M13

Samantha Hughes’ favorite M13 event of the year is coming up: Office Hours for Underestimated Founders at #LATechWeek! Join us for 1-on-1, 20-minute advisory sessions for founders with real, actionable feedback on whatever’s top of mind for them. Details below—and check out highlights from last year’s Office Hours here: https://lnkd.in/e3nqU8kf #Founders #VentureCapital

Setting employees up for success starts long before their first day. M13's Matt Hoffman, Julia Daniel, and Sarah Levine share our new tried-and-true guide to facilitate a seamless onboarding process. Explore the guide below! #Onboarding #Talent

“If you observe culture at large on the internet, it’s shifting away from posting selfies to here’s what I’m reading, watching, screenshots of the reviews of my movies and so on. It’s essentially going deeper about a person, trying to understand what they’re in … that’s what Shelf is all about,” says 🕺 Jad Esber, founder and CEO of M13 portfolio company koodos labs (the creators of Shelf). Learn more about Shelf—and what's next for the app in terms of capabilities and monetization—in TechCrunch from Jagmeet Singh: https://lnkd.in/gXPtuama

Welcome, Startup:NYC Season 1! M13 is proud to support Tech:NYC’s initiative for New York’s next superstar startups founded by emerging and underrepresented entrepreneurs. Meet the inaugural cohort of trailblazing startups focused on health and wellness tech, which includes an AI- and VR-powered mobile physical therapy clinic (TheraMotive), an app tackling phone addiction (BePresent), an AI-powered personal dental companion for personalized oral health and benefits (KELLS), and more: https://lnkd.in/e53tHG2s #HealthTech #WellnessTech

Wise words from M13 partner W. Christine Choi: "Life is too short for a**holes.” Christine is not your typical venture capitalist. A veteran of both the corporate and nonprofit worlds, she’s mastered the art of translating the scrappy startup mentality into any environment—be it boardrooms or space hangars. With a reputation for building deep, authentic networks that turn even weak ties into formidable connections, her playbook focuses on the humans at the center of every story. Below she shares her thoughts on a few rapid-fire questions about brand communications and storytelling. 🌟 A storytelling tip founders might not have heard before: Underdogs have a lot more fun! When you're obscure or not the incumbent, there are more ways for you to be creative and flex your freshness—and not fall back on safe corporate speak. 🌟 Something she learned from her time in the commercial space industry: In new tech movements—like commercial space, AI, or blockchain—there’s inspiration in uncovering the stories of people building industries and adoption that may not yet exist. Spark trust and understanding with fresh voices and authentic stories from “the hangar floor." 🌟 A comms trend she doesn't like right now: Quantity over quality. You may have raised a lot of capital, but a movement is energized by the right people. 🌟 How she's thinking about AI and community right now: AI is a reminder to flex our humanness. In a time when we are trying to seek even greater efficiencies and answers with the help of AI, I love that people are seeking out other people more than ever. We’re seeking humans to curate experiences, ideas, and information. Get more of Christine's tips for crisis comms, storytelling, and true authenticity at https://lnkd.in/dF32CiUv #AI #Authenticity #BrandComms #Community #Startups #VentureCapital

M13 partner and venture investor Brent Murri is excited about the convergence of AI and marketing/advertising. Below, he shares why. "For B2C businesses, marketing to consumers has been extremely hard. CAC (customer acquisition costs) is rising, data privacy changes are making targeting harder, and many marketing channels that marketers used five or six years ago—like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok—are not the reliable sources of ROI they used to be. B2B businesses are experiencing the same challenges across their channels: Email open rates are down, attribution is harder to measure, and the proliferation of point solutions make it hard to make sense of all the data being gathered. I'm intrigued by how companies are using AI to better target their buyer, better track the end consumer, and more effectively measure their marketing efforts. For example, say a brand wants to find a YouTube influencer who’s a natural fit to talk about them. Rather than a human spending hours—or weeks—watching videos to find those influencers, there are solutions that use AI to scrape and understand language in YouTube videos, then identify which users are most aligned with the brand. Using AI to find the right messengers for your product is a really interesting use case to me." Get more of Brent's thoughts on the creator economy, common misconceptions about #venturecapital, what makes a founder stand out, and what he'd be doing if he wasn't an investor: https://lnkd.in/gyW6W_Dz #artificialintelligence

Last week, M13 Partner Karl Alomar spoke at the 10th #SaaStr Annual conference, which gathered 13000+ cloud and SaaS founders, VCs, and execs. In his talk on “5 Key Steps to Building that the Best Founders Get Right,” he highlighted three types of #AI companies, and how M13 is investing in this space. Zenlytic offers a business intelligence tool built on top of an AI agent that can understand natural language questions, ask its own questions, read unstructured data, query a company's data lake to answer business intelligence inquiries quickly, and standardize metrics across a firm. Polimorphic is building the first Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) software for local governments. Its software replaces physical filing and difficult-to-navigate government websites with digital workflows and an AI-powered search tool for answering constituent questions. Prepared is bringing assistive AI for every 911 call, giving dispatchers real-time GPS information, audio transcription, and other vital data to make it easier to assess and respond to emergency situations. Thank you Cassie Cunningham for the video!

"We take regulations like [the SEC marketing rule] which are very complicated, very standards- and principals-based, and we turn them into AI agents. When we say regulatory #AIAgent, we mean an AI agent that can pursue an action—in this case assessing whether something is compliant or not—with a specific regulation." More on how Norm Ai’s regulatory AI agents work, from CEO John Nay’s recent interview at the NYSE ⬇ And learn more from John and other M13 founders Nami Baral (Niural and Sami Shalabi (Maven AGI) in our article on the rise of AI agents: https://lnkd.in/exD2Qb2V

"I think the biggest thing is to have at least one person on your team, if not more, that's going to shoot you straight. People don't tell the emperor when there's no clothes, and you've gotta have some people you really trust," Capsule founder and CEO Eric Kinariwala shared on the Rho podcast with Justin Wolz. We love when our portfolio companies collaborate! Check out the episode for more of Eric's thoughts on founder mode, startup branding, and founder mistakes: https://lnkd.in/eFKcv2m8 #Founders #FounderAdvice #Startups #FounderMode

"In a metrics-obsessed industry, I believe in the power of what can’t be measured," says M13 partner W. Christine Choi. "The satisfaction of an honest day of work, an epiphany that changes your worldview or direction, a meal with friends, holding hands with your elder parent—these are the things that touch and shape us at a cellular level." These “unmeasurables” become the acorns of stories that reveal our genuine selves, shape the direction of our teams and business, and open the door for audiences and partners to connect. It's about storytelling. And startups are always storytelling, from the moment they start sharing their vision with prospective talent and investors. At this year’s Future Perfect conference, we convened filmmaker Casey Neistat, TV icon and author Stacy London, and Overtime founder and CEO Dan Porter to talk about the why, what, and how of storytelling. Their conversation challenged the startup focus on growth metrics as brand building—and encouraged a refocusing on authenticity and personal connection. Dig into their thoughts about startup strategies for brand communications and how companies can leverage tension, curiosity, and authenticity in their storytelling: https://lnkd.in/ebWtQDy7 #BrandCommunications #StartupComms #Storytelling #Authenticity