Mike Vernal
@mvernal
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Partner @ Conviction. Investor by profession (@Rippling, @NotionHQ, @Statsig, @Clay_GTM, @GetCaptionsApp, @VerkadaHQ). Engineer by nature. Early-ish @Facebook.
San Francisco, CA
Joined April 2008
I have never used Swift and never written a Mac app but ChatGPT somehow got me to a working real-time monitor of my house energy usage in ~90 minutes. Mind-blowing experience.
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Pro tip: Never use a cumulative graph in a pitch deck. You destroy your credibility. It's the data-equivalent of using Comic Sans.
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The market you serve is arguably the most important factor for an early-stage startup. We've found that many product-oriented founders struggle with framing it. We wanted to share one way to think about a market and the "Market Size" slide.
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One of the most badass things I have witnessed is the Rippling team rallying to navigate the SVB crises a week ago. First, the team completed a heroic transition from SVB to JPMC for funds flow in less than 24 hours. 1/.
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Very excited to partner with @ivanhzhao, @akothari and the team at @NotionHQ! Notion has become a global phenomenon and is on its way to becoming the operating system for work across teams and enterprises. 1/ .
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We @sequoia are excited to lead the Series C in @StarkWareLtd, building on a partnership with @ukolodny, @EliBenSasson and team that began at the Series A in 2018. 1/.
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@rogerdickey @blader @kunalb11 The problem is that Excel is an 8 or a 9 for a lot of users. You have to target users for which Excel is a 6 or less (or really build an 11/10 blow-your-mind product).
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@pratyushbuddiga @rabois @patrickc @sama Disruptive technologies (PC, Internet, Mobile) tend to create more open-ended opportunity that has less of an age/experience bias. In the late stages of a tech cycle I think there’s more of a bias towards experience and linear innovation.
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Plaid for SaaS. @plaid is awesome. Congrats to the team!. I'm interested in a user-level middleware for SaaS apps (eg, a file picker). One model would be "Plaid for SaaS" - a UI that lets you connect to SaaS apps and their data. If you're working on this, would love to chat!.
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Notion (@NotionHQ) is a case study in being stubborn on vision and flexible on tactics. That steadfastness of vision has helped produce one of the most impressive startups in the world. This is a great recounting of that story.
40 years ago, computing pioneers thought everyone would make their own software. Today just 0.34% of the world are developers. Learn how @ivanhzhao, @akothari & @simonlast are building @NotionHQ to change our relationship with computers and software. 👇.
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One question I can't get out of my head is whether a traditional Google-style search box/experience is the right metaphor for an LLM-based backend/experience. 1/x.
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I wasn't so much "interviewed" by @HarryStebbings as I was hit by the sheer hurricane of energy that is the @twentyminutevc. Thank you for having me on the show!.
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We're thrilled to announce our partnership with @threads, a platform designed to make work communication more efficient and inclusive. @rousseaukazi and I sat down to discuss today's launch and the future of work.
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We are incredibly excited to share our partnership with Ryan Dahl, Bert Belder and the team @deno_land:. 1/.
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We @sequoia have loved working with the @houseparty team. We’re excited to see them continue to change the way people connect online as part of @epicgames. Congrats!
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@parkerconrad Character is revealed when pressure is applied. It was incredible to see how the team at @Rippling responded. Congrats to the entire team. And a huge thanks to the talented folks in the 🇺🇸 government who stepped in to make sure SVB and its customers were protected. 6/.
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Rippling is one of the most ambitious and impressive companies I have seen. They are accelerating as they scale – a rare feat. They are building one of the key enterprise platforms of the future. Congrats to @parkerconrad and the entire team at @Rippling.
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Congrats to @citizenapp on SF launch! We're thrilled to partner on their mission to keep people safe and informed.
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My three-year-old son just figured out how to order things via Alexa. Philip Glass's Symphony No. 8 is a curious choice.
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@alexandr_wang If true (not sure), it's an interesting metaphor for the development of AI. First, we can do the basic functions of a toddler (image + facial recognition). Next, we can do the basic work of kids (play games, do homework). Only a matter of time until entry-level work automated.
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I was fortunate to spend time with the first cohort of @W_Conviction's Embed and am excited to work with next cohort, alongside @saranormous, @prnvrdy, @Gary_Pesola and guests like @ivanhzhao and @zoink. One idea we've been talking about – a specialized AI Therapist / Coach.
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I sat down with @benrbn, @sistanisays of @houseparty to talk about their journey so far and where they go from here:
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It sounds so simple, but I really think the a defining characteristic of winning companies is just being able to ship great products quickly. The @getcaptionsapp team is just flying and they've now brought the power and simplicity of their leading mobile app to the web. 1/.
Introducing Captions for web. Video editing made simple, thanks to AI — now on a bigger screen. One-click editing, right from your browser.
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Many of us are figuring out this WFH thing for the first time. The @threads team has built an amazing platform for asynchronous discussion and decision-making. In the past week they accelerated their public launch and are making it free for the next few months. Check it out.
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We're thrilled to be partnering with @RocksetCloud and our friends at @GreylockVC on this incredibly cool cloud-native, serverless search and analytics platform. We've been using it for months at @Sequoia and love it. Congrats to the team on the launch!.
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A true legend (and a great storyteller). RIP.
We are deeply saddened to share that our founder Don Valentine has passed away. Our thoughts are with his family and with all those inspired by his pioneering vision and indelible impact.
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The team is killing it. Congrats and welcome to Damir and the team at @IndexVentures.
It’s been a big year for Captions, and it’s only July. Building on this momentum, we’re excited to announce our $60M Series C, led by @IndexVentures. That brings our total capital raised to $100M, which we’ll be investing in AI video research right here in New York City. We
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The @CitizenApp team has launched the most thoughtful, sophisticated contract-tracing solution available. It integrates contact tracing into the largest public safety app and includes integrated testing and detailed notifications if you've been exposed:
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Congrats to @iamveeve, @dhruba_rocks, @tudor, @ShrutiBhat and the entire team at @RocksetCloud! They are quietly building incredible tech with an incredible team and quietly tripling the business y/y. We are proud to have been supporters of every single round.
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We are delighted to deepen our partnership with @RocksetCloud by leading their Series B along w/ @jerrychen and @GreylockVC. Rockset has built the platform for real-time, data-driven apps. 1/.
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The @getcaptionsapp team has been building incredible product at a breakneck speed over the past year. AI dubbing into other languages. An AI-generated soundtrack to your videos. It's really good. Congrats to Gaurav, @dwightchurchill and the team!.
Today, Captions is thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $25 million in Series B funding in a round led by @kleinerperkins, with participation from our existing investors @sequoia, @a16z, and @svangel, bringing the total raised to $40 million.
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@rogerdickey @blader @kunalb11, I feel like this is a case study for the delta-4 test. It’s impossible to quantify what 10x or 100x better is. Basic idea of delta-4 – what would a customer rate the old thing on a scale of 1-10? What would they rate the new thing? The new thing needs to be 4+ better.
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The @CitizenApp team's core mission is to empower people to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. The team has been sprinting to serve communities during this time of mass unrest – COVID and the ongoing quest for justice. Kudos to the entire team.
How safety startup Citizen surpassed Twitter to become Apple’s top news app amid the George Floyd protests: by @StevenBertoni
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Congrats to @kareemamine, @NicolaeRusan, @vxanand and the entire team at @clayrunhq on their Series B!. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with them over the past five years. 1/.
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We are thrilled to support @aleksizy and the team at @CybersynInc in their quest to democratize access to the world's economic data.
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Very excited about the team coming together @CitizenApp and the progress on the new version. One of the most interesting companies in NYC at the moment.
Once banned by @Apple and vilified by the @NYPD, personal safety app Citizen could be launching a new era of social media platforms. Via @forbes @CitizenApp:
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Very excited to partner w/ the team @VerkadaHQ on the future of security cameras. They are the rare team that brings together both deep hardware and software expertise. And they are on 🔥.
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Ok, crazy product idea from a coffee w/ @RealKevinYang. Google Earth/Flight Simulators meets The Sims meets ChatGPT. You can travel to / teleport to anywhere in the world. As you zoom in, the locations are populated with randomly generated people. 1/.
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Getting to work with @rousseaukazi is amazing. Those who know him will agree. This is one of my favorite 7Qs so far.
In this week’s #SevenQuestions, @rousseaukazi describes a life-altering moment when he was in ROTC that fed into the driving philosophy behind @threads. Read the story here.
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Congrats to @iamveeve, @dhruba_rocks, @tudor, @ShrutiBhat and the entire teams at both @RocksetCloud and @OpenAI. I am sad to no longer work directly with you but am glad the team and tech will help power the most interesting tech in the world. Congrats!.
We’ve acquired Rockset, a leading real-time analytics database that provides world-class data indexing and querying capabilities. We'll integrate Rockset’s technology across our products, empowering companies to transform their data into actionable intelligence.
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We are incredibly excited to announce our partnership w/ @vijayeraji and @statsigio!. When I started attending board meetings, it blew my mind how many slides were dedicated to sales & marketing and how few slides were dedicated to product. 1/.
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After decades of hype, it's crazy that the "IoT future" still hasn't happened. The fundamental issue is complexity – product complexity, technical complexity and business model complexity. @Blueswireless is one of the most elegant solutions we've seen to the problem yet. 1/.
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Congrats to @jeanqasaur and the small-but-mighty team at Akita for the launch of open beta. Akita is a drop-in solution for monitoring and observability that automatically learns your API and traffic patterns, no code changes required.
We've hit a major milestone today: we launched our open beta. Akita is now fully self-serve!. You can try our fastest time-to-value monitoring solution for free today by signing up on the app. Read more in our blog post here:
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@jordanglee 1/ I'll try to do this with an extemporaneous tweet storm instead. To set some context, I am a trained engineer and probably spent a decade+ of my life writing software, but I haven't professionally written software since maybe 2009.
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Also, I'm new to this Twitter thing and just learned that I did a Tweet storm wrong. Sorry!.
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1/ Congratulations to the @whisperai1 team for the launch of the Whisper Hearing System today! While computers have obviously gotten much better at seeing things, it’s under-appreciated how good they can be at hearing things as well.
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We're thrilled to partner up with @StarkWareLtd (and @matthuang!). ZK-STARKs represent one of the most interesting and exciting technologies for scaling the blockchain.
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We are thrilled to partner with @harrybrundage, @hashemito and the entire team at @gadget_dev, along with @JeremyL and the team at @BessemerVP, to help developers build applications 50x faster. 1/.
It’s an extra special day here, because we finally get to announce our $8.5M Seed funding round from @sequoia and @BessemerVP! This is a big deal for us and we are incredibly grateful. We can’t wait to use this opportunity to tackle the biggest issues holding developers back.👩💻👨💻.
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.@parkerconrad to Neil @ Greenoaks: "I want to raise some money, but I want to tell you up front that the main condition here is we need to close over the weekend, and you need to be in a position to wire the full amount first thing Monday morning. " 4/.
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A favorite lesson from @roelofbotha is to guard against making resume-based assumptions. Roelof's degree is in actuarial science. Why? Because it was one of the best ways to make it to the US. A reminder to always try to get to the story behind the story.
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This is a really awesome launch. The team is really fast, and fast is a defining characteristic of great companies.
Meet AI Creator Ads. Use AI to generate top-performing video ads in one click. UGC-style ads have never been so easy.
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I first worked w/ @rsanghvi and @adityaag 14 years ago this month and have ended up working with multiple SPC alums as founders. I am excited to get to work with the whole SPC crew on their web3 fellowship program!. To apply, check out:
1/ Thrilled to open applications for our 3rd Founder Fellowship cohort—$400k in funding pre-idea. But this time, with our friends @ScriptCapital, @mvernal from @sequoia, @zoink, @ljin18, and @multicoincap, we're going all-in on web3.
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Verkada is doing an amazing job of modernizing buildings with consumer and cloud sensibilities. Don't underestimate what you can do when you bring together great software and hardware people. Congrats @VerkadaHQ and team!.
We are thrilled to share that Verkada has raised $80M in #SeriesC financing at $1.6B valuation to expand on the vision of building a software layer for every commercial building to run on. #technology #funding #security #accesscontrol #videosecurity.
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He looked at me and growled "What are you, a tourist?" He then smiled and regaled me with stories of working with Steve Jobs. A true legend.
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We're excited to partner with @AmirTime and the team at @GetSwitchboard on a new way to collaborate online. Switchboard re-thinks collaboration online by creating a video-first IRC-like system with an infinite, collaborative canvas. 1/.
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Luciana captured my thoughts perfectly. I have worked with some truly exceptional and highly competitive people, but I have never worked with someone as committed to excellence as @roelofbotha.
I am fortunate enough to have met many incredible people. @roelofbotha is in a league of his own.
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Mobile has revolutionized the way we travel, move and connect but we haven’t done enough to understand how mobile phones can make the world safer. I’m psyched to see Citizen continue to roll out and even more excited about the team and community we’re building to do that.
Today, @CitizenApp launches in Baltimore, making this the third city in its safety network. We're reminiscing on the day we made our partnership official with a handshake, a milkshake and a selfie.
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This is pretty wild.
It’s official: you can now create your own AI Twin, only on Captions. Just record a minute of yourself talking, and watch your AI Twin come to life. Go from idea to video in seconds, and get the perfect take every time. If you've ever wanted a twin — now’s your chance.
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@alexandr_wang BTW, I find ChatGPT to be really helpful for development, so I suspect that's a real use case.
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Congrats to the team behind @dagster on their Series B. Dagster is quickly becoming the orchestration tool-of-choice for the best data teams out there.
Elementl raises $33M Series B for its data orchestration platform based on Dagster by @fredericl.
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When it became clear that customer funds were going to be trapped at SVB on Friday, Parker and team decided to fund Friday's payroll using the company's balance sheet – basically, Rippling decided to pay everyone's payroll and hope they would get money back from SVB later. 2/.
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Customers agree – those we spoke to love the product. It has an impressive 4.9/5.0 stars on both G2 and Capterra. Congrats to @parkerconrad and the team for all they have built so far and we are excited to now be a part of the journey. 5/.
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@parkerconrad "And what you’ve got to understand is that we’re going to send it right out the door to cover customer payroll. That is the intention.” 5/.
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Excited for @CitizenApp to launch in LA! We're now live in NYC, SF, LA and Baltimore. We're just getting started.
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@NikhilGehani @lyft Jfyi:.1/ She, not he. 2/ She was wonderful! I certainly had no intent to diminish her in any way. 3/ To the extent I had a tone in the tweet, it was a reminder that not everyone is wrapped up in “who is going public today.”.
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One of the core attributes of the @statsigio team is that they're just really fast. As more folks start using GPT-4-style APIs, Statsig makes it easy to find the optimal prompts and configuration for these integrations.
In a world of ‘black box’ generative AI foundation models vs descriptive code, great experimentation tools will become even more important. Good experimentation is hard to set up and configure. That’s where Statsig comes in. #generativeAI #chatGPT #GPT4.
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We are thrilled to work with @borisjabes and the entire team at @getcensus! The modern data stack has been reshaped & massively simplified by tools like @SnowflakeDB and @getdbt. Data teams can now create a single source-of-truth in the data warehouse. 1/.
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Someone took my AirPods in Vancouver. Find My doesn’t stop them from using them but does let me follow along on their journey — they’re getting to explore the scenic sea-to-sky highway. My wife told me to think of this as the gnome from Amelie, which made me feel a lot better.
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