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We believe the 2020s are the decade of data. The trends are ubiquitous and plain. The number of data teams is growing as more companies rely on data for daily operations. In addition, the sophistication of these teams has progressed meaningfully in the last five years.

During this period, there have been three main categories of data work: business intelligence, machine learning, and exploratory analytics. Of the three, exploratory analytics is the least developed so far.

Reversing a problem is a common mental model for thinking about a challenge in a novel way. Especially in investing.

Google’s share price is $2863.55 as I write this. Is it a good price to buy?

The traditional way of thinking would lead one to build a bottoms-up model with a few assumptions and compare the output to the price.

But that approach ignores some critical information: the price. Price implicitly conveys the market’s expectations: how the company will grow, how valuable it will be, how strong the management team is. Most public companies are valued on the next ten years’ discounted cash flows. As Claude Shannon said, information is surprise.

co-authored with Patrick Chase

We are thrilled to announce that Redpoint has partnered with Spot AI to lead their $20M Series A.

Video cameras are everywhere: in warehouses, factories, car washes, hospitals, schools, banks, and stores. These cameras generate petabytes of data daily, but the software interfaces to access video today limit their use and value.

Spot AI enables simple access to insight from video. Spot AI builds an artificially intelligent camera system that stores video, analyzes it, and enables collaboration across a team. Plus, it’s plug and play.

Crypto companies that launch a token maintain two capitalization tables: equity and token cap tables. They are distinct but related.

Let’s look at a hypothetical crypto company’s cap tables. On the left, the cap table shows a company that has raised a Seed, A, B, and C rounds. In addition, there are allocations for the founders & employees, plus the Employee Stock Option Pool (ESOP) for new employee grants and retention grants.

Passive venture capital investing is a relatively new idea. But it’s transforming the industry. As later stage investors permeate venture capital, they are amassing index funds of startups. If the public equities market is any indication, passive investing is here to stay.

In public equities, passive investment funds constitute 54% of total dollars in the market, according to Bloomberg Reseearch.

Stripe is the most valuable private company in the US. The company started out life as /dev/payments helmed by two brothers from Ireland. Today, Stripe is synonymous with payments and tallies more than 15 products. From fraud to reporting, company incorporation to carbon removal, Stripe has redefined itself again and again. This level of success requires masterful leadership.

If you’re part of a management team, repeating yourself is a key to success.

When I worked in online advertising, we measured the performance of marketing campaigns in a particular way called aided and unaided recall.

Imagine I send you a survey with two questions:

1. List the names of all the venture firms you’re aware of.
2. Review this list of venture firm logos. Which ones do you know?

The first question is an example of unaided recall and the second is aided recall. A quantitative brand marketer for Redpoint might send this survey before and after a campaign to measure the impact of the campaign. Great brands score very highly on unaided recall.

Unlike equity-only startups, crypto startups maintain two capitalization tables. The first is the equity cap table, just the same as non-crypto startup. The second is the token cap table: who owns how many tokens.

In the early days of crypto, the convention for the genesis token distribution[1] was 80/20 community/insiders. Employees, investors, and the foundations responsible for running the projects (insiders) retained 20% of the tokens. At IPO for a classic startup, equity allocation is the reverse. Insiders own 80%.

Today, Height.app launched out of private beta, and we’re thrilled to announce Redpoint has partnered with the Height team, especially Michael & Kat, who hail from Stripe and Facebook.

We were captivated by Height when we met the team several years ago. In particular, the company aspired to a vision of enabling cross-functional teams to work better together, particularly as organizations grow. The past two years have accelerated collaboration tools adoption and the moment is right for a new product to push the project management sector forward.

The Modern Data Stack is taking shape. MDS is a movement led by many companies to re-architect data flows in an organization. The MDS is a reaction to the realization that data has become essential in every organization, but the tools, infrastructure, and culture to support that role aren’t yet in place.

One of the key parts of that ecosystem is data observability: the system in the MDS that ensures data is correct and flowing properly.