David @ NextView

NextView portfolio company @usehatchapp just was acquired by Yelp for $270M. Grateful to have led the seed round and served on the board—huge congrats to founders Chris Bache & Bill Violante and the entire Hatch team.

@AnthropicAI made Claude 2.5x faster this weekend. Six million people saw the announcement. But speed was never the real bottleneck. The thing limiting what most people get from AI agents is not capability — it is how much access they have actually granted.

5/ More reflections and details here: nextview.vc/blog/what-i-le…

4/ Lesson #2: Don’t just listen to customers. Rather, deeply understand their businesses. That’s how Hatch moved quickly (especially post-ChatGPT) and built what customers truly needed.

NextView portfolio company @usehatchapp just was acquired by Yelp for $270M. Grateful to have led the seed round and served on the board—huge congrats to founders Chris Bache & Bill Violante and the entire Hatch team.

5/ The takeaway: MBA programs excel at creating entrepreneurial intent. Without clearer paths to building, technical talent, incentives, or new models, many student MBA founders hit friction fast. nextview.vc/blog/into-the-…

4/ Even when technical students exist, incentives misalign. Many are pivoting out of engineering or focused on their own startups. Founders who succeed treat the company as a real post-MBA job—and some now question whether a technical cofounder is always necessary early on.

1/ 85% of MBA students start school wanting to be entrepreneurs. Business schools have leaned all the way in—labs, pitch comps, EIRs, incubators. But there’s a quieter question underneath it all: who actually builds the companies' products?

For 40 years the file browser hasn’t changed. Today, we’re launching with $8 million in seed funding to rebuild the file browser into something more intelligent, searchable, and delightful. The world is in the middle of a data explosion. We’re generating and using more files than ever, but the apps we’re using to manage our files don’t even understand them. It’s time for file browsers to become useful. When you search for “dog”, it should show you content with dogs in it, not just files with “dog” in the name! When you want to edit, convert, summarize, or organize a file, your browser should do that, too. Your files tell the story of your life, but when you need a specific one, you usually can’t even find it anymore. Why can’t your file browser find it for you, or cross-reference it when you have a question? Prompting can give an LLM a million tokens of context. With Poly, you can give it the next trillion. As long as we can afford it, all new users receive 100GB of free cloud storage. We can’t wait for you to try it out!

I wrote more about why we’re so excited at @NextViewVC: nextview.vc/blog/announcin…

For Gen AI–native creators and knowledge workers, Poly feels like the future of interacting with your own content... faster, more intuitive, and actually delightful.

At @NextViewVC , we invest in truly product-centric companies transforming the Everyday Economy, like @browsercompany and @withbeside. Poly fits squarely in that lineage.

We all use a file browser every day… and yet almost no one likes it. Poly is changing that by rebuilding the experience from the ground up.

Excited to finally share more about one of our portfolio companies: @polydotapp (withpoly.com) — an intelligent cloud file browser redefining how we navigate computing in the generative age.

After two years in stealth, Poly, founded by @Denizen_Kane, is emerging publicly with a beautifully reimagined take on one of computing’s most overlooked but pervasive tools: the file browser.

Every great story has an Arc. Thrilled to see @NextViewVC's portfolio company @browsercompany's next chapter is with @Atlassian. theverge.com/web/770947/bro…