Carlos Espinal

Excited to launch the updated Fundraising Field Guide! A must-have for first-time founders navigating the complex fundraising world. 🚀 Charts post-pandemic changes, offers practical guidance, and helps you find the right partner for your journey! -

1/ Investors reaching out before you raise is flattering, but an inbound message tells you less than it seems. I've updated my 2019 fundraising pipeline post and template to help separate real interest from FOMO.

4/ Fit: are you actually what they invest in? Funds often come in early to avoid missing out, then pass because it's too early for them, after taking a fair bit of your time.

5/ None means much alone. Read together, they show who is worth your time. Updated guide and template:

Today we closed Fund VII and Nation II. $320M. The number isn't the point. The point is: first checks that scare most investors, backed by the network and lessons that matter when things get hard. Our own founders are investing alongside us. That says everything.

This is a masterclass in articulating the groupthink trap. @adamshuaib nails the nuance here; it’s a universal risk, but one that VC is particularly susceptible to. Great thread.

The craft of cold outreach for founders: study prospects, send concise value-first messages, and follow up courteously to build real connections and unlock opportunities.

Keeping investors updated is a fantastic way to engage your biggest advocates. Crafting these communications can be tough. We previously shared the PPP method, and to make things easier, check out the PPP generator:

AI integration is more about people than tech. While big companies invest in AI, true productivity needs use by everyone. James Kuht MBE of Pair highlights that the key is aligning AI with team workflows. Discover how to turn AI trials into real success.

AI rollout, start with the work. Ladder: Automate → Illuminate → Advise → Act Loop each rung: Discover → Specify → Ready → Deploy Not everything climbs. Skip the loop and the ladder becomes a slide.

A friend said something that’s been stuck in my head: faster companies can take slower companies’ customers simply by showing up when everyone else slows down. I wrote up what it means for mindset and operational cadence. Read more:

Trust is eroding. Capital is rerouting. Some industries thrive on openness. Others thrive on verification, enforcement, and control. Venture adapts accordingly. The real risk is mistaking a moment for a permanent shift. I unpack that tension here 👇

At the start of the year, we adjust our approach before things pick up pace. The format changes, but the aim remains the same. Internally, it has a practical name, but I call it the Lasagna Meeting. What we create in December often clarifies in January.

Clicks aren’t traction and “work about work” isn’t progress. Just published an updated guide on how founders should structure weekly investor reports. Worth a read if you send updates. @seedcamp

RT @seedcamp: Huge congratulations @vriparbelli & the entire @synthesiaIO team! Incredibly exciting

We just wrapped Synthesia 3.0! Here’s what we announced: Video Agents: Video you can talk to in real-time. Add a Video Agent at any point in your video - and let them run training roleplays, do knowledge checks, interview candidates and much more. Avatars: Now they move and talk like professional speakers. Create an Avatar from a single prompt or image - with facial expressions, perfect lip sync, and natural hand & body movements. Copilot: Your very own professional video editor. Writes your script in seconds, connects to knowledge bases, and even suggests visual elements. Interactivity 2.0: Get viewers to engage and take action with interactive elements like quizzes, polls, hotspots, and forms. Courses: Design interactive learning experience that combine Avatars, Video Agents, and Interactivity - and measure performance data. I’ll be sharing more about each specific update in the coming days. More about @synthesiaIO next chapter here:

RT @danieldines: The turning point in the early days of UiPath was shifting our mindset - instead of building the next big feature that made sense to us as developers, we built what our customers needed. This same philosophy is what enables us to help customers surpass the exploratory and POC stages of enterprise level AI-adoption. Our approach to agentic automation is to enable our customers use the right tool for the right task, and allow people to have visibility into what agents produce - unifying AI agents, robots and human decision making into a single platform. Continental Resources is one of our customers and early adopters of agentic automation. Their solution is now in production, showcasing the right balance between AI-driven processing and human intervention. They chose a use case that tackles a common but high-stakes problem in the energy sector: accurate classification and routing of technical drilling data. This process would historically involve engineers manually reviewing and classifying emails, extracting well and stage data, verifying accuracy, and uploading files into internal repositories. By orchestrating agents, robots, and built-in decision flows to escalate inconsistent or incomplete data, they reduce manual oversight, increase data accuracy, and accelerate information availability for engineering teams. Early feedback indicates strong results, with the agents achieving high accuracy scores in identifying and classifying emails within an hour of deployment.

RT @seedcamp: 🎙️ In the latest episode of This Much I Know, our Managing Partner, @cee and Nandan Nayampally, Chief Commercial Officer of Baya Systems, delve into the geopolitics and innovations within the semiconductor industry. Tune in 🎧

RT @seedcamp: We are delighted to be recognised as a top 0.1% Power Law Investor in EMEA by @dealroomco This kind of recognition reflects the relentless work of our team and the strength of a platform built over nearly two decades