Character Capital

Our new book Click is out today, and Jake Knapp and I are celebrating in the best way possible — with a room full of founders, running Foundation Sprints together! Thanks to all the founders here with us today 🙌 And super special thanks to Eli Blee-Goldman Kristen Brillantes Jeanette Mellinger Xander Pollock 🙏

1Fort has raised an oversubscribed $7.5M seed round led by Bonfire Ventures, with Tim Draper (Draper Associates), Karim Atiyeh (Founder, Ramp) and all existing VCs doubling down—bringing total funding to $10M. Read more → https://lnkd.in/d5ZDSUrH

Quick announcement: After an 8-month hiatus, Character Labs returns in June!!! Applications are due April 27. If you're building in AI, and you want to create a truly differentiated product that clicks with customers, take a look at Character Labs - we'd love to work with you! 🙋 What is it? 👉 Character Labs is our 4-week sprint program for AI founders. We believe it's the only startup accelerator that's 100% focused on product-market fit. That means no luminaries, no demo days, no getting lost in huge cohorts. Just 4 weeks of focused work to accelerate your progress toward PMF. 🙋 Okay, so what actually happens in Character Labs? 👉 We (Jake Knapp, Eli Blee-Goldman, Jeanette Mellinger, and I) run a sequence of back-to-back sprints with a small number of teams. Each week we help you build a new prototype and test it with real customers. We provide 1:1 and small group feedback throughout the program and in the weeks following. 🙋 When and where does it happen? 👉 IRL kickoff in San Francisco on June 4-6, then remote until July 1 🙋 Will you invest in my company? 👉 Yes, every startup in Character Labs gets a $150k investment from Character Capital. 🙋 Will you invest in my next round? 👉 Yes, we guarantee at least pro rata participation in your next round. 🙋 Who are you guys anyway? 👉 Over the past 20 years, we have helped 300+ teams solve product and GTM with our Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint methods. As partners at GV (Google Ventures), we worked closely with Slack, One Medical, Flatiron Health, Gusto, Blue Bottle Coffee, Uber, and other monster companies. As co-founders and GPs at Character Capital, we work with AI founders from DeepMind, Gemini, Microsoft, Apple, Phaidra, Fathom - AI Meeting Assistant, Orbital, extend, CTGT (YC F24), Bindwell, and more. 🙋 Where can I learn more? 👉 character.vc/labs If you have questions, please send a DM or post in the comments. Can't wait to learn more about what you all are building!

Two days after recording our podcast episode about AI, DeepSeek R1 was released, prompting some of you to ask us NEW questions about how AI will affect the future of work, products, startups, and investing. Jake Knapp is off this week, but we invited our cofounder and partner Eli Blee-Goldman back to answer these questions and — for at least a brief moment — get us caught up on the latest developments in the world of AI. This week on episode 16 of Jake & JZ, we talked about: • Why DeepSeek R1 caused such a stir • How AI innovation can come from anywhere • Our 3 newest investments at Character Capital • Types of AI founders (with examples!) • Two important lessons from a Character founder • Doing it right vs getting it right • The downside of being able to build so quickly • Our recent Foundation Sprint Bootcamp • How we get better at sprints by learning from the community

10 years ago, I was a kid watching Google I/O amidst periodically disconnected household utilities. I was totally captivated by the nascent applications of AI on display and trained rudimentary models on the aging hardware (an old laptop) I had access to. Today, I'm excited to announce that CTGT (YC F24) has raised $7.2M led by Gradient, Google's early-stage AI fund, to help enterprises scale AI beyond deep learning. The round is joined by distinguished investors including General Catalyst, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Y Combinator. We’re grateful to be supported by luminaries in AI, including François Chollet (Keras), Paul Graham (YC), Peter Wang (Anaconda), Michael Seibel (Twitch), Mike Knoop (Zapier) and Wes McKinney (Pandas). We believe this is the most important problem to be working on today. Here's why: Since my undergraduate work, I’ve been obsessed with elucidating AI's unyielding demand for compute. AI models keep getting bigger, but the fundamental inefficiencies of deep learning remain. DeepSeek showed us that hyper-optimizing model training can push performance further, but scaling alone won’t fix the underlying problem, especially as timelines to AGI are hotly contested. This is what CTGT is solving. We've built a new kind of AI stack – one that removes the constraints of traditional deep learning by rethinking how models learn and train. It customizes, trains, and deploys models up to 500x faster with state-of-the-art accuracy on a wide variety of tasks. All without requiring massive compute. Our AI deployment and quality platform has already been used by Fortune 10 enterprises to gain more control over their AI models in real-world environments. Now, we’re expanding access to more enterprises looking to move AI from proof-of-concept to production. This is just the beginning of our journey in creating the next generation of truly intelligent AI: built from the ground up to be trustworthy and efficient, dynamically adapting to your needs. If you're interested in working at the forefront of intelligence, join us. And thanks to all our supporters, including Kulveer Taggar, Adil Syed, Nate Matherson, Jake Mintz, Matthew Lenhard, Character Capital, Deepwater Asset Management, CoreNest Capital

At the end of December, Eli Blee-Goldman sent us a thought-provoking text: "Hey guys, I just caught the o3 announcement from OpenAI. Over the Christmas break it would be good for all of us to think about what it means to be investing and building in a world where virtually any idea (software, graphics, copy, etc) becomes effortless to bring into creation. Many of the existing frameworks don't apply super well here. We are small enough to be nimble, and we should think very deeply about this." We decided to have this conversation live! This week, Eli joined Jake Knapp and me on the podcast to talk about our predictions for how startups and creative work will change in the future. On episode 15 of Jake & JZ, we also talked about: • What stays the same in an AGI future? • The importance of agency • The capabilities gap • Doing meaningful work with people you like • Surprising lessons from a Design Sprint with an AI bio startup • What changes in an AGI future? • How AI can close the gap between builders and customers • AI ethics and sentience • And much more

This week, Aarron Walter and I welcome back our very first third-time guest to Design Better—Jake Knapp! Jake and co-author John Zeratsky have a new book which is a prequel of sorts to their former book, Sprint. It's called Click: How to Make What People Want. We chat with Jake about the elements of what he calls a “foundation sprint” in this book, as well as some examples from the book of companies that have used foundation sprints effectively. We also talk to Jake about his decision to co-found Character Capital, a VC fund aimed at helping startups at seed stage with capital and sprints, and the qualities that they look for in their founders when deciding to invest.