From our first fund in 2010 at $1.6m to announcing $220m today, we remain steadfast in our mission to serve founders at the earliest stages. We are grateful to our founders, LPs, co-investors and the community for letting us continue doing what we love. techcrunch.com/2024/04/24/se…

not too late to join over 150 RSVP'd founders for the grand finale @PitchandrunNYC X @Techweek_ run tomorrow AM, starting from Chelsea NYC!

team dinner at ambassadors clubhouse. curry > carry ???

Thrilled to welcome @mikeyyyzhao to @EniacVC! Michael spent 8 years as co-founder & CTO of @vimcal, a deeply technical, AI-native builder who shipped product at the edge of what’s possible. Now he’s bringing that founder’s instinct to the other side of the table. He’s also woven into the YC, Berkeley, and SF founder communities, and has been quietly writing first checks and helping founders go 0→1 long before it was his job title. Founders backing founders is how we started at Eniac. Couldn’t be more excited to have him continuing that tradition. Welcome, Michael 🎉

Some personal news: I'm joining @EniacVC ! I’ll be investing in founders at pre-seed and seed with a focus on applied AI, vertical SaaS, and agent infrastructure. I stepped away from @vimcal earlier this year after eight years as co-founder and CTO. Building, scaling, and leading Vimcal has been the most challenging and rewarding experience of my career. I'm so thankful for my co-founder @jaylbird11 , our customers, investors, and the entire Vimcal team. I'm staying on as an active advisor and board member, and remain incredibly bullish on what the team is building ahead. Why venture? When John and I started Vimcal, we got an unbelievable amount of help from the @ycombinator community and beyond. Since then, I've tried my best to pay it forward, helping founders with everything from YC apps to product, GTM, and recruiting, sharing the lessons and mistakes I've made along the way. Over time, I started to support founders beyond just giving advice. That often meant writing the first check into a company, before they’ve even incorporated. I want to take what I’ve learned and make supporting and backing founders my full-time mission. Why Eniac? Eniac was one of the first seed-only firms, backing founders since 2010 when seed was barely a category. The founding partners (@Hadley , @nihalmehta , and @timy0ung ) were all former founders themselves, with a conviction that founders need partners who understand the 0-1 stage and are willing to roll up their sleeves alongside them. It says something that repeat founders with successful exits, who could raise from anyone, keep coming back to Eniac for their first check. I can't wait to continue Eniac's tradition of being the first believer in founders. If you or someone you know is building something new, I'd love to chat! Don’t hesitate to DM me!

Excited to have so many people here for NY Tech Week, here's my latest tips on being a real New Yorker this week: 1) You heard real New Yorkers ride the subway or Citi Bike. Wrong. We ride the top deck of the big bus to go from meeting to meeting. To look extra legit wave at the people on the street. 2) Want a Knicks hat for that Chalamet courtside MSG look? Wack. The insta girls of Williamsburg and the West Village wear Jets gear head to toe this season. 3) Need dinner after a long day of networking? Skip the tiny spots with no sign and a line out the door, that's where confused tourists eat. Real New Yorkers go straight to the Times Square Bubba Gump and ask for the window table so the city can see you crushing life. You’re welcome

Hot take - I don’t really worry about model cos competing w/ enterprise AI startups Yes, they are now doing FDE work, but: (1) AGI/models are ultimate priority; and (2) they won’t build out integrations, workflows, etc for the long tail of use cases (especially vertical ones!)

🌟 Judges announced for our Vertical AI Pitch Competition 🤖 Vertical AI • June 2 • @BrownRudnickLLP Joining the panel: - @Hadley (@EniacVC) - @hayleybay (@firstround) - @jefielding (@EverywhereVC) - @jordanrcrook (@betaworks) Looking forward to an exciting day of pitches and conversations across Vertical AI!

The traditional VC fund org structure produces slow decisions, politics, and consensus-driven strategy. The current environment is moving way too fast for an org to operate with multiple CEOs. The biggest firms are moving to structures that look more like 500 person corporations. We on the other hand have organized ourselves like an 11 person startup, which in my experience is the most dynamic type of organization.

Companies are revolting against their AI bills. @coworkerapp just launched the cheaper path: same frontier quality, one-fifth the cost.

If the next decade’s value really is concentrated in a handful of hyperscalers and model companies worth tens of trillions each, where do you think their next hundred multi-billion-dollar acquisitions come from? Companies building value around AI infra, tooling, and end-user adoption at the edges right now, fundable today at seed valuations. That’s where I’m focused, and it’s exactly why small funds still matter.

IPO at 29. Sold to Yahoo for $270M. Built one of the world's top CDPs. Sold to Rokt. Then built a digital trading card marketplace. With his brother. That's @mkatz0630. When you've spent 20 years mastering how brands reach consumers at scale, you develop a rare instinct for where attention and identity are heading next. @Trovexyz is the marketplace for digital trading cards — and it's already killing it. Because the best founders don't follow the obvious path. They follow the obsession. That's the Human Unicorn thesis in one career arc. 🎙️ EP32 of the @HumanUnicornPod is live. We go deep on: → The Interclick IPO & $270M Yahoo exit → Building & selling mParticle to Rokt → Why he left data infra for digital trading cards → Building a marketplace — and building it with his brother → What Trove is building and why now 🔗 Link in comments 🦄

We have gyms today because, after the Industrial Revolution, people’s jobs became much less physically demanding. We’re now on track to remove the cognitive friction associated with jobs too. Therefore a new muscle gets weakened: the brain. Once all the research is definitive, people will realize that they need to strengthen that muscle just like any other. And we’ll all be waking up early to get some reps in at the brain gym.

The bottleneck for world models is data. And unlike LLMs, world models will need fully licensed training data, a lot of which is going to come from video games. Origin Lab is building the bridge between AI labs and the industry sitting on it. Congrats on the $8M seed, thrilled to be backing this team!

Nobody talks about this, but trading cards are one of the largest hobby markets on the planet. Pokémon alone has outsold every video game franchise in history — by card revenue. Sports cards never lost their audience. They just never got a great digital home. That changes today. @Trovexyz lets you rip sports and TCG packs from your phone. Not browse. Not bid. Rip. The most addictive moment in the hobby, rebuilt for your screen. We've backed a lot of founders. The ones who win in consumer are almost never the ones who "identified the opportunity." They're the ones who couldn't imagine doing anything else. @mkatz0630 is that founder. 2x @EniacVC-backed. A collector long before he was a builder. He didn't study this market — he grew up in it. That's not a detail. That's the whole thesis. The best consumer companies aren't built by people chasing TAM. They're built by people who are a little obsessed. Mike is a little obsessed. And Trove is live today at @Trovexyz.

Lots of skewed data about the seed market right now. Cleanest picture I could pull:

I already use Oboe for most of my learning and the new version looks 🔥. Can't wait to dig in!

You may have never heard of MoPub. Or MAX. But they built the invisible rails of mobile advertising. @jimpayne did both. MoPub was the mobile ad exchange that wired up the smartphone internet — sold to Twitter in one of the defining ad tech exits of its era. MAX became the mediation layer that every major app publisher depends on today. Two companies. Two categories defined. And now Jim is back for a third time with @cloudx, leveraging the largest computing shift of our lifetimes -- AI. Most founders never get one of these right. Jim has done it twice — and he's not done. On Episode 31 of the @humanunicornpod, we get into the full arc: what he learned building at scale during the mobile boom, why he kept coming back, what founders consistently get wrong about timing and distribution, and what he's seeing now that makes CloudX the bet of his career. Three-time founders are a different species. This one will show you why. 🎧 Link in comments

@tryattention is quietly crushing it amongst generational scaling leaders like Anthropic, Profound, and Snowflake. ps. Best gift to my mom for Mother’s Day 🙃

Founders: do your own reference checks on VCs. Anyone can cherry pick a few positive reviews. The best targets are founders of startups a VC has publicly mentioned investing in but doesn’t now list on their site. That’s where the real signal is.