Zerong Wang

Mark "Z" Zmarzly 🦄 substack brings all the startups to his yard. And the startups are like, it's better than yours. And Mark's like "Damn right it's better than yours ... I can teach you, but I have to charge." Good thing he's got access to plenty Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits. See you in Melbourne at Intersekt next Wednesday and the AWS Financial Services Symposium in Sydney on Thursday. #AWSStartups #CloudInnovation #StartupEcosystem #AWSActivate #ScalableSolutions #TechForStartups #CloudForStartups #AWSGrowth #BuildOnAWS #StartupSuccess #AWSPartners #CloudFirst #FounderSupport #StartupJourney #TechInnovation #AWSCloud #ScaleWithAWS #StartupResources #AWSFunding #EntrepreneurSupport #AWSStartupsAccelerator

4

🌟 Huge congratulations to Paul Copplestone and the entire Supabase team on raising an impressive $80M Series C! 🚀 This funding, led by Peak XV and Craft Ventures, is a testament to Supabase's incredible journey as a go-to open-source platform and Postgres service, empowering developers globally. With a total of $196M raised, Supabase continues to revolutionize database management and stands at the forefront of the AI-driven demand surge, now powering 10% of AI use cases on its platform. Your commitment to creating an easy-to-use, developer-friendly ecosystem has won the trust of startups, enterprises, and industry leaders like Meta, Netflix, and Microsoft. The future looks bright as Supabase continues to innovate and scale! 🌍 Read more Here: https://lnkd.in/d89fb6QX #Startups #AI #Postgres #DeveloperTools #OpenSource #Supabase #VentureCapital #Innovation #SeriesC

5

After managing more than 1 million databases, Supabase is finally Generally Available 🐘 https://supabase.com/ga I joined Supabase 3.5 years ago to help with the Beta launch. Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson had a huge checklist of things to run through before the launch. Feels surreal going through that now, but also our priorities for GA has pretty much remained the same - open source, stability, security and performance. Build in a weekend, scale to millions! After 3 years, I am can confidently say that Supabase is THE best place to host your Postgres database (and your entire backend). All the primitives you need to build your application (Auth, Storage, Functions, Realtime and a Vector Database) are built right in, seamlessly integrate with each other and with Postgres. Oh we also have a lot of interesting announcements planned for this week!

119

13 Comments

Agree with Dheeraj. One of the most common requests we get is, why do we need a CRM if the conversations are flowing through you. So far we have avoided getting into the system of record. But AI changes everything. You don't need structured data for a system of record. And that's why we are building something in stealth. Prediction: CRMs as they look now won't exist within 2 years.

15

2 Comments

We've been a bit quiet at Lazer Technologies, but it's because we're busy building ❤️ 2 notable project launches to share: 1. Uniswap Labs, one of the biggest names in DeFi, just launched their new collaboration with KidSuper and we're pumped to help bring it to life 🦄💫 It's a major step forward in the world of crypto meets commerce, and the experience is absolutely seamless. As well, everything is built on Shopify 💚 Check out their launch announcement here: https://lnkd.in/gmruSPrf 2. Electric Capital is an early-stage venture firm that also makes tools for tracking NFTs, DeFi, and other web3 markets. We're lucky to have played a part in contributing to NFT Pulse (https://www.nftpulse.org/) with them - a free, open, analysis of Multi-chain NFT Data that analyzes on-chain transactions across multiple chains to provide real-time NFT insights, as well as their Crypto Market Map https://lnkd.in/gZRGdyDb ⚡️❤️

41

1 Comment

I pitched Transhuman Coin on CoinMarketCap. But I need your help! Transhuman Coin were selected as one of 5 projects to pitch. Can you believe that of all projects in the world we were selected?! The CoinMarketCap and HELLO Labs team said they loved my Aussie accent 😂 See the pitch 👇👇👇 BTW I need your help If you want to support projects such as rare disease research (eg. FOXG1 Research Foundation), autonomous wheelchairs (eg. Gogotech) and University of Technology Sydney brain computer interface development. Please consider voting 🗳️ for Transhuman Coin to get us up the HELLO Labs leaderboard or by reposting ♻️ this to your network. This gives us a chance to pitch to tech leaders in Hollywood if we get into the top 3. The more visibility we have, the more funding and support we can give (equity free) to projects that have real impact on human health. Vote here: https://lnkd.in/esEcsgMf

62

20 Comments

More things I've learned after interviewing 100+ Bootstrapped Startup Founders. If you want to get into ecommerce but are unsure what to sell. The stepping stones for ecommerce businesses are dropshipping and resale businesses. Dropshipping, for those unaware, is finding an item already sold in bulk in one region and working with the manufacturer to bring it to another. For example, you see that the Chinese are selling a really popular brand of can opener in mainland China. You decide you want to get this can opener into the US. You get the manufacturer to agree to the deal and start listing it on Amazon. Every time you receive orders, you pay the manufacturer for the cost of the item+shipping and they ship directly to the customer. The benefit of dropshipping is you put the cost of shipping and warehousing entirely onto the manufacturer. All you have to do is find the market, and place the ads. The downside is you'll only earn a small amount per unit. Little risked, little gained. You'll also go out of stock frequently since you'll probably only want to order after you have a certain order volume for a bulk discount. That's why dropshippers eventually evolve into resellers. Resellers are like dropshippers but they take on more risk. Resellers order items from manufacturers in bulk ahead of time, warehouse them and send them onto the final customers. Because you're taking on logistics and purchasing in massive bulk, you can "find" more money. Normally, it's better to start as a dropshipper because becoming a reseller without knowing market need is risky. Once you have a successful reselling business, you have everything you need to move into ecommerce. You'll already have warehousing, logistics, and probably a good supplier figured out. You may even have your own website. Now you just have to figure out what to sell. Fortunately, you've probably seen what's popular and already chosen a niche demographic for your reselling business. Heck, you can even ask your customers what they want to see in your store. One of the best examples of this kind of process was an Australian business I interviewed called Ozdingo Shopping run by Mal Badawi. They pretty much did exactly the process I listed above. However, instead of manufacturing their own products, they started using their reselling store to give local creators a national market. Now they have their own warehouse and are making a huge mark on Australian ecommerce. Read their story here: https://lnkd.in/gXDh7SNy I'm posting insights from my almost 2 years writing about founders every day until I run out and then I'm gonna do reruns. Check out my stores on bootstrappers.com!

3

Have you ever been confused by a transaction in your bank account? Akahu's enrichment API can help. We've created this public web tool to make it simple for anyone to use. Just copy and paste your transaction description from a New Zealand bank or card issuer. And voila, we'll display any match with a known merchant. (And for any banks and card issuers out there, you can use the API to display enriched data directly in your apps 😘).

107

13 Comments

HYPE! Some massive news: I've been putting in mad hours to make this the most comprehensive Supabase resource out there -> Supabase book is 100% real and coming in hot! After 1 year of crazy work, you can preorder: https://buff.ly/4c19uTB Got questions? Hit me up? -- #supabase #firebase #database #postgres #webdev #coding Packt

46

6 Comments

We gave 250+ engineers from around the world early access to:  -Voice -Agents -Compute -Wearables - and inference APIs They had 24 hours to hack. Here are the finalists from the "AI Supaheroes" hackathon by AgentOps.ai x Supabase x Build Club at Solaris (🧵): 1/ Agentic Reasoners Multi-agent reasoning framework for solving New York Times Connections puzzles Applied experiment where agents debate to solve complex tasks GPT-4o vs Groq benchmarked by AgentOps.ai 🥇 First place: $25k @AWS + $5k @StrongCompute credits Justin Jung 2/ PokéPrompt Pokemon simulation arena powered by agents Instead of creating your own team, you prompt an AI agent to battle for you and see which ones win 🥈 Second place: $5k @AWS + $2k @StrongCompute credits Jack Wakem Joel Tankard 3/ Dream Job AI voice agent that runs practice interviews with you and rates your performance using Vapi Also used by recruiters as a screening round William C. Wright Jonathan Talmi 4/ GitHero Agentic system for scanning and monitoring git repositories for security vulnerabilities, key leaks, and control violations 🥉 $5k AWS + $1k Strong Compute credits Sako M 5/ TL;DR Search and summarize any book by breaking down the chapters and identifying key points SparkNotes, but AI Tiffany Guan 6/ Gavin Github agents for automated issue resolution AI agent that automatically creates PR proposals to issues   Ishika Mishra Mark Shteyn Jyoti Ranjan Swain Tirth Shah

48

5 Comments

Groq has just secured $640 million in a Series D funding round, positioning itself at a valuation of $2.8 billion. This significant funding marks a response to the soaring demand for fast AI inference, driven by the need for speed in AI applications. As developers flock to GroqCloud, the company has seen extraordinary growth, now boasting over 360,000 developers creating AI applications using open-source models. With plans to deploy over 100,000 additional LPUs, Groq is focused on democratizing access to powerful AI resources. I've personally witnessed the transformative capabilities of fast AI inference in my projects, dramatically accelerating development timelines and enhancing performance. It’s evident that innovation in AI is not just for the tech giants but can empower every developer. What do you think about the increasing investment in fast AI inference? How does your organization leverage this technology for competitive advantage? With AI evolving rapidly, staying ahead of the curve is crucial. #AI #Groq #Investment #Innovation #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning

2

1 Comment

Had a great time at Geek Ventures event on Wednesday. Thanks again to Ihar Mahaniok for inviting us to meet with interesting founders and investors. A couple takeaways from the panel: Marty Ringlein of Adventure Fund, when discussing what founders should be tackling in the AI space, suggested following the same approach Jeff Bezos had with Amazon. Ask yourself 'what won't change in the next ten years?' and focus on solving those problem gaps in the market. Ihar Mahaniok talked about how many companies raise a million but fail to become a venture backable business beyond that. It is important to ask yourself if what you are building can scale in a way that is suitable for venture. Brian Yormak of Story Ventures said the best thing you can use your capital for is to invest in a moat - use investment dollars to create something defensible. Revenue is a lagging indicator of PMF so be convicted that what you are investing in will be long standing. There were many more insights from the event and I look forward to the next one. #earlystage #investing #aistartups #vc #venture

8

Six Months of Growth and Learning at Helicone Looking back over the past six months, I’m genuinely proud of what we’ve built at Helicone. Not only have we achieved impressive milestones, but we've also built an amazing team along the way. Here are some key milestones we've hit: 👉 1.5 Trillion Tokens Logged 👉 2 Billion Requests Processed 👉 10,000+ Users 👉 Doubled Our User Growth Rate 👉 Consistent Revenue Growth But numbers only tell part of the story. We've also launched features our users love: 1. Sessions Easily track and visualize multi-step LLM interactions. 2. Prompt Management & Experiments  Teams can easily version and test prompts. 3. Enhanced Speed & Performance Analyzing millions of requests in milliseconds. 4. LLM Moderation & Security Protect AI workflows from threats. Shoutout to Our Amazing Team None of this would be possible without our talented team: • Lina: Our founding designer, adding taste to our product. • Stefan: Our founding engineer, pushing LLM tooling innovation. • Yash: Our intern who has just left us to resume studies at UWaterloo • Kavin: Our current intern, advancing full-stack development and AI. Thank You for Your Support A huge thank you to our team and our community. We're just getting started and can’t wait to continue building the ultimate LLM observability platform for developers! For a detailed look into everything we've shipped in the past six months, check out our blog (link in comments 👇)

71

1 Comment

🐍 Snake Oil Alert 🐍 Shopify Merchants, have you received an email from Nostra AI this week? A good portion of our merchants have. I’m not one to publicly name and shame, but if you have already been caught out, and are still hounding merchants - I think it’s fair game. In short, Nostra has been caught artificially inflating site speed scores by cloaking content on your site, which is a big no-no, especially when it comes SEO. I’m not going to take credit for exposing them though - that was the work of Lukas Tanasiuk, Jake Casto and Youness I.. You can read more about Nostra here: https://lnkd.in/gTuQNDRZ Honestly, I thought being exposed back in December would have been enough to kill them off, but apparently not - so here we. Stepping back from Nostra though, let’s talk about some of the red flags you should be looking at when evaluating any solution: - Not being listed on the Shopify App Store. Shopify does a lot of work keeping snake oil solutions out of their App Store. - Any solution that requires you to change your DNS records. Terms such as “Edge Delivery” or “Crawler Optimization” should also be red flags. Shopify has 4.5k extremely talented engineers, let them focus on edge delivery optimisation.  - Any sales person that feels the need to send from a domain that isn’t their primary domain. Notice that ai-nostra.com isn’t Nostra’s actual domain. Nostra - if you can convince Lukas Tanasiuk, Jake Casto, Youness I. and myself that you are no longer shilling snake oil, I’ll happily make a correction post. On the bright side, it’s given us an opportunity to have some good discussions with our merchants about what we’ve got in the pipeline to keep their sites speedy. Funnily enough, this merchant actually had a 1.69s LCP, but there’s always room for improvement 😉

61

26 Comments

🚀 Exciting News! Channing and Emily's company Plenty has Launched to the Public 🎉 I'm stoked to share that their couples wealth building platform is now live! Plenty is built by a husband-and-wife led team with experience from Stripe, Even/One, and Homebase. Plenty empowers couples to invest, share, track, and plan their finances together. Personally, my wife and I have been using Plenty for about 18 months, and it's made planning for our future simple and easy, especially knowing we're earning 5%+ on our cash. No more guessing if we're on track for our goals or if we're saving enough – Plenty’s beautiful and modern UI gives us a clear view of where we are and how far we've come. Plenty is backed by industry leaders; such as the CEO and Cofounders of Wealthfront, Personal Capital, Carta, and Opendoor, Plenty just raised a new funding round, bringing their total to $8M! 💪 💸 Invest like the Wealthy: Access private wealth products like a 5.08% APY* Cash+ account, next-gen robo-advisory, and advanced tax-loss harvesting. 👥 Seamless Sharing: Flexibly label accounts as shared or private while investing together in joint or individual accounts. 📊 Effortless Tracking: Replace Mint and see clear trends for spending, earning, saving, and investing. 🗺️ Clear Planning: Achieve your milestones with personalized portfolios and plans, whether shared or private. 🪙 Affordable Pricing: Membership starts at $100/year/person + 0.20% for investing. Check out their site www.withplenty.com See their Fortune article here https://lnkd.in/gxfHbr59

16

4 Comments

Aussie Angels are running a monthly New Angel AMA, starting next Tuesday, to get angels comfortable with investing and have their queries answered Bridging that gap between joining a syndicate to writing those first cheques can span months / if not longer. And Cheryl Mack will help take some of the fear out of it by having these regular sessions. Open for all to join.  Cheryl will cover all your burning questions: - How do you gain conviction? - Is that a good valuation? - What are the latest updates on wholesale investor thresholds, and how will they impact you? - What qualifies as a small cheque in angel investing, and when is small too small? - And many more insights from the front lines of angel investing! 😇 https://lu.ma/pd22dpfx TORUS Jason Atkins Alexandra Lewis 🌊 Vinko Grgić #startups #angelinvesting #founders #capitalraising #venturecapital

9

1 Comment

🚀 Exciting news for early-stage #Web3 startups! IOTA APAC Accelerator Program is here, offering a $50,000 grant to fuel your journey. Check out the details below and apply now to shape the future of decentralized finance! #startup #accelerator #realworldassets #tokenization #defi

5

2 Comments

Supabase is now Generally Available During the first year of Supabase we set ourselves a goal: build a managed platform capable of securely running 1 million databases. Today we've proven that metric and we're announcing the General Availability of the platform that will service the next 99 million. Our tagline is “Build in a weekend, scale to millions”. This isn't hyperbole. In the past, reaching 1 million users was an incredible challenge. It took Instagram 2.5 months, Facebook 10 months, and Twitter 24 months. Over the past 12 months, we've had 12 companies start on Supabase and grow from zero to over 1 million users. 30% of the last Y Combinator batch used Supabase to launch their start ups. Rocket ships like Udio, Krea, Humata, and Pika use Supabase to build fast and scale faster. Enterprise customers such as Mozilla, PWC, Johnson & Johnson, and 1Password use Supabase to manage their applications securely. Check out what it means to be GA: https://supabase.com/ga

830

62 Comments

The Connecter 's Vision for Inclusive DeFi Supported by Leading VCs 🎉 We're thrilled to announce a monumental milestone in our journey towards financial inclusion! 🚀 The Connecter is now proudly backed by two of the most esteemed venture capital firms: Startupbootcamp Fintech and Hatcher+ 🌟 This pivotal backing is not just an endorsement but a testament to our vision and potential to reshape the fintech landscape. Startupbootcamp, a premier accelerator with a staggering $5.6 billion portfolio valuation, handpicked The Connecter from over 1.8k applicants for their sustainable fintech program. 🏆 This recognition underscores our commitment to revolutionizing decentralized finance (DeFi) and democratizing wealth access. Additionally, Hatcher+, hailing from Singapore, joined our funding round, bringing along their H2 Fund's AI-powered portfolio expertise. 🤖 Their focus on generating robust returns aligns perfectly with our mission to offer genuine utility and real-world assets within a B2B2C framework. The Connecter's approach is unique and user-centric, designed to bridge the gap between Web 2 fintech ease and Web 3 backend sophistication. 🌐 With support for over 130 payment options and an impressive 80% transaction success rate, we're setting new standards in global accessibility and affordability. This backing by leading VCs amplifies our momentum and strengthens our resolve to empower billions with full asset ownership, stability, security, and global reach. 🌍 Together, we're not just offering a DeFi solution but pioneering a movement towards a more inclusive and empowered financial future. 🌱 Join us as we continue to innovate and redefine finance for everyone, everywhere! 🙌 #DeFi #decentralizedfinance #finance #fintech #crypto #cryptocurrency #bitcoin #ethereum #AI #web3 #cryptowallet #cryptomarket #bitcoinetf

15

13 Comments