Ted Chai
70 posts
Ted Chai
@tedzchai
investing @ scale venture partners
San Francisco, CA Katılım Ağustos 2021
302 Takip Edilen294 Takipçiler
Personal update: I’ve joined @SpaceX and @xAI.
After investing in the future of work and AI at Bloomberg Beta, it became clear: AI capabilities are advancing and compounding at an unprecedented rate.
It only made sense to join the team accelerating the fastest and to build the future directly.
Excited to be working on making life multi-planetary and building AI to understand the universe.
If you’re a high-agency builder and want to join the mission, DM me.
Ad Astra! 🚀
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Ted Chai retweetledi
@charliewu Being able to say "i never said that" about something an intermediary proposes is a big part of what makes them useful. I wonder how plausible deniability survives once agents have near perfect comprehension & authority.
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Delve halts demos, Insight Partners scrubs investment post amid ‘fake compliance’ allegations techcrunch.com/2026/03/23/del…
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Ted Chai retweetledi
new @OpenAI — in collaboration with @paradigm, we developed an evaluation to measure AI on critical smart contract security capabilities
OpenAI@OpenAI
Introducing EVMbench—a new benchmark that measures how well AI agents can detect, exploit, and patch high-severity smart contract vulnerabilities. openai.com/index/introduc…
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Ted Chai retweetledi
🚨How does an AI-native startup unseat an incumbent?🚨
👇Enter the Greenfield Strategy: AI-native startup bingo.
The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation. One of the most powerful, and underrated, ways for startups to win distribution is to serve companies at their formation: greenfield companies.
@stripe @deel @mercury @cartainc @brexHQ @tryramp have all done this at scale.
Why does this work?
Simply put, acquiring customers de novo is easier than getting customers to switch:
- Many of the large software incumbents have hostages, not customers. Their customers would love to switch, but ripping and replacing existing software is risky and expensive. New companies don’t face those switching costs; they simply look for the best solution and evaluate based on merit.
- New companies don’t need as many features to have a complete solution.
- New companies have fewer stakeholders. You only have to convince the founders.
Grow with your customers:
If you attract all of the new companies at formation and grow with them, you will become a big company as your customers become big companies. Consider @stripe: many of Stripe’s customers did not yet exist when Stripe was founded. Some of those early customers later became large businesses in their own right. So when enterprises outside of Silicon Valley also needed to prepare themselves for a shift to ecommerce models, Stripe was an obvious choice, with plenty of relevant reference customers already in place.
Incumbents, on the other hand, would much rather sell to existing businesses vs. companies that don’t exist now but might exist in huge numbers in a few years. They are bound by the rules of P&L (Profit & Loss) – and there’s no “P” for greenfield companies that don’t exist yet, just “L” (in sales, marketing, and product development costs). The startup, however, isn’t bound to a financial model – the startup doesn’t need one; it's still figuring stuff out! That leaves ample room for the startup to define the category.
Graduation moments:
In a similar way, software “graduation moments” (the moments when a startup begins to develop enterprise needs) also create opportunities to execute this greenfield strategy. QuickBooks may be great for single-product, single-entity companies, but once businesses add multiple subsidiaries, currencies, or more complex reporting needs, they outgrow it and require the controls, integrations, and scalability of an ERP like NetSuite. And you can now build a far better ERP with AI - just look at @RilletHQ.
AI-native startup Bingo:
There are many different categories of enterprise software. Enough to fill a 5x5 Bingo board and more!
In each category of the Bingo board, there sits an incumbent that could be dethroned by an AI-native alternative.
So, how does a new company win the game of Bingo?
- Pick a square
- Make a narrow wedge much better
- Find a constant source of new customers
- Rapidly iterate and add features to grow with your customers
- Don’t be constrained by the division of existing categories
If you’re building a category-defining company on the Bingo board - come and talk to us.
cc: @arampell @astrange @a16z
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Excited to share @recallai has raised a $38M Series B led by Bessemer!
We’re building the infrastructure that gives AI access to the world’s largest dataset: conversations.
If you’re building with conversation data, we’d love to hear from you.
David Gu@davidgu
We've raised our $38M Series B, led by @BessemerVP, with HubSpot Ventures and @SalesforceVC joining. Over 2,000 companies (including @HubSpot, @clickup, @useapolloio) build on @recallai, the API for meeting recording.
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Ted Chai retweetledi
I'm excited to announce our $22M Series A here at Orchard!🍎
Here @Orchard_Robots, we’re securing America’s food supply by building the AI farmer that automates our nation’s farms.
Our mission is to make farming profitable, efficient, and sustainable again.
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I’m excited to share that @conversionai has raised a $28M Series A led by @AbstractVC to build the modern marketing automation platform.
Four years ago, @james__jiao and I started Conversion out of our UC Berkeley dorm room. Since then, we’ve launched, pivoted, and rebuilt the product more times than we can count.
Every pivot was a lesson. We changed the product, changed the audience, changed the pitch. But every time we tried to grow, we got stuck fighting the same outdated software.
For two decades, marketers have been stuck using software invented in 2006: Oracle Eloqua, Salesforce Pardot, Adobe Marketo, and HubSpot Marketing Hub. These tools were built before LinkedIn ads existed, let alone AI-driven campaigns.
In an era obsessed with “move fast and break things,” we chose a different path. We spent years working with top design partners to build a MAP that feels like Figma, enriches like Clay, and scales like HubSpot — but built from the ground up for modern marketing teams.
Today, Conversion is trusted by over 4,000 growing companies, including OpenAI, Abacum, Paraform, Warmly, Motion, and HockeyStack. In under two years, we’ve grown to nearly 8-figures in revenue, making us one of the fastest-growing marketing startups in the world.
Our gratitude to our investors, customers, founding team members, friends, and family cannot be overstated. This is a special team on a bold mission to displace massive, legacy incumbents. A mission to make marketing software feel like magic.
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This $28M round was led by Abstract Ventures, with participation from @HOFCapital, @trueventures, @AntlerGlobal, and top angels from @OpenAI.
A few special thank-yous:
1/ Our incredible investor group led by @dkwon98, Puneet Agarwal, @VictorWangJC , and Chris Millisits, for believing in our vision.
2/ Our amazing design partners: @BeauroyreMax , Stephanie Bian, Joseph Wang, @pranavmitl, Ethan Yu, Veronica Dominicis, and @fin465 for helping us build something complex, elegant, and powerful.
3/ And most importantly, our team: @charlie_he_ , @KyleWonzen, @levibkline , @matt_rowl_dev , Tayler Dunn, @SammyBoch, Naasir Farooqi, Swamik Lamichhane, @_varunnair, and @jimfutsu . Founders are only as strong as their team, and James and I feel incredibly lucky to work with such an amazing team everyday.
We’re hiring across GTM, marketing, engineering, and design. If this mission speaks to you, our careers page is in the comments.
If you’re tired of broken workflows and generic emails, comment “Conversion” and we’ll send you 100 high-performing templates from the best companies in the world.
PS: two years ago, we were nearly out of cash, surviving on Chipotle rewards points in Berkeley and deep into our second pivot. To every builder out there: stay scrappy, inquisitive, and grateful. Building a startup is a privilege. Keep going.
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