Susana Rojas

Partner @IndexVentures - investing in early stage & growth in NYC

[Susana Rojas @_susanarojas]

@pranavsinghvi @andrewziperski I like to have it but dont touch it bc its recourse, inflexible and not duration matched !!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Susana Rojas @_susanarojas]

@pranavsinghvi @andrewziperski Or venture debt is the cheapest 🤣🤣🤣

[Susana Rojas @_susanarojas]

@_catwu go go go Cat !!!!!!!!!! 🥳

[Susana Rojas @_susanarojas]

@andrewziperski If Kamala Harris had studied Ziperski, she would’ve won…

[Andrew Ziperski @andrewziperski]

https://t.co/tTtQwkYVDO

[Andrew Ziperski @andrewziperski]

The narrative momentum around this business is remarkable. Bending Spoons is symptomatic of a market failure; an aggressively levered Italian business is not the buyer “of choice” for American companies so much as the only buyer.

There need not be a “buyer” (in the traditional sense) at all.

What we need are deeper, more patient capital markets that enable entrepreneurs to compound within their life’s work -- markets that provide them with the capital they need to invest in growth and to deliver liquidity to shareholders who demand it on timelines that don’t align with the entrepreneurs’ own.

Airtable and Miro took the Bending Spoons path not solely because AI ruined their long-term prospects and the entrepreneurs wanted to “start over.” AI disintermediation is the easy-to-blame culprit, a bogeyman that allows Silicon Valley to avoid addressing a more fundamental challenge. It’s entirely normal for great businesses to encounter meaningful challenges that force them to adapt and compound in new directions. Progress is not a monotonic function of time. Many of the largest, most durable, most profitable businesses -- technology or otherwise -- attest to this.

In reality, Airtable and Miro are victims of a capital markets problem. “Venture capital” as we know it is simply the wrong product to finance anything but the narrowest universe of companies and the narrowest set of risks therein. This is true for many reasons -- the rest of my X feed outlines them all -- the most salient of which is venture’s impatient liquidity timeline. A company that is “venture scale” or “power law” is one that must become very large within ten years and deliver an “exit” (which is distinct from “liquidity,” to be clear) over that same timeline.

Many incredible businesses can’t deliver an “exit” on a timeline that satisfies their VCs: there’s no bid in size for their shares. In the private markets, narrative mirage and structural fund size challenges concentrate capital in a tiny number of companies; in the public markets, the same narrative mirage and structural, valuation-agnostic capital flows do the same.

Thus, we have Bending Spoons and its playbook. Identify entrepreneurs whose ambitions are constrained (explicitly or otherwise) by their investors’ liquidity shackles. Provide a “soft landing” and “return the pref.” Gut the cost structure, hike prices, and soak the price-inelastic cohort that remains. Harvest the cash flows.

What if there were something more aspirational? Consider a structure that uses the exact same cash flows that Bending Spoons harvests, but instead serves the entrepreneurs’ long-term interests. Entrepreneurs could deliver cash-flow-driven liquidity, divorced from “exits,” for investors whose timelines demand it and in doing so own a greater share of their own future. And just as importantly, they could access the ammunition they need to invest in a new direction, inside their life’s work, without completely starting over.

Bending Spoons will claim that permanent capital affords it a long-term view in the same breath that it claims founders need not be a part of their companies’ future. Bending Spoons decouples the horizon from the person. I believe that entrepreneurs building their life’s work deserve a structure that allows them to compound for their entire life, literally. And I believe that whether they can is a question of better capital markets.

This capital markets solution isn’t Bending Spoons, and it’s certainly not “venture capital.” It’s patient, aligned capital that sits entirely outside the venture system’s artificial timelines, supports entrepreneurs as they invest over decades, and generates liquidity for investors who need it along the way.

[Susana Rojas @_susanarojas]

@JDuizendstraal @wonderful_ai You know it’s special when JD tweets

[Wonderful @wonderful_ai]

Wonderful has raised a $550M Series C at a $5 billion valuation.

This latest funding was led by @insightpartners, with @salesforce joining as new investors and @IndexVentures, @BessemerVP, @IVP, @VineVenturesLP, and @9yardscapital returning.

In 20 months since launch, we're in production with hundreds of agents, systems, and workflows across a dozen verticals in over 30 markets.

With this new capital, we’ll be overdelivering for our customers, hiring hundreds of cracked engineers, FDEs, and former founders, and expanding our product capabilities across the entire enterprise.

Stay tuned 👀

[Susana Rojas @_susanarojas]

@bchandras3karan ❤️❤️

[Susana Rojas @_susanarojas]

@IDF Gracias!!!

[cruzrojacol @cruzrojacol]

#TodosPorColombia | Hoy, Colombia nos necesita.
📢 Tú también puedes ayudar donando a través de:

[Andrew Ziperski @andrewziperski]

https://t.co/xlIrwRVerF

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@visegrad24 @ABDELAESPRIELLA Cool

[Nicolás Abad @Nicobot01]

Telepatia has raised $42 million, including a $33 million Series A led by a16z.

My father’s nickname was Telepatia.

He was a doctor who passed away at 58 from a preventable cause. A few days after his death, ChatGPT launched. My first thought was that an AI Doctor would have saved his life as a patient, and that he would have loved using one as a doctor. So we built it: an AI Doctor for doctors, by doctors.

Telepatia's AI Doctor is live in more than 25 public and private health institutions, home to more than 100,000 doctors and nurses throughout Latin America 🇧🇷🇨🇴🇲🇽🇨🇱🇦🇷

We're building an AI Doctor and our goal is to bring Latin America its first Nobel Prize in Medicine since 1984.

[Susana Rojas @_susanarojas]

@Nicobot01 So proud be a small part of this journey!!!! Go nico!!!!!

[Susana Rojas @_susanarojas]

@TheRealDanSaedi Epic - congrats!!!!

[Susana Rojas @_susanarojas]

@ericmreiner 2 weeks until we vote this degenerate out

[Susana Rojas @_susanarojas]

@shaunmmaguire @petrogustavo 💯

[Susana Rojas @_susanarojas]

@_catwu @lennysan 🔥🔥🔥

[Andrew Ziperski @andrewziperski]

Venture capital evolved from featuring savvy research analysts like Mary Meeker and Bill Gurley to people who can’t define FCF because technology companies (for better or worse) generally rewarded the latter over the last few decades.

Consider the two big waves where VCs made most of their money in the last 15-20 years: mobile-first consumer social/internet and SaaS.

Mobile/social companies operated in largely permissionless markets that inherently favored young founders, who naturally are not particularly financially sophisticated. SaaS markets, while they generally favored slightly older and more mature founders, similarly didn’t reward financial sophistication; product and GTM chops were far more important.

Both internet and SaaS businesses ran relatively capital-light business models with high gross margins, which gave companies a lot of wiggle room. Financial optimization was just not a key driver of success. And these companies were all built against the backdrop of an enormous bull run and low interest rates post-GFC. Companies could generally raise cheap equity, and most felt like they just didn’t need to think too deeply about how to properly capitalize their businesses.

Silicon Valley became a place where engineering/design/product/sales skills were rewarded and finance was not. “Wall Street” was looked down upon, and people who cared about finance were derided as being slow, bureaucratic, extractive, negative-sum, etc.

These dynamics have obviously changed.

The frontier AI labs are extraordinarily capital-intensive. Some of the hottest applied AI companies have negative gross margins, where optimization on that front over time will make or break their businesses. The asset-heavy aerospace/defense/industrial companies in El Segundo naturally require capital structure sophistication. Technology as a broad industry has matured, and many winning founders are no longer whimsical Stanford types who spent their summers writing code, but Wharton grads who cut their teeth at banks and buyout firms. And, whether companies will admit it or not, the equity capital markets are essentially shut for all but a very small handful of companies, whose success will now depend on their ability to think even slightly outside the box on capitalization.

Finance is now a first-class citizen in Silicon Valley.