Jerry Lee

Developers don’t need another “conference.” We need spaces where ideas spark, experiments happen, and community feels real. That’s why we’re bringing Camp AI by Auth0 to the Bay Area — think summer camp energy, but with the brightest minds in GenAI. You’ll hear from builders at Okta, CircleCI, Traversaal.ai, CodeAnt AI, and Acuvity, plus a panel with leaders from GitHub, Vercel, and Amazon Web Services.From late-night code chats to big-picture debates on how AI is reshaping the dev workflow — this is about building together, not just talking about it. And yes… there will be merit badges. Spots are limited → https://bit.ly/4lbaBol #CampAI #GenAI #DeveloperCommunity #BuildWithAuth0

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Congrats to Mika Eddyand the entire Malama Health team on their $9.2M raise. There is a tremendous amount of noise—and frankly a lot of worry—about what great start-ups will look like in the age of AI, and what unintended harm may happen. But here’s the flip side. When AI + smart founders tackle a problem in women's health, it can mean more personalized attention for the people who need it most. In maternal health, that means better support for vulnerable populations, healthier pregnancies and births, and stronger families. And the ripple effects matter: better outcomes, lower costs for hospitals, savings for insurers and government programs, and healthier communities. This is the kind of investment we should all be rooting for. Win. Win. Win. Proud Investor. #LFG

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Ready to turn your idea into a startup? The LvlUp Ventures First Check Fund is here to give you the boost you need. Getting started is the hardest part. You've got the idea and the vision but you need the fuel to get moving without the headaches. That's why Lvlup created this. $1K to $10K to get things rolling plus $10M in perks to accelerate your growth. No data rooms, no red tape, no waiting months. A decision in under a week. Real support and network access from day one. This is your launchpad. The early momentum that turns a concept into a real company. Whether you're pre-formation, idea-stage, or just getting started, this is how you begin your startup journey with real institutional backing behind you. Ready to get started? Apply now using the link in the first comment.

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Seeing more startups offering $10k to $30k referral bonuses for founding engineers, and honestly, it’s a really smart move. Recruiters typically take 15 to 20 percent, which is $30k to $40k on a $200k base. A great referral is a bargain by comparison. More importantly, these early hires matter. The founding team will either build or blow up your rocketship. Don’t cheap out on your first few hires, with money or with time. Saving $20k on the wrong person can end up costing you everything.

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The most interesting companies are often obvious to founders before they are obvious to the market. That was the idea behind Black Flag 100. For the second year, we asked 500+ founders across the ecosystem which early-stage companies they were most excited about. More than 1,500 nominations later, the result is this year’s Black Flag 100, a founder-voted list of 100 up-and-coming companies across frontier technology. A few things stood out. The center of gravity continues to move toward harder, more physical categories: 🛡️ 27% Defense 🚀 22% Aerospace 🤖 22% Robotics & Manufacturing 🧠 19% AI And while the Bay Area remains the clear hub, the next generation of frontier technology is increasingly being built across a broader map: 🌉 40% Bay Area 🌴 20% SoCal 🗽 18% East Coast 🤠 8% Texas These are not easy companies to build. They require technical depth, long-term conviction, and a willingness to take on markets that most founders historically avoided. However, these are the quests that move the world forward. Congratulations to every company on the 2026 Black Flag 100, and to the founders building where the stakes are highest.

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Speaking at TRANSFORM VC's Impact a Billion Summit to answer your most asked questions. Topic: How we're turning cold outreach into warm connections at Valley. The mission: Kill spam forever. We asked a simple question: What if every message in your inbox actually mattered to you? Most outreach is noise. Spray-and-pray tactics that waste everyone's time. Valley's building the alternative - outreach so relevant and thoughtful that prospects welcome it. What I'll cover: → How signal-based targeting beats volume approaches → Why AI personalization finally works (when done right) → The death of "blast 10K emails and pray" The vision: Connection comes first. Spam becomes history. If you're building in the outreach/sales space or just tired of terrible cold emails, come find me there. What are some questions you've always wanted to ask me about Valley? Sign up: impactabillion.com Looking forward to the conversations.

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Traditional startup mentorship is dead and I have the data to back it up. In the 2010s (and even early 2020s), for Founders in our Techstars program the value was in mentor madness. A crazy 2 week period where they met ~100 folks that could help them take their business to the next level. It was stressful and dramatic. "Why did I get this meeting, why not that meeting?" and a lot worse than that. In 2025, what I'm seeing at Foundations is the opposite. While many of our mentor office hours fully book, they're not nearly as busy as our Slack or community presentations. The valuable mentorship today is peer mentorship, rapid knowledge sharing from those learning in real-time how to build and win in the new a AI-first world. There are no "experts" and those with vast experience from the "before times" aren't nearly as helpful as the startup sitting next to you. Wild, wild, wild times ahead folks. And I'll be frank, if anyone who hasn't been in the weeds building or shipping a product in the past 6 months is giving you advice on how to do it, don't listen. Maybe you should be the one advising them :)

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We asked founders who's building the future. They delivered. Introducing the Black Flag 100.2 No VC bias. No algorithms. Just founders — the people who know better than anyone — answering one question: "Which early-stage companies are you most excited about right now?" https://lnkd.in/gVfw5uVC

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The new QSBS rules proposed by the Senate could be a massive win for early-stage startup employees and founders. The changes should create more liquidity, optionality and hopefully more interest from folks wanting to start companies or join them early. Here’s what’s changing (if it passes): - Tax-free gain cap: $10M → $15M - Company asset limit: $50M → $75M - Partial tax exclusion now kicks in sooner, rather than having to wait 5 years — 3 years = 50% tax-free — 4 years = 75% tax-free If you’ve taken a bet on an early-stage company and your comp is tied to equity this could mean millions in tax-free upside if you plan for it. Series A / B founders this is the perfect time to start thinking about your optionality.

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Built InPulse at the Community Hackathon NYC, a high energy event bringing together builders focused on social and community driven tech. The goal was simple. Help people connect better in real life. We noticed people show up excited to network, but hesitate to start conversations. So we turned networking into a game. - Social quests. - QR verified connections. - A live leaderboard that makes meeting people fun. On the backend, we built an AI agent using Phinite.ai, integrated Tavily to personalize each event in real time. Frontend was built through Lovable Created with my teammate Anshi Shah. The energy at this hackathon was unreal. More experiments soon. Demo video below

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Perelel replaced its angel investors with this $27M round from Prelude Growth. Founders: don't be afraid to proactively reset your cap table if the right growth partner comes along.

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I’m thrilled to officially announce our $3M seed investment in Propel People, a company we built inside the 1848 Ventures studio to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing the #construction industry today: the skilled #labor shortage. For small and medium-sized contractors, hiring isn't just a challenge. It's the number one threat to their growth, profitability, and safety. With 94% of contractors struggling to find qualified workers, it’s clear that traditional hiring methods aren't built for the trades. That’s why we built Propel People. It’s a mobile-first, AI-powered hiring platform designed for how construction actually works: in the field. By leveraging smart candidate ranking, instant #SMS-based screening, and a fully #bilingual interface, Propel helps contractors build great crews faster and more efficiently. I’m also thrilled to formally announce that industry veteran Dexter Bachelder is at the helm as CEO. Having worked with Dexter and the team over the last few months, we've already seen the impact of his leadership. His 25 years of experience scaling construction tech companies will be instrumental as Propel People enters this initial stage of growth. This investment reinforces our core thesis at 1848 Ventures: building AI-native companies that solve fundamental pain points for the #SMBs that form the backbone of our economy. A huge congratulations to Dexter and the entire Propel People team on this milestone. We are incredibly proud to partner with you to support the people who build our world. Read the full announcement below. #constructiontech #venturecapital #seedfunding #ai #skilledtrades #smb

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Very happy to share that we are leading Pursuit's Series A. Mike Vichich and Brandon Max are exceptional leaders. I met Mike in December 2024 and was immediately struck by his focus on building in government, one of the most important and under-innovated sectors. Big vision, strong execution, and optimism. At the time, I was between roles and doing some angel investing. That conversation made it clear I wanted to work more closely with founders like him. A year later, I get to do exactly that. Leading this round is a full-circle moment. If you're building in GovTech please consider taking a look at their fantastic product. And reach out to us at Builders VC as we love the market!

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🚗🤖 My Curbivore fireside chat with Harrison Shih, Senior Director at DoorDash Labs, is now live on The Driverless Digest Podcast. We got into DoorDash’s push into autonomy, with a focus on their latest delivery robot, DOT. We discussed: 🧠🏗️ The philosophy behind DoorDash Labs 🤖📦 DOT robot specs and how it fits into a multimodal delivery ecosystem ⏳🚀 Why now is the right moment for delivery automation 🏙️🤝 How DoorDash works with cities to roll out autonomous delivery 📊🛍️ Consumer behavior trends in delivery, and how autonomous delivery evolves in cities over time

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New partnership alert!! Excited to announce that Black Flag is partnering with xAI to give founders free credits and direct access to Grok - xAI’s family of powerful, multi-modal, real-time models. Across essentially any end product you're applying to Black Flag with, Grok will deliver: - Deep reasoning across text, code, and context - Faster inference and improved function calling - CUI: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth just announced that Grok is being adopted for handling Controlled Unclassified Information If you're building in critical technology areas important to the West - space, energy, autonomy, cyber - the next generation of secure software will be built with Grok and you can now get a head start through Black Flag. Only 18 days left to apply to Black Flag’s January batch - apply at the link in the comments!

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I’ve spent most of my career behind the scenes. Now, as a founder, I’m learning to build in public. At #LATechWeek, we launched the live beta of LABEL IQ AI the next programmable DSP for creators and musicians. 🎶 Make AI music + videos 🪙 Launch fan-backed tokens 💸 Earn instantly with automated splits 🔒 Keep 100% ownership Fans don’t just stream, they help fund the art they believe in. More clips from the launch coming this week https://LABELIQ.AI

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Secrets to Recruiting Startup Talent (vs. Big Tech) We break down the hard truths of hiring—and why startup recruiting is about grit, not résumés. A candidate’s past success at Big Tech often says more about the company than the person Founders must rebuild company DNA across geos—esp. for Tel Aviv-born startups Energy > pedigree in early-stage hiring Recruiting against Google? “Their food’s great. Our food sucks—but you can change the company by lunchtime.” This is how real founders vet for hunger. #Startups #Hiring #Recruiting #TechTalent #Founders #StartupLife #ThisWeekInStartups #EarlyStage

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Strong teams are built around proactive problem-solvers. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking with experienced builders across EdTech, GovTech, and mission-driven startups about how they’ve approached sequencing hires, structuring teams, and building organizations that can scale. Across very different contexts, one pattern keeps showing up: organizations that invested early in strong leadership teams are the ones that scaled most effectively. That reflects how we’ve built SBNC’s programs team — a group of leaders who take real ownership, solve problems before they escalate, and operate with both urgency and care. It’s a big reason we’ve been able to grow our impact as quickly as we have. Looking back, I realize I instinctively prioritized hiring people who were already building things of their own — founders, local leaders, and consultants — and that has shaped our culture in powerful ways. Now we’re applying that same philosophy as we think about the next phase of our technology work: building the right foundation, prioritizing leadership, and being intentional about how we structure the team for long-term scale. To fellow founders: what did you prioritize in your earliest hires, and how did that approach evolve as you scaled? #FounderJourney #TechForGood #NonprofitLeadership #EdTech #ScalingImpact

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YC recently announced in their Request for Startups: "10-person, $100B company." Here's what they're missing: → The infrastructure for this doesn't exist yet. You simply cannot run a $100B company when you're playing hide-and-seek with your own knowledge. That's why we (Aditya Iyengar and Ansh Gupta) built Mirror (YC W25): We're not building another app to add to your stack. We're building a digital clone for your knowledge. The 10-person unicorn isn't a fantasy. It just needs the right infrastructure. See how Mirror (YC W25) makes it possible → https://www.usemirror.ai/

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