Operator Collective ??

No one does it alone, and Operator Collective is designed to bring people together who know how to succeed and want to help each other. Hear from a few of our founders to get a feel for what's it like to be a part of OpCo, and the magic that can happen when we put the Collective Venture Model to work ?? Caitlin Colgrove, Co-Founder & CTO, Hex Melanie Fellay ??, CEO & Co-Founder, Spekit ??? Deon Nicholas, CEO & Co-Founder, Forethought? Shannon Goggin, CEO & Co-Founder, Noyo? Pouyan Salehi, CEO & Co-Founder, Scratchpad ?? https://lnkd.in/gfjT4wtb #CollectiveVenture #VentureCapital

Co-chairing Fortune Most Powerful Women again was a true joy. So many elements align to Operator Collective ?? - from the people and what feels like a reunion (plus meeting new friends) to tackling the biggest issues of the future. Too many highlights this year to cover in one post - but founder/former CEO Rachel Romer speaking for the first time on stage about her stroke along with current CEO Bijal Shah, both Operator LPs from our portfolio company Guild, Joanna Strober from OpCo portco Midi Health’s session on thriving in midlife (and having a number of women come up to me to say how life-changing and lifesaving Midi has been for them) to interviewing Fei-Fei Li, the Godmother of AI and World Labs founder/CEO, and Campbell Brown, OpCo portco TollBit senior advisor, on the mainstage about the future of AI rank among my top. OK, getting a high five from Halle Berry after chatting about changing the world was fun too. It’s an honor to be part of this iconic institution alongside those who work tirelessly to make it such a great experience. Congratulations and thank you to Maryam Banikarim ???? ?? Emma Hinchliffe Ellie Austin Michal Lev-Ram Allie Garfinkle Lisa Clucas Michelle Berg Mona Nair Anastasia Nyrkovskaya and the rest of the awesome Fortune team. And of course Pattie Sellers for starting this all so many years ago. Erica Ruliffson Schultz Lara Caimi Astha Malik Christina Crawford Kosmowski Alice Steinglass Gina Boswell Elena Gomez Shannon Nash, Esq., CPA Reshma Saujani Victoria Treyger Alka Tandan Arrie Park Karen King

Congratulations to Vasek Mlejnsky, Tomas Valenta and team E2B! We're excited to see E2B out in the wild - it's the code-interpreting layer for AI apps and agents, providing companies with open-source sandboxes that allow them to run LLM-generated actions in a secure and isolated cloud environment. Equipping AI agents with code execution capabilities helps solve problems like hallucinations and unreliability, and E2B’s new Code Interpreter SDK allows developers to add code interpreting to any AI app. Want to see E2B in action? Here's how Perplexity implemented advanced data analysis for Pro users in one week: https://lnkd.in/gP7askVX Go team! ??

As you may have seen in nerd processor and in Fortune's Most Powerful Women update today, I started as Operator Collective ??'s first-ever Founder in Residence this month! ?? In 2024, I've spent time with more than 200 different startup founders. I've worked with them as?coaching clients?or helped them?tell data stories. I've gotten to know them in introductory conversations, at events, and in their search for customers and investors. These conversations have informed a lot of the writing I've done about startups this year, especially in AI. Founding is a difficult and lonely road, and much of what founders have shared resonates with me. When Mallun Yen?pitched me on joining?Operator Collective?as their first Founder in Residence, specifically to better support founders both in and outside the portfolio, I saw an opportunity to systematize and scale the work I've been doing with founders this year. Before I got started, I spent 6 weeks talking to 100 startup founders I hadn't worked with previously to find out what they wanted. I wrote about what they said in this week's nerd processor, and about the projects I'm focusing on based on their feedback. * Top of the list: Connections to legit customer opportunities * Bottom of the list: Drive-by product and marketing ideas Let's gooooooo! Link to full piece below. https://lnkd.in/gF_hZcAg

Excited to welcome three powerhouses to the OpCo team: Dana Marohn Spiliotis, Partner on the investments team; Kieran Snyder, Co-Founder, Chief Scientist Emeritus and former CEO of OpCo PortCo Textio as our first Founder in Residence; and Kate Mitchell to our Investments Advisory Committee! ?? These additions to our team help us double down across all key functions, allowing us to serve our founders, develop our community, and build a generational firm. By design, we're more than just a venture capital firm. We're a community of operators, founders, and investors working together to build something truly extraordinary. And, just like our portfolio companies, we’re building for the future by surrounding ourselves with the best people who have been there, done that and are eager to help the next generation. Read more from Mallun Yen ??

Excited to host this conversation in Seattle on 10/24 with two founders from OpCo’s portfolio, each at different stages of AI company-building so we’ll have LOTS of ground to cover. Kieran Snyder, Co-Founder and longtime CEO of Textio, has invaluable experience in building with AI from the ground up. Textio is used by customers like T-Mobile, Uber, Strava, Upwork, J&J, and McDonalds to help managers build and coach high-performing teams with AI-powered recruiting communications, interview feedback, performance reviews, and more. And Jerry Zhou, Co-Founder and CEO of Supio, which automates bulk data collection, extraction, and analysis from unstructured documents for legal teams, is fresh off their $25M Series A. We'll get into the weeds about what it takes to build an AI-native startup in an AI-native world. I'm excited to team up again with Brett Queener & Tyler Churchill at Bonfire Ventures ?? and Kirby Winfield & Jen Haller at Ascend. We only have a few spots left, DM me with your email address if you’re interested in joining us for an afternoon of networking, cocktails & light bites, and a fireside chat with these two remarkable founders. Hope to see you there!

Imagine deploying an AI chatbot that suddenly starts spewing nonsense, or an AI-powered financial model that inexplicably shifts its predictions overnight. In today's AI-driven world, these aren't just hypothetical scenarios – they're very real risks that keep tech leaders awake at night. Enter Distributional, the groundbreaking startup that's revolutionizing how enterprises test and trust their AI applications.?Read on for why we're invested in our latest OpCo PortCo Profile. Congratulations to Scott Clark, Nick Payton, Michael McCourt, Renaud Bourassa and the entire Distributional team on their $19M Series A announcement today! ??

If you follow me, you know that I love telling stories with data. I go viral several times a year with my data stories. I've turned these stories into a successful software company, fundraising success, a high-performing marketing engine, and millions of dollars of revenue, not to mention significant personal career acceleration. All for telling stories that I love. Telling great data stories and sending them viral isn’t magic, and I’ve built a playbook over the last several years. I spent all summer writing it down so other people can take advantage of it. I’m thrilled to announce Viral Data Stories 101 and Viral Data Stories 201! This is for: * Marketers who have ideas for data stories, but don't know how to put them together * Data scientists who want to improve their storytelling skills * Entrepreneurs who want to build a content advantage * Salespeople who want to engage prospects in creative ways * Anyone with a passion for storytelling with data VDS 101 is a self-serve email course with my entire playbook and exercises to practice your skills: how to think of a good story, how to build a data set, how to turn it into something sticky and drive audience. When you finish the course, you get a live 1-1 consult with me to help bring your story to life! ***I’m offering a launch week discount of 50% on VDS 101. Discount code in the comments!*** VDS 201 is a deeper, hands-on custom workshop for teams. We’ll tailor all the exercises specific to your organization, and you’ll leave with a great roadmap to build out your data story engine. It has been a labor of love to get this playbook organized and ready for others to use. Huge thanks to John Chalovich and Jessica Fahrenholtz for their feedback on my drafts! Let me know what you think! Here's to great storytelling! https://lnkd.in/gsTwUVB9

“Few corporate positions are as new—yet as key—as the Chief Customer Officer.” In this month's Operator Spotlight, Harini Gokul (She/Her) dives deep into how she’s tackling growing cybersecurity concerns, the evolution of customer success and the CCO role from putting out fires ?? to strategic growth driver ??, and how (as a "recovering engineer") she stays focused on building. Her remarkable career spans leading cloud transformation at Microsoft to developing an industry-defining customer success model at Amazon Web Services (AWS) to now driving a $300M+ P&L at leading cybersecurity firm Entrust. Read on for more! #ChiefCustomerOfficer #customersuccess #cybersecurity

Big things happen when passionate leaders come together with a common purpose. ?? And as Midi Co-Founder & CEO Joanna Strober describes it: "When women invest in solutions that impact us personally, we break down barriers, create change that resonates deeply and authentically, and address gaps in care that have been overlooked for too long." We are incredibly proud to announce the $5M Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) we organized and managed for OpCo PortCo Midi Health as part of the company's oversubscribed Series B. 80 investors joined in - a high-powered group of women leaders and icons spanning entertainment, professional sports, media, beauty and fashion, health and wellness, technology, and business. These Midi investors understand the massive unmet needs in the $600 billion women’s health market today and the power of strong women leaders coming together to invest in companies that need to exist. Among the new investors are actors/producers Amy Schumer and Connie Britton, Phenomenal Media’s Meena Harris, soccer star Brandi Chastain, fashion designer/entrepreneur Tory Burch, investor and Angel City FC co-founder Kara Nortman, former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, Waymo Co-CEO Tekedra N. Mawakana, PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada, Stripe executive Claire Hughes Johnson, and Toast CFO Elena Gomez. Top executives (and many other OpCo Operator LPs!) from OpenAI, Atlassian, Databricks, Cloudflare, Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Life360, Calm, Universal Music Group, and Warner Media also joined the round - see the full list here: https://lnkd.in/g2HDv93t Menopause is hot! ?? More from Mallun Yen below, and thank you to Fortune for breaking the news, link in comments! https://lnkd.in/gS7H7aC6