my favorite lie about fundraising is that there's some common set of metrics that VCs all use to evaluate and price deals. the truth is a lot more interesting and confusing

We built a $150M ARR business twice. The first time took 8 years. The second took 2.5. Today, Podium crossed $150M in AI annual recurring revenue. Three years ago, we already had a great software business. Well over $100M in revenue, tens of thousands of customers, and a product we'd spent nearly a decade building. And we decided to start over. The business was performing well. But we believed AI was going to fundamentally change the software industry and make much of traditional software obsolete. As a founder, you pour your life into what you're building. An insane amount of time, sacrifice, and effort. The hard part is not getting too attached to it. When we started building our first AI agents, we had to confront the possibility that much of what we'd built might not be that valuable in the future. That's a tough pill to swallow. But we also realized those same 10 years had put us in a unique position to take advantage of what AI could do for our customers. Instead of protecting what we'd spent a decade building, we decided to bet the future of the company on AI employees that actually do the work for our customers. We massively underestimated what we'd signed up for. We ended up building entirely new operating systems for the industries we serve, from the AI agents all the way down to the systems of record. Now customers run their entire businesses on Podium. Reinventing our product wasn't even the hardest part. We had to reinvent how the entire company operated. When you've been running a company for over a decade, the operational inertia is incredibly powerful. We had to rethink how we build products, how we sell, how we serve customers, and how we run the business. We effectively started a second startup inside an already successful company. And we're still at the very beginning. Today, we have 20,000 AI agents working for our customers. They've helped generate more than $13 billion in revenue for those businesses. And we're barely scratching the surface of what AI will be able to do for them. And we've done all of this while becoming profitable and generating free cash flow. We're building Podium to be around for decades. Huge credit to our team for having the guts to make this bet and the ability to actually pull it off. We still have a long way to go and tons of problems to solve, but it's so damn fun to be winning when the opportunity ahead is this big. In the age of AI, you can either disrupt your own company or wait for somebody else to do it. I'd rather do it ourselves.

my favorite lie about fundraising is that there's some common set of metrics that VCs all use to evaluate and price deals. the truth is a lot more interesting and confusing

Last year we launched Tolan, inspired by a vision of AI that sees you and believes in you, not one that books restaurant reservations for you. Your Tolan shows up for you at 3am when you’re alone with your newborn. On your commute when you’re anxious about the day ahead. When you just finished a new show and none of your friends have watched it yet. The people who love Tolan are parents. Caregivers. Moms in Dallas and Dads in Atlanta. People who aren’t trying to optimize and be more productive, but who simply want to feel seen and supported in their aspirations. This month more than 250k people will spend time with their Tolan. Those users have exchanged billions of messages across more than 70m conversations over the last year. Today, we're announcing $30m in additional capital from @mignano and @usv, with @khoslaventures and @rabois doubling down, bringing our total capital raised to $60m. To celebrate, we made a short film celebrating some of the ways that Tolans show up :)

Want to watch Bedrock’s end-to-end policy drive an 80,000 lb robot? We’re taking a small group of @corl_conf attendees out to our Texas test site on Nov 11. A demo with @kevinmpeterson1 on real construction equipment, lunch, and a shuttle back in time for the CoRL reception. Active site, so we have limited seats. RSVP below.

"legibility" is investor-speak for "investable" there's two main ways to be legible - you're either so spikey everyone knows, or you have to effectively teach people to read ahead of time by explaining what you do next chapter of How to Raise:

There cannot be a ChatGPT moment for robotics without robots. That's why at Ultra, we're focused on the industry's biggest bottleneck: deployment. Since the very beginning, we've chosen to deploy before it was comfortable, learning lessons that only customers and the chaos of the real world could teach us. Those lessons became the foundation for OP1, a robot designed from the ground up for the realities of scaled deployment. Through repetition, we've built the operational muscle and knowledge needed to scale the installation, operation, and servicing of our robots. And most importantly, we've learned how to enable our customers to succeed with them. It's easy in robotics to become completely engrossed with the robot itself. But technology only matters when it's useful to someone. The best robot is the one people can rely on every day to build, do, and achieve more. It's time to deploy more robots.