Weekly Roundup: This is Personal 🤖

Happy Friday, DVC! After declaring bankruptcy in 2023, this week VICE Media announced “fundamental changes” to its distribution model. The “edgy” news outlet will no longer publish on its own site, opting instead to partner with other companies to share content.

In a time when we need hard-hitting news more than ever, sadly we’ll now have to look elsewhere to learn “How This 8-Year-Old German Shepherd Became Berlin’s Hottest Underground DJ”.

Welcome to DVC!

Welcome to the 6 new members who’ve signed up for DVC since last week! We’re happy to have you 👋 

Startup News & Weekly Poll:

2 weeks ago we wrote a short update on exciting developments from Maybe - a startup building a personal finance tracking & advisory platform.

In 2022, our Doriot Venture Club community invested in Maybe’s crowdfunding round on Republic. By Summer 2023, Maybe had limited funds and not enough demand to keep the lights on. In hindsight, they spent too much time and money building the features users wanted least.

The team eventually shut down the product and pivoted to build Detangle - an AI tool to make sense of legal documents.

The full story is wild, but the TL;DR is that on a nostalgia-induced whim, founder Josh Pigford open sourced Maybe (i.e. published the entire codebase for anyone to view/copy). In a week, Maybe became the #1 project on GitHub and added 1,500 people to a new Discord community.

The momentum helped them raise $1.5M in new funding from OSS Capital - all while keeping us “small investors” on the cap table at the same $10M valuation. With the new money and minimal expenses, they now have years of runway.

The Takeaway:

Will Maybe survive? Maybe Who knows… What we do know is that it would have been very easy for them to “shut it all down” and start over with new investors. But they didn’t… Long live Maybe!

On a related note, Doriot founder Gerry Hays is writing a weekly series titled “52 Reasons to Invest in Venture”. Maybe’s turn of events inspired this week’s post: “Reason #8 - It’s a bet on the human spirit”.

Entrepreneurship is a strange blend of triumph, tragedy, joy, and despair - often all in the same day!

To investors: Even if you feel removed from it, you have a valuable role in the process 🙏 

To founders: You never know what’s around the corner… keep pushing 💪 

To everyone: Take part in this week’s poll ;) 👇️ 

Last Week's Results:

Last week we asked if you’re using AI in your day-to-day life... 67% of you said “Not yet, but I’m looking for ways to use it“ and the other 33% said “Yes, I use it often”!

If you’re in the 33%, feel free to reply to this email and let us know how you’re using it. 67% of us would thank you for the ideas 🙏 

Vote for New Deals:

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New companies suggested this week:

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Deal Review #75 Summary:

Over the past 2 weeks we looked at Personal AI - a startup helping anyone build unique, no-code AI models trained on their individual memories.