Byron Ma

Excited to be part of NY Tech Week! 🎉 Come see me and let's talk tech. Whether you have questions, want to start or scale your business, or are interested in a quick intro to AI as a productivity tool, drop by and say hello! Let's innovate together. 🚀 #NYTechWeek #Innovation #AI #BusinessGrowth

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Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

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My cofounder twisted my arm to join a "B2B Product-Market Fit" bootcamp. I was skeptical, but it wound up being insanely useful - probably the highest ROI thing we've ever done. Here's why: WHY I WAS SKEPTICAL: Yes, product-market fit is "the only thing that matters." But it's a vague concept. It's a vague, ethereal thing that nobody seems to understand. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing you can teach or learn. I'd also tried all the "best practices" out there (ideation exercises, customer interviews, experimentation, etc.) and found that they... didn't really work. So a bootcamp about product-market fit seemed like the best way to incinerate money and time. WHY I DID IT: My cofounder and I met with Rob Snyder, who's got founder experience and started this weird Product-Market Fit bootcamp... geared towards MBA/consulting/i-banking as well as product and developer types. In our first 30-min meeting, Rob didn't try to sell us on the bootcamp... he just helped us make a TON of progress in our business. I was still skeptical… But we decided to do the bootcamp & schedule weekly 1:1s with Rob. Why not -- it was more affordable than a sales coach, and Rob actually speaks at a founder level WHAT HAPPENED: The bootcamp is insane, like nothing else I've experienced. It approaches product-market fit from first principles, but is highly actionable. So we made a bunch of progress on our business, but I also built mental models about product-market fit and scaling that help me feel confident that I'm focused on the right things. It also didn't take a ton of time, maybe 2-3 hours per week. Not at all a distraction, with a very high signal:noise ratio. My favorite part has been getting a ton of feedback from Rob and from other founders in the program. We review each others' sales decks, sales calls, outreach messages... and debug things to get closer to "pull", vs "push." It was cool to see that there were pre-revenue companies all the way to companies with $2M+ ARR... each trying to find repeatable pull and deepen their understanding of product-market fit. SO WHAT: Our startup feels different now. We're getting a lot of traction, our sales conversations are smooth, and I know exactly what matters & doesn't. We feel pull in sales calls, customers say, "we're cutting budget... Konko is the only thing we're investing in." This is energizing to hear, and a lot of this comes from the work we've done as part of this bootcamp. If you're a B2B startup, $0-$2M ARR, and customers aren't pulling the product out of your hands... you should apply to the next Product-Market Fit bootcamp. We're coming back for our second round, it starts July 8, DM me for an intro to Rob! (Or just DM Rob Snyder)

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Starting a new fun project with Victor Lee - an AMA series with early stage founders. There are many podcast shows featuring successful, famous entrepreneurs. But what about those who are still relatively early in their journey, perhaps just one step ahead? The zero-to-one founders who have recently cracked the product-market fit and raised Seed or Series A capital. They may not have figured out everything yet, but they have fresh, relatable tips and advice to share. We’ll invite early-stage founders for a one-hour AMA session. Afterwards, we’ll create a public webpage featuring each Q&A session with media clips and transcriptions. This will be 100% free and open to the public. Our first AMA (June 11 1pm PST) will feature Will Drewery, whose company (Diagon) recently raised $5.1 million in Seed funding. We’ll get to know Will better and cover topics such as tips on raising funding in this tough environment. It will be a fun AMA, and you can register for free using the link below. RSVP now!

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Impactful Biz, Ops & Investment Roles at Early Startups & VCs: • Chief of Staff to Ex. Head of Product at Google • Founding GTM at the most YC product used by other YC companies in the past four years • Chief of Staff to a Partner at a Top-Tier VC Fund • Head of Platform of a NY State Backed Accelerator • Investment Associate at a Seed Stage Fund Investing in Category-Defining Companies • Partner at a Defense-Focused VC Fund • Chief Revenue Officer of a New Space Company in El Segundo • Venture Capital Analyst at a fund investing in overlooked geographies • Investment Associate at a Spirit-Focused Fund • Strategy & Ops Lead at a Company Focused on Helping Improve Autism • Senior Product Manager at a Company Focused on Building Shopify for Content Creators • Program Manager for a Space Security Company • Open-ended Investment Position at a Top-Tier Accelerator • Biz & Ops Lead for One of the Most Loved Digital Consumer Products 💸 All companies are well-funded and backed by top-tier investors. ⬇ You can find links to the roles above, plus many more, in the comments.

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So excited for Jiaona Zhang (JZ) to join us on Sauce's next AI for Product. "The best product leaders are chameleons. They lean into different functions to build the best product. They are able to wear different hats & act as a glue. They spot what needs work & go fill that hole." We'll unpack the spiciest 'AI for Product' Qs and what it's like to scale impactful products as CPO Linktree, SVP Product at Webflow and Head of Product at Airbnb. Got questions for JZ?

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A few insights into the startup fundraising process from last week's talk with Chelsea Zhang (Equal Ventures) and Michelle Liao (DayZero) When you’re starting to fundraise Assign one founder to lead the process - Designating one founder to spearhead the process not only ensures a cohesive narrative and pitch but also effectively divides the demanding tasks of running the company and securing funds. Do your research - Tap into your network to glean insights from those who have raised money before. You can learn a lot from their experience. Thoroughly research potential VC funds to pitch, find the ones that are aligned with the vision and stage of your company. Don’t waste your time reaching out to investors that invest outside of your scope. Gaining momentum VCs move fast - VCs often operate with a clear investment thesis, having extensively researched the sectors they specialize in. As a result, they have a precise idea of what they're seeking and can swiftly recognize it. For example, before Chelsea came across DayZero - she had already seen 40+ variations of the same model. When VCs identify an opportunity that aligns with their criteria, they move fast. The investment process between Equal Ventures and DayZero took ~2 weeks. Gaining momentum during the process is important - Its important to end your VC conversations around the same time so you can round up all interested investors. Generating momentum involves prompting VCs to take action, which might entail instilling a sense of urgency or fostering a bit of FOMO to encourage swift decision-making. Closing the deal Be ready to negotiate quickly - Understanding which deal terms are important to you you as a Founder is crucial to research in advance. The process can unfold rapidly, making it overwhelming to decipher your priorities afterward. Dealing with rejection - Receiving a "no" from an investor doesn't invalidate your startup. Investors operate based on specific investment criteria, so it's important not to take rejection personally. There’s an investor out there that is probably a better fit; the key is to keep searching until you find them.

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Last week, I sat down with ⚡Arnon Shimoni, a product leader, focused on monetization at Storytel to talk about what he's learned about the modern monetization stack, building billing systems in house, and the benefits of managing entitlements via a separate service. I loved this conversation, and we’ll release the entire interview soon on youtube. In the meantime, here's a great clip where Arnon discusses personal experiences with hard-coded pricing & packaging. Highlights: 1. Why it's so hard to build internal monetization services --> you just can't predict how monetization will change as you interact with the market. 🔮 2. Why he's argued for the separation of billing & entitlements --> There's an education piece that's missing. Everyone knows about feature flags, no one knows about entitlements. This problem creeps up on companies, and then they look for solutions, and by then it really hurts because everything has been hardcoded.🔒 3. The one exception & when none of this matters → when you have a very simple product that you don't intend to mature and whose pricing & packaging you don't intend to change. 😉 Through years of experience operating within the systems that govern feature access, pricing & packaging, quoting, and billing, Arnon has become an expert in SaaS monetization infrastructure. He's been an engineer and product leader by day, having held product roles at Pleo & SQream, prior to Storytel. He's also a generous writer, sharing much of his knowledge on his blog, which I've linked to in the comments. #pricing #packaging #b2bsaas #monetization

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Starting to feel that the Series A/B markets are warming up. Over the past year+, most founders preferred to avoid a distracting and lengthy Series A process in a slow market. Instead, they often raised a quick seed+ round, and focused on building and growing past the usual Series A metrics. Recently, we've seen some startups close quick/oversubscribed Series A/B rounds, and more founders are considering raising now. It's still closer to anecdotal than robust data, but we'd be among the first to notice at Pioneer Fund, with our large portfolio of strong YC startups. I plan to post here again if the trend continues or not.

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This San Franciscan has landed in the Big Apple for #NYTechWeek! Here’s why it was important to me to be out here this week and I view NYC as a sister city. ((scroll down for 2 events The Council is hosting today!)) 🏭🏥 Reminder: The Council Fund invests at Pre-seed in Software’s Third Act, the transformation of the essential economy. Our investments span healthcare and industrial sectors like manufacturing, logistics, construction. 🐂 I’m eternally bullish on NY & SF and hate how many pit the two cities against each other. The reality is that a lot of capital and talent flow back and forth between the cities. They need each other to thrive! 🗽🌁 Cities like NY & SF attract young and mid-career talent because of their population density, transient nature, beauty, and reputations as cities where someone new on the scene can make a name for themselves. For the areas we invest in, I’m *specifically* excited about NY because of: 🏗️ Closer proximity to industrial hubs which are scattered across the Midwest / Rust Belt 🏛️ Closer proximity to DC where a lot of regulation around VC, startups, healthcare, onshoring initiatives, and industrial sectors takes place 💰 Many of the large financial institutions that are backing hard tech focused funds and major healthcare initiatives are also headquartered here in NYC 🎯 We’ve got several startups here who are hitting it out of the park, like Dirac and Siena. This has further validated my belief in this ecosystem to support young companies! Today we are kicking off with 2 events on Day 1 of #NYTechWeek 👉 AI Demo Day: The Council, Next Wave NYC, Lynx Collective, Flybridge will host 8 founders and 200+ investors and founders for a pitch competition this evening! Luma: https://lnkd.in/gbdYiJMw 🔜 Can still join the waitlist! Small & Big VCs in Hard Tech: The Council joined General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Iron Prairie Ventures, AlleyCorp, House Of Ventures, Steel Atlas for 2 back to back panels on industrial innovation & collaboration across the capital stack Luma: https://lnkd.in/gj6D4-Au ⏰ Event has passed

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Let the wave begin! Pioneer Fund company Recall.ai *grew their revenue 10x* in the past year, has 300 enterprise customers, and just raised a $10M Series A led by Ridge Ventures. David Gu and Amanda Zhu dropped out of college at age 19 to start the company. They've grown it exponentially with a tiny team. They make it easy to build meeting bots that are cross-platform. They're aggregating all these different APIs into one unified API, the way Twilio did with cell phones. At first it "sounds" easy to build a meeting bot -- just integrate with the Zoom API. But in fact there's a huge long tail of things you need to build, security and privacy pitfalls, automations, transcription complexities, integrations, the calendar invites where someone is using Google Meet or Teams, staying up-to-date with the libraries, etc etc. Recall takes care of all of that. It's WAY easier to build on top of Recall.ai and focus on the features that make you unique. Congratulations to the Recall team!

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Someone asked me how to move from SW to HW / robotics as a kickass builder excited to jump in. Love it! My response: robotics needs more great SW leaders who treat HW like a commodity, figure out a huge market need / GTM path, then pull in a team to unlock that.  With a SW mindset and SW architecture thinking. A lot of MechEs in love with their tech and the HW.  The HW is commodity - hard but commodity - and SW is where the interesting stuff is.  Simpler is better.  Most important is problem selection.  That is where you make / break the company and idea. And yes - there is HW innovation to be had - and I love folks doing that and doing it well. But there are far, far more opportunities for automation and problem solving with huge value creation now, with basically commodity OTS HW and SW. Choose problem, assemble solution, kick butt.

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If you’re an early-stage founder, finding out what your customers *really* want so you can build the right product is critical. I’m excited to share some of First Round Capital's PMF Method program with Gagan Biyani on Friday! Gagan has founded 3 companies including Udemy, Sprig, and Maven. We’re hosting this live conversation for product leaders & founders on how to reach PMF. You’ll learn: - How to identify your customers' real problems - How to test demand by selling before building - When to write code vs. build a no-code MVP RSVP to join on June 14th (it’s free): https://bit.ly/3VBAK69

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Very good advice to founders on hiring your first sales exec. I especially like how you outlined the process to know when it is the right time to hire someone.

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Solve for information asymmetries! Architecture & Civil Engineering - Layout interpretation ~other industries: Healthcare - <Prescription> interpretation Financial Products - <Subject to market risks documentation> interpretation Loans - <Fine print> interpretation There’s going to be a slew of startups commercialising this year with a value prop of simplification using AI

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Are you looking to break into VC / PE / being a CEO? Are you frustrated at job applying process? Do you want to surround yourself with the best and brightest and build a network that includes investors, 10x founders, and other hellbent on changing the world? Do you run a start up that needs some hypergrowth? The job market has changed, applying for jobs is dead, its all about creating jobs via entrepreneurship or possessing executive skills to create a job at a company. Come join us at IOTA Labs MBA bootcamp; a donation based month long part time, program that puts infront of VC/PE deal flow with the intention that if you can follow the program, you will be contributing to large deals and getting paid for the work. The point of this program is to rapidly convert highly motivated individuals to high performing executives by surrounding them with the training, network, and skills they need to be successful @ IOTA or beyond. With training from tenured product manager @ Google, VC Fund managers, investors, 10x founders, CxOs (15+ at GM, Salesforce, Accenture), legal experts, and other subject matter experts https://lnkd.in/eSgHkB9u Seats will fill up fast just as an FYI , do please repost this so we can help as many people as possible.

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There are two main things we did to give ourselves more runway with Harlow while bootstrapping the business: 1. Cut costs so that we operate at break-even, which extends our business runway infinitely to give us more time to do focused tests to figure out PMF and which growth channels will work for us. 2. Brought on consulting clients so we could make money, which extends our personal runway infinitely by allowing us to feel more safe and comfortable while building. How are my other bootstrapped founders making it work?

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In October, we announced our $1.8 billion Series C financing and take-private of SP+ (SP Plus). Today, I couldn’t be prouder to share that we have officially closed our transformational acquisition of SP+. This acquisition and Growth Buyout (GBO) is creating a paradigm shift in how technology companies scale and represents the largest venture-backed M&A deal and the third largest AI fundraise (just behind OpenAI) in the past year. We’ve created a once-in-a-generation opportunity -- allowing us to deploy our proprietary, artificial intelligence technology to more than 50 million consumers, across 4,000+ locations, and processing over $4 billion in payments a year -- enabling checkout-free experiences with a speed, ease, and convenience that is unparalleled, even online. While re-envisioning parking is our focus and priority today, the opportunities for growth beyond parking are limitless. In the future, we’ll use our artificial intelligence platform to power checkout-free transactions in new verticals – making the everyday experience of living, working and playing remarkable – giving us back our most valuable asset, time. From the outside, an entrepreneur’s journey can seem linear and academic – identify a problem, develop solutions, raise capital, deploy, scale – and repeat. In reality, it’s entropic and riddled with roadblocks. We’ve been repeatedly told our ambitions are impossible. But – our team comes back each day with strength, tenacity, determination and conviction. We’ve learned from every failure, every denial, every slammed door, and we’ve gotten stronger, smarter and faster. Today we closed our $1.8B financing and take-private of SP+ – creating a company that’s stronger together. The last six years have been a remarkable journey. I couldn’t be more thankful for our investors, advisors and most importantly, the entire Metropolis Technologies team that helped get us here. Special thanks to my co-founders and executive team Peter Fisher, Travis Kell, Courtney Fukuda, Ryan Hunt, Eddie Thomas and John-Paul Sukkar. I’d also like to thank the newest members of our executive team Chris Sherman, Ritu Vig, Kris Roy and Wenyu Blanchard. Our Series C was comprised of a best-in-class syndicate, led by Eldridge Industries with significant investment from BDT & MSD Partners’ affiliated credit funds, Vista Equity Partners, and Temasek as well as strong support from Metropolis’ existing shareholder group led by 3L. Thank you to all our exceptional partners, investors and advisors who thought outside the box and believed in our vision, every step of the way -- including Tony Minella, Todd Boehly and Lisa Ohlmeyer at Eldridge, Anton Zietsman and Dave Leyrer at 3L, Goldman Sachs and BDT & MSD Partners. We’ll celebrate today but know, we’re just getting started.

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I chatted with VC general partners recently, and they shared something obvious but still very important for startup founders that is often missed. To succeed, you need three critical roles among the founders: Sales, Product, and Engineer. ✅ Sales is the person who gets customers and drives revenue. ✅ Product is the visionary who shapes the product and keeps it on track with customers' real needs. ✅ Engineer is the one who builds the product and makes it work. Having these three roles covered is crucial! It balances the team and covers all the bases. 💡 If you're starting something new, ensure these roles are in place. It can make all the difference. #StartupLife #Founders #Teamwork #Fintech

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