Sacra this week: Runway, Art Blocks, and Duffl

Hi everyone 👋

We’re going to be sending our members weekly emails to (1) share all the interviews and reports that we’re doing, and (2) to get more of your feedback and help us shape the direction of future research.

Check out the new research below, and book a time with us here to tell us about you—your investing and research process, what you want to learn to run your company better, or anything else that Sacra could help with.

Jan & team

New & upcoming interviews

We are publishing new interviews at a rate of 3-5 per week with founders and executives. These interviews are key to the research that we do for our reports and the funds & platforms that we work with.

Reply to the email to offer questions you’d like us to ask upcoming interviewees, request specific interviewees and offer feedback.

New

Cristobal Valenzuela, Co-Founder & CEO of Runway: $35M Series B from Coatue and Lux Ventures to rebuild Adobe Creative Cloud in the browser, using machine learning to automate video editing.
David Lin, Co-Founder & CEO of Duffl: $12M Series A post-Y Combinator to offer ultrafast grocery delivery on dense college campuses, powered by college students as the labor force.
Erick Calderon, Co-Founder & CEO of Art Blocks: $6M Seed by True Ventures to create the Gagosian of generative NFT art, built on OpenSea and the Ethereum blockchain.
Bucky Moore, Partner at Kleiner Perkins: investing in Netlify as the next cloud platform, building workflows and a developer-centric UX on top of AWS.

Upcoming

Peter Zhou, Co-Founder & CEO at Rutter: $27M Series A from A16Z—talking to learn more about the universal API trend, specifically applied to ecommerce data.
Michael Houck, Co-Founder of Launch House: $12M Series A from A16Z—talking to understand the business models of would-be Y Combinator disruptors like Launch House and OnDeck’s ODX.
Dave Nemetz, Founder at Reverb: Founder of Bleacher Report, launching a fund focused on web3 and creator economy—talking to learn more about the trend of creators functioning like independent media brands.
Jacob Wenger, Chief Product Officer at Shortwave: $9M Seed from Union Square Ventures for the team that built developer platform Firebase—talking to understand new approaches to displacing Outlook along with Front and Superhuman.
Deb Bardhan, Chief Business Officer at Highnote: $54M Series A from Costanoa Ventures—talking to round out our coverage of card issuing point solutions along with Lithic and Apto.

Product update: Highlights

We launched highlights to make it easier for you to save ideas from expert interviews and reports and refer back to them later. Just highlight a patch of text on any Sacra document and click 'Highlight' in the context menu that pops up.