ExpertDojo: Investing in Startups from LA to the World

Hi folks,

My name is Minh Do, and I’m helping out interviewing and writing articles about founders, investors, and builders in LA. If you want to be featured or know folks who want to be featured, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn. This week, we talked to Brian Mac Mahon from ExpertDojo. It’s a really fun interview, digging into Brian’s thinking and what ExpertDojo is up to. Keep an eye out on their newsletter for more updates coming from them soon!

🏃♀️ Quick hits

The Founder: Brian Mac Mahonis a well-traveled Irishman who has managed to find himself domiciled in Los Angeles. He is an experienced founder and investor as the self-titled head honcho of ExpertDojo.

The Company: ExpertDojo has invested in over 250 companies worldwide, mainly in pre-seed and seed. Most startups are minority and female founded technology companies but are opportunistic in terms of industry.

Tip: ExpertDojo regularly hosts events across a wide spectrum, so keep a look out. It also offers programs for young startups to get them to growth and revenue.

How did Brian Mac Mahon make it from Dublin, Ireland all the way to Los Angeles, California - building companies along the way, including one of the most vibrant startup ecosystems in ExpertDojo?

Brian comes off with a straightforward, opinionated, and spirited candor that is rare in soft-hearted California. His strong opinions hail from a lifetime of entrepreneurship that spans the globe and has observed the rise and fall of waves of companies. He’s lived in over 40 countries, including all over the United States.

It’s Brian’s perspective on Los Angeles, entrepreneurship, and innovation that are really telling about the kinds of startups he wants to see in the world and what he has an eye for, and ultimately, what kinds of startups he wants to see at ExpertDojo. When asked about what is unique about startups in Los Angeles, Brian got passionate:

“Right now, startup is moving back to its core, as it’s forced to with every recession. I think really great companies build phenomenal products based on a really good story, right? And so storyline without a good product is highly likely to fail, and a good product with a poor storyline may not fail but it's much harder to be successful. Now, a great product with a super story line, it's gonna do amazing things. And LA, without question, is the uncontested champion of the world when it comes to stories.”

And this, for Brian, is in contradiction to what we see in other tech-heavy cities.

“People go and stay in cities for different reasons and what that does is it crafts who they become and what they're able to create. People come to LA because they felt that they had the ability to be able to achieve the thing that they'd always imagined was unachievable or they had the ability to be on the screen. The stories here are glorious. They’re beautiful. They’re about human emotion. It’s very hard to do that outside of LA because VC’s outside LA are glorified accountants. And when have you heard a glorified accountant tell a good joke?”

For that reason, he thinks that LA has “the ability to be the center of entrepreneurship in America” and by contrast he thinks “the oversupply of capital in Silicon Valley is an abomination. It’s a cancer in America.”

At first, this sounds like a strong opinion, but Brian goes on to say that he isn’t “saying anything that everybody doesn’t know.” After all, we’ve seen the rise and fall of WeWork, Theranos, and more, right? The overheating of capital has led to oversubscribed hype rounds in companies that lacked a business model or failed to ultimately deliver on their promises to users while inflating their offerings to the demise of entire industries (we’re seeing that play out with the strike in the wake of the rise of streaming).

“It’s a cancer in America. But it’s not the people, okay. What's happened is: it's not that venture capital is bad. It’s what we’ve allowed to happen to it. Once you have multi-billion dollar funds, you have the ability for VCs to put a hundred million dollars in a Series A. Once that happens, terrible companies can temporarily win against great innovation. So what we've done is we have smothered all of the great entrepreneurs for 15 years. Look, anybody can raise seed, my mom can raise seed. Seed is irrelevant when the next round is a hundred million dollars. It's about A. So who’s raising A? Nobody. Only the unbelievably exceptional companies.”

This sentiment is very powerful. Seed startups are very crowded, but the real difficulty in raising is Series A, and you have to be a real legit business to raise A. This line of thinking gets precisely into Brian’s theses with ExpertDojo:

“Recessions are wonderful times. I dream of recessions like this. I mean, I have roughly 270 startups at ExpertDojo and when any one of my founders moans about a recession, I tell them to stop being a f***** idiot and just go out there and build a proper business.”

In sum, Brian’s thinking is that recessions force entrepreneurs to focus on the fundamentals of business. This is why Brian pushes his current cohort of entrepreneurs, it’s not about raising money or branding, etc. The most important factor is growth.

“The only thing founders should care about is growing. They just don't know it yet. They think what they care about is investment, but they should only care about growing, so you have to help them grow. And we can’t help them grow for only 12 weeks. It's too little time. We have to help them for at least a two-year period and preferably a four year period. So we have interaction every single week with them for years, much of it one-on-one, with a strong focus on go-to market, and the execution of sales and marketing tactics that will move the needle.”

Therefore this is a great time to build and see what the next generation of innovation will be. Part of this thinking is Brian’s interest in supporting the larger ecosystem of startups in Los Angeles and worldwide. ExpertDojo doesn’t only invest in Los Angeles, but in companies from all around the world, as long as they align with the thesis of growth.

On the back of this growth, Expert Dojo has decided to do what any good investor would do, further support those businesses with more capital to fuel continued growth. These successes have been the impetus for Expert Dojo to grow itself beyond their flagship accelerator, and are now in the process of raising a $50Million fund, part of which will be invested into the strongest of the accelerator's alumni.

Brian and his team continue to push the envelope and plant their unique VC flag in the Santa Monica soil. “At Expert Dojo we are a fund for the people and by the people. If any investor or founder wants to be involved with us, we welcome them to join as an LP or apply to be a portfolio company. After all, what good is it for a lad from Ireland to live the American Dream, if he can’t pay it forward to the future builders of this great nation.”

For those interested to learn more about Expert Dojo please contact Brandon@expertdojo.com

Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.

💡 Creative Synergy Between Hollywood and Artificial Intelligence

Sep 22 2023

🔦 Spotlight

Executives in the media and entertainment industry are betting that AI can be a positive force by augmenting human creativity in addition to increasing efficiency. These companies range from brand new startups like Strada, an AI-enabled cloud platform with tools for production and postproduction to more established AI-powered companies including Invisible Universe, developing family friendly franchises on social media, and Toonstar, developing irreverent adult franchises on web3. This is not to mention the incumbent Hollywood studios who are snapping up AI talent while their hands are full with a striking workforce worried about AI.

We had the opportunity to delve into how ToonStar uses AI and web3 to create community-driven franchises.✍️🤝🤖

Image Source: Toonstar.com

🏃♀️ Quick hits

The Founder: John Attanasio and Luisa Huang are both Hollywood veterans. Prior to launching Toonstar, John spent nearly fifteen years developing franchise properties and driving innovation at Warner Bros. and DreamWorks where he held roles in marketing, business development, digital content creation and tech commercialization. Luisa also spent over a decade at entertainment behemoths such as Disney and Warner Bros. holding a variety of roles in strategy, consumer products, business development, and digital content creation.

The Company: Today, Toonstar is an interactive story studio focused on creating entertainment franchises through community-driven storytelling. In essence, it bridges the creative minds in the writing room with everyday fans, inviting them to actively participate in the content creation process. This unique process is made possible through technology, namely Web3, blockchain, and AI.

LA Connection: Toonstar is headquartered in Los Angeles and is deeply integrated with the Los Angeles entertainment ecosystem given the extensive industry experience of its founders.

Toonstar, founded about eight years ago by Disney, Warner Bros., and Dreamworks veterans John Attanasio and Luisa Huang, operates as an interactive story studio. Its main focus is on building entertainment franchises through community-driven storytelling. Essentially, Toonstar connects writers with everyday fans, allowing them to actively participate in content creation. This unique collaboration is made possible through technology, including Web3, blockchain, and AI.

The Role of Blockchain and NFT in Franchises:

Toonstar uses blockchain technology and NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) as a key part of its approach. They distribute NFTs representing characters in their franchises to the community. NFT owners can then shape their character's backstory, with more NFTs giving greater voting power in deciding the story's direction. The creative process at Toonstar is similar to traditional studios, where writers create scripts for each episode. However, there's a twist - each episode ends with a cliffhanger, and the community decides what happens next. These choices are presented for voting, sometimes with full creative freedom. Toonstar's machine learning tools facilitate this interaction, blending fan input with professional storytelling seamlessly.

The Role of AI in Franchises:

At first, AI mainly sped up episode creation behind the scenes. But gradually, it moved beyond that and became part of the community-facing aspect. In "Space Junk," Welbecca became the first AI-voiced character, serving as both a character and a tool to help NFT owners develop their characters and stories.

The upcoming Toonstar franchise, "Fortun3," goes even further in integrating AI. It includes an AI-powered simulation game that blends with the episodes, adding a real-time dimension to the storytelling, coinciding with the FTX trial.

Exploring Toonstar's Franchises:

Toonstar has made its mark with past franchises like "The Gimmicks" and "Space Junk." "Gimmicks" was the first interactive TV series in the Web3 realm, co-produced with Mila Kunis, featuring a comedic storyline about wrestlers. "Space Junk," created by Dominic Russo, explored humor among space garbage collectors.

Toonstar is not oblivious to the fact that anything related to blockchain is out of favor with the public, in fact, it is the subject of their next franchise. "Fortun3" is inspired by the FTX implosion, mixing elements of "South Park," "Silicon Valley," and "BoJack Horseman," and will feature T.J. Miller from "Silicon Valley."

While entertainment titans are in the midst of a hiring frenzy still trying to grapple with how best to incorporate generative AI into their business practices, Toonstar is one of many creative businesses driving progress by innovating their way past the enormous barriers to entry in standard production companies. As the entertainment industry evolves, Toonstar's dedication to inclusivity and innovation is creating opportunities for new voices and unique storytelling experiences. 🎭🎬🌟

Want to invest in real estate but don’t have the time or money to buy and manage a whole property?

Investors are flocking to Arrived, a Jeff Bezos-backed real estate investing platform that even Zillow Co-founder Spencer Rascoff loves using. It's a beautiful app and web platform that already has over 353,000 people who have invested over $100M in real estate properties. We don't blame them - Arrived takes the guesswork out. You just:

• Browse expert curated vacation rentals and long-term rentals (only <0.2% of properties pass their expert diligence process before being offered to you)
• With just a few clicks, select the properties you like and invest anywhere from $100 to $50,000+ per property
• Sit back while Arrived takes care of the management and operations for you. Simple.

Real estate has outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 20 years as an asset class - but it's not easy to get into. Arrived's seamless platform fixes this. So what's stopping you from becoming a real estate mogul?

🤝 Venture Deals

LA Startups

• Afterparty, a fan connection and monetization platform for creators, raised a $5M Funding Round led by Blockchange Ventures, joined by Acrew Capital, Act One Ventures, Tamarack Global and Wilson Sonsin. - learn more
• Bevz, a software platform for independently operated and small chain liquor/convenience stores raised a $3.1M Funding Round led by Dynamism Capital and Golden Section Ventures with participation from Stage 2 Capital, Hustle Fund, Bridge Investments, Tiller Partners, Irish Angels and others.- learn more
• Gametree, a cross-platform gamer social network and universal gamer login system, raised a $1.75M Seed Round. - learn more
• Estate Media, a personality driven real estate media company, raised a $1.65M Funding Round from investors including Powerhouse Capital, Upstate Shredding CEO Adam Weitsman and others. - learn more

LA Funds

• WndrCo participated in a $100M Series B for Writer, a three-year-old San Francisco startup that uses LLMs trained on extensive online text datasets to improve corporate content creation. - learn more

📅 LA Tech Calendar

Friday, September 22nd

• LA Tech Wind-Down 🗽- Join Startup Coil and The KINN Friday evening in Venice for an alternative to the mid-week happy hour for networking, chill vibes, and functional non-alcoholic libations.
• HackSC Presents: USC Hack Night #1 🗽- Join others in tech and tech-adjacent fields Friday night on USC’s campus to hear from USC's AI Collective, Capture the Flag (CTF) team, and a surprise special speaker.
• Climate Night: Activity + Mixer 🗽- Join Climate Designers, Climate Collective, andTerra.do in Glendale for an exciting evening of fun and connection at Climate Night: Activity + Mixer!

Monday, September 25th

• Tech Networking - Studio City🗽 - Join other tech enthusiasts at an exceptional gathering, attracting diverse professionals from all corners of the tech industry, including investors, founders, marketers, sales experts, engineers, and more.

Wednesday, September 27th

• Investor & LP Only Poker Evening - Step into a world where strategy, decision-making, and calculated risks converge in the form of a poker tournament designed exclusively for investors and fund LPs. This investor only event in Santa Monica is hosted by Expert Dojo, Incisive Ventures and Pitbull Ventures.

Thursday, September 28th

• Starburst's SoCal Aerospace Community Mixer🗽 - Join the Starburst Aerospace team Thursday night in Hawthorne for some BBQ, beverages, and vibrant conversation with our local aerospace & defense community of partners, investors, founders, portfolio companies, and ecosystem players!
• Founders Pack: Wolves Hunting Unicorns Summer Startup Pitch & Gaming Bash - Join Founders Pack Thursday night in the Arts District for their Summer Startup pitch and gaming bash for founders & investors from pre-seed to series a startups.
• AI x Creativity: Unlocking Creative Potential - Join others interested in AI in Santa Monica Thursday evening at an event exhibiting interactive AI entertainment pop-ups and a panel discussion lead by director of creative consulting at Designworks LA, Paul Ferraiolo, about how AI can amplify the role of the creative.

🗽 - Free

📙 What We’re Reading

• Deloitte AI Institute's new Generative AI Dossier reveals key business-ready use cases for Generative AI Deployment. -
• See how compensation at startups has changed significantly in 2023 in Carta’s State of Startup Compensation, H1 2023 Report. -
• Listen to (or read) an engaging conversation between Minnie Ingersoll, Partner at TenOneTen, and Adrian Fenty, founding managing partner at MaC Venture Capital and former mayor of Washington, DC. In this episode, Adrian dives into the intersections of government and technology. - listen here

Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.

✨Diverse, Impact-Driven Founders Shine at Plug In South LA's Demo Day

Sep 15 2023

🔦 Spotlight

Plug In South LA, a Los Angeles accelerator program, hosted their 2023 Founder Showcase at Blackbird House in Culver City on Thursday night. Founders made their pitches and then participated in a short Q&A session with Plug In South LA’s founder Derek Smith. 🎬🚀🌟

Half of Plug In’s first national cohort, consisting of ten companies, are based in Los Angeles with the rest dispersed across the country from Washington D.C. to San Francisco. Diversity is the name of the game for this group of companies. Not only is Plug In South LA designed for under-represented founders the companies themselves span the gambit when it comes to sector with healthcare, social networking, marketplace startups and more.

Plug In South LA was founded by LA-native Derek Smith in 2014 because he noticed a significant lack of representation and opportunities for Black and Latinx communities in the growing tech industry in Los Angeles, particularly in South Los Angeles neighborhoods like Crenshaw, Leimert Park, and Inglewood. He wanted to bridge this gap and create a platform to empower underrepresented talent by providing networking, exposure, and support within the tech sector. According to its website, Plug In South LA’s accelerator is “designed for Black and LatinX founders who are focused on solving big problems in Healthcare, Fintech, Digital Media, Climate Control and Sustainability Efforts in historically marginalized communities.”

Scroll down to see more information and the full list of companies! 💻🌴🌇

Want to invest in real estate but don’t have the time or money to buy and manage a whole property?

Investors are flocking to Arrived, a Jeff Bezos-backed real estate investing platform that even Zillow Co-founder Spencer Rascoff loves using. It's a beautiful app and web platform that already has over 353,000 people who have invested over $100M in real estate properties. We don't blame them - Arrived takes the guesswork out. You just:

• Browse expert curated vacation rentals and long-term rentals (only <0.2% of properties pass their expert diligence process before being offered to you)
• With just a few clicks, select the properties you like and invest anywhere from $100 to $50,000+ per property
• Sit back while Arrived takes care of the management and operations for you. Simple.

Real estate has outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 20 years as an asset class - but it's not easy to get into. Arrived's seamless platform fixes this. So what's stopping you from becoming a real estate mogul?

🤝 Venture Deals

LA Startups

• Bold, a healthy aging platform, raised a $17M Series A led by Rethink Impact, with participation from Samsung Next and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, Khosla Ventures, GingerBread Capital, and Primetime Partners. - learn more
• Requirements management and digital thread platform, Prewitt Ridge, raised a $4.1M Seed Round led by Squadra Ventures, joined by Stage Venture Partners, Aurelia Foundry, Wonder Ventures, Haystack, Acequia, TechStars, GC&H and others. - learn more
• Morty, a platform to help people find local ‘IRL’ experiences and cultivate real world interactions between friends, raised a $2.2M Seed Round from prominent Los Angeles-based firms including Wedbush Ventures and Wonder Ventures. Initially only featuring escape rooms, Morty recently expanded into haunted attractions with plans to feature immpersive theater, speakeasies, location based VR and more!
• Mavida Health, a maternal mental health platform, raise a $1.5M Pre-Seed Round. -
• VideoAmp, a media measurement and optimization software company, raised a $150M Series G led by Vista Credit Partners. - learn more
• Strada, an AI-enabled cloud platform with tools for production and postproduction, raised a $1.9M Pre-Seed Round from some major Hollywood players among others. - learn more

LA Funds

• M13 led a $5M Seed Round for Carenostics, a revolutionary AI platform for identifying chronic disease patients and prompting treatment. - learn more
• Mucker Capital participated in a $12M Series A for Optera, a Boulder, CO-based company providing ESG and carbon management software. - learn more
• Alpha Edison participated in a $33M Series D extension for Kin Insurance, the direct-to-consumer home insurance company. - learn more

📅 LA Tech Calendar

Saturday, September 16th

• Y3K Innovation Summit USC - A day filled with workshops, competitions, and opportunities to connect with industry leaders and fellow tech enthusiasts of all levels. The event is designed for anyone interested in exploring the future or entrepreneurship, social impact, and career development within the emerging tech industries including digital content creation, virtual and augmented reality, blockchain application, artificial intelligence, and e-gaming.

Wednesday, September 20th

• Startup Cafe🗽 - Meet and connect with like-minded entrepreneurs, investors, and industry professionals while enjoying a nice cup of coffee or going on a hike or both Wednesday morning in Venice.
• The LA Business Show - Day 1 🗽 - Join hundreds of business experts and leaders for the first day of this business expo in Downtown Los Angeles built to equip, educate and encourage the small businesses and entrepreneurs with 300 exhibitors, 150 seminars and unmissable masterclasses.

Thursday, September 21st

• The LA Business Show - Day 2 🗽 - Join hundreds of business experts and leaders for the second day of this business expo in Downtown Los Angeles built to equip, educate and encourage the small businesses and entrepreneurs with 300 exhibitors, 150 seminars and unmissable masterclasses.

Friday, September 22nd

• LA Tech Wind-Down🗽 - Join Startup Coil and The KINN Friday evening in Venice for an alternative to the mid-week happy hour for networking, chill vibes, and functional non-alcoholic libations.

Other events to add to the calendar

🗽 - Free

📙 What We’re Reading

• Disney’s recent deal with Charter Communications signals the growing challenges of transitioning from traditional TV to streaming. -
• SpaceX's satellite internet division, Starlink, falls short of Elon Musk's ambitious 2015 projection and faces challenges expanding its subscriber base, especially in urban areas. -
• 5 things to know about a potential strike against video game companies. -

🚀 Plug In South LA’s 2023 Cohort

See below for all 10 companies featured at Plug In South LA’s 2023 Demo Day.

🩺 At Their Side, LLC

HQ: Long Beach, CA CEO: Emily Woodman-Nance

Sector: Healthcare

Description: At Their Side is a 24/7 healthcare status platform that enables healthcare providers to communicate with families, allowing staff to dedicate more time to providing care rather than being occupied with phones.

🪴 MyVoluntier

HQ: Atlanta, GA CEO: Aubrey Gibson

Sector: Social Networking Platform

Description: MyVoluntier is a virtual civic engagement hub, akin to a 'LinkedIn for civic engagement,' centralizing community initiatives, events, resources, fundraising, and volunteers to inspire social connection and drive collective impact.

🍽️ Nutrible

HQ: St. Louis, MO CEO: Kwamane Liddell

Sector: Healthcare

Description: Nutrible is a technology platform that provides virtual social service navigation and nutrition-centered chronic care management to vulnerable patients and communities.

💼 Peadbo

HQ: Washington, DC CEO: Keith Chaney

Sector: B2B Software

Description: Peadbo (short for Personal Advisory Board) is a cloud-based platform that allows users to build and manage teams dedicated to their personal or professional growth and create recurring newsletters for their broader network of supporters and advisors.

💐 Postal Petals®

HQ: Los Angeles, CA CEO: Talia Boone

Sector: B2C

Description: Postal Petals®, an immersive floral and wellness startup, uses fresh cut flowers and do-it-yourself flower arranging to promote creative expression as a form of mindfulness and self-care.

💸 Prosperety Technologies Inc.

HQ: San Francisco, CA CEO: Darren Black

Sector: FinTech

Description: Prosperety Technologies Inc. is a fintech SaaS platform that helps small businesses succeed financially with: the right customers at a reasonable cost, unlimited access to no-fee, no-credit-check, no-revenue, capital from consumers and the ability to easily build and get business credit. All in the same place, on the same platform.

🏀 Subler

HQ: Los Angeles, CA CEO: Carlos Rivera

Sector: Marketplace, Proptech

Description: Subler is a B2B/C SAAS marketplace that connects schools with communities, making it easy for event organizers to find and rent school spaces. Subler democratizes access to athletic and event spaces and simplifies the rental process by centralizing new leads, creating leases, and collecting rent — all in one place.

📳 SwayBrand

HQ: Los Angeles, CA CEO: Horace Flournoy

Sector: Marketplace

Description: SwayBrand is a marketplace that connects brands with creators for on-location user-generated content. They aim to be the new studio for creators and help brands reach new audiences through authentic, personalized content.

👟The Crease Beast

HQ: Los Angeles, CA CEO: Matt J.

Sector: Consumer Products

Description: The Crease Beast is an innovative shoe care brand that provides sneakerheads with effective products to preserve footwear aesthetics.

*The Crease Beast was not present at the Demo Day but is part of the 2023 cohort

🚗 Upward

HQ: New York, NY CEO: Osvaldo Rodriguez

Sector: FinTech

Description: Upward helps 5M ride share drivers and delivery workers save at least $2,500 in taxes by automating the process of finding the largest possible deductions, so they pay less when it is time to file.

Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.

📦 Crate: Get Your (Online) Life in Order

Sep 14 2023

Hi folks,

We have another founder profile for you this week. It’s a fascinating early stage consumer business with just about the strongest LA ties possible. Read on below for more!

🏃♀️ Quick hits

The Founder: Anna Bofa is an LA native and Dartmouth graduate (go Big Green 🌲🌲), who has worked for some of the most successful consumer internet companies in Silicon Valley, including both Google and Facebook (pre-Meta shift).

The Company: Today, Crate is your AI-enabled space to save all your content, from any source and any file type. As it matures, the AI engine will learn about you and be able to curate “Crates” of content for your next trip, research project, hobby, or event without you having to lift a finger. Crate has raised pre-seed and seed rounds and is actively raising capital now!

LA Connection: Crate founder Anna Bofa was born and raised in Los Angeles, has raised money from multiple top LA VCs (Upfront Ventures, MaC VC), and the company is headquartered here as well.

I don’t know about you, but my online life is a mess. I have five email addresses, files stored across a multitude of Google Drives and my personal desktop, social media accounts on the major platforms, a notes app full of random ideas, shared albums on my phone, and a multitude of other content saved in places I don’t even know. I’m sure I’m not the only one in desperate need of a digital Marie Kondo. If you’re like me, Anna Bofa and her company Crate are coming to save the day.

Pre-Crate

🌴 Anna Bofa was born in sunny LA but went about as far from home as possible (in the continental US) to attend Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. At Dartmouth she immersed herself in the startup scene. While her classmates were prepping for jobs on Wall Street, reading the Financial Times and WSJ, Anna was avidly poring over TechCrunch, starting from its earliest days in the mid 2000s. Anna was hooked on reading about the seismic shifts in the business world, led by companies like Google and Facebook. Her jumping off point into the world of technology happened when she organized a speaker from Google to come all the way to Hanover New Hampshire to speak to her business club. After the talk, she and the speaker were at dinner, where he asked her why she was still thinking about a career on Wall Street, when she should be working for an innovator like Google.

In 2009, Anna applied to Google’s bizdev team, got the job, and moved to the Bay Area right out of school. For context, in 2009, Google’s share price was less than $10 per share (adjusted for stock splits), while it’s now trading at $136 per share. It was already a massive company, but it wasn’t yet a true pillar of the business world as it is today. When she was starting out, she still had to explain to business owners what internet marketing was and why it was superior to advertising in the Yellow Pages and in magazines.

❝

My first job at Google was to help businesses understand the world had changed. Back then most businesses still used the Yellow Pages. There was this divide between the internet and the physical world, which was just starting to get bridged.

After two years helping transition the world to the digital age, Anna moved to Dropbox, which had just raised a Series B. She was one of the first hundred employees, and got her first taste of creating software for storage and organization of information. She then left to be an early employee at Pinterest (which was pre-revenue at the time), where she was even more immersed in the world of consumer content curation and organization.

After three years at Pinterest, Anna decided to do something a little different. She left Silicon Valley for Africa, working for a year with the Grameen Foundation in Kenya and Uganda, helping local entrepreneurs build a for-profit mobile data collection business. While Anna had been in the tech and startup scene for almost a decade at that point, she had never truly been on the ground floor of a startup, and she started getting the entrepreneurial itch.

That said, she still had to get one more feather in her Silicon Valley cap before setting off on her own, so she joined Facebook in 2017.

Thanos collecting Anna’s resume

2017 was an interesting year for Facebook. The 2016 election had just happened, moms - not college students - were now the dominant force on the platform, and the company had to do some soul searching. Zuck and co decided the core of the product should be Facebook Groups, and Anna joined to help lead that effort. Facebook Groups are still massive, with over 1.8 billion users per month in 2021. Anna was on the ground figuring out what made groups like “New Moms of Los Angeles” and “Massachusetts Real Estate Agents” tick. What she found was that the most successful, happy, and engaged groups were those where curated content was shared constantly.

This helped crystalize her vision for a new startup - one where content curation, sharing, and discovery was central, but people were not the product.

Crate

📦 Initially, Anna thought about building her new idea within the Facebook ecosystem, but (rightly) decided that building something just to be owned by her employer was probably not the best use of her time. So she struck out on her own, going through months of “co-founder dating” before eventually realizing she could just build the initial product herself as a solo founder.

❝

I had this idea in my head that you need to have a co-founder to start a company. And I felt like I tried it, but I was sort of being held back because I was trying so hard to fit in with another person. So that's when I just decided to just go out on my own and be a solo founder.

Anna had been trying to get the company off the ground in London and then in San Francisco, but eventually connected with LA-based Upfront Ventures to lead her pre-seed round, after which, she decided it was time to move back home to Los Angeles. She then went on to raise another round led by another top-tier LA fund, MaC Venture Capital.

The idea for Crate at inception was pretty much what it is today, two years later. The goal is to help you organize your online life by saving content across all platforms and file types into a single location, a “Crate,” and making that Crate shareable and AI-enabled. For those of you who love Pinterest, Crate definitely has echoes from Anna’s time there. The key difference is that, according to Anna, Crate is a data company rather than a social company - more a Google than a Facebook or Pinterest.

🤔 So how does Crate work?

The easiest way to understand is with an example. Let’s say I’m planning a trip to New York. I’m scrolling on Instagram and see a photo a friend took. I add that to my crate. Next I’m looking at flights on Kayak or Google Flights and am deciding between two flights. I add them to my crate. I go on Yelp or Tiktok and find cool restaurants, I add them to my crate. Now this Crate is shareable, but the unique part comes from the AI enablement. Crate has built its own AI models, which take in data from all Crate’s users and build you custom Crates based on what the community is adding to Crates, and what you’re personally adding.

The end goal looks something like this: You’ve used Crate for a while. It knows your general preferences across entertainment, travel, education, etc. Now you’re planning a trip to Mexico City, and instead of you manually pulling in everything for your Mexico City experience, Crate takes what it’s learned about you, adds it to what it’s learned from everyone else going to Mexico, and pulls together a completely AI generated Crate with the best possible restaurants, activities, and travel details curated for you. This doesn’t only work for travel, but also for anything else you do on the internet. It will be able to help with research, with news, with entertainment. It will be like a personal assistant organizing your internet life for you.

Crate is still in its early days. Anna and team have spent the last two years building a cutting edge product, which is finally available as public beta. I’ve been playing around with it, and it’s been pretty helpful to have a single place to go for topics I’m passionate about (e.g., Los Angeles tech, dinosaurs, etc.), and the AI recommendations are just starting to kick in.

What’s next for Crate? Anna and co are actually just hitting the market now to raise some new capital to “build the next great consumer platform,” so if you’re interested in learning more, feel free to reach out to her directly or to dot.LA, and we’ll put you in touch.

Today Crate is available as an iOS app and a Chrome extension, so you can find it wherever you live on the internet. 📦🎁📦🎁

WIl Chockley is a partner at 75 & Sunny, where he evaluates potential investment opportunities across sectors and works with founders to build their strategy and execute on their vision.