Unusual Ventures

Big news from AirOps today! We are so excited to work with Alex Halliday, Matt Hammel and Berna Gonzalez. Here's why we led their $15M Series A round earlier this year. Content marketing was always an obvious use case for LLMs but the earlier (and hyped) startups in the space are flaming out and struggling. Most CMOs are still getting no benefits from AI. Check out our blog post in comments below to learn why. This is where Airops comes in. Their customizable workflows help marketers take on moonshot content projects, from programmatic SEO to upgrading entire product libraries, that were just not worth the effort without AI. Their customers are experiencing once-in-lifetime organic growth gains. So it's no surprise they were seeing crazy growth and are doubling down on the mission of helping marketers grow with AI. We at team Unusual Ventures are so thrilled to help them along the way.

We are excited to announce our investment in AirOps, a no-code custom LLM application builder to ship ambitious content projects that had historically been too intimidating and costly to attempt. Unusual GP Sandhya Hegde explains how AirOps completely changes the daunting risk-return profile of a moonshot marketing project by reducing the upfront investment needed and putting ongoing maintenance on autopilot. You can leverage the awesome scale and expertise of LLMs to launch a moonshot project faster with a small team. You can then iterate on it till you start hitting your metrics. Combined with a good idea, you can see moonshot impact from AirOps like 20X traffic growth within months. ⬇️ In the comments, read more about our investment in AirOps, and congratulations to Matt Hammel, Alex Halliday, and Berna Gonzalez!

Excited to share that we are launching Resolve AI and announcing our $35M Seed round, led by Greylock, with participation from Unusual Ventures and an exceptional group of angel investors. Our first product is an AI Production Engineer that autonomously resolves alerts and incidents and handles operational tasks, improving reliability and freeing up engineers to focus on building. This is the second time Mayank and I are building a company together. We met 20 years ago in grad school at UIUC and have been working together since 2012. Since then, we’ve built multiple generations of development and observability tools in startups and large companies, and helped create impactful open-source projects like OpenTelemetry. Along the way, we've worked with some incredible people—this is actually the third time that five of our founding team members are working together–and we’ve also added many new folks with diverse experiences. Resolve AI is deployed in several customer production environments, helping troubleshoot production issues and delivering real-world impact for engineering teams significantly reducing Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), increasing uptime and improving reliability. We’re grateful to our customers and investors for their support in making Resolve AI a reality. For more information, check out my blog post: https://lnkd.in/gS_2ETkK Let’s get back to building!

We are thrilled to back Spiros Xanthos and Mayank Agarwal again as they launch Resolve AI. They were one of Unusual's first partnerships and investments and we are glad to see they are back at it again. Spiros and Mayank are clearly world class in their understanding of the observability space and, as seasoned Founders, they are perfectly positioned to rethink engineering tools in an AI-first world.   Resolve empowers engineers with AI tools to automate operational grunt work tasks like infrastructure management and on-call support that can consume the majority of an engineer's time. Their initial product, an AI Production Engineer, couldn't come at a better time as the explosion of AI-generated code means more software to manage and, therefore, more outages to respond to.   At Unusual Ventures, we back founders who have unique insight into today's most challenging problems and the operational experience to capitalize on the opportunity. We couldn't think of two more capable founders in Spiros and Mayank to tackle one of the biggest challenges in software development today. Congratulations to you both and the entire team at Resolve AI on your new venture, and thank you for trusting Unusual Ventures to be a part of your exciting journey from day 1 again.

John Vrionis, Co-Founder and Partner at Unusual Ventures, has been a venture capitalist since 2006, backing over a dozen billion-dollar companies. His philosophy? Learn by doing—especially through overcoming adversity. Whether in sports, school, or professional life, John is drawn to those with relentless drive and the humility to keep learning.

We recently sat down with Samantha McKenna to hear her best advice for early stage founders on how to approach sales, especially if they are new to it. Technical founders often worry sales is about persuasion. That's not quite right. Sales done well is about problem solving. As Sam puts it, "You're not here to pitch and to sell. You're here to solve." In order to problem solve well, you have to listen really closely. Technical founders are typically GREAT at asking questions to deeply understand a problem. More tips from Sam in the link below

Think the best repeat founders don’t make mistakes? Wrong. How they deal with them is what really matters. As I have made the shift from repeat founder to early-stage venture investor, I am not suprisingly often drawn to exceptional repeat founders. There are numerous benefits that come with having prior founding experience that I think are fairly well understood: 1️⃣Time in an industry to develop expertise and a unique insight into future opportunities.  2️⃣More credibility to raise capital and attract top-tier talent.  3️⃣Management and organization building experience  4️⃣Experience communicating product value to customers  5️⃣Knowledge of what you are signing up for — for better or worse! What’s distinctly missing from this list is not making mistakes. There is a saying that as a repeat founder, you won’t make the same mistakes, you will just make new ones!  From company to company, circumstances change, different people are involved, markets shift, and inevitably a whole new set of challenges arise that you can't handle perfectly. Flawless execution doesn’t mean never making mis-steps, it is more about how quickly you identify the issue at hand, acknowledge the problem and then implement a scalable solution. One of the key things I look for in repeat founders is evidence that they have learned how to shorten the mistake to resolution cycle in order to grow the business as fast as possible. The best repeat founders shorten this cycle dramatically while many (not all) first time founders need to learn the hard way through first- hand experience. If a repeat founder, even a highly successful one, thinks they know all the answers and won’t make mistakes, it is a quick pass for me. Questions for founders to consider, how are you learning through your mistakes while building? And repeat founders, what kinds of new mistakes are you making and have you been able to address them faster?

M&A can be an emotional journey with plenty of twists and surprises! While news headlines highlight M&A transactions that seem to have happened quickly and easily, most transactions take considerable time, effort, and luck. Lars Albright provides 10 tips to help founders increase their situational awareness while navigating M&A! His recommendations include: ➡ Identify product advocates early, willing to take the risk and stand strong against any negative pushback. ➡ Run a time-boxed process, and mutually agree upon a timeline ➡ Embrace the challenge. Focus on what you can control instead of only thinking about the end game. Read all 10 tips! Link in the comments!

❓ Should you completely automate your outbound sales process with AI? On the latest episode of the Startup Field Guide podcast, we asked Samantha McKenna how early stage founders should think about using AI tools to augment their GTM motion. Her recommendation: Use AI to up-level your education about prospects and buyers, use it for research, but don't use AI to do mass outreach because it will turn off your buyers. Listen to the entire episode! Link in the comments! ⬇