Jim Stoneham

After prior experience serving SMBs in eCommerce, I'm so excited to be working with @GOMEGAAI as they change the game for aspiring entrepreneurs

psst… we’re throwing another epic after-party for TechCrunch Disrupt, taking over a whole vintage hotel. Reply for early RSVP access. See you poolside.

So this will be epic. I'm hosting SignalFire's penthouse after-party for TechCrunch Disrupt. 5 DJs, fire dancers, and laser art in a $10M SF penthouse mansion. Retweet this to be entered to win a Disrupt conference ticket lu.ma/signalfireafte…

Unveiling the playbook for a business-in-a-box startup that’s raised $178 million from @SignalFire, @sequoia, @transformcptl, and others. We talked with Jake Cooper, the CEO of @GrowTherapy_, which provides turnkey solutions to more than 12,000 therapists. Independent therapists who want to focus on helping patients use Grow Therapy to set up just about everything else to run their business, including marketing, billing, in-network payer relationships, and more. 💡 The idea During the pandemic, Jake couldn’t find an in-network therapist, and his co-founder wanted to run an independent practice, but faced endless logistical hurdles. There had to be a better way. ❓ Is this a business? The number of Americans experiencing depression and anxiety tripled during the pandemic, but only 10% could afford out-of-network therapists, and finding a covered practitioner was a challenge. To test whether therapists wanted Grow’s services, they posted job ads and got 50 replies in the first day. They’d struck a nerve and quit their full-time jobs to start Grow. 💨 Execution After the successful ad, the founders quit their jobs and focused first on therapists—not patients or insurance companies—keeping their scope narrow. They included only behavioral health therapists, not specialists. They serviced only independent therapists, not group practices. They only operated in Florida at launch. Focused execution taking one step at a time. 🙌 Setting the foundation Jake said one of the best decisions they made was investing in technology to create their own electronic health record system, which made their services stand out and grow more easily. They created an AI-powered matching system to connect patients and therapists to solve the problem of how hard it can be to find a therapist in-network. 🚀 Want to build your own business-in-a-box startup? There’s an incredible opportunity to build and scale business-in-a-box platforms across other specialties! If you’re interested in learning more, check out this recording of the founder event I hosted with @waynejwhu and join our next Moxie event to hear more about Dan Friedman’s approach for powering medspas. Links in comments below 👇

@HomeDepot if you’re going to lock up literally half your items in your stores, how about staffing an employee per aisle so we can actually buy what we need without having to chase people down and/or wait for someone to show up? I imagine your average cart size is dropping…

Can't believe we're already halfway through 2024! It's been an exciting H1 for @SignalFire's #HealthTech portfolio as we announced our investments in @GrowTherapy_ & Praia Health alongside some of our favorite co-investors at @sequoia, @transformcptl, @TCVTech, Frist Cressey Ventures, and @providence with many more in stealth😉 In response to the overwhelming interest, @waynejwhu and I are excited to host Jake Cooper to unpack @GrowTherapy_'s MSO playbook on May 29 (Wed), 1pm PT 🚀 We'll unpack the following topics and many other questions submitted by aspiring #MSO founders: ​❓What are best practices for building business-in-a-box infrastructure in the healthcare industry? ❓Why is it an exciting time to be building MSO models? ​❓What are lessons learned from Grow Therapy's hyper scaling journey? Last call to register to join us virtually in the link below👇

Joining @SignalFire was the clear choice as I transitioned into venture. A key reason is our Beacon AI data platform. We use it to fuel our portfolio's success, and it's foundational to our GTM approach signalfire.com/blog/modernizi…

My colleague @JoshConstine digging deep into AI - a must-watch!

Looks to be an epic gathering! Come join us.

Founders and builders deserve an inspiring place to meet, so we're hosting a party at an AI art gallery in SF on March 13th. Featuring 44 robotic gongs playing AI-generated music, live opera singing and DJ sets, giveaways, and more. Register here! lu.ma/aiart

The best AI talent is no longer at Ivy League schools or tech giants, but at 9 top startups we call the "AI-vy League". @TechCrunch interviewed our CTO @IlyaKirnos about our research. Here's an excerpt A new report from VC firm SignalFire suggests that the percentage of AI hires coming from top schools such as Caltech , Harvard , Princeton, Yale and Stanford — or those with doctorates — has dropped significantly from a peak of around 35% in 2015. The 9 "AI-vy League" startups SignalFire found have the best AI talent are @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI, @MosaicML (now at @databricks), @cohere, @AI21Labs, @huggingface, @StabilityAI, @midjourney, and @inflectionAI. “We discovered a high concentration of top AI talent amongst a few startups when historically we saw this clustering at public giants like Google,” Ilya Kirnos, SignalFire’s co-founder and CTO, told TechCrunch+. And this, Kirnos claims, is a good thing for its potential to lower the industry barrier to entry for non-PhDs. “This will create demand for new ways to assess recruiting candidates for real-world software engineering experience,” Kirnos said. “Engineering is increasingly moving away from building whole products from scratch in a vacuum,” he added, “and toward cobbling together stacks of AI models, APIs, enterprise tools and open source software. Instead of filtering by university brand names, we may see employers seek out new ways to screen applicants for expertise in building functional products out of the stack the company actually uses.” More on how AI is uprooting the Silicon Valley power structure in our full report lnkd.in/gqMcdgZE and TechCrunch lnkd.in/gUt56ywc

@JoshConstine Sharing good insights as always Josh!

"Quiet Layoffs" are the new "Quiet Quitting", I told CNN. Tech giants are demanding employees return to office or resign... in hopes many will voluntarily quit to reduce severance payoffs and bad PR. AI is another big driver of mass layoffs Tech giants are retooling to bring in experts on new ChatGPT-style LLM technology, and are cutting teams building with old techniques. AI automation is starting to cause layoffs too by letting fewer people get more done, even if employers don't realize it. 70% of surveyed professionals said they were using AI tools but not telling their bosses. But at least access to AI jobs is democratizing. Our firm SignalFire's research found a 50% drop in the percentage of AI hires with PhDs or Ivy League schooling, with hirers preferring applied work experience. I bet we'll see more job interviews include homework projects using the hirer's actual software stack instead of resumé screens and theoretical questions. Our full AI-vy League report here signalfire.com/blog/ai-vy-lea…

With every new innovation, there's a new attack vector - great post about the issues and what to do about it by @TonyPezzz

@JoshConstine @OpenAI @AnthropicAI @MosaicML @cohere @AI21Labs @huggingface @StabilityAI @midjourney Love the insights our Research team delivers like this using @SignalFire’s Beacon data platform - confirms what I’ve seen anecdotally

A new class of "AI-vy League" startups have usurped the Ivy League schools and tech giants as the best place to hire tech talent. According to our data, these 9 companies are: @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI, @MosaicML, @Cohere, @AI21Labs, @HuggingFace, @StabilityAI, @Midjourney, & @inflectionAI. De-credentialization is driving this massive trend. The % of AI startup hires that have a PhD or went to a prestigious school was cut in half since 2015. Smart hirers are realizing that applied AI experience matters more than a fancy brand name or stint at Google The rise of the AI-vy League is exciting because it means the future belongs to those who can build, not just those with privileged backgrounds. More on this power shift here signalfire.com/blog/ai-vy-lea…

@pranay01 Chief Everything Officer!

Things you have to do as an early stage founder who doesn’t code - customer calls and sales - product - design - support - admin and HR - finance - fundraise - legal - compliance reporting

Data quality has been the achilles heel for every growth and product team I've been part of - I wish we had Anomalo then, but psyched to be supporting them now!

We've got an amazing team building a unique highly scalable early-stage model - and we're still hiring a few key roles: jobs.signalfire.com/jobs?filter=ey…

Training LLMs is surprisingly a lot like teaching humans. Describe the problem, show them what success looks like, and let them practice. I wrote this overview of LLM fine-tuning methods to give more people a basic understanding of how modern AI works, while helping experienced builders pick the most efficient training strategy. I walk through: Why big models benefit a lot from prompt engineering Why small models have to use fine-tuning instead Why new methods like LoRA are so exciting The big takeaway rings true for many parts of tech beyond engineering, including product, design, and marketing: Experiment, iterate on historic techniques, and keep learning the newest strategies — You never know where your next big breakthrough will come from. Thanks to @Tesla 's fmr @karpathy, @ContextualAI’s @yaroslavvb and stealth startup founder @cosminnegruseri for inspiring this post! signalfire.com/blog/comparing…

In Enterprise sales, free trials can be very effective - or a huge waste of time. Close more deals with these tips signalfire.com/blog/designing…

@jkosoy @NotionHQ @narrowd Software engineers and hardware - always a tricky combination! 😂

Day 54 @NotionHQ. Learned how to use the espresso machine. Still lousy at foaming. (Any tips @narrowd?)