Avner Ronen

The next phase for on-chain yield is about building portfolios around multiple return drivers. This is why we built PRISM.

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Interesting to read the latest round of posts from European VCs about how it's important to work all day every day to compete with the [Americans/Chinese/Japanese/Indians...insert your favourite bogeyman work culture here]. A few quick points I'd make in retort: 1) Building a really big company is a marathon. No one works all day, every day for a decade or two. You have to build balance into the journey. 2) There are absolutely moments in time when you do need to work insanely hard. You can't expect a 9-5, 5 day a week existence and build a 'venture scale' business. I did plenty of all-nighters building my company. But, when you don't need to be all-in, use the gap to recover, reflect, recharge, etc. 3) Reflection is really key. A lot of founders are very buried in the detail - feeling busy, moving little things forward constantly feels like progress. I definitely fell for this. The better founders know when to step back, reflect, talk to others, etc. Bill Gates always took a week out to read and reflect while becoming the richest person on the planet - if he found the time to do it, you probably can too. 4) We built a detailed, multi-level Performance and Wellbeing program for Founders specifically to address this - it was modelled heavily on what people in other performance work do (musicians, sportspeople, high level politicians, etc). Guess what - they don't all sprint all of the time. They build in rest, think about diet and exercise, lean on family and support, etc, etc. 5) Finally ... all the versions of this post I've read are from VCs who've never built a technology company themselves. I remember such 'advice' well when I was a founder. If you're a CEO, don't listen to a jumped-up finance bro in a hoodie who has never done your job telling you how to do it! If you ever work with Balderton I can promise you that we will have HUGE expectations and hopes for the company you're building but one of the reasons we're working with you is that we believe you will do what it takes to try your best to get there - don't expect paranoid micro-management.

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💥 𝗦𝗻𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝗽𝗲𝗲𝗸 𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗲𝗿 ��𝗼𝘄𝗹 𝗟𝗫 𝗮𝗱 💥 We couldn’t quite match our AI contemporary Ramp, pulling in Saquon Barkley as a headliner— at $8m per 30 seconds, it turns out the full 1:10 of runtime put a serious dent in our venture funding. But we made the tradeoff: more screen time, no celebrity cameos. Because we felt our launch video for Numeric Intelligence carried its own weight—with movement, visuals, and sound that rival any big-game spot. And we had Saquon's athleticism and punishing style covered in typography: Arizona Flare breaking ankles with sharp cuts, Booton trucking through would-be tacklers. For us, the vibe is the closest thing to what it must feel like to crank through a one-day close (or reverse hurdle a defender). 🎧 Pro tip: sound on - the audio f**king slaps 🔊

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Product is only half the equation. Without distribution, even the best product stalls. The companies that win build both muscles. Episode 2 with Bill Macaitis out now https://lnkd.in/ebWg47Be

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The Agent Protocol Series — post 2 of 8. Six new agent protocols launched in the last twelve months. The cheerleading has been deafening. They're not solving the problem your brand actually has. When an agent shows up at any of your digital surfaces acting on someone's behalf, four things matter: — Know which agent is at the door, and on whose behalf. — Let it efficiently query what it needs — products, inventory, pricing, case history, contract terms. — Let it work in stages — building a cart, drafting a case, filling a form, queueing account changes. — Where the action is material — payment, account change, signed agreement — accept it with credible proof a human authorized it. Three of those four are mostly solved problems. Clean HTTPS APIs with structured JSON, well-formed OpenAPI specs, and OAuth-based authorization handle them. Your engineering team can ship all three today using stacks they already know. The fourth — which agent, and on whose behalf — is the real frontier. And it's the one the new protocols quietly skip. A signed payment mandate proves that some agent was authorized to spend $200. It doesn't prove the agent talking to your API right now is the one the user actually authorized. It might be a credential replay, a competitor doing recon, or a botnet running price discovery. The mandate doesn't help you tell them apart. Neither does an Agent Card. Neither does an MCP tool call. The unmarketed work that actually matters is happening in places like Web Bot Auth, model-provider signed assertions, and OAuth extensions for delegated agent actions. None of these trend on LinkedIn. All are more load-bearing for your brand than any of the new protocols. You can build an agent-ready brand experience today using only standards your engineering team already knows — and outperform most of what brands waiting on the protocol stack will ship in 2026. Three things to scope this quarter: — Clean APIs designed for agents: OpenAPI specs, structured JSON, bulk queries, idempotency keys, useful errors. — Tiered identity. Start with what exists today — IP ranges from known model providers, OAuth scopes. Layer in cryptographic verification (Web Bot Auth, signed provider assertions) as those mature. — A policy framework that routes agents by tier. Anonymous / identified / on-behalf-of-user / partner — each tier gets different access. Design the policy once; let the system route at scale. The protocol industrial complex is marketing complexity as if it were a roadmap. It isn't. The brands that win won't be the ones who shipped six new protocols — they'll be the ones who decided which agents to do business with and built the plumbing to enforce it. If an agent showed up at your brand tomorrow on a human's behalf — could your organization say which agents are welcome, on what terms, and who owns the answer?

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I'm excited that Hallstone Ventures has announced the final close of Fund I much faster than anticipated. This underlines the fund's unique investment thesis focused on backing founders building AI-driven infrastructure for media, entertainment, & advertising. This focus, along with the incredible network of deep domain expert investors, is what drew me to support the vision of Seth Hallen, former President of the Hollywood Professional Association & current member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences #AI Task Force. The amazing array of Partners include former chair of Motion Picture Laboratories, Inc. (MovieLabs) Leon Silverman, Andy Beach (former Microsoft CTO of Media & Entertainment), Brian Kenworthy (Head of Emerging Tech at Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios), Jack Wenzinger (Senior Architect at Oracle), Artin Nazarian (Qvest Global), Gregg Sandheinrich (Fabric), Mac Moore (CoreWeave), Rich Welsh (President of SMPTE), Thomas Loftus (entertainment lawyer), Juan Pablo Saibene (Qualabs), Geoffrey Tully, Dave Kochbeck, David Sugg, Claire Lee, Chris Blandy (ex Leader Media & Entertainment at Amazon Web Services (AWS)), Rick Hack (former Head of Media & Ent Partnerships at Intel), Jason Fotter, Michael Merrill (former Head of Global Production Tech at Netflix), Richard Berger (President of Motion Picture Laboratories, Inc. (MovieLabs)), & Bastien Minniti (former Head of Tech at Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios).

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"The nature of digital technology is to embed, mix, smooth, disagreggate; too often, the image of decentralization conceals a quiet recentralization elsewhere. It’s not just advertising that is closer to our bodies, but every kind of information. With cryptocurrency, the spaces of traditional finance are reconstituted in the self ... in which the access point for dematerialized wealth is no longer the bank vault but the individual and their personal knowledge (their private key)." https://lnkd.in/e93xWw2p

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love this from our CEO Keyvan Mohajer👇 Agentic voice AI is moving from “demo” to durable ecosystem—and 2026 is the year it scales. Keyvan lays out how we’re making that real: Polaris delivering up to 4× lower latency and 35%+ lower error rates (as high as 70% on customer data), crossing 1B queries/month, and expanding monetization in-vehicle—from food and coffee to reservations and parking with partners like OpenTable and Parkopedia. The bigger idea: an open, multi-agent model (MCP/A2A compatible) that lets enterprises bring their own agents into cars and connected devices—so innovation compounds instead of starting from scratch. If you’re in restaurants, retail, or mobility, this is the blueprint: dependable conversational AI + agentic actions + partner ecosystem = faster cycles, lower costs, and new revenue. Resharing the full Benzinga piece below—worth the read. Benzinga #VoiceAI #AgenticAI #CustomerExperience

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Why we don't run ads for RealWorld.fi (ironic since I'm the founder of a performance ad company) A few months ago a client walked in with a Patek Philippe that had been sitting in a drawer for years. He needed liquidity for a deal that couldn't wait. We appraised it, placed it in insured custody, and funded the loan in days. He kept the watch. He got his cash and immediately he told two friends. Another client brought in a collection of vintage banknotes, the kind of collateral most lenders wouldn't even know how to evaluate. We did, we funded it, and he told his network too. A Dali came through our doors. Yes, a Dali. Same process, appraisal, insured custody, loan funded, owner keeps the piece. Every single borrower came through a referral or a partner introduction with zero paid acquisition. We didn't plan it this way, we just kept solving problems and people kept sending us more. We're not trying to scale by shouting louder, we're scaling by making every single client experience worth talking about. If you hold physical assets and need liquidity without selling, or if you want to earn 10-15% APR lending against insured physical collateral, DM me or visit realworld.fi

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Every #VentureStudio GP knows some portfolio bets won’t hit. That's expected - and it's one of the reasons studios are such a powerful vehicle for innovation. And while a venture's failure might be what's visible to the outsider, what keeps them up at night isn’t failure at the venture level — it’s failure at the systemic level within the studio. One bad entity design. One IP misstep. One governance gap. That’s how studio operations fall apart. We break down how to spot (and fix) these cracks before they turn into fault lines in our latest paper, "The GP Dilemma" - DM me and I'll send you a copy!

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I listened to an Invest Like The Best podcast with Wolfgang Hammer this week. Wolfgang helped create House of Cards and has run major studios. Now he’s working with Mitch Lasky and Marc Andreessen on a new model for building films. His thinking applies directly to founders. He breaks a company’s story into three layers: 1. External: what the product does. 2. Emotional: the motivation behind building it. 3. Philosophical: the beliefs about how the world should work. The companies that communicate well operate cleanly across all three. The ones that struggle usually stay stuck in the external layer. Hammer’s prompts are simple: • What are we doing? • Why am I doing this? • How should the world work? Run these for your customer. Run them for your company. Look for the alignment. That’s the narrative you use with executives, frontline teams, customers, and investors. The logic is straightforward: people act when they understand what you do, why it matters, and how it fits into their own view of the world. A clear story makes decisions easier and keeps teams moving in the same direction. Hammer also makes a strong point about the role of a CEO. Communication is the job. The audience changes constantly, but the underlying philosophy should hold steady. When the story is clear, the context-switching becomes manageable. One pattern shows up across every strong narrative: hardship, money, status, and transformation. Almost every meaningful story traces a shift from one state to another. People respond to change, not static descriptions. Takeaway: revisit the three layers often. As the product, market, and team evolve, the narrative needs to evolve with them. A sharp, coherent story makes everything else easier.

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The State of Generative Media report is out today from fal and it’s the most comprehensive look at where generative image, video, and audio stands and where it's going. A few things that stood out to me: - 44% of image generation is already in production workflows - Media companies' AI spending is projected to grow from $2.6B to $12.5B by 2029 - Production use cases (e-commerce, advertising, studios) have overtaken entertainment as the primary growth driver Jeffrey Katzenberg said it best when I attended fal's Generative Media Conference last October: "It's the democratization of storytelling at a level that has never happened in the existence of humankind." The window between "experimental" and "production" is collapsing fast. We led fal's Series B last year because we believed they were building the defining infrastructure layer for this shift. Everything since (and fal’s ridiculous growth) has validated that bet. Full report: https://lnkd.in/gKDY-RWt

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We're excited at Kindred Ventures to share this week that we co-led a $15.5M financing round for Creatify AI, which is building at the intersection of generative media, AI agents, and the $1.1 trillion global advertising market. The premise: video is the most effective medium in digital advertising, but one of the hardest to scale. Production is slow, iteration cycles are expensive, and performance is often hit-or-miss with fuzzy feedback loops. Creatify is changing all of this by reinventing what’s traditionally been a fragmented, manual, and expensive process into a fast, generative ad-creative AI agent with built-in testing and feedback loops. Creatify's AdMax is an AI agent designed to manage the entire video ad lifecycle—from concepting, scripting, and generation, to massively-scaled A/B testing and performance analysis. It allows brands to create dozens (or hundreds) of on-brand, UGC-style video ads in minutes, optimized for the platforms where content moves fastest, like Meta, YouTube, and TikTok. The founders, Yinan (Steven) Na, Ledell Wu, and XIN ZHOU, bring deep product engineering and AI research experience from Meta, Snap Inc., and FAIR (fka Facebook AI Research). When we met them over a year ago, they had started building the scaffolding to make something powerful and deep in this storytelling and brand world and its $1.1 trillion global market. Today, they've created the first ever AI agent for designing, producing, and testing video ads in live deployment, and have reached over $9M in ARR. Their vision was clear: the entirety of making and testing video ads could be reinvented and automated using one smart, creative human and an agentic orchestration of LLMs, video generation, and video understanding.   This team, their focused vision, and their early product execution sums up why we’re excited to co-lead Creatify AI’s $15.5M Series A alongside fellow investors WndrCo (Jeffrey Katzenberg, Sujay Jaswa, Chonghao Huang) and with Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross, and angels. More thoughts from us below on the Kindred Ventures blog! 👇 More details from the Creatify blog: https://lnkd.in/gAT_wDaK If you're a brand, agency, or creator, check out AdMax: https://creatify.ai/admax To join the team: https://lnkd.in/ggdmDrHk https://lnkd.in/d37fQ9Ap

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I go to Consumer Technology Association's CES Show each January for two reasons: What bets are startups and large companies making in product innovation and technology, and how likely are those bets to move the needle this year in a way that creates momentum. And to separate what looks close from what actually is. You stand in front of the thing, ask a few annoying questions, watch where it breaks during live memo, and suddenly the gap between promise and deployment becomes visible. Consumer takeaways from CES 2026 🤖: Robots are everywhere, but most home use cases are still a patience tax. The near-term winners are constrained environments: coffee stations, vending-store formats, hospitality support. Transparent displays are finally credible, but they’ll show up in premium B2B long before they become normal in homes. Smart appliances will keep getting smarter, and better at monetizing attention. Investor takeaways: one steady, one heavy ⚠️: The steady one: the best startups weren’t betting on miracles. They were building on proven components, tight scope, clean deployment paths, and obvious ROI. The heavy one: the “synthetic companionship” category is crossing from weird to normal, fast. And when a substitute for human connection becomes normal at scale, the cost rarely stays where the product team expects it to. We don’t need to be afraid of a Terminator scenario. The risk that keeps nagging me is closer to a social autoimmune disease 🧠 Tools designed to help us start weakening the very social tissue that makes people resilient. AI-generated convenience slowly replaces effort, and effort is where humanity's true survival skill lies. Put that next to AI reducing the demand for human labor, and something else shifts. Work needs fewer people. Relationships start to feel expensive. Families stop being the default and start becoming a choice you have to justify. That’s the bet I keep thinking about. And it’s the one we should be far more deliberate with before AI-induced convenience becomes normal. #CES2026 #Future #AmbientAI #TransparentDisplays

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Anthropic is investing $100M in its Claude Partner Network, and is setting the tone for new partner programs in the AI era. Yes, Anthropic is partnering with the biggest names in tech and services, but they also "see a massive opportunity for smaller partners and smaller businesses looking to add Claude to their technology stacks", which should be welcome news to the many boutique and AI-native services firms looking to get into this ecosystem. This CRN interview with Steve Corfield, Anthropic's head of partners, is worth a read. https://lnkd.in/e6WW3TzM Steve's comment that they want to "demonstrate that Anthropic is the most committed AI company in the world to the partner ecosystem" is one of the many reasons they're a key player in our Tercera 30 research.

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Something shifted at Sundance. We felt it. Filmmakers felt it. Investors felt it. The conversations weren’t about if the industry is changing. They were about who is building the infrastructure for what comes next. Now StoryXen is approaching launch. And SXSW is right around the corner. This isn’t just another software demo. This is a new production ecosystem. A place where: • Development connects directly to capital • Compliance aligns from day one • Workflow syncs instead of fractures • Creators stay in control At SXSW, our ecosystem partners will be in one place. Funding. Production. Execution. Distribution conversations happening in real time. No middle layers. No smoke. Just access. But here’s the truth: We’re only scheduling a limited number of demos leading into launch. 🎬 If you're a filmmaker preparing a project this year — you need to see this. You have two options: 1️⃣ Schedule a Virtual Demo before SXSW 2️⃣ Book an In-Person Demo at our ecosystem booth in Austin This is where preparation meets opportunity. The future of filmmaking isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s being built. And we’re opening the doors. Schedule here: https://lnkd.in/gf5aZ5vU #SXSW2026 #FilmTech #IndependentFilm #FilmProduction #FutureOfFilmmaking

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The best CMOs aren’t storytellers anymore — they’re system architects. Story still matters. But story alone doesn’t scale. Today’s CMO has to build growth like an engineer and lead like an artist. We’re designing systems — where data, brand, and demand run in sync, and every dollar actually moves the business forward. We’re not in the room to show campaigns. We’re there to connect marketing performance to valuation, pipeline, and momentum. Because the question isn’t “How do we prove marketing’s value?” It’s “How do we build a business that can’t grow without it?” When marketing is wired into product, sales, and culture…it stops being a function. It becomes infrastructure. And that’s where the next generation of CMOs will win: by turning story into system, and system into scale. The companies that get it first won’t just grow faster…they’ll last longer.

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