Last month, the first company I co-founded, Palantir, joined the S&P 500. For most of 20 years, the naive mainstream view of Palantir was that it was a “glorified consultancy” – a services firm and not a real tech innovator building SaaS “products” or “platforms”. To dismiss Palantir early on was short-sighted, given they’d hired some of Silicon Valley’s top tech talent, but it was based on a factual observation: unlike most software businesses, many of our engineers spent significant time working alongside our customers. We called this team “Forward Deployed Engineers”, and they obsessed over the intricacies of our customers’ daily work, business models, and pain points. 

8VC was founded to address major market gaps, and we’ve found several surprisingly close to home. We cofounded Affinity after seeing firsthand how legacy CRM falls short of real relationship intelligence, and today their platform is used by 3300 + investment firms. We noticed a similar gap in portfolio management and performance tracking, where manual work and nonexistent data were the norm. Driven by our own frustrations, we co-founded, seeded, and led the series A for Standard Metrics, which has grown to over 100 top investment firms and 7000+ companies while revolutionizing the efficiency and quality of data collection, portfolio analytics, and reporting. Now, building on the data foundation they created, they have launched Global Benchmarking, adding deep utility and macro awareness to match their micro abilities.

We were thrilled to host June's Chat8VC event alongside our portfolio companies Ramp & Vercel in NY. We were honored to feature Nik Koblov (Head of Engineering) and Nico Bevacqua (Head of UI / UX Engineering) from Ramp as well as Guillermo Rauch (CEO) and Lee Robinson (VP Product) from Vercel for a discussion anchored around the future of frontend engineering.

Recruiting is a founder’s most important job. The returns on top talent, and the network effect of smart people pulling in smart people, are the not-so-secret secrets to our work at 8VC - and building Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, and Saronic, to name a few. Yet conventional hiring is slow and expensive. You need to ramp up in-house recruiters to overcome scaling bottlenecks (creating fixed costs for variable needs), or pay contract firms steep commissions (up to $20-40,000 for senior technical hires). $250 billion a year is spent on recruiting in the US, almost entirely on labor. Software only represents 2.6% of that spend, and is mostly mediocre. It’s also built for recruiters, not hiring managers, highlighting a bigger issue: recruiting outsources input away from a new hire’s future team, while steadily increasing overhead.

While most discussion of aviation breakthroughs focuses on areas like VTOL, advanced fuels, electrification, or autonomy, weight is a universal concern. In commercial aircraft, lowering costs through methods including weight reduction has helped expand access to air travel from an estimated 383 million global air passengers in 1970 to almost 4.5 billion in 2019. In defense, weight reduction means greater range - increasingly critical with conflict looming in the Indo-Pacific. In recent decades, weight reduction has largely involved replacing metals with composites - most notably in Airbus’ A350 and Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, with total reduction estimated at 20%. 

Today, two neural architectures scale to the limits of available data and compute:

Today, we’re pleased to share the transcript from that conversation. Karim and Nik share numerous insights on Ramp’s journey, which recently marked five years and over $1 billion in customer savings. They explain how Ramp has been guided by the same mission since their first prototype, how they’ve achieved and maintained product/market fit, how they’ve built and sustained a dynamic and collaborative talent culture, and where AI has (and hasn’t) factored into their product evolution.

While models command the spotlight, the AI age ultimately depends on real-time, reliable data access - and this is true of countless traditional business processes. Today, Postgres is the de facto database for enterprises, SMBs, and developers, yet Change Data Capture (CDC) and data movement tools for Postgres represent a massive bottleneck. Picture the Ever Given wedged in the Suez Canal, with data as cargo.

Today, OpenGov announced its acquisition by Cox Enterprises for $1.8 billion USD. 

For our final Chat8VC of 2023, we hosted Dr. Nik Spirin, Director of Generative AI and LLMOps at NVIDIA. He sits at a very compelling vantage point in this role. Prior to NVIDIA, he was a serial entrepreneur, classical ML PhD, and researcher by training who worked on many interesting applied AI projects at places like Gigster and played key roles in the enterprise-wide AI transformations of Canon, Dentsu, and Vodafone.

Our story is certainly full of ups and downs. Airbyte today is often associated with our open source data infrastructure project and product. It really started though in July 2019 when my co-founder and I first decided to build something together. We implemented a fairly disciplined system around idea exploration and honed in on the problem-space of data and went through YC in January ‘20, which was the famous COVID batch where we went from being in person to fully remote. 

At our September Chat8VC gathering, we hosted Mike Del Balso, founder and CEO of Tecton and a visionary behind Uber's Michelangelo, for a conversation with 8VC Partner Bhaskar Ghosh. As a reminder, Chat8VC is a monthly series hosted at our SF office where we bring together founders and early-phase operators excited about the foundation model ecosystem. We focus on having highly technical, implementation-oriented conversations and give founders and builders the opportunity to showcase what they’re working on through lightning demos and fireside chats. This can be a fun side project, related to a company they’re starting, or a high-leverage use case within a company operating at scale. 

In the spirit of sharing some lessons from our events, earlier this year we had the pleasure of hosting Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, the co-founders of Tome, at our monthly Chat8VC gatherings in April.

Unstructured data is the undiscovered country of the enterprise, containing the institutional wisdom AI seeks to capture. Unlocking the value of that data has proved elusive, as both enterprise search and LLMs have fallen short individually. Aryn's mission is to help you answer questions from all of your data. To this end, Aryn is bringing generative AI to OpenSearch and data preparation - and bridging the gap from results to answers. 

We were delighted to engage in a dynamic conversation with Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit during our August Chat8VC gathering. As a reminder, Chat8VC is a monthly series hosted at our SF office where we bring together founders and early-phase operators excited about the foundation model ecosystem. We focus on having highly technical, implementation-oriented conversations and give founders and builders the opportunity to showcase what they’re working on through lightning demos and fireside chats. This can be a fun side project, related to a company they’re starting, or a high-leverage use case within a company operating at scale. 

We were delighted to engage in a dynamic conversation with Andrew Lee (co-founder/CEO of Shortwave) and Dennis Xu (co-founder/CEO of Mem) during our June Chat8VC gathering. As a reminder, Chat8VC is a monthly series hosted at our SF office where we bring together founders and early-phase operators excited about the foundation model ecosystem. We focus on having highly technical, implementation-oriented conversations and give founders and builders the opportunity to showcase what they’re working on through lightning demos and fireside chats. This can be a fun side project, related to a company they’re starting, or a high-leverage use case within a company operating at scale.

It’s hardly news that we’re living in an era of information overload, with an unrelenting explosion in data volume, complexity, and fragmentation - most of it by popular demand. As user personas have multiplied, new tools and systems of record have cropped up faster than they can be managed. Despite massive data growth, there’s an increasingly acute shortage of data discoverability and transparency. Simply determining what lives where is surprisingly difficult. Perhaps most worrisome, the downstream consequences of data misplacement and breaking changes extend far and wide. 

AI and automation have become essential components in the developer's toolkit, transforming the way we build software and offering the best hope yet of meeting the unrelenting demand for scale, speed, and reliability that has come to characterize the cloud-native era. Whether as engineers or investors, when attempting to identify the essential tools amid a sea of contenders, context is everything. This is doubly true for generating test code - a realization that helped to guide the formation of 8VC’s newest portfolio company, SapientAI.

Spartan Radar’s momentum continues to build following their Series B (led by 8VC and joined by strategics Microsoft and Wipro), with rapidly expanding partnerships and the addition of radar engineering authority Dr. Matt Markel as President. In this post, we explore how Spartan’s ambitious yet pragmatic approach delivers immediate safety upgrades to today’s automotive industry, while scaling to an autonomous future.

Today we are highlighting Piyush Jain from Yugabyte. Piyush is a software engineer at Yugabyte working in the database group. Before this, he worked at Nutanix, after which he completed his Masters at UT Austin with a focus on distributed systems. In his free time: Piyush keeps an eye on developments in layer 1 blockchains, enjoys hiking, practicing yoga and playing tennis (started picking up recently).

Today we are highlighting Ross Carter from Epirus. Ross Carter is a Senior Software Engineer and the Product Software Scrum Master at Epirus, with a specialization in embedded software development. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in Physics & Computer Science and joined Epirus immediately afterward. Outside of work, he enjoys making pottery, going to (mostly country/blues) concerts, and anything outdoors/active.

Blend Builder is a brilliant banking product, ready for a bigger challenge than mortgages alone

Today we are highlighting Scott Martin from Epirus. Scott hails from Colorado where he had internships working on mmWave radar spatial mapping for the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, a Tier-II drone radar, and an in-flight internet module and studied under the esteemed Dr. Zoya Popovic at the University of Colorado - Boulder. He came to Epirus after deciding to defer pursuing a Masters degree due to the drop in education quality at the start of the covid pandemic. Since coming to Epirus, his growth as an RF engineer accelerated working on cutting-edge products with mentorship from the phenomenal Epirus team. In his free time, Scott enjoys climbing and backpacking.

We are proud to announce 8VC Fund V, with $880 million in new capital to continue our work supporting and partnering with entrepreneurs at every stage of their journey, and building companies ourselves. 

T&E is one of the last core elements of wealth management yet to be reimagined in dynamic, digital form. Doing so will unlock transformative possibilities.

Today we are highlighting Daniel Isen, a Member of the Technical Staff at Yugabyte. He was one of three engineers that started the YugabyteDB Managed project, their fully-managed database-as-a-service offering. 

We live in a time where folks are working from everywhere on their own devices – they are not tethered to a desk at an office on a company provided laptop. The surface area of what can go wrong has increased exponentially. Twingate was born out of this pain point to solve for rapidly evolving security needs.

Today we are highlighting Lauren Hartsfield from Addepar.

I was a physics major at Davidson College with a CS minor and broadly wanted exposure to tech. Seeing as I was at a liberal arts school, there weren’t a ton of alums in the tech industry so it was more challenging to visualize my path. 

Loop is simplifying freight audit and payments by transforming legacy processes with a tech-enabled approach.

In supporting the industry defining companies of the 8VC portfolio, we are fortunate to work with the brightest, most dedicated people in the world. As we look to identify the next generation of best-in-class entrepreneurs, we naturally turn to our network of peers and friends. ‍

In supporting the industry defining companies of the 8VC portfolio, we are fortunate to work with the brightest, most dedicated people in the world. As we look to identify the next generation of best-in-class entrepreneurs, we naturally turned to our network of peers and friends. ‍

We are excited to introduce TAP, the newest company to emerge from 8VC’s Build program. Read on to learn how TAP is partnering with industry leaders to teach the skills needed to thrive in the 21st century economy, while helping underserved communities to create opportunities and mentorship networks close to home.

In 2022, the technology sector experienced its biggest downturn in a generation, marking the end of a formidable bull run in Silicon Valley. Many are wondering what the downturn in tech equities means for venture capital as an asset class. Is VC better today than it was a few years ago? How does it compare to competing assets like the rest of private equity, public markets, cash, credit, etc?

We’re pleased to announce 8VC’s participation in the $75 million Series A for Photys Therapeutics, led by MPM Capital and joined by Omega Funds, Longwood, Arkin Bio, Mass General Brigham Ventures, MRL Ventures Fund, Eli Lilly and Company, and Heritage Medical Systems.

Enterprise networking is the offensive line of IT. It’s not flashy. Few understand its inner workings. It tends to get taken for granted. Yet it is a key determinant of forward progress, and when something goes down, or you need to replace a key piece (or worse, start from scratch), people instantly panic. ‍

This transcript comes from a panel that 8VC hosted for the SaaSBOOMi community during a series of events in Silicon Valley. SaaSBOOMi is a massive and fast growing pay-it-forward community of 1500+ Indian SaaS companies. We believe deeply in the ability of SaaS founders across the world to build global from day one. 

At 8VC, we’re proud to partner with the most exceptional founders to build transformational technologies that create long-term economic and societal value.

In March 2020, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic delivered global supply chains a rude awakening.

My skincare education started with my mom’s magazines. After receiving my first Clinique “yellow cream” as a tween, I’d devour the glossy pages like I was cramming for a test.

Construction is a leading industry in Latin America driving economic growth and creating prosperity, worth over $140 billion annually and growing every year. It’s also a highly distributed industry, with over 50% of material volume going through small and often family-owned hardware businesses.

We are excited to announce Seaplane’s $15M Series A, which we co-led with Bill Coughran, Partner, Sequoia Capital and Brian Long, Partner, Atlantic Bridge.

As SeeMetrics emerges from stealth, we are pleased to announce 8VC’s participation in their $6 million seed round, led by Workbench alongside Essence VC, AGP, and Verissimo Ventures. SeeMetrics has laid out especially ambitious goals and built a platform to match. Not only do they manage the security stack for the modern enterprise, but they are also equipping CISOs with executive visibility and decision-making capabilities befitting a true C-level function.

Earlier this week, Twingate announced their $42 million Series B, led by BOND. It has been an absolute pleasure working with the Twingate team since day one when we co-led their seed and Series A rounds. It has been wonderful watching the team bring the zero trust vision to network security and we wanted to share some of the thinking around why we believe the opportunity and Twingate’s approach are truly special.

A lot of friends and early-stage CEOs of enterprise software companies think that Customer Success (CS) is the critical function to build after you develop a product and figure out how to sell it. Not so.

Earlier this month, Fieldguide announced their $17 million Series A, led by 8VC. Fieldguide CEO Jin Chang’s excellent blog post conveys both the tremendous functional appetite for their platform, and their larger mission to empower risk practices to increase trust in commerce and capital markets.

8VC is excited to announce that we’ve led a $23.7 million Series A for Standard Metrics, formerly known as Quaestor.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched as subscriptions have become both an increasingly prevalent business model for leading software businesses, as well as a modernizing force for legacy companies.

The 8VC team is thrilled to announce our partnership with Rocketlane to build a category-creating SaaS company in the emerging area of Customer Onboarding — and our first significant investment in India’s SaaS ecosystem.

The essence of being a good venture capitalist is making moonshot bets. Sometimes that means backing entrepreneurs who build new software workflows for stagnant, legacy industries; other times, it means backing entrepreneurs who push the boundaries of what we can do as humans and as a society by building platforms to capitalize on breakthroughs in fundamental research.

At 8VC, we are dedicated to developing partnerships with strong founders. We are now recruiting for the next class of 8VC Bio-IT Fellows — if you are a graduate student with an entrepreneurial interest, please apply here. You can find more information through this flyer.

At 8VC, we have been continually enamored by the digital revolutions taking place within many pivotal and economically important enterprises as they adapt to the modern age.

Since we published our proposal on “How to Save $900B Annually in American Healthcare” three years ago, the crisis facing the US healthcare system has deepened.

The past year underscored the vital role healthcare plays in our lives: we relied on doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, and countless others to keep us and our loved ones safe during a devastating pandemic. For many, the experience was also a sharp reminder of how confusing, impersonal, and expensive our healthcare system can be.

Since leading Ushur’s Series A in 2018, we have watched them dramatically grow their intelligent automation (IA) capabilities and traction. We are excited to announce 8VC’s participation in Ushur’s $25M Series B, led by Third Point Ventures, alongside Pentland Group. We are thrilled to be continuing to partner with Ushur as they revamp insurance, financial services, and healthcare.

This summer I had the pleasure of being part of the third 8VC Fellowship cohort, joined virtually by 25 incredibly smart & talented students from across the country. The Fellowship Program offers an inside track to meeting world-class founders and engineers across the 8VC network as well as a deep look into the world of venture.

Our partners have built many great technology companies over the years as founders or early leaders, and we are deeply enmeshed in a number of industries, debating what is coming next and working with leaders to help our entrepreneurs succeed or to put together new companies.

Paul Ehrlich, one of the forefathers of modern medicine, famously proposed the idea of a “magic bullet” that would selectively kill pathogens while sparing the body. His research led to the first drug for syphilis and established the chemistry-driven paradigm of therapeutics that would persist for the next 70 years. Unfortunately, it turned out that there is no simple way to achieve arbitrary targeting of cytotoxic chemical compounds, and these magic bullet treatments proved difficult to reproduce. The lack of precision delivery presents pharma with a double-edged sword: higher doses with elevated toxicity, or lower doses that are potentially inefficacious.

Today, we announced that 8VC has led a $5.8M round of financing in Quaestor alongside our friends at Spark Capital, Abstract Ventures, Riot Ventures, Fathom Ventures, and GFC. We’re excited to tell the world more about Quaestor and its source of inspiration.

Every year in America, roughly 23,000 people undergo a Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT). These procedures are typically last-line interventions to save cancer patients. When successful, the therapy is often curative.

A profound shift in how primary care is financed is opening up opportunities for entrepreneurs to transform the landscape of American healthcare. Who will start the next Humana?

Imagine you have an incurable disease — maybe Alzheimer’s or multiple sclerosis. Though you might be willing to take a chance on science, you would nonetheless face a difficult decision in choosing whether to volunteer for a clinical trial.

Why health IT has under-delivered, and how we can recover the promise of the 2010s.

We all saw the empty aisles and mad rush to grab that last roll of toilet paper on grocery shelves this past week. People will demand more goods. And the quickest and most flexible way to move things is on trucks.

The life of application developers in today’s cloud-native world has been profoundly affected by two conceptual developments: containers and microservices. These have led to the creation and maturation of orchestration engines, which offer software developers more simplicity, velocity, reliability and agility in launching and managing cloud-first applications.

American society mythologizes great inventors and celebrates the “stroke of genius”. But profound ideas are usually the result of incremental and often painstaking progress on hard technical problems. Entrepreneurs must rapidly prototype, test their products against the market to determine if they’re addressing real challenges, and develop profitable business models, all at the same time.

8VC traditionally invests in companies that tackle industry-wide problems by reimagining traditional paradigms and helping modernize some of our oldest technological infrastructure. That’s why we invested in and launched Esper...

Alex Kolicich explains why Deliverr is poised to fix the fulfillment industry

At 8VC we invest in technologies with the capacity to transform antiquated processes in old-line industries. In the private sector, one of the least tech-enabled industries is Law.

While my title says “VC”, I first and foremost identify as a maker. I have always focused not only on how and why things work, but how to make them operate with greater efficiency.

8VC is thrilled to announce our investment in Assembly Brands, an innovative consumer product platform building crave-worthy brands for a new generation.

John Tenet writes on why he joined 8VC and his vision for the firm.

A suite of reforms aimed at unseating corrupt players, increasing access to healthcare data, and aligning incentives towards quality care could save our country as much as $900 billion a year.

America’s reactive model of kidney care enriches an oligopolistic dialysis industry, wastes billions of dollars a year, and creates worse health outcomes for millions of Americans each decade

Presidents Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and others supported a separate, lower capital gains tax rate. A lower capital gains rate encourages investors to reallocate funds from existing investments to higher-growth companies, stimulating economic progress and creating jobs for American workers

Human relationships are the basic fabric of any economic transaction. Whether a 1-to-1 handshake deal or a complex, multi-year merger process between multiple corporations, markets run on personal relationships between people.

State governments should competitively reimburse private prisons that are most effective at reducing recidivism and helping prisoners reintegrate into normal American life. Only by rewiring incentives can we attract the best and brightest entrepreneurs to solving America's mass incarceration nightmare.

Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s ascension to power may prove to be one of the most pivotal events in the modern history of Saudi Arabia and the Middle Eastern region. Under the banner of the recently announced “Vision 2030” project

CEOs shouldn’t worry about their budget all the time — on a day-to-day basis they should work on managing their company, building an awesome product, developing key relationships, identifying distribution channels, etc.

America faces a mounting transportation crisis, and the primary culprit is road congestion. Traffic makes us unhealthy, wastes enormous amounts of time, and cripples national productivity. America needs expanded roads and transportation infrastructure, but traditional gas tax funding is no longer available.

AI and robots will take our jobs - but better ones will emerge for us The fear that robots will soon take your jobs has a grain of truth to it - however, the future paves the way for more jobs for humans, based in technological innovation

Joe Lonsdale, who is used to making more than 500 times his money from tech start-ups, says the hottest thing in Silicon Valley now is in the biosciences.

Yesterday, on Tuesday, November 21, Heather Mack of the WSJ published an article entitled “Joe Lonsdale-Backed Blink Health Faces Potential Loss of Half of Its Customers.” The article is a response to a lawsuit brought by our investment Blink Health...

When an employee of a privately held technology company leaves the company and exercises her stock options, she typically has 3 months to qualify for favorable tax treatment. However, if there has been a run up in the value of the company since the options were originally granted, the employee may face enormous tax obligations.

The private equity industry, though much-maligned, plays a vital role in making America's economy run more efficiently. In the coming years, elements of the PE and VC industries will begin to share strategies and best practices.

Joe Lonsdale and Jack Abraham are pleased to announce the launch of Terminal, a talent group which will enable technology companies to access top talent worldwide.

Eugene Kleiner is a legendary figure in Silicon Valley - a great technologist, entrepreneur, and investor. In this essay we reflect on "Kleiner's Laws" for investing successfully.

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, legendary female leaders have shaped the course of our economic destiny. I am proud to consider the women here friends, mentors, and role models — and hope they inspire you as much as they inspire us at 8VC.

For-Profit College Incomes Should Mirror Student Outcomes

A popular opinion in the technology community is that real estate agents will soon be replaced by software — whether in the form of direct consumer-to-consumer marketplaces, or programs which automate many of an agent’s basic functions.

We recently conducted a survey of what our portfolio CEOs say they want most from a venture capital firm. What do entrepreneurs think about the inner workings of a VC?

"Over the past year, I have witnessed not only the depth of 8VC’s engineering capability, but also the breadth of their strategic vision."

Wisdom is very often dialectical in nature. Extreme, conflicting viewpoints are often simultaneously true – whether in business or more broadly in human life.

Operations Director Caroline Graham describes how 8VC manages our network of investors, entrepreneurs, and fellow venture firms more smoothly than vinyl.

Inspired by our piece ‘A Deficit of Leadership’, two up-and-coming leaders in our community shared some of the most important principles of leadership below. We’re excited to see what’s next for Aneesh Pappu and Josh Singer.

New technologies can enable organic, market-driven solutions to regulatory problems, but only if they escape legislative straitjackets

This is the first installment in a two part series.Here we unpack the philosophical and evolutionary assumptions at work in the debate over technological unemployment. In Future of Labor II, we discuss the economics of new job creation and chart several industries of the future which will create employment opportunities for American workers.

In the wake of the $125 billion Pentagon waste scandal, the case for transparency and data-driven financial reporting is stronger than ever.