Jon

As an early stage founder, at every point during the recruiting process, you have to be selling candidates on why your startup is going to be the next great opportunity in their career. bit.ly/30YIvDK

Big News: We've acquired Turingon and welcomed its founding team to GovSignals. Most GovCon tools automate one slice of the work. We run the whole thing, intelligence, capture, proposals, post-award, as one compounding system. Cleared at FedRAMP High and DoW IL5. Welcome, Arthur, Ellen & the Turingon crew. govsignals.ai/blog/govsignal…

Exciting to see this for the @DatabentoHQ team!

Buy and manage domains without leaving Railway railway.com/domains

@christinaqi Congratulations!

Storytime: When we launched 3 years ago, people warned us that data is a saturated market - that there isn't much room to innovate. But if you've touched any dataset in our industry, you'll likely disagree. The industry is broken. It's just that someone with a *very specific background* needs to fix it. Before Databento, I started a hedge fund, but it wasn't just any hedge fund: It was one of the few HFT firms built from scratch: colocation, bare-metal networking, nanosecond timestamping, custom feed handlers, low-latency systems - all of it. We built every part of the stack and saw the difference that high-quality data made in our PnL. When you built the plumbing yourself, AND you relied on it in production, AND you know how to start a business, you have the chance to build a game-changing company. Today, Databento is the fastest-growing company in our industry, precisely because we have more than just a surface-level understanding of data. This is why we decided not to sell Databento at this stage, but instead, keep innovating along our own unique path. Because we haven't peaked yet. Because we're still cooking. Because our team wants to stay. We saw the pain firsthand for nearly a decade, and we kept asking ourselves why nobody had fixed it. Eventually we realized - we should probably be the ones to do it. This milestone belongs to our customers too. You trusted us along the way, gave us candid feedback, and helped shape Databento into the platform it is today. Your support has helped prove that the industry is ready for a new standard. Thank you for giving us the chance to raise the bar in our industry.

Congrats to the entire @DatabentoHQ team!

I'm excited to announce Databento's $97M Series B led by @NEA, with participation from @DRWTrading, @Redpoint, @tribecap & more.

Worth the full listen to this podcast: @guyoseary and @tferriss. Guy has a unique ability to spot and work with the best talent - whether in music or investing - from @Alanis to @Madonna to @DarioAmodei and beyond. He rarely talks about himself so this interview is a treat!

Has a developer you know lost their peace? Is that developer you?

As a founder, building a company is one of the hardest professional hills to climb. Choosing the right partner is one of the most important decisions you'll make along the way. Hear why @alexhalliday, CEO and Co-Founder @AirOpsHQ, and @abhisharma_b, CEO and Co-Founder of @relyanceai, chose Unusual.

Earlier this month Unusual portfolio company @LassieAI raised $35M led by @a16z to build AI for small businesses to run themselves. Lassie is already trusted by 700+ practices across the country, working autonomously to provide them with 30 hours of labor per month. Big congrats to @steijnpelle, @fredericrenken and more on this milestone!

For early-stage companies, nothing matters more than product-market fit. While many VCs focus on revenue growth, we help founders build something customers truly need. Hear from @tanguychau, CEO & Co-Founder @paxtonai, and Ethan Aldrich, Co-Founder of @GovSignals, on how we partner with founders to find PMF and build enduring companies.

In the early stages of building a company, hiring is one of the biggest challenges founders face. Our Talent Partner, Jon Volk, advises founders that attracting great talent requires more than just a compelling role. Founders need to inspire candidates to believe in their vision, trust their leadership, and see the start-up's long-term potential. Learn more about Unusual Ventures' Founder Services: lnkd.in/gapRiquy

Huge congratulations to Unusual Ventures portfolio founder @steijnpelle and the Lassie team on their Series A led by @a16z. We're proud to be part of the journey and excited for what's next!

Only desperate people buy from startups. Robbie Th'ng from our Founder Services team highlights a key startup truth: your earliest customers are often those with an urgent, painful problem that existing solutions aren't solving. Learn more about Unusual Ventures' Founder Services: lnkd.in/gapRiquy

@JimmySpencer Time my friend, time

This stuff is nothing. Twitter would have melted during the 2002 WCF.

Big move from @cartainc. The launch of Carta Law through the acquisition of Avantia marks another step toward building a more integrated operating system for founders and startups. Read more: businesswire.com/news/home/2026…

Last night, Unusual Ventures and @lithos_ai hosted an Engineering Leaders Happy Hour at MLSys focused on “Beyond the Hype: AI Agents from Demo to Production.” Great conversations with leaders from @GoogleDeepMind, @Meta, Together AI, @perplexity_ai, @SpaceX, and more on what it takes to bring agentic systems into production.

we're hiring across the board at rime - revenue, marketing, engineering, modeling, data operations. join us - my dm's are open!

Btw @feross and team are absolute animals, and Socket is quickly growing into a generational business. If you’re interested in joining, please let us know!