Andrea Funsten
1.5K posts
Andrea Funsten
@AndreaFunsten
I invest in early stage software companies and adore Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. It’s pronounced on-dray-uh.
SF & NYC Katılım Mart 2015
1.1K Takip Edilen8.6K Takipçiler
@JasonrShuman @mariadavidson @usekojo I met a group of 22-26 yr olds in Montana two summers ago who had left big city life / computer centric jobs to go to trade schools. They wanted to get off the professional treadmill, work with their hands, spend more time outdoors + were hyper aware of what AI was about to do
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The US needs 500,000 new electricians this decade.
Apprenticeships take 5 years.
Microsoft’s Brad Smith says it’s the #1 thing slowing data center expansion.
The AI bottleneck isn’t chips. It’s the trades.
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i made a 3-day Claude Cowork for Beginners course, and it's yours for free
by the end, you'll have a personalized AI teammate on your computer that:
• knows your style
• connects to your tools
• and produces finished work you can send immediately
here's what you get:
day 1: install cowork, set global instructions, and run your first real task (15 min)
day 2: workflows that replaced hours of my week, including building landing pages from a description and running full competitive analyses in one prompt
day 3: skills, plugins, and connectors so cowork actually knows how you work and can access your tools
+ copy-paste prompts so you can follow along as you read
like + comment "COWORK" and i'll DM it to you
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@pratyushbuddiga @patrick_oshag like no other and with a wicked back hand 🎾
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Best growth investor no one talks about: Deel @ 200m, Anthropic @ 5b, MatX at 2/300m?
Never met her, but as a craft respector, I have to give her some flowers. When Colossus piece @patrick_oshag ?
Yasmin Razavi@YasminRazavi
The @MatXComputing team is ambitiously building the compute infrastructure for our AGI future. It’s been a pleasure working with @reinerpope, @MikeGunter_ , and the team this past year. Incredible milestone and the best is still ahead.
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@bhalligan @GeorgeHuSF what's a example of the tyranny of or that you corrected?
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We used to do an annual field trip with the Hubspot management team to the west coast and meet with execs we respected, just learn.
On our first one, @GeorgeHuSF, then COO of Salesforce, gave us advice that stuck:
Fight the “tyranny of Or"
Great CEOs know it's a false choice, even as they scale.
In this episode, @vladtenev explains how he manages the speed or quality tension without compromising either at @RobinhoodApp
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Most people overpay their taxes
But did you know you can use AI as your free, personal tax advisor?
I wrote a free guide showing exactly how I set up an LLM to analyze my tax return & come up with strategies to pay less in taxes
Leave a comment & I'll DM it to you
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after 7 years since returning to Adobe (post the acquisition of @Behance), i’ll be shifting gears over the coming months + jumping into the fast-evolving world of filmmaking and storytelling (a longtime passion). excited to join @A24 - an independent studio i have long admired - as a partner and will be kicking off a few special projects within. fortunately, i’ll remain extended family of Adobe and look forward to working with them as a future tech partner.
it’s hard to leave a team, mission, and customer base I care for deeply, but the Adobe team, strategy and pipeline has never been stronger. our upcoming releases of new products and transformational workflows across creativity and marketing are years in the making. i leave w/ a ton of gratitude - for shantanu and our leadership team, the incredible team we’ve built, and the countless learning opportunities Adobe has provided.
i am especially grateful for the era of Adobe’s rich history that I’ve participated in - bringing products to the cloud/mobile/web, building foundational models and new products in the age of AI, growing Behance to > 50M members, innovating in areas like content credentials that foster attribution for creators, and helping advance our mission of creativity for all.
as i jump into my next chapter at A24, I'm excited to finally be NYC-based (and will continue supporting founders as an investor/product advisor, writing "Implications," and serving on the Atlassian board). but right now i'm just very grateful to my colleagues at @Adobe, excited about the company’s path ahead (and our collaborations to come!), and eager to get to work w/ my new partners supporting the world’s best storytellers at A24.
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I'm hosting a free masterclass for AI coding beginners tomorrow!
We'll cover:
- Which AI builder tools to use
- How to build a custom chrome extension entirely with AI
- How to build a simple SaaS web application
- Q&A
Comment "builder" and I'll DM you the access link
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@henrythe9ths This is such a valuable AI guide for everyone. Thank you for putting it together
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There's a shocking fact about AI that nobody tells you: You can catch up to the public AI research frontier in just 2 weeks. Yes, really.
I've built a $150M annual revenue startup over the last 8 years and If I were to start a company today, I’d drop everything and go all-in on AI.
But like many busy software builders, I felt lost—overwhelmed by the noisy, crowded and fast-moving modern AI landscape. And I wasn’t alone.
So I spent my entire holiday diving deep into AI research—reading 30+ papers, watching hours of lectures, analyzing trends, and catching up to the research frontier.
✨ Here’s what I learned:
- You don’t need months (or years) to catch up.
- You don’t need a PhD or decades of ML experience.
- You need fewer than 20 papers and 2 weeks to understand the major breakthroughs shaping AI today.
It's because the technology is extremely nascent and most techniques that came before are no longer relevant:
- ChatGPT is barely 2 years old and Transformers are only 7 years old.
- Most game-changing discoveries happened within the last 4 years, driven by a few breakthrough ideas, scaling laws, and efficient matrix multiplication.
The biggest secret?
Many groundbreaking AI papers with thousands of citations are surprisingly simple and applied, like adding "let's think step by step" to the prompt, or simply asking the LLM over and over again to improve its answer (Self-Refine).
I realized there are tons of founders and builders in the same boat—wanting to dive deeper into AI but unsure where to start.
I've created an essential AI Guide that helped me catch up, in just 2 weeks, to the frontier of public AI research to figure out where the next opportunities and gaps were:
- Curated list of only the most important papers
- Simple explanations of key concepts
- Clear pathway to understanding the frontier of modern AI
It’s perfect for:
- Founders expanding into AI
- Builders wanting to innovate at the frontier of AI
- Investors looking to separate the signal from the noise
👇 Want the full guide?
- Like and Share this post
- Comment "AI Guide"
- I'll send you the complete guide
(ps, I’m also teaming up with @VishalVasishth, co-founder of @obviousvc with @ev (focused on large-scale societal impact companies like Twitter, Medium, Beyond Meat), to host a small meetup to discuss what's working and needs to be solved in the AI stack in SF. Message me if you're interested)
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@stephxsher What non well-known firms did you raise from that took the leap of faith pre "good enough metrics" 😉
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Sorry, Datadog lore, I love our story and can’t resist going down memory lane:
We also couldn’t raise anything from well-known investors until series B - when we actually had good-enough metrics to back our valuation + a pair of nerds singularly focused on product marketing / communicating the value to customers in a new, rapidly evolving space (cloud).
By the time we were going into the C we had developed a culture of monitoring internal GTM metrics on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis - forced to be thrifty and disciplined to the point where we knew where every dollar was going and what ROI could be expected from it.
1. Communication around newtech is important, especially for fundraising and landing design partners in early days. Lots of amazing companies with loads of potential flying under the radar right now because of this
2. I am the poor girl who first managed that gigantic spreadsheet 🥲 RIP to my early twenties
Matt Turck@mattturck
TIL Datadog was rejected by YC back in the day
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@rrhoover disagree here. On the rare occasions that it has shown up in presentations it shows how self aware the team is and, more importantly, steers the convo to how they are planning to mitigate those risks proactively or how a perceived risk (to the inch deep VC) is not really one
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Founders, when fundraising don't include a slide highlighting risks in your business.
Let investors ask about these and be prepared to respond.
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@inazarova I mean like walking around the streets. There are no people.
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I think I’ve been in NYC too long because even SF feels too quiet and calm for me.
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I'm seeing more new systems that combine batch & streaming from the start. It’s becoming clear to me that batch and streaming systems will not stay separate. Curious to discuss this.
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@jrichlive What about learning about how to build strategies and follow along others on @ComposerTrade
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A friend’s son (early 20’s) asked for investing advice. Here’s what I said:
1) Set up Wealthfront account. Cash acct pays ~5%. Set up auto invest in Investment acct every 2 weeks.
2) If you want to own specific ETFs, rec QQQM, SPY + VIG. Ideally DCA here as well.
Set it up, stick with it + increase the $ invested as you earn more.
🤞
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@HarryStebbings You need @zygo, the founder is based in London and happy to connect
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After running 100 miles a week for many months, my knees are wrecked and so I must now take up swimming.
I need the best headphones for swimming! What do we recommend? Need to listen to 20VC in the pool! 😉
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