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Joyce Shen

How to build A+ team?

Originally posted on July 23, 2022 Recent article in WSJ about Tour de France provides a good reminder of how to build high performing team and what great teamwork looks like. To win the yellow jersey in the Tour de France, it definitely takes more than the lead rider. Lead

Approaches to Strategic Financial Planning for Startups

Originally posted on September 7, 2022 I want to turn to a different topic: approaches to strategic financial planning for startups, a timely topic now that we are in September! A few weeks ago, I wrote why starting financial and strategic planning early in 2H of the year is important.

AI Generative Models are eating the world

Originally posted on September 21, 2022 My Berkeley co-instructor David Steier and I have been talking about large transformer and/or generative models for a while. We have seen many students using these large models and apply them in very interesting and creative ways to enable various meaningful use cases

A note on due diligence as a VC

Originally posted on November 23, 2022 I wrote about due diligencing ethics in my last post; I want to follow up and write about due diligence in general. Typically, people think that due diligence involves getting answers to a checklist. This is a small (and easy) part of the due

Berkshire Hathaway 2022 Letter: Key Learnings

originally posted on February 28, 2023 One of things I did this weekend was to read Warren Buffett's 2022 letter discussing Berkshire Hathaway. A few things stood out to me: When we open the letter, the first page is not the letter, but rather Berkshire Hathaway's

How startups can navigate 2023?

Originally posted on March 31, 2023 It's kind of crazy that we are now at the end of March. It is shocking how fast time is moving. I remember that it wasn't that long ago that I was working with companies on budgets and 2023 strategic

How to Drive Customer Loyalty?

Originally posted on April 1, 2023 New York City weather turned fabulous early afternoon on this Saturday. We walked around the park and then stopped at a small Italian restaurant for a quick lunch. The owner, dressed impeccably, stopped by each table and said hi. He asked how the food

Thoughts on Generative AI, June 2023

This week I had the opportunity to speak at Women in Data Science event hosted by 6sense and the Generative AI event hosted by CFA Institute of New York. I also had the opportunity to meet the some of the new Berkeley SkyDeck startups as an advisor. Some high level

Defensibility in AI Applications

I have seen many AI startups in the past few months, and we need to talk more about defensibility. While it is great to see rapid innovation in ML and AI, I urge entrepreneurs and startups to consider defensibility further. What is defensibility? Defensibility is demonstrating high barrier to entry