Innovation Endeavors

10/28/2024

is in full swing!

Join us today at 1:30pm at Breakout Stage 1 for our panel, How AI is Supercharging Tools for Knowledge Workers, moderated by Harpi Singh.

AI advancements are transforming how professionals operate, freeing up time from repetitive tasks and unlocking space for greater creativity and innovation. Our panel will dive into the latest AI-driven tools designed to 10x productivity, boost performance, and reimagine workflows for the future of work.

Huge thanks to our fellow panelists, Scott Dietzen, Tanguy Chau, and Luke McGartland, for lending their expertise to this discussion!

We look forward to exploring how AI can enhance your team's efficiency, creativity, and more. See you there.

Disrupt is where you’ll find innovation for every stage of your startup journey. Whether you’re a budding founder with a revolutionary idea, a seasoned startup looking to scale, or an investor seeking the next big thing, Disrupt offers unparalleled resources, connections, and expert insights to ...

10/23/2024

Some of the hardest talent for to recruit is technical talent. No matter the job market, technical talent remain in high demand. And thanks to the arms race, there’s a growing bottleneck for highly specialized AI and talent.

With that said, we're so appreciative that talent acquisition expert, Kathy Cardozo, took the time to join our founders for an in-depth workshop on how to hire and retain key technical talent.

Drawing from her experience working with companies like Google, as well as startups including Eikon Therapeutics and Machina Labs, Kathy laid out a roadmap for building a high-performing engineering recruiting engine to help companies achieve their hiring goals — and ultimately — scale effectively.

We've linked her insights in the comments below👇

10/22/2024

The current drug discovery paradigm mostly relies on one-target, one-drug approaches. This has resulted in enormous clinical successes, but many are often short-lived in complex diseases as patients fail to durably respond. From an evolutionary biology standpoint, this makes sense. In most cases, our biological systems have evolved to be resilient to unusual changes. This is why combination therapy has become the standard of care across many oncology indications and why we’ve seen a whirlwind of activity in bispecifics in I&I.

Despite this, the broader field still comes up short, focused on rational combinations of targets that don’t take advantage of the structure present in underlying biological networks.

We think the toolkit has now matured to interrogate these complex systems, understand and map the underlying network biology, and design therapeutic agents with multi-functional activity.

Passkey Therapeutics embraces this biological complexity and aims to change the existing paradigm. With a stellar team led by Bruce Beutel, Will Chen, Soumya Ray, Passkey is posed to deliver some unique therapeutic hypotheses across multiple disease areas and help push us into a new era of therapeutic discovery. We’re thrilled to partner with this team!

Blog link in comments 👇

10/21/2024

From blueprints to bots 🤖 🏗️

has the potential to bring unprecedented productivity gains to the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. The opportunity is compelling not only because the industry has historically been slow to adopt digital technology but also because AEC runs on a uniquely vast amount of structured and unstructured .

Today, we explored a number of these new opportunities including:

- Automated design tools that boost efficiency and reduce errors
- Real-time project management powered by AI
- The benefits and challenges of adopting agentic systems in AEC

We see AI as not just a tool but a catalyst for innovation and growth for AEC.

From blueprints to bots: AI and agentic systems for architecture, engineering and construction (AEC)

10/09/2024

Traditionally, most applications followed a relatively straightforward system architecture; a frontend client would make an API call via REST or GraphQL to a stateless backend which completes all core manipulation via database queries.

But this paradigm is changing. As Davis Treybig shares, "modern applications are increasingly becoming distributed systems in the sense that the compute and storage model of the application is spread across client, edge, and cloud."

Learn more:

All applications are becoming distributed systems. The shift towards distributed data & compute across client, edge, & cloud.

09/30/2024

Zillow will now combine climate risk scores, interactive maps and insurance information on its home listings.

This step gives prospective buyers their first combined look at climate risk information with home insurance recommendations — and it's all thanks to First Street.

Learn more about why Zillow's climate information will be especially comprehensive on Axios 👇

The new one-stop shop for climate data is aimed at helping prospective home owners know extreme weather risks.

09/18/2024

Congratulations to Trunk Tools for being recognized in Will Reed’s Top 100 for 2024: The Culture List! 🎉

This list highlights companies not only for their and but also for their exceptional workplace .

https://bit.ly/3XNU2Xk

Will Reed’s Top 100 is a curated list of emerging tech companies who are building high-performing teams where employees thrive and customers stay.

09/10/2024

Congratulations to the Atom Computing team on this exciting collaboration with Microsoft 🎉! Atom's groundbreaking work in fault-tolerant quantum is accelerating us toward a future where quantum supercomputers can solve problems beyond the reach of classical systems.

Atom is pushing boundaries with its neutral technology, scaling qubits, and advancing quantum error correction. And now, with this collaboration with Microsoft, these two leaders in quantum will work to build the world’s most powerful quantum computer — on a path to scientific and commercial advantage.

The future of innovation is bright, and we're excited to see the tremendous value quantum unlocks for society and industry.

See more here:

Tech Perspectives

09/06/2024

We began our journey with Own nine years ago. At that point, Own had identified an emerging market opportunity in cloud-to-cloud backup for business applications — a need that was just beginning to surface as more shifted to the cloud and one that we believed in, given our experience investing in data companies.

It wasn’t long before Own’s focused ex*****on and relentless attention to customers, sales, and efficiency ensured they would build a substantial business. Today, Own is trusted by thousands of organizations to protect and activate mission-critical SaaS data.

Harpi Singh shares more about Own’s remarkable growth and milestone acquisition 👉 https://bit.ly/4gdbcoi

We’re so excited to see the continued impact Own will have within the Salesforce family 🚀🚀🚀

Celebrating the Salesforce acquisition of Own: A milestone in cloud data protection

09/05/2024

Huge news! 🎉 Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Own Company.‬ ‭Own’s protection and data management solutions will take the Salesforce‬ ‭Platform Data Security and Privacy products to new heights.‬

Watching this incredible team achieve such a remarkable milestone is thrilling and reinforces why we continue to partner with visionary founders to rethink large industries. We’re proud to have backed Own from its Series A onward, and we're excited to see the continued impact Own will have on the Salesforce family!

https://sforce.co/4dWUDeL

08/27/2024

Yaniv Makover recently met with Authority Magazine leadership columnist, Cynthia Corsetti, to discuss how AI is reshaping communication and content across several industries. Read the interview to learn how you can adapt to this changing landscape.

An Interview With Cynthia Corsetti

08/26/2024

Evaluation is the hardest part of building products, and one of the only reliable ways to evaluate systems at scale is to experiment. As a result, tools like Eppo will likely become an essential component of AI-native companies.

Our lead investment in Eppo's Series B reflects our longstanding focus on core computing infrastructure, applications of advanced mathematics, and machine learning.

TechCrunch shares more about the core decision-making engine Eppo is building for enterprises:

Eppo, which is building an app, website and AI experimentation tools for brands, has closed a new funding round that values Eppo at over $100 million.