Eric Groves

Sierra partnered with Curative to build their AI voice agent that's creating faster, better experiences for members and providers while freeing up their team to focus on what matters most: building deeper relationships

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Promise Venture Studio just opened two funding tracks for early childhood founders. The Build Award: $200K + 12 months of programming for 6 early-stage organizations led by proximate leaders expanding community impact. The Imagine Award: $20K + 6-month pilot support for 10 changemakers testing transformative ideas in early childhood. Build Award closes April 12. Imagine Award opens July. This matters because early childhood remains chronically underfunded—and proximate leadership drives the most durable solutions. If you're building in this space or know someone who is: https://lnkd.in/euKGca6Z

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If you care about winning investor attention, customer trust, or even five minutes of mindshare in a noisy world, this episode will hit home. I sat down with Donna Griffit, a world-renowned corporate storyteller who has helped over a thousand startups and Fortune 500 teams raise more than $1B by doing one thing exceptionally well: turning complex ideas into stories people actually want to hear. What struck me most is how she describes founders coming to her with a mix of “dessert, dinner, appetizers all over the place.” Same ingredients. But once storytelling enters the picture, the meal finally makes sense. And the audience feels it. A few gems from our conversation: → Design isn’t decoration. Every visual on a slide changes how the message lands. → Stories stick, metrics don’t. People won’t recall your CAC or LTV in a pitch. But they’ll remember the founder whose father was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and built a billion-dollar company trying to fix it. → Your job is to answer investor and audience questions in the right order. Her 4-act structure isn’t about creativity but reducing guesswork. → The first meeting is a first date. Don’t throw ten years of financials at someone. Create curiosity. Let the questions happen. → Get genuinely curious about the person in front of you. The best conversations aren’t monologues but ping-pong. → Patterns help investors process information, but your origin story breaks through. That combination is where trust forms. Donna also shared a point that made me pause: our brains haven’t had a hardware upgrade in 36,000 years, and visuals were literally designed to help us recognize our own tribe. No wonder we need to see something before we believe it. That’s exactly why her work matters. And it’s why founders who embrace storytelling outperform those who cling to dense decks, feature lists, or Excel tab explosions. If you’re a founder, marketer, seller, investor or simply someone who wants your message to land, this episode will give you a fresh way to think about how you communicate. 🎧 Listen here: https://lnkd.in/eZr3eCMg Let me know your favorite takeaway. This one is packed.

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A few weeks back, I watched Maggie Hott, GTM leader at OpenAI, confidently navigate her first board meeting at Unify. Having worked with her through Emergence Capital's Operator in Residence (OIR) program, seeing her immediately contribute valuable insights made me think about how most board members receive virtually no training for this critical role. At Emergence, we've built our firm around developing board excellence. We grow all our partners from within and have established a culture of mentorship focused on board service. Junior investors aren't thrown into the deep end—we pair them with senior GPs to observe effective board dynamics firsthand. My initial experience was at DroneDeploy alongside my partner Kevin Spain, where I got great mentorship before taking on independent board responsibilities. We extend this methodology to our OIR program, where operators learn how to be effective board members. Based on my experience mentoring directors, here are the fundamental principles I share with first-timers for how board members can best support founders: 1. Reframe the purpose: Problem-solving, not reporting If your board meeting is primarily reporting, you're wasting your management team's time. Information sharing should happen asynchronously, with board members engaging with materials before the meeting. This enables the live session to leverage collective intelligence on critical challenges. This rarely happens because many directors overextend themselves across too many boards—another reason we maintain a disciplined investment pace. 2. Master the Socratic approach The most valuable contribution often comes through thoughtful questions rather than declarative statements. Your objective is to enhance the decision-making capability of management. I enter each meeting with 1-3 specific areas where I know I can add value, focusing questions on these topics. 3. Follow-through separates professionals from amateurs Diligently document your commitments, establish clear action items, and execute them. It's crazy how just doing this proactively makes a board member stand out. 4. Understand your unique contribution to the board ecosystem A high-functioning board resembles a great basketball team—you need complementary skills, not redundant ones. In every meeting, I stay conscious of my distinct value relative to others in the room, whether that's SaaS expertise, AI knowledge, or a particular relationship dynamic with the CEO. I calibrate my role based on needs—sometimes assertively addressing areas where others have less experience, other times asking probing questions where fellow members have deeper expertise. -- To my knowledge, Emergence is the only VC firm with a formalized program dedicated to board excellence. It's an investment that yields returns where they matter most—in bending the odds of success for our founders. Founders, I'm curious: What board member behaviors have you found most valuable?

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Harpoon Ventures + Black Flag is teaming up with Microsoft for Startups to provide founders with access to up to $250,000 in Azure credits, empowering builders to scale faster, train models more efficiently, and access world-class AI infrastructure. What’s included: ⚡ Up to $250K in Azure credits (usable across Azure OpenAI, Grok 3, Llama 4, and more) 💻 On-demand GPU VMs for model training and fine-tuning 🧠 Access to GitHub Enterprise + Microsoft 365 Business Premium 🤝 Dedicated Microsoft technical + GTM support This partnership is designed to give deep-tech and dual-use founders the tools and resources they need to win. To keep pace with an increasingly hostile near peer environment, we need the complete resource stack: political, capital, technological. This is a great addition.

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I’ve been talking with founders about how painful enterprise customization still is — even in 2025. David Dworsky and Gordon Ritter just put words to what we’ve been seeing: the age of point-and-click configuration is ending, and the next category winners will make customization conversational. For early-stage founders, this is the wedge: - Own one painful workflow - Capture the data - Build toward becoming a system of record If you’re building in this space, I’d love to hear how you’re approaching it. Link to the full article on this in the comments. 

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