Founders Committee Ventures Updates, Assembly AI and Together AI

Dear Investors & Supporters,

It’s been a minute since our last update, so we’ll get right to it. We think the Venture Capital landscape is changing, and market conditions have changed right along with it. When funding was flourishing, anyone and everyone was investing while assuming that those conditions would last forever. But here we are. They have not lasted forever.

We knew this day was going to come which is why we’ve always been cautious about when and what we invested in. We are also very aware that early stage Venture Capital is one of the riskiest investments. So, with all this being said, let’s get into the good and bad news.

What is happening with the current portfolio?

All our portfolio companies are still active and have a healthy runway of more than 12+ months. Some of them have found validation in their products and are now growing at a rate of 50% MoM on average. They are all still very aware that they’re in early stages, and know this means they must be very cautious about the cash burn while simultaneously running as fast as they possibly can to find product-market fit. One thing we admire about our founders is their ability to pivot, and how they will always pivot to find product-market fit in other serviceable obtainable markets. A separate update with the entire portfolio metrics will be sent out next week.

Is Founders Committee Ventures still investing?

Yes we are and we continue to add more and more deal flows to our pipeline. However, our acceptance rate has been lower since there is less money being deployed into startups. Our strategy has evolved. We’re focusing on very early stage: meaning anything below $10 million valuation. We have also kept our check sizes within the range of $25k-$100k. Now our minimum requirement for investors to invest in a deal is $1k with a 2% management fee per year. This will allow you to diversify your portfolio even further, and ensure if market conditions deteriorate you have a more widespread exposure to different markets.

We have found that many companies are claiming to be AI or adding a layer in order to tap into the recent buzz. We’re noticing traditional businesses trying to adapt to this new AI world, when they would actually be performing better without it. Our focus has been on trying to skim through the noise and learn as much as we can as this industry grows. Luckily, some of our team members have years of experience in machine learning and AI. While the hype may be new, AI is nothing new to the computer science world. The foundations of AI were laid out in the 1940s and 1950s, and the birth of the academic discipline began in 1956 at the Dartmouth conference. Fun fact: the term ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined by John McCarthy in 1960s. Historically, we saw an early success in AI with programs like like ELIZA and SHRDLU. From 1990s until today, the increase in compute power paired with Internet trends has made AI more adaptable to businesses.

Going forward, we will adapt to machine learning / AI and focus more of our investments into it, because we believe it is the next big step in the Internet revolution. And while there’s always the possibility that it could be a bubble, we know that these are very normal market cycles. We are confident that this is not the time to panic, but to rely on our knowledge and logic when making decisions.

The future of Founders Committee Ventures

We’re building an AI system internally called Assembly AI. This will allow us to collaborate, assist, and make better decisions with the team. We believe this will give us the capacity to see and filter through more deals, and give everyone the chance (including the investors) to collaborate on the decision making process of each deal. But the most exciting part is that we’re training it to catch red flags! Some of the initial testing has shown that we can easily scan through company financials, compare transcripts of what the founders are pitching us against their deck, and even get an overall sentiment of the entire team with the click of a button. We saved as much data as we possibly could since the start of the fund in 2020 (we have 2000 documents roughly translating to 20 million tokens!). Saving this data has paid off and given us the upper hand as we implement this new AI technology. The video demo below will show you some of the capabilities of our system. We are excited that this is just in the initial testing phase— we have still a lot of work to do.

When can we see a dashboard?

We’ve had calls with everyone and we hear you! You would like to see the companies you have invested, the amount invested, their current valuations, and obviously some more KPIs as we move forward. We are prioritizing this and will tackle this request next. You’ll be able to see your investments, but we will not yet attach the AI system, as we want to make sure to prioritize privacy and security.

Who is building this system?

I cannot disclose who we are working with because they have an NDA with JP Morgan Chase. What I can say is they have become a good friend of mine and our interim CTO. This person has become an important part of our process and has helped us take Founders Committee to the next stage. I’m working with them on a way to get permission from their compliance office, so we can introduce this individual in the future— but for now we are very grateful to have this talented individual on board, and are looking forward to continuing with the great work.

One last thing!

When I started Founders Committee Ventures, I believed early stage investors in venture capital firms should help founders build their initial product and business. I still believe this to be true— now more than ever.

For my next magic trick, I would like to introduce a new product that can make this possible. Please welcome my new (in stealth) startup: Together AI. You can find a sneak peak of it with our Founder Flow & Expert Flow. This is separate from Founders Committee Ventures, but in the future, Founders Committee Ventures (and many other funds) will be able to live inside Together AI. Many companies implement a fund inside their startup (Coinbase, AngelList, OpenAI, Salesforce, etc). Together AI will allow founders and their startups to match with experts and investors to speed up their business and early product development. It will also give Angel Investors, Syndicate VCs, and Corporate VCs the functionalities of Assembly AI (hence the later merge). The merger will empower investors and venture capitalists by integrating the advanced functionality of Assembly AI. This strategic move not only enhances their toolkit but also for the first time opens up new avenues for experts to leverage their skills in exchange for venture capital assets, directly contributing to the growth of startups. At the heart of this integration is our AI technology, designed to streamline back-office automation and minimize collaboration friction. By harnessing precise data analytics, our AI ensures the optimization of project scope development for startups, facilitating smoother and more efficient project executions.

I'm the CEO, and Together AI is my startup. Our leadership team is bolstered by the expertise of a CTO and a CPO (Chief Product Officer), who are not only seasoned in Machine Learning and AI but also highly qualified: the CPO holds a PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science, and the CTO has a master's degree in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Additionally, we've appointed a Head of AI UI/UX, further enriching our team's skill set. We've taken a significant step to expedite our progress by hiring our first full-stack software engineer last week. I'll keep this update brief, but rest assured, I'll share more exciting news about Together AI in my next update this month. Stay tuned!

This is a lot to take in and I completely understand, so please, I would like to invite anyone of you to book a call with me so I can answer any questions you might have, or just to chat and hear your thoughts.

I’ve been working on this nonstop because I truly believe this is the future of the startup and VC ecosystem. It’s been almost 3 years since the last time I had a full-time job, and this is just one part of my conviction and dedication. I want to scale both Founders Committee Ventures and Together AI, and at some point merge them. We are lucky enough to have the human resources, but we will soon start raising more funding to help us achieve the next steps. We are in initial conversations with institutional investors to raise a $50M Fund II and have a few angel and VC investors for Together AI already. Thank you again from the bottom of my heart for your support and your patience. Without you, none of this would have been possible.

Book a call with me!