really Does and Where We’re Looking to Invest
• M13's Guide to Building Your Early-Stage Fundraising Deck
• AI Guardrails: How Enterprises Can Safely Adapt to the Generative AI Wave
• The Rise of AI Agents

Q&A with venture investor Anna Barber

Many believe AI is at peak hype right now. Does a founder have to have AI in their pitch deck to get your attention? 

AI is all about efficiency gains—it makes things faster, cheaper, and better. It’s not a trend, it’s a paradigm shift that is improving efficiency. So if you’re a founder that is not using AI. I want to know why.

What are people getting wrong about AI right now?

There's a notion right now of we're in an AI bubble, and then the conclusion that some people draw is nothing that's getting funded today is going to work out. I think that's the wrong frame. 

People see that we're undergoing a massive platform shift—similar to what happened in 1999, similar to what happened in 2008 with cloud computing—and so people are excited to invest behind that thesis. As a result, valuations have maybe gotten a bit frothy, and people are getting ahead of their skis in terms of backing things that might not have an actual market.

“The fact is there will be generational companies that are getting funded now, even though there will also be a lot of companies that don't succeed.”

I think both can be true. While we're in a bubble and undergoing a major, exciting platform shift, it's also a great time to be investing. When you look backwards at 1999, you see evidence of that in companies that not only survived that period, but thrived, and become some of the largest companies in the world (like Google and Amazon, and infrastructure companies like Cisco). 

What is exciting to you about AI right now?  

I’d say there are three big areas I’m really interested in:

I’m also interested in companies building AI agents. I believe that yesterday, AI was all about data structures, algorithms, and machine learning. Today, the focus is on generative AI. And the AI of tomorrow is the world of agents.

What is not interesting to you about AI right now? 

As an early-stage investor, it’s challenging to invest in large foundational models. This is where big tech companies are focused on investing.

{{appearances}}

As an investor, what makes a founder stand out to you? 

There are a few types of founders that stand out to me. 

• Founders with a lot of courage, who aren’t afraid of contrarian thinking 
• Founders who see venture capital as a tool, not the end goal
• Founders with deep perspective on the market they’re building in because of prior experience—it’s probably not a coincidence that I tend to be drawn to older founders
• Founders with a deep conviction about their purpose and the business they’re trying to build

You were a founder and worked at a startup that went bust in the 2000 dot com boom. How has that shaped the way you make decisions as a venture capitalist?

I learned from the early 2000s dot com boom, that in every hype cycle, there will still be generational companies made. Apple, Amazon and Google were considered startups that many called “hype” back in 2001. I look at startups today as the future Googles and Apples. Regardless of the hype, a handful of startups today will be the biggest companies in the world in 2035.

‍You’ve also been a lawyer, a consultant, a talent manager, and more—how have these other career paths shaped you as an investor?

Starting my career as a corporate lawyer and a McKinsey strategy consultant gave me a real foundation of understanding how large companies work. That experience was valuable to me as I transitioned into the startup world, because I didn't harbor any illusions that things were somehow easier if you were a large company.  

I also spent six years as a talent manager working with writers and directors, which really helped me hone my storytelling skills. The time I spent in Hollywood has really informed both my ability to craft a great story and my appreciation for storytelling as a leadership skill. I believe founders are only as good as the story they tell. What attracts capital? What attracts people to work for you? Stories. 

Finally, I founded a company called Scribble Press: I raised money, ran that company for a while, and sold it. So I went through that entire trajectory of inventing something completely new, bringing it to the world, pivoting it, trying to sort out how to make the unit economics work, trying to iterate quickly in a physical retail environment where quick iterations are really, really hard. That experience taught me a lot of humility and insight into how tough it is to be a CEO and how lonely it can be.

What’s a daily habit of yours? 

Every morning I write down five things I’m grateful for and text them to a friend. It’s my gratitude practice. And I say “practice” because it doesn’t always come naturally—but I’ve found that when I do it, it puts me in a more positive mindset and helps me be more creative throughout the day. 

To close out, let’s do a quick lightning round: 

First job?

Photographer’s assistant. Once during a cosmetics catalog shoot, it was my job to make the perfect swirl in the cold cream. Today that job doesn’t really exist anymore; you can create the swirl with AI. 

Favorite app?

The New York Times games app.

Guilty pleasure? 

Elin Hilderbrand novels—they always feel like the beginning of summer to me. 

Book, movie, or music rec?

Right now I’m reading This Is How You Lose the Time War. It’s fantastic. 

Hidden talent? 

I used to be a pretty serious triathlete, and I can change over from the swim to the bike in record time. The secret is laying out your outfit in exactly the right way, for maximum efficiency. 

If you weren’t working in tech or venture, what would you be doing?

I think my alter ego lives in the Adirondacks and teaches kids to rock climb. 

✨ Highlights from this RocketGuide✨

• The brand flywheel — An overview of how all the pieces of a scalable brand comms function fit together, even at the early stages. This includes your website, social channels, visual brand, earned media, and more. 
• Fundraise announcement example — An example of a traditional fundraise announcement, what information is in there, and why. This is useful for crafting both a press release or a blog post announcement.
• Fundraise announcement timeline — Announcing a milestone takes time and prep work. Use our activities timeline to get the most out of an announcement—and learn why you should start earlier than you think. 
• [Template] Fundraise announcement timeline — Download our timeline to start planning now.

According to a recent study, the number two leading reason startups fail is poor marketing strategies and execution. In today's competitive landscape, brand marketing is more important than ever.

Brand communications touches every aspect of your business. Brand at the early stage includes PR (or "earned media"), social media, thought leadership, and events, and strong branding improves investor decks, product marketing, and internal comms. Done right, with a commitment to iterating quickly, the function keeps your startup top of mind, impacting customer purchase decisions, talent hires, fundraising, and more.

Whatever your experience, our comprehensive RocketGuide to Early-Stage PR will help you announce your near-term company news and, more meaningfully, activate your brand comms flywheel to achieve business goals going forward.

For more seasoned brand managers, today you may have fewer resources and more audiences to reach in a fragmented media landscape. You may also not be getting feedback that translates into traditional metrics. Our RocketGuide may spark coordination for greater consistency across your available channels, make your assets work harder for your brand, and help you iterate faster to improve engagement. The way we consume content is ever-charging—so let’s go!

‍

Christine Choi, M13 Partner, Head of Brand Communications
M13 founders work with partners like Christine to build trust and a resilient foundation early on for enduring businesses to scale. Prior to joining M13, Christine worked with Sir Richard Branson and Virgin's North American airlines, hotels, fintech, and commercial space companies to go to market and establish their brand reputation. She was also on the founding teams of Teach For America and KIPP public charter schools.

The brand flywheel

Even at the early stage, you’re already building the daily habits of a scalable, effective brand comms function. And you’re probably already getting feedback that shows that content matters. 

In a media landscape where news and social media are weighed equally, publishing your own content is essential. According to Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer, B2B buyers prefer “digital discovery” over a sales call, with 75% of respondents saying a specific piece of thought leadership content led them to research a product or service they were not previously considering.

Learn where your content can be amplified by checking out the brand flywheel.

Who is this for? Defining your audience 

Brand comms involves a range of activities, but its overall purpose is to connect your audiences with a memorable narrative about your company.

‍Narrative + engagement = brand reputation, built over time.

Understanding your priority audience(s) helps you build relevant content and an execution strategy to reach them. Audiences to engage at the early stages are: 

Customers: Understanding what matters to them helps shape helpful educational content that demonstrates your expertise, boosts sales, and builds trust.

Talent: Brand communications can attract and retain talent. Top talent is drawn to exciting, well-funded startups, and momentum—fueled by content, press, and awards—builds excitement around your brand. Encourage your team to share your story with their own networks and acknowledge them when celebrating milestones. 

Investors and partners: Effective brand communication helps raise capital. Research from Hard Numbers shows companies with the highest media coverage see a 35,635% increase in funds raised from their first event to Series B. Yes, investors are people too, and they’re checking out your social.

Media and opinion-makers: Unlike ads, earned media can’t be bought. An article from a trusted outlet that mentions your company can boost both awareness and credibility. Build relationships with reporters by following their work and engaging genuinely. Don’t just pitch—nurture reciprocal media relationships.

Crafting “sticky” messaging from the get go

Your investor decks, sales decks, job descriptions, and social posts are starting to tell the story of your company. To reach a wider audience, it’s time to dig deep and craft a compelling narrative, which starts by objectively answering the question: Why should I care? 

Consider additional questions to uncover compelling stories that can be authentically told by you in person or on a call (without slides!).

Company messaging: Spend time with your leadership team to create your company messaging. Unique stories matter, so pick concrete anecdotes that help you stand out. 

• Why does your startup exist? 
• What is most compelling about what you do? 
• What is a memorable compliment from a customer?
• What’s an ideal headline (8 words or less) for a news story about your company? 
• What will a journalist find most interesting about your company right now? 
• How has your product or service disrupted an industry norm? 
• What unexpected insight have you/your company discovered that will impact the future?‍

Founder messaging: Your audience and reporters want to know your reasons for being an entrepreneur and what it took to get your business off the ground. 

• What is your personal stake in the problem you are trying to solve? 
• What is your founder origin story?
• What or who inspires you? 
• What unexpected quality about you makes you the right person to innovate in your specific area? 

Mistakes are made to learn from. As you practice sharing your story out loud and activating the flywheel, your narrative will get even more precise—and stickier.

Early-stage PR: announcing your first fundraise  

Let’s now prepare for your first news announcement, which for early-stage tech founders is often your first fundraise. 

Explore two Rocket Guides templates to help you get going. First, our interactive fundraise announcement timeline—and the accompanying template you can download—will help you identify what to start doing ahead of your announcement.

Our example fundraise announcement identifies the basics you should cover for either a traditional press release or a more personal blog. 

Three basics every startup should do 

Even if you’re not quite ready to draft your first announcement, here are three things you can do to activate your brand flywheel:

Keep your social channels active. When reporters and investors look you up, they will look to social for signs of life, traction, and to see who’s on your side. Build a trust-based relationship with your community with a consistent cadence of insights, partnerships, educational tips and news. Save time by reposting content across multiple channels. (And if you absolutely don’t want to get active on social, don’t set up “zombie” channels with no followers that make it look like you have nothing to say.) 

Win hearts and minds, starting with those already on your side. Activate your network of stakeholders so they get emotionally invested in your team’s progress. Get them excited to receive interesting content from you to post on their own social channels (they’re influencers too). 

Relationships matter—and not only when you need something. Stay informed and get to know reporters and experts who cover your industry. Nurture these relationships, learn what matters to them and what they’re writing about (and what’s overlooked), and see what events they’re planning where your insights can be useful. Be brighter together.

The road ahead

Our RocketGuide may make you reconsider engaging earned media: It’s a lot of work. You may also start thinking about how to resource for brand comms. At the early stage, you may have people on your team already doing adjacent work. Other options are to hire an agency or consultant on a project basis or ask your investors for help. If you're an M13 portfolio company, reach out to us—that’s what we’re here for. 

Whether it’s now or later, you will need to scale brand comms as your company and responsibilities grow. A brand comms executive who has a seat at your table from the beginning will help you anticipate public perception risk early, before it’s too late to identify and address structural problems. 

Whereve you're at, knowing how brand comms works is a great first step and will establish realistic expectations.

Ready to learn more? Check out our full RocketGuide to Early-Stage PR. 

We’re going back to the moon—but this time we’re doing it with commercial industry, in a way that would blow the minds of the people at NASA 20 years ago.

——AC Charania, NASA Chief Technologist

You have to meet any market where it’s at. Sometimes having 10x better technology alone isn’t enough.

——Michael Chime, Prepared Co-founder & CEO

I fundamentally believe that the Empire AI project will spur the kind of broader economic and tech growth in New York that we saw centered around Stanford and Silicon Valley for 20 years.

——Julie Samuels, Tech:NYC President & CEO

At our Future Perfect conference this year, we brought together three innovators with a unique and important skill set: getting private and public companies to work together. 

As co-founder and CEO of Prepared, a company building the next generation of public safety, Michael Chime knows the importance of meeting government infrastructure, systems, and budgets where they’re at. As President and CEO of nonprofit organization Tech:NYC, Julie Samuels understands how different entities can work together to support New York City and State. And as Chief Technologist of NASA, AC Charania is ushering in a new era of collaboration between the private tech industry and the nation’s storied space agency—including literal moonshots. 

Here’s what our panelists shared about their experience navigating the overlapping worlds of public and private stakeholders. 

Meeting public entities where they’re at 

Michael Chime’s interest in public safety came early, when an active shooter event in a neighboring town became a catalyst for his interest in helping make schools safer. Years later, he and his co-founders built Prepared, an AI-powered assistive 911 tech company. Today, 30% of the American population is protected by Prepared’s tools for operators that reduce call process times, translate caller audio from 140 languages, transcribe calls in real-time, and equip first responders with live video that helps save lives. 

Building a solution for a public entity like the National 911 Program brings unique challenges for a tech startup. “For your regular SaaS company, if you can provide 10x better technology, you have a good chance of success. That’s the bar: 10x better tech,” says Michael. “When we were building Prepared, we walked into 911 dispatch centers and realized they had technology that was from the 80s. So it wasn’t only a matter of better technology being available; it was a matter of financial constraint, government procurement processes, and switching costs.” 

Drawing inspiration from companies like Slack and Yammer, known for championing a bottom-up business model, the Prepared team decided to offer their solution to dispatch centers for free or a low initial cost. Only after the center was up to speed on Prepared did they start to have procurement conversations. 

“You have to meet any market where it’s at,” says Michael. 

Julie agrees: “For a long time, we saw startups and tech companies come in and be like, I can fix this, it’s so easy to fix tech in government. But it’s actually not the technology that’s hard to fix, it’s all those other things Michael talks about. Meeting government where it is, especially at the local level, is key.” 

Empire AI: A case study for successful private-public projects 

Julie Samuels’ organization Tech:NYC sits at the intersection of the tech sector and civic space in New York City. As the landscape shifts and technology becomes the largest sector in New York, Tech:NYC works to make sure the tech industry is supporting the city, and vice versa.

One recent noteworthy win is the Empire AI project, a $400M public and private consortium to promote responsible research and AI opportunities focused on public good. With a new expert-designed supercomputer being built in Buffalo, universities will have access to the level of compute needed to compete with the private sector and do cutting-edge research across computer science, climate tech, astrophysics, and more. 

The massive project was made possible only through collaboration between public, private, and philanthropic entities, and is a shining example of what can happen when these entities work together. “We got this through the state budget process in a matter of months,” says Julie. “This kind of thing just does not happen that quickly, so it has been amazing.”

These collaborations can yield transformative results. Julie shares, “I fundamentally believe that the Empire AI project will spur the kind of broader economic and tech growth that we saw centered around Stanford and Silicon Valley for 20 years—becoming a new center of gravity for the best faculty, post-docs, students, employers, and startups.” 

NASA's new era of partnerships

AC Charania spent much of his career in private space and aviation companies like Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and Reliable Robotics, describing his job as “taking ideas from the back of a napkin and turning them into reality.” Today, he is NASA’s Chief Technologist and oversees meaningful partnerships between the private sector and America’s premiere space organization. According to AC, “My job is to take 20+ years of public-private partnership and technology development at private companies and translate that to working for the government.”

One major project at hand? Returning humans to the moon. The Artemis Program will include an expedition around the moon and later a week-long stay on its surface, and it will bring the first Canadian, woman, and person of color to this kind of lunar exploration. 

“We’re going back to the moon,” says AC, “but this time we’re doing it with commercial industry, in a way that would have been incredible for those thinking about a lunar return 20 years ago. The way we’re going about it contractually, and the architectures and collaborations we’re doing with commercial industry, are incredible.” 

NASA works with private entities through licensable technologies, contracts, and collaborations, as well as by publishing its list of technology gap priorities it is searching for other organizations to close. For example, there is solar arrays technology that was built by a startup and is widely used by NASA now: “It started with a small business idea that we incubated, and now we’re using it all over the solar system," says AC.

He concludes, "The wave of commercial industry collaborations with the government is probably an unstoppable force in the 21st century, because of the talent and capital that industry can bring to the table." Simply put, "Industry can innovate more rapidly." 

The team doesn't need you to be the best player in the league. They need you to be the best person in that role, for that team.

——Shane Battier, 2x NBA Champion

I love to talk about the power of compounding improvement. Every January 2nd, I always say: If we get 1% better every day, by the end of the year, we've gotten 37x better.

——Carter Reum, M13 Partner & Co-founder

Shane Battier is regarded as one of the most successful—if unusual—basketball players in history, known for his data-driven approach to basketball and teamwork. Michael Lewis famously dubbed him “The No-Stats All Star,” a nod to the fact that Shane’s strengths aren’t captured by traditional basketball metrics, but by the fact that his presence on a team made them significantly more successful overall. 

In other words, Shane's presence on a team helps the whole be greater than the sum of its parts—or as we say at M13, to shine brighter together.

According to Lewis, “The game tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group…. Morey has come to think of [Shane] as an exception: the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he has ever seen. Or rather, the player who seems one step ahead of the analysts, helping the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his own personal interests.”

Shane joined M13 Partner & Co-founder Carter Reum at our annual Future Perfect conference to talk about leadership, teamwork, and his unique approach to winning. Here are some of the top lessons—for business and for life—from their conversation.

1. Embrace unseen, ‘unsexy’ contributions

Winning teams win as a team—not as individuals. It’s important to acknowledge that some of the most important work may not be immediately visible or celebrated.

“Kobe Bryant is the toughest competitor I’ve ever had to guard against. But even the great Kobe Bryant had strengths and weaknesses,” says Shane. “I knew when Kobe Bryant went to his right hand, he had a 62% shot of scoring. (That’s legendary, by the way—that’s what makes him one of the greatest players of all time.) But if I sent him to his left hand, and I kept him from the basket, it was only a 42% shot. You don’t have to be a math major from MIT to know that if I’m guarding Kobe, I’d rather him have the 42% chance of success than the 62%. If I can get him to do the 'bad thing' every single time, I’m creating positive expected value for me.” 

Armed with this data, Shane memorized every spot on the basketball court where he could get that edge. “And so even though I wasn’t sexy, I couldn’t jump, I was slow, I didn’t score—I still knew how to create value on every single space on the floor,” he concludes. “That’s why when I was on the floor, my teams magically played better.” 

2. Obsess over process

In both sports and business, you simply can’t control outcomes—they depend on too many factors outside of your control. What you do have control over is your own contribution.

“I became obsessed with process,” says Shane. “I cannot control the result. I cannot control whether the ball goes in or not. But I could affect where Kobe took his shorts from. I became detached from the actual result, because that’s something I can’t control—so I can’t worry about it.” 

This mindset helped him reframe success for himself and his team, and to focus in on the things he could influence instead of the things he couldn’t. “Carmelo did kick my butt,” Shane laughs, recounting guarding 10x NBA All-Star Carmelo Anthony. “But the process was pure, so I didn’t worry about it.” 

“I always talk about that with founders,” Carter agrees. “Respect the process. And if you just do the right things enough times over a long enough period of time, the results should follow.” 

3. Trust and mission focus are the most important factors for success

“As much as I love data, it still comes down to people,” says Shane. “In my work, running analytics in Miami for five years, we produce a lot of research—but maybe the most seminal piece of research that we produced was about the power of teams. There's two factors that determine your team's trajectory and success: trust and mission focus.”

Championship sports teams are made up of teams that have high trust in each other and a strong, united focus on the team’s ultimate mission. Similarly, 

“It’s the same for investing as it is for basketball,” says Shane. “It’s what makes us human.” 

4. Learn from worthy competitors

To encourage your own growth, seek out and respect worthy opponents who challenge you to grow and improve. Identifying and learning from people at the top of their game forces you to elevate your own strategy. 

“Kobe and I have played this meta game-within-the-game-within-the-game, the only he and I knew we were playing,” says Shane. “And he knew that I knew that he knew that I knew. As a competitor, I hope all of you find a worthy foil and a worthy competitor that you play a meta game with that only you know.” 

Your cheerleaders will boost you up, but sometimes it’s your competitors who build you up the best. 

5. Evaluating founders 

In closing, one attendee asked Shane about his experience talking to founders. His response came back to the main theme of the day—that winning teams requires more than just successful individuals. The whole must be greater than the sum of its parts. 

“I love talking to founders,” says Shane. “There are a lot of founders that have amazing ideas, have the passion, have the drive. But if they can’t get the right people to go along with them on their journey, they’re not getting my money. At the same time, I’ve invested in people whose idea might be subpar, who might not be very charismatic—but they are amazing at building a team that can execute, around that framework of trust and mission focus.”