#232 | Request for Startups, Future of Manufacturing, & more
May 18th | The latest from Eclipse, Dawn Capital, Felicis, Scale, Battery, and others
SandHill.io aggregates and shares the latest investment themes, market insights, and best practices for operating and investing from 700+ VCs, analysts, and operators.
This newsletter curates a selection of posts featured on the website each week.
Investment Themes & Theses
Summer 2025 Requests for Startups (Y Combinator Team)
Why AI Agents & Copilots Will Unlock Trillion‑Dollar Value (Dawn Capital)
The Future of Domestic Manufacturing (Eclipse Team)
Our Thesis on Sensors (Zach Johnston, Sr. Associate @ 2048)
Autonomous Finance: Fintech’s fourth wave (Tobi Coker, Partner @ Felicis)
The Next AI Infrastructure Layer Will Be Grounded in Code (Priyanka Somrah, Principal @ Work-Bench)
Industry Developments & Analyses
You Can Just Program Biology (Matt Mandel, VC @ USV)
Who’s really building Health & PharmaTech unicorns (Sooah Cho & Danielle Zhao, SignalFire)
When Will We Pay a Premium for AI Labor? (Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Theory)
The Siren Song of Advertising (Eric Flaningam, VC @ Felicis)
Building TurboTax in a weekend: How LLMs are automating America’s tax code (Alex Niehenke, Principal @ Scale)
AI Finally Gets Top Billing in the Battery Ventures Tech Spending Report (Scott Goering & Evan Witte, Battery)
Systems Of Record in the AI age: ServiceNow, SAP and Workday (Akash Bajwa, Principal @ Earlybird)
Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating
You need a better testing strategy (Kyle Poyar, Partner @ Tremont)
0-$5M: How to Identify Your ICP — Lessons from Vanta, Clay, Retool (First Round Review)
CFO playbook: Five elements of building world-class investor relations (Jeff Epstein & Alex Wu, Bessemer)
Thinking About Taking the Founder Leap? Here’s How to Prep for the Emotional Gauntlet (First Round Review)
Additional Reads
Why VC and software have PE envy (Matt Brown, Partner @ Matrix)
Everything is Technology (Packy McCormick, GP @ Not Boring)
AI Snake Oil (Rob May, GP @ Half Court Ventures)
Beyond Code (Parul Singh, Board Partner @ Initialized)
Why Bell Labs Worked. (1517 Fund)
Checklist legal and institutional action items for launching your emerging manager (David Teten, Partner @ Versatile VC)
Synthetic Populations (Rex Woodbury, MP @ Daybreak)
Financial Immaturity (Jean de La Rochebrochard, MP @ Kima Ventures)
The Invisible Game (Akshay Mehra, VC @ Hummingbird)
Notes:
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