Matt Cohen

🌊 Founder & Managing Partner @ripple_ventures 🎙 Host of @TankTalkPodcast / Family Office - - Be an LP

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

Thanks for inviting me onto the @BNNBloomberg show today @JonErlichman to discuss everything happening in the venture capital markets these days and how Canada and our entrepreneurs are playing a vital role in creating the next great tech leaders!

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

@bwertz @VersionOneVC The 🐐 ! Congrats

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

Awesome to join @TurnerNovak on @ThePeelPod 🙏

[Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak]

New @ThePeelPod live from Allocate's Beyond Summit

I asked 15 investors to give me their spiciest take.

Thanks to @numeral, @FlexSuperApp, and @Amplitude_HQ for sponsoring this episode!

Timestamps
1:22 Seed investing is dead (@thistrippjones)
5:56 Seed is not dead (@BRosenblatt4)
13:19 Most consensus era of VC ever (@naywilliams)
18:02 Taking the Power Law Pill (@pratyushbuddiga)
29:15 The 2nd-time founder premium is dead (@mattybcohen)
32:46 AI will crush intelligence labor
42:25 New deep tech investors will lose their shirts (@sunilnagaraj)
46:39 ChatGPT for robotics is still 15 years away (@josungjoon)
52:07 The app layer ARR reckoning
58:30 The AI bubble will pop in Q2/Q3 (@amiasmg)
1:08:22 Most individuals invest in VC wrong (@jonoberheide)
1:15:25 Allocators have become too allocator-y (@federdan)
1:20:55 LP’s should value information, not just returns
1:24:09 Upcoming litigation of Russian doll SPVs (@ashercdkey)
1:30:13 Why retail needs private market access (@SPintoPeyronel)

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

@TurnerNovak put 15 of us on the record for a live episode of @ThePeelPod at the @joinallocate Beyond Summit.

The question: what's your spiciest take on the VC market right now?

Mine: the 2nd-time founder premium is dead.

For a decade, repeat founders commanded a 2-3x valuation premium vs first time founders for the same idea, same stage, same TAM. The logic was clean, it made total sense. They would hire faster, ship faster, raise faster, fail less often. That edge was real.

AI just inverted that curve.

A first-time founder with Claude, Cursor, and a clear thesis is shipping product in weeks that used to take months. Sales motions that needed a full GTM hire are getting handled by the founder and an AI SDR. Decks, models, board materials, hiring funnels, all compressed.

The repeat founder's moat was never pattern recognition. It was operational leverage. AI is now the great equalizer on that leverage, available to anyone with taste and conviction.

The next decade of fund returns could come from first-time founders nobody saw coming, not from the same names doing it again at higher entry prices.

Other hot takes in the episode worth your time. @thistrippjones, @pratyushbuddiga , Amias Gerety, Sunil Nagaraj, @DanFeder, CFA and more.

Shoutout to Turner Novak for the format and Allocate for the venue.

Watch & Listen Now

#venturecapital #vc #aiinvesting

https://t.co/giBMxuemRw

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

This was fun! 🎙️

Shooting @fnthawar and many other amazing @TankTalkPodcast episodes this week at the @TOtechweek #homecoming event - presented by @deel

Subscribe to know when episodes drop soon - https://t.co/OXXgZuFnXx

[Jordan Satok @jordansatok]

This is going to be a good one! @mattybcohen @EliotPence @TankTalkPodcast

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

See links for full episode:

▶️ YouTube: https://t.co/uQvodms3M3
🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/FqMHAIYOVa
🟢 Spotify: https://t.co/5VYO7pOR8Q

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

The reported @SpaceX IPO valuation is ~2x the combined market cap of Canada's big six banks! ($1.75T vs US$840 billion)!

Sit with that number for a second. It reframes how you should think about where capital is actually flowing, and what the next wave of trillion-dollar IPOs does to everything else competing for it.

On this week's Tank Talks Rundown show, @ruffoloj and I dig into one of the most loaded weeks in tech: quantum funding gaps, SPACs back on the TSX, vertical SaaS that won't die, and the AI burn nobody's pricing in.

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

See links for full episode:

▶️ YouTube: https://t.co/CrzEyLggBK

🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/FqMHAIYOVa

🟢 Spotify: https://t.co/5VYO7pOR8Q

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

@JasonrShuman drove Uber at night to fund himself while sourcing VC deals by day. One of those deals was @latchaccess

Now he's a GP at @PrimaryVC , which scaled from $190M to $1.6B AUM without ever drifting from seed.

In Episode 320 of Tank Talks, we get into:

→ Why most VC platform teams are built to fail, and how Primary's 60-person Impact team delivers customers and talent, not just capital

→ Why software-only moats are dead, and why he's betting on hardware-activated agent networks

→ Primary's incubation model: backing founders only after the wedge is validated

→ The lessons from winding down his footwear brand Category5, and how that founder's scar tissue shapes how he invests

The throughline for any emerging manager:

Differentiation isn't a tagline. It's an operating model you build deliberately and refuse to dilute as you scale.

#venturecapital #seedinvesting

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

@hsu_jonny @PacBio Incredible! Well done @hsu_jonny and @blankbio_ team!

[Blank Bio @blankbio_]

Today, we’re excited to announce our $7.2M seed round alongside a strategic collaboration with @PacBio! At Blank Bio, we help pharma make more informed decisions in clinical trials by capturing the biology that makes each patient’s tumour unique.

We do this by training RNA foundation models to learn the patterns that shape disease progression and how patients respond to treatment. In our collaboration with @PacBio, we will generate long-read, bulk RNA-sequencing data from patient tumour samples across multiple indications. This dataset will be used to further train and evaluate our models.

Our models are currently focused on two main applications. First, we predict how a patient’s disease is likely to progress over time from their molecular profile. Through the FDA-recommended approach of covariate adjustment, these RNA prognostic scores can help clinical development teams design trials that reach statistical power with fewer patients. Second, we’re working to help pharma teams understand biological differences between patients so they can identify who is most likely to respond to a given therapy.

We are thankful to @definevc, @LeonisCapital, Nova Threshold, @ripple_ventures, @SignalFire, @ycombinator, and other investors for being early supporters in our vision. This financing will support the continued development of our foundation models, expanded collaborations with pharma, and growing our patient-level datasets.

Read the press release: https://t.co/co7TUzVM0B
Read the blog from the team: https://t.co/kvukd5VFnO
Learn more about Blank Bio: https://t.co/1HOUzdnZYv

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

@mamoonha @figma Great talk today at Beyond Summit @mamoonha - humble and inspiring at the same time.

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

Hot take segment with @TurnerNovak on @ThePeelPod at @joinallocate Beyond Summit in Park City, UT.

Short, opinionated, spicy.

Stay tuned.

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

@elonmusk orbital data center vision is already a reality for one Canadian company, which launched 10 satellites on Falcon 9 in January.

This week on @TankTalkPodcast: @KeplerComms - CEO @mitrymin and I sat down at their Toronto HQ to learn more.

Watch: https://t.co/lyvfKZXx3P

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

See links for full episode:

▶️ YouTube: https://t.co/GE09ZvNmjY

🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/FqMHAIYOVa

🟢 Spotify: https://t.co/5VYO7pOR8Q

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

🇨🇦 Bring it home 🇨🇦

New Tank Talks with @JonLoveKingSett, founder of @kingsettcapital , one of Canada's largest private equity real estate platforms.

His thesis: Canada doesn't have a capital problem. It has a permission problem.

👇We dug into:

The $25B Canada Strong sovereign wealth fund
Tim Hodgson's Major Projects Office and the 5-10 shovel-ready projects promised by spring 2027

Why institutional capital is finally coming home to Canada

And on real estate:

Triple-A office is quietly the strongest asset class in the country

For-sale residential is in pain, but a sharp recovery is coming

Office-to-hotel conversions are just getting started

The capital is here. The talent is here. The opportunities are here.

What's missing is permission to build.

Worth your time if you care about where Canada actually goes from here. (Links Below)

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

New @TankTalkPodcast 🇨🇦

@ruffoloj and I break down Mark Carney's $25B Canada Strong Fund: serious sovereign wealth vehicle or political fund?

Plus @cohere / @aleph, @XanaduAI, @SpaceX / @cursor_ai , @Meta layoffs, and @thomabravo's Medallia wipeout.

Watch & Listen Now -
https://t.co/aYJ7AIMgAO

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

New @TankTalkPodcast 🇨🇦

@ruffoloj and I break down Mark Carney's $25B Canada Strong Fund: serious sovereign wealth vehicle or political fund?

Plus @cohere / @aleph, @XanaduAI, @SpaceX / @cursor_ai , @Meta layoffs, and @thomabravo's Medallia wipeout.

Watch & Listen Now -
https://t.co/aYJ7AILILg

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

New site, new era at @ripple_ventures

This past quarter we backed founders across AI infra, AI for science, deep tech, and AI-native services.

Full write-up + fresh look: https://t.co/5TXoZy26G4

[Matt Cohen @mattybcohen]

The first LP I ever pitched asked how much cash I had in my bank account before he'd listen to the fund deck.

He was testing one thing: would I play the long game.

Full conversation with @avarma on Mantle Mondays

👇

[Mantle @withmantle]

@mattybcohen (@ripple_ventures) joins @avarma on this week's episode of Mantle Mondays to break down what's actually getting funded right now and what isn't.

https://t.co/K6esgqvHMd