Vaark Ventures

Innovative startups - pitch SXSW PITCH 2025.?Showcase your tech product or service startup to get noticed & networked in front of industry leaders, investors & media on a significant global stage during SXSW. APPLICATIONS ARE NOW OPEN.?Learn about the qualifications, tech categories & application process:?https://lnkd.in/ev7DQ-k Application deadline is Nov 3.?

Long before I was a contributor to open-source software, I was a user of public domain / shareware apps. I remember flipping through the Amiga World magazine looking for software I hadn't seen before. Some of the cutting edge stuff was pricey. Even games were ~$30 - $60 back in 1990 (I'm guessing it would be 3x with current inflation) Eventually, I started contributing back to the community, and what started as a hobby turned into a passion. While working for a large telecom I was afforded a great opportunity to work my way up to an architecture role, designing and implementing systems mainly on open-source software. It wasn't easy to convince the management of the benefits! Even though the web servers were running Linux ;) It's a bit easier today - but sometimes I still have conversations with folks that hear "open source" and have a bias against it for various reasons. Some are valid, but other times it's based on the illusion that a proprietary vendor solution will always be higher quality, more secure, or cost less in total for ownership. I don't use open-source for everything - but rather look at it on a case by case basis. https://lnkd.in/g5hGUedS

Honored to be a part of the New York City Economic Development Corporation and Biolabs@NYULangone-hosted Golden Ticket Contest. Many innovative presentations from local start-ups like Aggregate Biosciences and @ImmuNovX Biotech - the NYC-metro biotech space is sizzling! #lifesciences

The will to win.

Fantastic opportunity to learn some basics, thank you Accelerate Long Island!

I wanted to make an important #PSA to all my #founder friends who use Carta for their electronic cap table management system. Carta implemented a feature last year to enable companies to set up access levels to their cap table for entire groups (e.g., investors, employees, ex-employees, etc.). By default, Carta recommends providing "Basic" access to all employees and service providers. The part that may not be intuitive is that "Basic" access includes access to your company's full financing history (including total dollars raised, original issue price, number of shares, fully-diluted share counts, and post-money valuation). Please don't take this post as a suggestion or recommendation to keep this info from your employees but in my experience, most founders would rather not have all employees, advisors, and contractors from having this info as a default matter. If that's you, you should check your Carta account to consider switching permissions from "Basic" to "Restricted" for employees. You can navigate to this page by clicking "Cap Table" in the left-hand column and then selecting "Cap Table Access" from the drop down. HT: Chandra Shih (my partner at Lowenstein Sandler LLP), who first alerted me to this!

What most get wrong about startups is that they think a founder comes up with this one big idea and then just goes and executes on it. What really happens is that every single day the founder questions the idea, tinkers with the idea, tweaks the idea, adds to the idea, removes from the idea, hates the idea, and falls in love with the idea all over again … every single day, all at once, all the time.

A great article about what we're on a mission to build at Dendritic Health AI. "How can we take a student from topic introduction to mastery? Students need to be able to diagnose in the middle of an interview and order the right tests and then administer the right treatment. We want to take that from having to go over four years in medical school to something that you can use AI to do in one sitting.” “We find a way to do it. It’s long hours, it's long nights, it's long weeks, it's weekends. But the amount of times people have said ‘You can't do this, you're gonna be too busy,’ and we’ve found a way to get it done is encouraging for us" Thanks to Crain's Detroit Business and Anna Fifelski for the feature. https://lnkd.in/eWMPgNVB Trevor Woods, Jonathan A.

I was fortunate enough to network with a sea of innovators at the Medicare and Medicaid Founders & Funders event hosted at Chief. Interesting mix of startup solutions at the table tackling some of the challenges within the VBC arena. I see a lot of tech enable turnkey solutions focused on specific chronic condition. There was a women’s health pregnancies fitness app solution with an amazing ui/ux. I think the most intriguing is the one tackling #SMI in the adolescent #Medicaid space that I m looking forward to learn more about. Overall, a great evening well spent. Thank you Vadim Gordin and Oriana Fuentes for inviting Vaark Ventures #startup #healthcare #preseed #seedinvestment #networking

It’s that time again - fire it up!