Jonathan Lehr @fendien

Enterprise VC @Work_Bench | We Lead Seed Rounds with $2-4M Investments | Organizer @NYETM, @KauffmanFellows 19 | My better half is @MichaelaLehr | 305 Native work-bench.com NYC Joined March 2008

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

3 hours ago

It's wild how many AI email bots now use out-of-office replies as prospecting signals. My @Work_Bench cofounder is on vacation, and her OOO lists me as the backup contact. Years ago, that just meant she'd come back to a queue of automated follow-ups. Now it means I'm getting flooded with emails titled: "Intro via Jess" "Jess suggested I reach out" Apparently the newest SDR on the team is the OOO auto-reply.

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

21 hours ago

wow that's some creative hustle

GEOFF @geoffreywoo

a day ago

i remember this trip. i had a call with scott and zach to invest in the @cognition series A @ $2b while they were en route to visit this kid’s parents. @ScottWu46 is a savage and a winner. hard to compete against or bet against someone who goes this hard

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Proby Shandilya @ProbyShandilya

5 days ago

"Charlie Munger talked about the importance of being multidisciplinary and multidisciplinary thinking. He thinks getting a functional understanding of many disciplines is not that hard. You can just go read the books now or you can talk to your AI about it. I think multidisciplinary thinkers are going to do incredibly well." Activating Munger Mode for H2 2026. If you are too and you're in NYC, shoot me a DM-- we should grab a coffee.

TBPN @tbpn

5 days ago

.@collision is bullish on two types of people: high-agency individuals and double majors. "There are two categories of people I would be super bullish on right now and I think will do incredibly well over the next 10-20 years. First, high-agency people. The people at Stripe who

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

5 days ago

In an era of AI talent wars, founder conviction matters more than founder pedigree. One of the hottest debates in venture right now is around founder legibility. They're the pedigreed founders that every investor immediately understands and the perspective is that you should back them because they will attract tons of capital and have an advantage in the market from being "king made." Here's the wrinkle. Some founders may now be too legible. Their backgrounds are so attractive that the biggest risk isn't competition from another startup. It's getting poached by Big Tech and the AI Labs. Over the last few weeks I spoke with three different Seed investors who had the same story. All three paid up for exceptionally credentialed founders. Each was in a different sector across agents, AI infra, and security. The premise was straightforward: expensive at Seed, but potentially massive outcomes. Then something else happened. The companies started showing promise and the founders got offers they couldn't refuse. These weren't large acquisitions of the companies, but rather talent raids. Big tech and AI labs increasingly don't want to compete with the best talent. They want to hire it. The result is a strange dynamic for Seed investors. The founders everyone agrees are exceptional may also be the founders most likely to get pulled off the field before the company reaches escape velocity. So what do you optimize for? Founders who have a unique world view, are talented enough to build something important, and hungry enough to turn down the comfortable path when it arrives. That's the hard part of Seed investing today. Finding founders who are legible enough to believe in, but not so obvious that someone else buys the dream before it becomes a company.

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

6 days ago

@mmurph @TechCrunch Congrats Matt and team on the new fund!

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

6 days ago

@vasuman @ProbyShandilya sure is!

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

6 days ago

@arian_ghashghai @Erica_Wenger correct. here's the data... x.com/i/status/20248…

Jonathan Lehr @fendien

4 months ago

Wild stat from StepStone about emerging managers: In 2021/2022 there were 938 managers who raised a Fund I Since then, only 190 subsequent funds have been raised by this group

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

6 days ago

@briannekimmel over time you develop a Spidey sense to avoid them that is unless you're @DanielChesley and they jump on you 🤭

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

7 days ago

LFGGGGGG 🔥🔥🔥

Shams Charania @ShamsCharania

7 days ago

BLOCKBUSTER: The Milwaukee Bucks are trading franchise icon Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bobby Portis to the Miami Heat for Tyler Herro, Kel'el Ware, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Kasparas Jakucionis, 3 first-round picks (including No. 13), 1 pick swap and 1 second-rounder, sources tell ESPN.

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

a week ago

Never skip leg day!

Ali Ghodsi @alighodsi

a week ago

@figma @grok can you fix the photo so leg days are included?

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

a week ago

ha this is cool

Thomas Dimson @turtlesoupy

2 weeks ago

did you make it into the superintelligences? are you in the weights? intheweights.com

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

2 weeks ago

@nikunj this is such an important call out and not enough people are talking about it sucks that employees are the ones to take the hit, often unknowingly 😤

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

2 weeks ago

So great to be at the @FinTechLab's Annual Demo Day at @BNYglobal @prashantreddy presented @artian_ai's platform for building controls-native agentic workflows Artian has built-in vs bolted-on controls for multi-agent use cases with a specific focus on Financial Services

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

2 weeks ago

"The right customer intro at the right time can really inflect a seed stage company's trajectory" @DanielChesley sharing more about the @Work_Bench model on his @awscloud Summit panel For enterprise startups there's no better place to be immersed in a customer ecosystem than NYC 🗽

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

2 weeks ago

At @awscloud NYC Summit to cheer on @DanielChesley's VC trends panel Walking the floor beforehand, it's wild to see some of the logos still kicking and boothing it up

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

2 weeks ago

@kseniam0s @SapphirePrtnrs @RecastCapital @screendoorvc @hamilton_lane @Vintage_Inv Several awesome names here that we're fortunate to work with at @Work_Bench You forgot @StepStoneVC and @LevelVC though!

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

2 weeks ago

Read Nnamdi's full analysis and methodology here - whoisnnamdi.com/taking-stock-o…

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

2 weeks ago

What a unique analysis by @whoisnnamdi He set out to calculate the total number of seed stage companies that are “alive” at any moment, and surprisingly no one had done that analysis before With some thoughtful estimating and a few assumptions, he arrived at pretty solid data set His findings were striking - Seed company exits outpace new Seed company fundings right now There are various forces contributing to this - non-AI companies being deemed unfundable in this market, some companies going right to A, and others bootstrapping - but nonetheless it's a pretty surprising chart to see

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

2 weeks ago

@sharongoldman Congrats Sharon! Very exciting

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Jonathan Lehr @fendien

2 weeks ago

An interesting byproduct of today's Seed market: rounds keep getting bigger, while more emerging pre-Seed and Seed funds are being launched with relatively small fund sizes. The result? A growing pool of co-investor capital that still needs someone to lead the round, set terms, and write the anchor check. We recently led a $6M Seed where the founder had over $10M of interest from smaller funds already in their orbit. The challenge wasn't demand. The challenge was that none of those firms could write the $4M check needed to anchor the round. Until a lead emerges, all of that interest doesn't actually move the company much closer to closing. Then comes the irony: once the lead commits, there may only be $2M left in the round. Suddenly many of the firms that were interested from the start can't get any allocation. It's a reminder that fundraising is about finding the right capital stack. In today's Seed market, the ability to lead rounds may be more differentiated than the ability to participate in them.