Maggie Tang

VC schedules, and thoughts on being a VC noob. -- VC schedules to know -- Most venture capital firms hold partner meetings on Mondays. This is typically when the investment committee votes on new investments and other key decisions. Savvy founders learn the exact timing and may need to provide additional data over the weekend to stay in motion. It is also well known that many venture capitalists observe a “European summer,” with August often being light or fully off. Similarly, the winter holidays reduce activity across much of December. That said, data from Carta shows a meaningful year-end push to close deals in December, followed by a flurry of activity in January. Founders should be cautious about kicking off fundraising during these slower periods. You do not want a raise to go stale and fall apart. VCs talk to each other, the industry is highly interconnected. -- I’m a mid career Noob! -- I am an “emerging manager,” effectively a new VC, less than three years in. In venture capital, the timeline is long. On my Linkedin you'll see I have two roles at Blitzscaling: Limited Partner means I put money into a fund, but have no decision making ability, and General Partner means I'm actively finding startups, bringing them to the partnership, and funding. As a General Partner, you are often considered an emerging manager for close to a decade, as it takes years for a fund to fully mature and establish a VC track record. Investing is a long game, but the upside can be extraordinary. Fortunately, I entered this role with a positive angel track record from my own bank account, which is often a good idea to have as a VC. When I learn a new VC concept or term, I’m an AI first, I’ll link to my post a few days ago in the comments, I totally live for constant growth and learning, if you’re not growing you’re dying. Fun fact: Many/most start their VC career in their 40s, as they need to have enough tech and biz cycles, a broad enough network, resources, and a platform to stand upon. As we end the year, I'm sharing more career thoughts, and productivity thoughts, rather than industry trends and market maps and frameworks and forecasts. I wrote all of this by hand myself, but used AI to edit some of it.

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Why Great Startups Need Great Key Partners and Why Rory in Chicago Is the Backbone of Our Capacity to Deliver Deployables by Workbnb 🚀 One of the biggest pressures in due diligence is simple and fair: “Your deck looks great, but can you actually deliver the units?” Every early-stage #hardtech founder knows that question. And every serious investor deserves that answer. That pressure is real and justified. Most startups don’t fail because of vision. They fail because they can’t execute, can’t produce, or can’t scale. At Workbnb, our confidence doesn’t come from slides or pitch practice. It comes from who we’re building with. That’s why our partnership with Rory Rubin, Modular BUILDING Solutions and S.I. Container Builds, Inc. in Buffalo Grove, Chicago, is mission-critical. Rory leads a modular manufacturing operation with 32,000 sq. ft. of indoor, climate-controlled production space and another 32,000 sq. ft. of space to expand outdoor plus out door staging and storage capacity. For a startup we made the best decision to leverage experience in the best region to “ship product” and when entering due diligence, that kind of infrastructure isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It’s a proof point. It means: • Multiple units built simultaneously • Year-round production unaffected by weather • Space to store, stack, and accelerate deployments • Factory tours as a real pathway to “seeing and touching” the units investors are asking for This is what investor confidence looks like in real life — not theoretical capacity, but actual space, actual machinery, and an actual craft teams standing behind you. And behind all of that is Rory: one of the top women in construction, a rising star in modular prefab completing high-visibility, code-compliant projects in Chicago proves she knows how to hit deadlines under pressure. And she’s a respected leader guided by a simple mantra: “Do Good.” That’s why S.I. Container Builds, Inc. is more than a vendor — they’re our strongest key partner with strong values. When your mission is bold and the stakes are high, you choose partners who make delivery possible! For Workbnb, due diligence isn’t a theoretical exercise. We pass due diligence by proving we can execute. We have the support with the square footage, the machinery, the team, and the partner to produce units investors can walk into and touch. 😎 This is our answer to the toughest question in due diligence: Yes — we can deliver. And here is the partner who ensures it. Rory Rubin, Modular BUILDING Solutions makes our vision tangible. Please follow Deployables by Workbnb for all the latest updates, our progress as a portfolio company in the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), and shipments. 🚚 #MadeinChicago The Workbnb, Inc | Techstars '22 movement continues in Chicago! 🚀🚀 #Workbnb #Deployables #Modular #Construction #WorkforceHousing #Chicagotech #Proptech #Contech #Traveltech #Techstars #LACI #RebuildLA #Housing #Mhub #startups #realestateinnovation

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I’ve never seen more Junior VC talent leave VC for tech startups than right now. And it makes sense. 65% of VC investments never return 1x capital. The carry math is tough: GPs don’t see a dollar of carry until LPs get their full capital back first. Then profits are split, typically 80/20. With 30 portfolio companies, where most return nothing, you need one investment to return 50x just to move the needle. Most funds never get there. Less than 30% of 2020 vintage funds have returned any capital to LPs at all (Carta). At a startup, your equity is tied directly to the company you’re building. The upside is real and it’s yours. In VC, you’re waiting on a portfolio of other people’s bets to pay out, most of which never will. So if you’re staying in VC, it shouldn’t be for the money. Stay because you want to help build companies. Because you find the work genuinely interesting. Because you want the seat at the table. The carry is a lottery ticket. The work is the reward. ♻ Repost if you know someone trying to decide between VC and a startup right now. #venturecapital #startup #founder

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Women influence 85% of consumer spending. Most of the markets built for them are still running on outdated infrastructure and data nobody bothered to collect. That's the $15T gap Capital F was built to close — and today we're sharing our $17M debut fund. Thank you Dominic-Madori Davis and TechCrunch for covering it. Raising a new venture fund is not for the faint of heart and I'm lucky enough to do it with Margaret Coblentz and the best LP's around. But it's WAY easier than being a founder and we get to back some of the best out there. #LFG

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SF VC Takeaway #2: Pricing expectations, performance bars, and what’s actually getting funded. One theme that came up repeatedly in SF was how far pricing expectations and performance bars have shifted, even compared to just a few years ago. A few things investors kept anchoring to: 1️⃣ Median Series A valuations are higher than their 2021 peaks, but fewer of them are getting done. 2️⃣ Capital is being concentrated into fewer and fewer companies (and lots of capital!) 3️⃣ “Good” progress is no longer enough and the bar for standout performance has moved in an AI-native world So what does “top performance” mean right now? One investor told me that top quartile seed companies in their portfolio are going from $0 to $2M in ARR in <12 months. Outside of pure traction numbers, a few other themes that came up to describe "top performance": 📈 Explosive early revenue ramps (or a very credible path to them) 📊 Strong velocity and momentum for 2 quarters in a row, even if the baseline is small. 🚀 Clear signals of category leadership, not just product-market fit. Sometimes shown by either domain expertise, speed of product optimization, or by lack of competition in the category. This creates a counterintuitive dynamic where it can be easier to fund a company with strong pedigrees in a hot space and no traction yet than a company that went from 0 to $1M ARR at what used to be considered a rapid pace. Pricing today is driven by trajectories, not moments in time. We used to say investors invest in lines not points; I think that's more true than ever now because crossing certain milestones doesn't carry as much influence as it once did. Finally, investors still say that valuation matters, but many of them are acting differently. Pace and belief in category-defining companies really sets the price; while slower growth gets scrutinized rather than discounted. One silver lining in the camp of durable growth: Series A rounds are happening so fast that many companies don’t yet have meaningful history of retention data. Large bets are being made on velocity before the durability is proven. Several investors told me the same thing: we may soon swing back to a market where retention, not growth, becomes the defining metric. Let's hope so. I'll share my third SF VC takeaway tomorrow!

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And now, Anthropic is gearing up for dealmaking. After staying lean while OpenAI went on a $6B acquisition spree, Anthropic is building out a corporate development team with ex-SoftBank, Morgan Stanley, and Airbnb talent. Targets include coding tools, industry-specific AI, and technical talent — with deals likely under $500M. With revenue surging, product traction accelerating, and M&A muscle forming, Anthropic looks ready to follow OpenAI’s suit — and step into full-stack territory.

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12 ideas from Don Valentine (founder of Sequoia) 1. There are two things in business that matter, and you can learn this in two minutes- you don’t have to go to business school for two years: high gross margins and cash flow. The other financial metrics you can forget. 2. The trouble with the first time entrepreneur is that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. After a failure, he does know what he doesn’t know and can beat the hell out of people who still have to learn. 3. The world of technology thrives best when individuals are left alone to be different, creative, and disobedient. 4. The art of storytelling is critically important. Most of the entrepreneurs who come talk to us can't tell a story. Learning to tell a story is incredibly important because that's how the money works. The money flows as a function of the stories. 5. We don't spend a lot of time wondering where people went to school. We are interested in their idea about the market they are after. The magnitude of the problem they are solving. 6. We don't wait for you to knock on our door. We knock on your door. 7. The right people to invest in are technologists. People who have a dream to solve a problem. Most were not interested in becoming wealthy. That was an accident. They were interested in solving technology problems and creating new products. 8. One of my jobs as a board member has been to counsel management to avoid distraction and to execute with constructive paranoia. 9. Think about a company like Eastman Kodak – it was the leader in its market, and now it’s gone. How can a $100 billion company go out of business? The answer is, easily and quickly. 10. We don't choose people. We choose markets. 11. We have gone into business with some people who had no business credentials. We taught them that you only had to do a few things well. 12. All companies that go out of business do so for the same reason – they run out of money.

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