Jenny Fielding

They're a global pre-seed venture capital firm investing in companies working on money, health, and work.

Jenny Fielding is joining us.

There's your panel, James.

I mean, it's incredible.

David and I also started the Fund Rockies, which was the local edition of what is now Everywhere BC.

Jenny Fielding was a Techstars managing director in New York.

Her partner, Scott Hartley, they started what was called the fund then and it was a regional strategy and we launched the rockies edition and this was this was like we knew massive already was not going to be doing pre-seed idea stage investing this was part of that sort of cards on the table we just hadn't really figured out the formula yet but in the meantime we had new tons of people that were building stuff and we helped coalesce a little bit of capital for the region and so we were doing that and we sort of knew that that like pre-seed arbitrage kind of investing was not ultimately where we were going to drive the most alpha use our pattern recognition and and network and also like the kinds of companies we wanted that got us the most excited we really wanted to see more turns we wanted to see more progress and we started looking at a lot of these companies in in deep tech and re-industrialization uh you know and and and hard tech based industries And there's no rhyme or reason to invest in them at that stage, right? It's basically, it was what David's saying before, it's about the team, their pedigree, where they came from.

So all these things sort of came together for us.

Because the valuations are just totally distorted all the way down to the seed stage.

Like Jenny Fielding mentioned that $100 million post-money valuation for a seed round is basically normalized now in AI.

Which is just terrifying math when you think about it.

I mean, if a VC buys 10% at $100 million post-money and they have a $500 million fund, they have to return to their LPs.

Yes.

Veteran VCs Dave McClure from Practical VC, Jeff Clavier from Uncork Capital, and Jenny Fielding from Everywhere Ventures went on the record.

They formally declared that they are entirely abandoning closed proprietary API wrappers.

A massive shift in capital allocation.

Yet this hardware push collides directly with platform friction coming days after Amazon banned Meta's Muse agent for unauthorized scraping.

And on this week in startups, leading venture capitalists Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, and Jenny Fielding broke down why the smart money is pouring into open weight models, warning that proprietary closed API moats have largely evaporated despite aggressive price cuts from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Before we break down the forensic data, please hit follow

or subscribe to the channel on Apple Podcasts to always listen completely ads-free.

Which leads us to our second topic, the open source venture pivot.

Yeah, the venture capital landscape is experiencing a violent recalibration right now.

In the latest episode of This Week in Startups, a panel of top VCs, Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, and Jenny Fielding, they formally declared a pivot.

Along with Jason Calacanis, right? Right,