Omar Nawaz

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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Financial institutions use models for almost all aspects of their businesses, from credit approval and marketing to fraud and compliance. The future of automation in finance is clear, but banks will have to upgrade the way they manage model risk to accommodate the pace of change and different types of models. Spreadsheets, emails, and homegrown solutions will be very costly to retrofit for the next decade of innovation. The Ethos team has built a next-gen model risk management platform to help the entire industry prepare for for what's coming next. We Canapi Ventures are excited to lead Ethos' $6M seed round. Their highly configurable platform provides inventory management and MRM workflow capabilities to approve and track models through the risk management process. Thrilled to get to work with Jett Oristaglio and Mike Fotinakis on the journey, alongside Capital One Ventures and our friends Sheel Mohnot and JC Bahr-de Stefano at Better Tomorrow Ventures. CC: Harrison Kioko Its rare for an early stage company to have perfect market fit with banks of all sizes, but that's what got us immediately excited when we first met the Ethos team. If you're a bank looking to uplevel your MRM processes, please reach out. More on our thesis below: https://lnkd.in/gRE8RMUz

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I recently sat down with David Prosser at Forbes to discuss how we, at AAF Management Ltd., have strategically positioned ourselves to ride — and invest through — the current AI wave. The conversation came at a meaningful inflection point for us: just days after announcing 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘹𝘪𝘴 𝘍𝘶𝘯𝘥, a $55 million early-stage hybrid vehicle anchored by Mubadala Capital. Over the past decade in venture, I’ve seen the industry evolve through extraordinary macro shifts — the rise and fall of online-native e-commerce brands, the boom and bust of biotech, and the irrational exuberance of the ZIRP-era liquidity that fueled a historic valuation run-up, followed by a painful but necessary reset. Each cycle has followed a familiar pattern: euphoria → over-investment → correction → consolidation → compounding. And every cycle reinforces the same truth: 𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘦𝘵𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. So, are we in an AI bubble? The honest answer: it depends which asset class you mean. As I said in the interview: “It’s really a story of two different worlds. A handful of very large private companies have been flooded with liquidity and seen huge valuation increases — but that’s not been the experience of small start-ups raising their first $1M to $5M.” Because most investors follow momentum, we’re seeing overzealous valuations in public markets (e.g., NVIDIA) and late-stage private names (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI). But in early stage, while Seed valuations have crept up, most AI startups raising $1–5M rounds remain sensible. We see AI as a once-in-a-generation platform shift, not a passing cycle. Through The Axis Fund, we’re intentionally positioned to capture both beta and alpha across this paradigm: Beta — via our 20% fund-of-funds allocation, giving us exposure to the next wave of category-defining AI companies: • Decagon – AI for customer service (backed by Andreessen Horowitz ) • ElevenLabs – AI voice and language models (backed by ICONIQ) • Sanas – AI-powered voice translation (backed by Insight Partners) • Legora – Legal AI for the EU (backed by General Catalyst) Alpha — by cherry-picking the most promising companies across Pre-Seed to Pre-IPO. Our AI thesis is clear: • 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐋𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫: Agentic workflows driving automation, efficiency, and error reduction. • 𝐒𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐫𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞: Libraries, tools, and data systems enabling scalable model deployment. • 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐀𝐈 > 𝐚𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐀𝐈:  Founders solving real, high-value problems in fintech, healthcare, SaaS, and industrial tech. • 𝐆𝐥𝐨𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞, 𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Founders who think globally and execute precisely in their markets. We will stop talking about AI as a category the way we stopped talking about cloud or web protocols, 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘢𝘶𝘭𝘵. 👇🏽 Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/ejwREwEe

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CNBC gets to see all the #changemakers and among all of them they selected Bianca Diana Anghelina to be in the Top 50. Bianca's vision and drive has built AILY LABS as a true #agenticAI enterprise solution for the most accurate capital allocation decisions. If you're a #CFO, you should see an AILY LABS demo. Aily app is scenario planning at AI-speed and accuracy. One of the best capital investment decisions we've made at Insight Partners. https://lnkd.in/eXffZEyu

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From Measurement to Orchestration, with Pranav Piyush from Paramark.com In this week's Intelligent Marketer ep, Rishabh and I dug into the evolution of marketing measurement in a world where direct, click-based attribution has broken. The smartest marketing teams are building systems that triangulate incrementality testing + MMM results. Pranav discusses how getting this "central brain" right is a critical foundation for AI-driven orchestration & execution of an end-to-end marketing roadmap. Topics covered: - Policies, not dashboards: how to decode decisions as machine-readable rules that turn insights into actions - Confidence-weighted budgets: how to use error bars in lift/MMM results to drive budget reallocation - Latency-aware orchestration: how to incorporate daily platform signals vs weekly incrementality results vs quarterly MMM output - Creative as a portfolio: how to weight hit rate & EV alongside typical ROAS metrics - Constraint-aware bidding: how to bake margin, inventory, compliance, and brand safety costs into the decision function

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