Adverb Ventures

Calling all SF AI Builders - come join us for a happy hour on Tues 10/22: https://lu.ma/vr0esudt

Congratulations to Cove on their public launch today. Backing founders like Stephen Chau who can unlock the potential of LLMs with totally novel product experiences is one of the greatest joys of doing what we do!

We made the decision to start Adverb in the fall of 2022, just before ChatGPT took the world by storm, but even then it was clear the promise of AI was underfoot. Gary Pesola saw the same opportunity and jumped into venture at nearly the exact same time, first at General Atlantic and more recently focusing on all things AI at Conviction. Today, we’re excited to welcome Gary Pesola to Adverb Ventures! Gary has joined us this month as a full-time investor and has hit the ground running (he literally did a half ironman the weekend before his first day with us and is training for a full ironman next month). In every one of his references Gary’s insatiable curiosity, infectious enthusiasm, and ability to build rapport with founders stood out. He brings an AI-native network and perspective to our team, from everything to products, how we work, and who we know. We’re delighted to have him on our team! Gary is based in SF and you can reach him at gary@adverb.vc. Let's go!

We made the decision to start Adverb in the fall of 2022, just before ChatGPT took the world by storm, but even then it was clear the promise of AI was underfoot. Gary Pesola saw the same opportunity and jumped into venture at nearly the exact same time, first at General Atlantic and more recently focusing on all things AI at Conviction. Today, we’re excited to welcome Gary Pesola to Adverb Ventures! Gary has joined us this month as a full-time investor and has hit the ground running (he literally did a half ironman the weekend before his first day with us and is training for a full ironman next month). In every one of his references Gary’s insatiable curiosity, infectious enthusiasm, and ability to build rapport with founders stood out. He brings an AI-native network and perspective to our team, from everything to products, how we work, and who we know. We’re delighted to have him on our team! Gary is based in SF and you can reach him at gary@adverb.vc. Let's go!

We’re thrilled to share an exciting team announcement for Adverb Ventures: Liza Gurtin, who joined our team while we were still raising our first fund - first as an advisor, then as Director of Products, Community, and Programs, has transitioned into investing full-time. Liza brings distinctive operating experience through hyperscaling to her work as an investor. She was employee #18 at Robinhood where she built early capabilities to foster Robinhood’s growth, and wore a variety of hats while wrapping up her degree in Symbolic Systems and Human Computer Interaction at Stanford full-time. Next, she joined the early product team at Slack and went on to hold product roles for developers and Slack’s end users alike as the company scaled 10X and went public. She’s worked with and backed incredible founders, and knows what it takes to build products and companies people truly love. She’s also a seasoned investor, having backed over 20 companies as an angel investor and previously on the investing team at Matrix. When Liza learned we were starting Adverb, she was first in line to raise her hand to help - and boy did we take her up on it! Over the past year and a half, Liza has made huge contributions at Adverb - quarterbacking 30+ events for founders and builders, finding incredibly talented builders early in their founder journeys, and contributing to nearly every aspect of taking Adverb itself from 0 to 1. Liza’s perspective on building distinguished teams and businesses – as well as her sharp eagle eye for fine-tuning product details and notifications – are already an asset to the companies we’ve already backed, and will be for those yet to come. Congratulations, Liza, on your new role as an investor. If you are a founder in the earliest stages of building, new to NYC and looking to plug into the startup community, or eager to trade notes on Taylor Swift shows - get in touch! You can reach Liza at liza@adverb.vc.

We are cooking with gas (or perhaps convection?) over here at Adverb - and on the hunt for an early-stage investor to join us! We invest $500k to $5M in ambitious founders in the earliest stages of building. In our first year, we've backed 15 companies across a wide range of industries including consumer, fintech, enterprise and moonshot frontier investments in biotech and beyond. We get to partner with seasoned serial entrepreneurs and founders in the earliest stages of their careers. Every day is a different, we work collaboratively as a team, and there is no ceiling on the amount of impact you can have. If this sounds like the opportunity for you, apply here: https://lnkd.in/gAZa_iiH

We are cooking with gas (or perhaps convection?) over here at Adverb - and on the hunt for an early-stage investor to join us! We invest $500k to $5M in ambitious founders in the earliest stages of building. In our first year, we've backed 15 companies across a wide range of industries including consumer, fintech, enterprise and moonshot frontier investments in biotech and beyond. We get to partner with seasoned serial entrepreneurs and founders in the earliest stages of their careers. Every day is a different, we work collaboratively as a team, and there is no ceiling on the amount of impact you can have. If this sounds like the opportunity for you, apply here: https://lnkd.in/gAZa_iiH

Congrats to the Accend (YC S23) team! We are proud to have backed this stellar ex-Brex team on a mission to leverage AI to accelerate the work of risk and compliance teams. AI is well suited to automate manual, repetitive back-office tasks, enabling teams to focus on complex, high-value workflows — Accend is already freeing up extraordinary amounts of time for their customers, and this is just the beginning 🚀

Congrats to Particle on raising its Series A from Lightspeed and a number of luminary angels! Their thoughtful, user-centered approach to build a personalized news app powered by AI is in a private beta - and they are hiring!

In our work with founders, a frequent question is “how do I get tech press coverage for our fundraise / launch / milestone?” In my own experience – in dozens of interviews during my roles at Slack, Twitter, for #ANGELS and now Adverb Ventures – engaging with journalists can be a force multiplier for companies already under the spotlight. But for early-stage founders the question remains as to how to break through in an incredibly noisy ecosystem in the first place? That’s why we asked two friends to dinner to share some real talk with founders: Aaron Zamost (who led Comms at Square through hypergrowth) and Lauren Goode, senior writer at WIRED who recently moved to the business reporting desk after years of writing about the technology sector. My biggest takeaway from the evening: it all starts with compelling storytelling, and like all things, empathy for the person on the other side of the table (in this case, a reporter). It turns out that reporters are humans, too – understanding their interests and how to develop the kind of rapport that results in the press founders dream of is a long game. Read on below and sign up for our newsletter: