Mariano Battan

The gap between what’s possible—and what’s actually built—has never been bigger. Excited to continue backing entrepreneurs around the world building the future with >$15B in new funds - Apps, Infrastructure, Bio + Health, American Dynamism & Growth🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 Andreessen Horowitz

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Extremely good insights by Leon Eisen, PhD . Discussion about two common models that startup founders seems to follow. Which one IS better or is it wiser to use them both. Very valuable advices. Recommendation to all founders.

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Most deeptech founders start their pitch talking about what they built: the architecture, the breakthrough, the technical achievement. But the best founders lead with who cares and why. I think of founder pitches on a four-stop spectrum: 1. Look what I could do 2. Look what I did 3. Look what it accomplishes 4. Look who cares The first 30 seconds should make me excited to dig into the innards of the product and understand how it works. I went into this in more detail with Jason Rainbow and the team at SpaceNews on the Commercial Space Transformers series. I just wrote more about the framework, and a few founders who got it right, here: https://lnkd.in/gEb6zND3

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$211 billion in venture capital flowed to AI in 2025: half of all global VC funding. Sequoia frames the total opportunity at ten trillion dollars. After compiling 200+ slides of research on the state of agents, I think that estimate is conservative. But here's the question no one is mapping well: where does the value actually sit, and how does it flow? I built a seven-layer market map of the agentic economy—from the silicon and energy at the bottom to the autonomous agents at the top—and used it to compare how Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and NVIDIA are placing fundamentally different bets on which layers will matter most. Some findings that surprised even me: Neon reports that 80% of its databases are now created by AI agents, not humans. There are 144 non-human identities per human employee in the average enterprise. Claude Code already accounts for 4% of all GitHub commits. And the protocols connecting this stack: MCP, A2A, ACP — are growing by Reed's Law, not Metcalfe's (i.e.: MUCH faster). The bottleneck isn't engineering anymore. It's imagination. (Link in the comments)

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How to build a “fantasy VC portfolio” that could help you break into VC 👇 Some people treat fantasy portfolios like a wish list: “I would have invested in OpenAI, Figma, Stripe.” That’s hindsight, not investing acumen. A real fantasy portfolio should force you to think like a fund manager. Here’s the simple version: 1. Define your “Fund I” Set real constraints: - Fund size - Check size - Stage - Sectors - Geography - Ownership targets Everything you “invest” in must fit the mandate. 2. Set portfolio construction rules Decide: - of core positions - Reserves % - Ticket sizes - Deployment pace - Constraints → discipline. 3. Build a real pipeline Track companies weekly with: Company, sector, stage, source, location, status (Watching / Passed / Invested). This gives you deal flow. 4. Write a mini-memo for every check Include: problem, why now, team, market, competition, model, risks. End with: Invest? How much? What ownership? No memo → no check. 5. Track valuation & ownership Log round size, valuation, your check, and % ownership. This teaches price discipline and dilution math. 6. Maintain a portfolio dashboard Track entry valuation, ownership, markups/markdowns, notes, and outcomes. You’re now running a shadow fund. **This is the hardest part because you may not have access to the information but hopefully you are close enough to the companies to get the info or find publicly disclosed info** 7. Write quarterly LP updates Summarize new investments, follow-ons, markups, misses, and lessons learned. This builds judgment. 8. Turn it into a public track record Share memos, sector insights, and what you got right/wrong. In a few years, it won’t feel “fantasy," it’ll look like evidence of your investing ability. ---- 𝐈𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮'𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔.𝐒., 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐥 𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮'𝐫𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭. Verivend 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 "𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐦𝐨" 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐬.  𝐈𝐭'𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐚 𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐫 → https://lnkd.in/grrJxqxq ♻️ Share to help someone in your network! #venturecapital #verivendpartner #startup #fundraising

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New interview with Joaquin Cuenca, CEO of Freepik (#4 AI app by spend per a16z) If any company should’ve been killed by AI, it was them: a library of stock images. The exact thing AI was built to replace. But Freepik pulled off the comeback of the AI era. The timing couldn’t have been worse. When DALL-E 2 dropped, Joaquín had COVID. Doom-scrolling AI art for hours. “I came out of that in despair. I had no plan. I only knew that what we were doing was not going to be the business of the future.” His strategy: accept you have no plan and act anyway. They grabbed Stable Diffusion the moment it launched, put it in front of 600k subscribers, and learned from their users. Freepik is now growing faster than at any point in its history. New episode. We got into: → How Adobe, Shutterstock, and Getty reacted to AI vs Freepik → Why “no moats” is the only honest advice for pre-AI founders → Where full automation still breaks (and humans still win) → The moment his team realized their old skills were worthless and how he handled it  🎙️ Link to Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eif3_uHC  ▶️ Link to YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eV36rKAM

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📈 Why did OpenAI buy tech’s hottest news show?   Fresh off the biggest funding round in Silicon Valley history—$122 billion at an $852 billion valuation—OpenAI acquired TBPN for an undisclosed amount. This marks OpenAI’s first major media acquisition. If you’re not familiar, TBPN is a daily live tech-and-business show often referred to as SportsCenter for business. The show averages about 70,000 viewers per episode, which is still small by mass-media standards, but much more influential than its size would suggest but it has real pull inside Silicon Valley. Its guests have included Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and other high-profile executives, some of whom rarely speak to legacy media outlets. 🤔 So, why buy it? 1️⃣ First: distribution. TBPN reaches exactly the kinds of people OpenAI cares about most: founders, engineers, operators, investors, and tech executives. The show helps shape what this crowd pays attention to, who they take seriously, and how they talk about the companies driving AI forward. And because the show lives natively on X, its clips travel fast and far beyond its live audience. 2️⃣ Second: the IPO. That distribution matters even more this year ahead of an expected IPO, and TBPN already sits unusually close to the exact audience OpenAI wants paying attention: tech finance people, ambitious builders, decision-makers, and future shareholders. Its exclusive NYSE partnership only strengthens that case. 3️⃣ Third: TBPN knows how to package a company for this audience without sounding like corporate comms. The hosts are AI optimists who are fluent in startup and tech culture, and good at turning company messaging into content their loyal audience actually watches and shares. OpenAI’s own announcement makes clear that this was part of the appeal: beyond keeping the show running, it specifically called out TBPN’s “comms and marketing instincts” and said the team will also contribute inside OpenAI. OpenAI says TBPN will remain editorially independent. But a show largely covering AI while being owned by the most powerful AI company, during its IPO year, raises obvious trust questions. One more notable detail: TBPN did about $5 million in ad revenue in 2025 and was on pace for more than $30 million this year, yet OpenAI is winding that business down. That says a lot about the real value here. -- 📍To keep up to date on the most essential AI developments, insights, news and resources, sign up for my weekly AI newsletter (Link in bio & the comments 👇).

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Venture studios operate differently than accelerators, incubators, or funds. Despite this, most research lumps all innovation models together. The result? No one has a clear picture of what actually makes the studio model work. Studios need better benchmarking. LPs need better diligence data. Researchers need clearer classification frameworks. Ecosystem leaders need evidence, not anecdotes. That is what this survey unlocks. By combining operational data, governance models, return structures, and idea funnels - and analyzing them through the Venture Studio Index - we finally get a rigorous, apples-to-apples view of how studios behave. Participation matters because the dataset will allow us to: 🔍 Compare strategies across different studio archetypes. 📖 Understand execution models in context, not in isolation. 💡 Illuminate where value is created (and where it leaks). 📄 Build white papers that bring clarity to an emerging asset class. Studios have until the end of Q1 2026 to add their voice. It takes about an hour. In return, you gain access to the aggregate findings and help build the foundation the field has never had. You can contribute here: https://lnkd.in/g3cHdbtd This is the research infrastructure the studio ecosystem has needed for more than a decade.

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Some companies raise $100M and make YC headlines. Some quietly print cash. Some win developers before they ever pitch the enterprise. All three become giants. Take Exa. An AI company that raised $85M in a Series B, more than $100M total, hitting a $700M valuation in just a few years. They nailed timing, positioning themselves as the first search engine for AI agents. With partners like Nvidia, Benchmark, and Lightspeed, it’s clear why momentum is on their side. And behind the curtain, leaders like Will Bryk, Jeffrey Wang, Nitya Sridhar, and Scott Langille are building the infrastructure that makes it real. Then there’s Runpod. Named one of the “25 U.S. companies most likely to reach a $1 billion valuation” by Forbes, they’ve already built up a community of over 300,000 developers. But they’re just getting started. With Justin Mongroo, ex-SVP at WP Engine and VP at Salesforce and Slack, joining the exec team, RunPod is positioning itself for enterprise contracts. They began with PLG. Now they are scaling up market. In the past year, CEO Zhen Lu raised $20m from companies like Intel and Dell, and from my time with folks like Luke Piette, and Zachary Gulsby here in SF, I can tell you this is a team built to win. And then you have Acre Security. They sell digital and physical security solutions into six legacy industries: real estate, education, government, healthcare, manufacturing, retail. It may sound boring. But “boring” is printing cash. They are profitable, multiple 9-figure ARR, with massive $500k+ ACVs. No flashy fundraising rounds. No big PR. Just execution. Leaders like Andrew Rapsey and Kumar Sokka are proving that execution matters more than optics. Three companies. Three models.

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