RigorVC

Today we're releasing the AWARE framework—a guide for governing AI agents in the enterprise, developed by our Work AI Institute with security leaders at @Glean, @PaloAltoNtwks, and @databricks. Why now? We noticed something in hundreds of conversations with CIOs and CISOs: everyone is trying to secure AI agents using tools and frameworks that were never designed for autonomous systems. Enterprise security was built for human users, structured systems, and predictable data flows. Agents break all three assumptions. They retrieve, decide, and act across tools—often without a human in the loop. And the current playbook doesn't account for that. Most companies are governing agents the same way they govern SaaS apps, and it's not working. The numbers bear this out. Only 17% of organizations have automated controls for AI data flows. AI-specific breaches take 290 days to contain—40% longer than traditional breaches. The fundamental question has changed. It's no longer "does this person have permission?" It's "is this behavior appropriate, right now, in this context?" We developed the AWARE framework to start codifying how enterprises should think about this: 𝗔ctor Intent: Who or what is acting, and why? 𝗪ork Context: Is this data sensitive right now, in this context?  𝗔utonomous Guardrails: Is the agent staying within its declared scope?  𝗥eal-Time Risk Scoring: How risky is this behavior at this moment? 𝗘cosystem Observability: Can we trace what it did across every system it touched? Nobody has this entirely figured out, but we need a framework for moving forward. The organizations that treat agent governance as a design principle (not a bolt-on) will be the ones that scale AI with confidence. See everything we announced at Glean's Security Showcase today at 10am PT: glean-it.com/4s4Xidf Read the full framework here: glean-it.com/3Nawklv

Most investors know within the first few minutes whether a founder is worth a second meeting. Not from a pitch deck. From a conversation. They’re listening for three things: 1. Do you truly understand the problem and the customer? 2. Are you honest about what isn’t working yet? 3. Can you think clearly when questions get unscripted? Investors aren’t just evaluating the idea. They’re evaluating how you think. Nail that first conversation, and the door to funding opens. #startups #venturecapital #founders

When @travisk was fundraising Uber's round that valued it at $70B, he ran four rooms simultaneously out of their New York office for an entire week, each booked in 90-minute slots across 12-hour days: "This is how we'd fundraise: we had four rooms in our New York office booked for a week with an hour-and-a-half slot on each. So for 12 hours in a day, four rooms going in parallel." "I'm in the $250M-and-over club, that's one room. Then there are these other rooms, down to the fourth room, which is like $25M checks. There's a guy who works for a guy, who works for a guy, who works for me who's doing that room." "But we're oversubscribed. So we started putting multiple investors in the same room. We were like, 'We're just out of slots dude. Let's go.'" "The storytelling we did, anybody on my team could tell that story and make it happen. And that was a big part. It was the story... then there is making it scalable so that there are 10 different people in a company that can pitch it at any given time. And that’s when you take it all the way."