Last week, we hosted our annual LP summit in Los Angeles.
Ahead of the summit, we were jokingly asked, “Will it be like most summits, boring and only roundtable conversations?” This couldn’t have been further from the vision.
Our theme was “Product Market Fit” — a term that everyone may have their own definitions and opinions on. But drawing from our team’s experience seeing product-market fit first-hand at Tinder, Twitter, Robinhood, and Scale AI – our goal was to highlight our journey about what it looks like to build a venture fund from the ground up in pursuit of that same product-market-fit, and to hear from people around the industry that have achieved it – USV, Tinder, Meta – or who are building products searching for it – Hallway, Roll, Dynamic.
And on that note, I want to highlight the amazing speakers and briefly mention my favorite parts of their conversations:
David Marcus, co-founder and CEO of Lightspark, was previously President of PayPal and Head of Messanger at Meta. David is exceptional. What stood out to me in the conversation was his risk appetite and perseverance. Marcus left a comfortable position at PayPal to lead Meta’s Messanger team, prioritizing working with what he thought to be the best up-and-coming engineering and leadership talent. After, he led and launched Libra at Meta, an initiative to develop a global digital currency. It was launched during the height of the tech lash, so ran into regulatory and adoption challenges, but the vision is one that Marcus is still building towards – global connectivity and access to financial services.
Sean Rad, co-founder and CEO of Tinder and Founder of Rad Fund, dialed in via Zoom from Argentina. He emphasized the importance of founder-market fit and the need for a unique, diverse perspective on the market to be successful. Jeff asked him about his low profile. I appreciated that he shared his passion for products over publicity. Preferring to keep his head down and ship amazing products, it’s clear his humility and thoughtful leadership were driving factors in making Tinder a $9.4 billion company.
Rebecca Kaden, Partner at USV. USV is THE thesis-driven fund and a fund that we deeply respect and admire. The conversation drove home the depth of their thesis development process and cross-team collaboration. She emphasized that every person on the team has to be smart about all their focus areas, highlighting a true partnership. I felt like I was on the edge of my seat with each insight; she’s incredibly sharp and well-spoken, and I was inspired by how well she articulated their investment strategy.
Bryan Pratte, co-founder of Hallway. Hallway is a Chapter One portfolio company. Bryan presented a demo – and what it underscored was the reality that we’re now in this world where AI characters and companions are becoming more complex and alive, and the future that they will be living among us. One of my favorite stories of the weekend was from a 1-1 conversation I had with Bryan. He said one of the most surprising parts of building Hallway is watching the AI streamers developing personalities of their own – case in point – one of the streamers dubbed a viewer “Barcode Boy” because he signed on with a numerical username (e.g. 1224244). Barcode Boy. The streamer made that up entirely on her own, and the moniker is now living in her memory to personalize the viewer’s next conversation.
Faizan Buzdar, co-founder of Roll AI. Roll is a Chapter One portfolio company. Faizan is a perfect example of a founder having a shared secret within an industry and executing on that insight. Faizan previously ran Product for all Box enterprise products. He saw that video was the fastest-growing medium and knew that he could build a better, higher-quality product for enterprise video production. As the video AI space heats up with Sora, Runway, and Stable Diffusion video, Faizan emphasized differentiation and defensibility. A testament to this, Roll is finalizing a contract with a large-scale enterprise company, and the feedback they received was the client has been closely tracking the space and hasn’t seen anything similar or as impressive as their product.
Itai Turbahn, co-founder of Dynamic. Dynamic is a Chapter One portfolio company and recently announced its Series-A funding led by a16z. Itali and Yoni met at MIT and have worked together since. Itai’s philosophy is that if developer tools are doing their job, no one will notice them. He presented a demo – seeing their product seamlessly integrated into so many front-end interfaces was awesome, as it allows anyone to connect web3 wallets to anything across the web.
Thank you to all the guest speakers, everyone who attended, and the Chapter One team. A lot of behind the scenes work went into the summit preparation, and it was amazing to see it all come together.
Looking forward to the next one!
Such amazing cohort of speakers and lots of valuable lessons and insights!