Portola Valley Partners

?? This is what innovation looks like. ?? Innovation in the built environment happens, at least for me, in the electrical closets and refrigeration mechanical equipment rooms of real customers. ?? I built my first gateway in 1989. Connected a Honeywell Industrial Automation SCADA system with PLCs called the SCAN3000 to a 1975 Honeywell Delta 2000/1000 BAS. ?? And the Honeywell Enterprise Buildings integrated (EBi) was born! ?? ?? In the mid-90’s at Johnson Controls I worked for JCI Special Systems writing Metasys Integrator (MIG) drivers. ?? In 1996 at Pacific Gas and Electric Company I helped develop the CA Metering Exchange Protocol (CMEP). ??In 1997 at my first startup Silicon Energy, sold to Itron, Inc. for $71M, we built the worlds first integrated web-based Enterprise Energy Management (EEM) platform. (US Patent 6,178,362). ??????We were building XML and Web Services years ago! (It was called Asynchronous JavaScript and XML or “AJAX”). In 1997. ?? In the summer of 2000 I wrote the JCI embedded gateway for the Cisco Mediator. ????????In 2002, at my 4th startup company IFS, we built the XML-based EEM platform called “Enterprise Data eXchange (EDX). ??In 2003 IFS hosted, sponsored and showcased the very first vendor interoperability “XML Symposium”. That’s where I first met my friends and current partner TCS | Building Automation Systems ?? Out of that, a group of industry professionals got together in a conference room and the Open Building Information eXchange (OBIX) was born! I was right there in the middle of it. ?? In 2010 IFS was acquired by my last company Phoenix Energy Technologies and there I connected 16K retail and grocery customer buildings together across a dozen different BMS systems. One of the largest integrated real-time building portfolios ever built. ?? And last week, in the Refrigeration Equipment Mechanical Room at our newest grocery store customer Northgate Market, I wrote a Danfoss AK255/800 software gateway! For the 3rd time in as many decades. ?? ?? Today facil.ai boasts seamless plug and play connectivity with dozens of legacy, proprietary and, of course, open BMS systems including: Danfoss, Emerson, Johnson Controls, Schneider Electric, Honeywell, Tridium, Siemens, Trane Technologies, ABB and many others. ? facil.ai is the easiest, most advanced AI Supervisory Control Optimization solution in the industry, saving customers up to 50% energy on their Central Plants/Chillers, HVAC equipment and large portfolio (retail) RTU assets! The data (five years worth) is here: ?? https://lnkd.in/gxiFU_G8 ?? Our customers love us! ?? facil.ai is proud to be a Portola Valley Partners portfolio company. ?? We are thrilled to be in conversations with several large infrastructure companies as partners or acquirers. BUILD???GROW??FUND??EXIT?? Inquiries to our interim-CTO John Majeski Portola Valley Partners [email protected] #innovation #future #venturecapital #technology #leadership

Founders - use our current benchmark data to help raise your next VC round. Broken out into 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles so you can place your fundraise within the broad current market. ???????????????????? ? All numbers in the chart below are post-money valuations for primary rounds in Q3 2024. ? Solid growth in Seed and Series A valuations from Q2. ???????? ???????????? ? All numbers reflect the total amount raised in a given round. ? Rounds have gotten larger at the 50th pct over the past year. ???????????????? ? Percentages in the chart reflect the total equity sold to investors in the round. For SAFE rounds, it reflects the expected ownership at conversion given the valuation cap. ? Dilution is calculated for each round independently - so you can't just read across the median valuation and round size to get the dilution figure! Other people will have different definitions of "pre-seed" - I get it! Amount raised in a SAFE round is the biggest determinant of the valuation cap. Also good to note that some of the pre-seed raises will probably end up raising more money on the same valuation cap. That part of the market is tricky. ?????? ???????????? ???? ???????? ?????????? ???? 1. Okay quarter. $20B invested into Carta startups, little less than Q2, little more than Q1. 2. Down rounds still hovering around 20% of all rounds. Still more kludge to work through from the boom times. 3. Dilution continues to center around 20% in Seed and Series A. 4. Time between rounds notched down for Seed to A, but up for A to B. Still good to plan for longer than you expect. 5. M&A bounceback? 170 companies acquired last quarter, the highest since 2022. Our full State of Private Markets report for Q3 is now live. Link in comments for the full report. If you want this graphic for your industry, give me shout that out in the comments below. Here's to a strong fundraising close & a better 2025! If you’d like more of our data in your inbox, subscribe today: https://lnkd.in/gNa_Dk-F

We are thrilled to welcome Robert McGoodwin to our sales team as the new Account Manager for the Northeast Region! ?? With over 20 years of experience in IT sales and a background in serving both Federal and State/Local government sectors, Rob brings extensive expertise in hardware, software, and public sector solutions. He will be focusing his efforts on our emergency vehicle preemption products, including the newest addition Route Prediction. Welcome, Rob! ?? https://lnkd.in/gHenYjs5 #TeamLYT #smartcities #evp

Friendly reminder for the week: “No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.” – H.E. Luccock It's a simple game of addition vs multiplication. Illustration by me ?? P.S. I've created 500+ visual metaphors like this to teach interesting ideas. Follow Pejman Milani for more.

?? TODAY (Saturday): Virtual Screening of Show Her The Money - link for tickets below ??? ?? As a Producer of the award-winning movie, Show Her The Money, I hope that you'll join us today for our first virtual screening of Catherine Gray's feature-length film that draws attention to funding women entrepreneurs with venture capital. ?? This movie, unlike a lot of documentaries, is actually uplifting - it shows possibilities, outcomes, and incredible results when women entrepreneurs get the funding they need to scale their startup businesses. ?? The movie's Director, Ky Dickens, did an incredible job in assembling a film that is incredibly exciting to watch. The cinematography, the sound, and the cast are truly phenomenal. every time I watch the movie I have to remind myself that these are not actors. ?? Importantly, this is not a movie that's just for women. It actually provides information around receiving and investing in venture capital that applies to anyone. TICKETS HERE ??????https://lnkd.in/gurZpkqe #venturecapital #innovation #startups #entrepreneurship #future

Get rid of irrelevant details so that the essential things and the relationships between them stand out. As the saying goes, "Any damn fool can make it complex. It takes a genius to make it simple." Think of Picasso. He could paint beautiful representational paintings from an early age, but he continually pared down and simplified as his career progressed. Look at each one of the pictures and steps and appreciate the genius of his simplification. Not everyone has a mind that works that way, but just because you can't do something naturally doesn't mean you can't do it--you just have to have creativity and determination. If necessary, you can seek the help of others. #principleoftheday

Meetings are so fascinating. Almost every one of them is way too long for what is needed! For everyone who runs a company, make this the year where you put pressure on meetings and their length. Sometimes a long meeting is actually needed - but many times it's not. People tend to fill the time the time they have. If you give them 30 minutes they'll take 30, if you give them 15 minutes they'll take 15. I love 7-minute meetings that are normally booked for 30 minutes. I love 27-minute meetings when they are normally booked for an hour. People are always complaining that they don’t have enough time when in fact they just had 9 meetings on that day that all were wasted by filling the time they scheduled and thus wasting 2-4 hours!

Innovation made fun. ?? ?? LA Tech Week brought us together to mingle, play, and work! First time being pitched on the dance floor.??Yes, it was my idea… Adetola Olatunji?|?Hayley Nystrom (McCurdy)?|?Vaughn Blake | Fernando Sainz de Rozas | Olamide Anyanwu | Bonita Stewart | David Waxman | Jeff Ponchick | Cody Peterson?| Orchid Taghdir | Nuzi Barkatally?|?Naseem Sayani (she/her) | Karmel Graham, MBA | Laura Lucas | Cecilia Sanchez | Israel M. | Silvia Mah PhD, MBA | Catherine Gray | Pocket Sun | Alicia Castillo Holley, PhD, MBA, MSci #innovation #entrepreneruship #startups #technology #venturecapital