Arash Ferdowsi

Wiz got acquired for $33B, so I got curious and reverse engineered how it looked at seed and if we'd invest based on our models. Wiz has four co-founders: Assaf, Ami, Yinon and Roy. They are all repeat entrepreneurs who worked together to build Adallom led by Gili when he was in Sequoia Israel. Adallom, data security startup, raised $50M and got acquired by Microsoft for $350M. Founders roughly stayed about 4 years, until they completed their vesting. Roughly $50M-100M must be allocated to the founders. Gili starts a new VC firm called CyberStarts in 2018. In 2020, he leads a $21M seed round at a roughly $67M post-money (If I am wrong, it's likely somewhere between 40M-100M). The company has all the slam dunk signals for a seed investor: - All four co-founders had a life-changing exit with a tier-1 acquirer. Perfect track record. - All four co-founders worked together in their prior company. Perfect team-synergy-fit. - Their prior lead investor is backing them again. Perfect investor-fit. - Working on a problem that they worked before. Perfect founder-idea-fit. The billion dollar question is that if you were to have access to this company as a first-check investor at $67M valuation, would you invest? When the world of VC is focused on valuation as a one-dimensional problem, I bet that majority of seed investors would pass and emerging seed VCs who back this company at this valuation would have been grilled about being frothy! 😊

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I’m excited to announce our $1M Comfy “Open AI” Grant, an open source AI grant, alongside the launch of its first sponsored model, Anima Anima is a new open-weights model created via a collaboration between CircleStone Labs and Comfy Org, with support from this grant program. The model is focuses on Japanese anime style (e.g. Ghibli). It is currently in preview stage but already gaining huge traction. Open models are the foundation of creative AI. Comfy exists because of them, and this grant is our way of giving back and continuing to empower the ecosystem. People might ask, with so many visual AI models around, is there really any more need for more? The truth is, professional creatives absolutely love and hate today’s AIs. They might be able to generate stunning imagery and coherent fonts, but the moment you want to break it down into individual layers, they start to fall short. The models are great to generating clips that goes viral on social media, but horrible at sticking to specific color grading or output high bit depth results that meets the standard of modern day production. These are huge gaps between model research and professional creatives, and Comfy stand at the front and center of that gap and the grant is here to close it bit by bit. We know $1M alone won’t train a state-of-the-art foundation model today. That’s okay. This is just the starting point. Beyond direct funding, we also support grantees with real-world evaluation, production testing, and promotion across the Comfy platform. Grant recipients retain full control over their model and license (as long as it remains open). We can’t wait to see all the amazing open source models that come out of this effort. Application form and link for model in comments

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We at Blitzscaling Ventures are proud to invest in Atrios, an a16z portfolio company where we saw CEO Taylor Offer demo the product at the a16z Speedrun Demo Day. Atrios is an AI-powered network intelligence platform that maps who knows who and makes those relationships actionable for go-to-market teams. How it works: -Tech vendors can post offers and specify the types of roles they want to connect with. -Connectors (often founders, VCs, business development professionals between roles, or highly connected individuals) can peruse the offerings and choose the best fits. -The connectors reach out to their prospects for a mutually agreed-upon introduction. -The tech vendor gets a qualified, warm intro to a lead. The connector gets compensated. The business decision-maker accelerates their decision-making process. -All three parties benefit: the vendor, the connector, and the business decision-maker, which is why the company is cleverly called “A-Trios,” Atrios. And yes, Taylor Offer that's his actual given name, perfect for using AI for modern business development. Link to our post in comments

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HockeyStack raised a $26M Series A and is managing $20B+ in campaign spend. Here's what nobody talks about: one co-founder is silently carrying an entire team’s LinkedIn content strategy on his back: Emir Atli (Hiring Chief of Staff) (Co-Founder & CRO) has 37,000+ LinkedIn followers and posts daily. He spent $2M on LinkedIn ads this year and published the entire playbook, targeting strategy, creative performance, audience mistakes, everything. The result? $74M in outbound pipeline and 353 qualified meetings at $50K ACV (per Emir’s playbook). Through thoughtful LinkedIn content breaking down hiring philosophy, SDR strategies, and exactly how they book meetings publicly, he’s bringing HockeyStack millions of impressions a year. Meanwhile, Buğra Gündüz (Co-Founder & CEO) posts occasionally about product differentiation and hiring announcements, and Arda Bulut (Co-Founder & CTO) doesn't post. This is the content gap that's killing most B2B companies! One founder posting daily while the other two stay quiet is the norm, not the exception. The CEO focuses on product and fundraising. The CTO ships code. The CRO becomes the de facto content engine because revenue depends on it. It's inefficient, but it's real. This is not a shot against Bugra and Arda, only an opportunity for 2026. Most B2B companies say "we need all our executives posting," and leave all the work to a CMO that’s handling a myriad of other campaigns, events, etc. HockeyStack proves you can grow to $26M Series A and 200+ customers with one founder doing the heavy lifting on content. It's not ideal, but it works when that one person shares actual data instead of generic advice. The uncomfortable truth? Most SaaS companies have this exact setup. One founder posts constantly. The others stay silent. Emir proved the model works by sharing real numbers generates real pipeline. The playbook is already written for HockeyStack. The content strategy is already proven. The only question is whether the CEO and CTO will run the same play. If one person sharing the spreadsheet built this much momentum, three people sharing the entire company's data could be unstoppable!

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