CM Weekly: Ideal Customer Profile, Seed rounds, How Transformers Work

Race Capital is excited to announce that we will be hosting an AI Pitch Night during SF Tech Week, in collaboration with A16Z, on June 1st. Judges include investors from Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Vectara/Google Research, and myself from Race Capital.

We invite all founders who are interested in pitching their startups in front of our distinguished panel of investors to apply through our application link here.

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Written by Chris McCann, General Partner @ Race Capital. More about me.

🗞️ Interesting Reads

• An in depth guide for founders on defining your ideal customer profile, which is one of the necessary steps for founders preparing to go to market. 
• 10 tips for pitching VCs during more difficult times, also applicable for all fundraising processes. 
• According to Crunchbase the median seed round a startup raises is $2.3M, and the median Series-A is $12M. 
• Series D rounds are proving to be the most difficult with the number of late stage deals down, and amount raised down for 8 straight quarters in a row.
• A simple explanation to how transformers work within the context of LLM models.
• One criticism of many new AI companies is that they are just thin layers on top of OpenAI. One way to expand this "thin" layer is through personality.
• Early history of Github, and what it took to get to product market fit. 
• The technical reasons on why OAuth is so difficult to integrate.
• A macro view on some of the major challenges the US faces within the next upcoming decades.

🔥 Startup Jobs

• By Company: Databricks, GoodNotes, Zeet, Polysign, Opaque, Lightning Labs, OtterTune, and more
• By Role: Engineering, Data Science, Product, Design, Operations, Finance, Legal, and more
• By Location: SF Bay Area, New York, London, and Remote

Browse more open roles across our portfolio at Race Capital's Portfolio Job Board.

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