Notes from Vivian’s presentation:
- CRV has been around 50 years and is on fund 19.
- They are generalists that invest in Europe, LATAM, all corners of the world. They have $12B in value creation, 78 IPOs, and many exits
- Vivian was early product @Uber.
- CRV has a small investment team compared to other firms of their size.
- They invest with very high conviction and are founder first.
- Showed a market map of hype vs. enduring businesses.
- User adoption in AI has been faster than ever.
- It’s not atypical for a company to reach millions of users and double digit millions of revenue in the first year.
- Advice for founders: be clever with you GTM and SEO.
- 3 things in the application layer that allow startups to be defendable:
- Build your own model
- Research the market.
- It’s hard for VCs to be excited about the 10th AI copywriting tool they’ve seen this week.
- VCs are always creating market maps. Founders can find them and use them to research competitors. Also, research the market through Hacker news, reddit, etc.
- Build stickiness with your customer.
- pro-sumer churn is fast for easy-to-build AI products.
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