500 Global

At the Proximate Summit ( https://lnkd.in/gRDyC6Ga ) last month in NYC, I shared some early thinking on a question I've been sitting with since leaving 500 Global: If the art and science of company building is changing, shouldn't the capital structure that supports it change too? The session, "A Field Guide to Investing in Capital Efficient AI", was a conversation with Joyce Koltisko from the Yale Endowment and moderated by Jorge M. . We covered a lot of ground. Here's what I put on the table: AI native companies, businesses that fundamentally could not exist without AI, are reaching profitability faster than any prior generation of startups. Gamma hit $100M ARR with 50 people. Surge AI bootstrapped to a $30B valuation before taking outside capital. The Lean AI Leaderboard is tracking dozens more. These companies don't need capital for runway. They need it, if at all, for signal, for enterprise credibility, for access to networks. That changes the entire power dynamic between founders and investors. Meanwhile, the instruments we use haven't moved. The SAFE note is 10+ years old. Ownership norms of 20% at seed were built for companies that burned cash for three years before finding product-market fit. And VC distributions to LPs have been painful across recent vintages. Something has to give. Bloomberg published their new AI billionaires list today — 19 new entrants worth a combined $59B. What stands out to me isn't the number of names. It's the ownership concentrations. Edwin Chen at Surge AI didn't raise outside capital for years. He retained the equity. Now he stands to capture more personal wealth from his company than founders who raised ten times as much. I'm convinced this will be an archetype that gets studied: the capital-efficient founder who treated dilution as a last resort, not a milestone. https://lnkd.in/gBFs7sMS I don't know exactly what the new capital design looks like yet — revenue participation, structured profit-sharing, automated information rights via API — but the founders who are already renegotiating these terms are showing us where this is headed. Joyce brought the institutional perspective: even with all this change, allocation decisions still center on people, networks, and conviction. That tension, between capital efficiency and human judgment, is where the real design work lives. Appreciate Jorge Torres for creating the space and the Proximate team for putting this together. More to come.

Collaborated with Lucia Perttula on a short video of our week at GITEX AFRICA in Morocco. Come follow our journey and activities, it was an exciting week! 500 Global Demola Adegbite Reda LAKHLIFI

Day 1 of Silicon Valley Takeover. We bring some of the best international founders in our portfolio and put them right in the middle of the action in SF. Same house. Same city. Same access. No excuses. Two sessions set the tone. Khailee Ng (Managing Partner, 500 Global) opened with a number that reframes the entire game: SF raises $2–3 billion per week in early-stage deals alone(not counting the mega rounds). Most countries don't see that in a year. Only the top startups win. But if you're not here, you don't even know what the bar looks like. That's why we built SVT around three core skills: → Think Bigger → Willingness to Change → Do Whatever It Takes In the afternoon, Albert Lee , co-founder of MyFitnessPal, joined us. 9 years bootstrapped. One round raised. $475M exit to Under Armour. His entire philosophy came back to one question: "What is making this hard for the user right now? Fix that." "Moving motivation is actually very, very difficult. Almost all of our time was spent reducing friction." And the line I keep coming back to: "If users succeed, we succeed. That's all that matters in this game." 20 more days to go.

Congrats Koya Matsuno and Gatwĩri Njogu-Mokaya ! This is proof of your brilliant work. Always proud to see 500 Global 's Sustainable Innovation Seed Accelerator alumni doing well. Keep building.

Tomorrow I’m sitting down with Peter Walker for a webinar to walk through some of the charts we found most compelling at the moment: • Why seed valuations are climbing — and what’s driving it • The growing shift toward building in atoms, not bits • Where the next wave of unicorns is quietly taking shape We hope that you leave with a fresher perspective on today’s market, a sense of how this cycle fits into the bigger picture, and a few signals worth keeping on your radar. To join us, check out the link 👇 📅 April 15 | 9–10 AM PT, 12–1 PM ET Register here: https://lnkd.in/eb7csyvG 500 Global Carta VC Unlocked