The article also highlights the summer of 2023 as the hottest on record since 1880 and how this affected early-stage founders and investors. It provides advice on when to reach out to investors and features insights from various venture partners, founders, and CEOs. The piece also presents a pitch deck teardown for Tanbii's $1.5M pre-seed deck and discusses the importance of FinOps in optimizing cloud costs and infrastructure. It also raises concerns about the potential disadvantage of startups in the AI era due to the power of data. The article concludes with a discussion on the wait time for EB-2 and EB-1 green card categories for those born in India and the changing nature of pitch decks.
Key takeaways:
- Summer 2023 has been recorded as the hottest since 1880, affecting early-stage founders who were trying to pitch their ideas to investors who were on vacation.
- TechCrunch+ offers a recurring column, How to Pitch Me, which provides tips and strategies from early-stage investors who are currently interested in making deals.
- Robert Luo, founder of Mi Terro, raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed funding round for Tanbii, a carbon-management platform, less than a year after raising the same amount for Mi Terro.
- AI-related startups received $40 billion in venture funding in the first half of 2023, raising concerns about whether smaller startups can compete with giants like Salesforce and Microsoft in the AI race.