Peterson Ventures

Back in 2012, Peterson Ventures was founded on two premises: 1️⃣ Peterson Partners was sitting in Utah, a burgeoning tech ecosystem that at the time was undercapitalized from seed-stage perspective 2️⃣ Our founding partner Joel Peterson had been teaching at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business since the early 90s and had unique access to founders on campus Fast-forward twelve years and we've now backed 46 Utah-based startups and 38 GSB-founded companies and we continue to invest in and be very bullish on both of these ecosystems. Earlier this month, these two worlds collided when we hosted a happy hour for GSB alumni living in Utah. It was great to see old friends and meet new ones. And as a Utah native, it was really fun to meet talented GSB alums who recently relocated to Utah for our outdoor lifestyle and strong tech ecosystem. Looking forward to the next decade investing in these two ecosystems!

A week ago we hosted our annual intern and alumni BBQ @ Sundance Resort. Thanks to John Koelliker for being willing to share his story as a former intern at Peterson Ventures who we have had the privilege to back as he is building Leland, more to share on John Koelliker and the story at Leland. Always a great opportunity to reconnect with our former interns and their significant others. 14 years ago, my friends and mentors Dan Peterson and Brandon Cope hired me as an intern to join JCP Capital, the Joel Peterson family office entity that was also doing direct investments. Two years later we raised our first fund with outside capital and Peterson Ventures was off and running. I still consider myself the OG intern. From that time forward we have had the privilege of bringing on tremendous interns over the years, over 40 at this point. Each one of those interns has made meaningful contributions to what Peterson Ventures has become today. We’re grateful this year to have Priscilla Russo, Winston Huynh and Nate Hardy as interns this summer, and excited for them to join this great group of Peterson Ventures interns. Our interns have gone on to do great things including several that have and are building great careers in venture capital, several who are CEO’s, many more who are VP and C level roles in and out of our portfolio. More importantly, it is a group of great people doing great things in their professional and personal lives. Thanks to Laurel Mills for organizing and to Sundance Mountain Resort for hosting us. Already looking forward to next years gathering.  

In the linked article below for Utah Business, I wrote a little bit about why we're so excited to be partnering with Caleb Hicks and the SchoolAI team. Since the pandemic, average test scores for reading and math for K-12 students have declined across the board. Study after study shows that students receiving one-on-one tutoring display accelerated learning and achieve higher test scores, but historically delivering one-on-one tutoring is prohibitively expensive and not scalable. By harnessing recent advancements in AI, SchoolAI has built the first scalable solution that can provide a one-on-one, personalized education for every student. After launching the product less than a year ago, hundreds of teachers are signing up for the platform everyday and hundreds of thousands of students are using the product daily. They are signing large contracts with leading school districts, attracting a terrific team, and are poised to build the leading AI platform in a massive industry (the US government spends $800 billion per year on K-12 education). As a former junior higher teacher and repeat tech founder, Caleb is uniquely prepared to build SchoolAI. We couldn't more excited to be partnering with him and the SchoolAI team on the journey ahead!

We're excited to announce that Peterson Ventures led the $5.6m Seed round for Synthpop - Healthcare AI, and I'll be joining their board. Backing Elad and Jan to build this much needed admin automation solution in healthcare felt like a no-brainer given their deep expertise in both healthcare and AI - thank you both for giving us the opportunity to join your cap table! Privileged to work with a great group of co-investors including Medha at Defy and Eric at Ovo Fund. A little more about Synthpop below and you can read more in the piece on Axios by Aaron Weitzman (linked in comments)... Synthpop leverages multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) to streamline healthcare, one workflow at a time. Synthpop’s AI agents perform complex healthcare administrative tasks - from referral sorting and processing, to instantly validating medical orders and prescriptions by referencing payor and clinical guidelines. Synthpop's AI Agents can navigate complex payor phone trees, freeing up your team to perform more critical tasks. Following Standard Operating Procedures, Synthpop’s agents are accurate and tireless, allowing you to scale your business to get more patients the care they are prescribed.

We are hiring a Controller @ Seis! (please share!) If you've ever wanted to be less of a cost center and more on the "business" side as an accountant, this is the role you've been looking for. We're backed by Y Combinator, Album, Peterson Ventures, Goodwater, F-Prime Capital, Elad Gil, Immad Akhund, Arash Ferdowsi, Max Mullen, Brent Thomson, Dan Romero, Jack Altman, Shrug Capital, and other amazing investors. (Feel free to ping me directly too) https://lnkd.in/dhu5vUJS

The Washington Post highlighted one of our customer’s success story using Tiny Health to heal her daughter’s gut condition yesterday. It was a piece on how consumers are turning to at-home testing platforms to take control of their own health because our healthcare system isn't always able to give us answers. It was a fair piece on the balance needed - not all platforms/companies are equal, and consumers should definitely do their own research to discern the credible from the snake oil. I like that someone in the comments section wrote: "be open (to new innovations), but also be smart." You can read the write-up here: https://lnkd.in/gv2kmveS --- After we found out about Angelika’s story ourselves through her interview with Lizza, WaPo’s amazing investigative journalist, we interviewed her to get the full case study. "Within six weeks, Annika's diapers were normal," Angelika recounted—the first time since she was born almost two years ago. Working with Tiny Health was so incredibly helpful. It changed everything. In Annika’s follow-up test, her good bacteria level was way up. The action plan worked—the overabundant [bacteria] had decreased,” Angelika said. Beyond digestive issues, Annika's speech had been delayed. But the next time Angelika and her daughter visited the speech therapist, they couldn't explain how she was suddenly talking in complete sentences. “I also saw her other symptoms resolving—her inflammation, gas, and irritability were gone. And it all coincided with her improved gut health," Angelika said. You can read more about her story here: https://bit.ly/tinyfpies --- While we can't promise to help everyone, Angelika's story of how we turned her child's health around is not uncommon. We've heard thousands of similar stories which fuels the Tiny team even more passionately to serve. Based on scientific literature, our children’s immune system is trained by their gut microbes in the first 1,000 days. Given that 80% of our immune system is in our gut, it is so crucial to make sure they have the right balance of bifidobacteria, acetate, HMO digestion and also a tiny bit of unfriendly bacteria. I knew I couldn’t wait the avg 10-15 years that it would take for the medical system to adopt the latest groundbreaking research in gut microbiome. Not for my family. I started Tiny Health to empower parents to detect potential gut imbalances and course correct early on to avert chronic conditions that are affecting 1 in 2 kids today. Even beyond the early days, as an adult, you can still modify your gut with proper nutrition, specific supplements and lifestyle changes. This can influence your resilience to illness, mental health, metabolic health, sleep, skin, digestion, health span and also longevity. You can’t change your genetics, but you can certainly change your microbiome, and your epigenetics.

Hosted a dinner earlier this week with other CTOs/Engineering VPs in Utah. It was a great chance to connect and share notes on topics from Product/Eng alignment to remote management to AI — exciting times for Utah tech. Thanks to Peterson Ventures for sponsoring and helping organize the event!

We had such a blast bringing together the Peterson Ventures team and Bay Area portfolio founders to at the Giants game last night. I am a huge believer in peer mentorship and love bringing together our founders and seeing the serendipitous connections made that form the foundation of our community. Thanks to all the founders that took time out of their busy schedules last night to hang out with us! Also loved bringing our Stanford GSB Investment Committee up from Palo Alto for the evening. A Special shout out to the amazing Laurel Mills for planning such a fun event for our team and portfolio.

We had such a blast bringing together the Peterson Ventures team and Bay Area portfolio founders to at the Giants game last night. I am a huge believer in peer mentorship and love bringing together our founders and seeing the serendipitous connections made that form the foundation of our community. Thanks to all the founders that took time out of their busy schedules last night to hang out with us! Also loved bringing our Stanford GSB Investment Committee up from Palo Alto for the evening. A Special shout out to the amazing Laurel Mills for planning such a fun event for our team and portfolio.

I’m PUMPED to finally launch our latest advertisement that we worked on with Creatably Our goal here? Make ERP and Inventory Management fun, relatable, and sexy for maybe the first time…ever. We believe that massive conglomerates like Netsuite are out of touch with modern e-commerce companies. We are not another nameless, faceless, legacy ERP. I would LOVE if you guys can share this video to support the brand of Luminous and send to anyone who might want a laugh, or would find a solution like Luminous something they would consider. Support Utah businesses! Enjoy!