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Derek Chu

Principal at FirstMark

Derek Chu is a Principal at FirstMark, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York City, where he focuses on consumer internet investments. He is also a Board Observer at POSH. Chu holds a degree from The Wharton School, where he studied from 2008 to 2011.

His professional accolades include being named in Forbes' 30 Under 30 list for Venture Capital in 2016 and Business Insider's list of young star investors in 2014. Additionally, he is licensed with Series 63 and Series 7 certifications from FINRA, which he obtained in July 2011.1

Highlights

Apr 17 · linkedin

Generative AI applications have reached an inflection point. Led by companies like Glean (enterprise search), EvenUp (legal), and Typeface (content creation), the first AI-native enterprise apps broke from the pack, distinguishing themselves from the wave of AI-native applications that emerged last year following the rise of OpenAI and Anthropic.

As a group, these companies grew faster than anything we’ve ever seen in the history of SaaS. Their rapid ascent blew past all prior measures of outlier potential. At Menlo Ventures, my partners Matt Murphy, Steve Sloane, and I studied these early winners and distilled the key strategies that made them successful in a new playbook designed to guide the next wave of AI-native enterprise apps:

👾 Displace services with software 🏆 Target work that is high-value, high-volume, or facing labor shortages 📈 Seek pattern-based workflows with high engagement and usage 🔓 Unlock proprietary data ✍ Embrace zero marginal cost creation 🏗 Build where incumbents aren’t, can’t, or won’t 🌟 Win with compound AI systems rather than models

Read the full post here:

Apr 3 · linkedin

Thrilled to announce Menlo Ventures' partnership with Higgsfield AI, a video AI company dedicated to democratizing social media content creation for everyone.

Founder Alex Mashrabov and his team are pioneering a cutting-edge diffusion transformer architecture that will unlock unparalleled visual realism, natural movement, and physics simulation in AI-generated videos.

The result? Longer, smoother, more coherent video sequences that rival professional content. Think the leap from GPT-2 to GPT-3 for video — a step-function improvement from the sub-5-second clips flooding social media today.

This is just the beginning. Higgsfield is ushering in the next era of video AI, and we couldn't be more excited to partner with Alex and his team on this journey. 🚀

Read more from my partner Amy Wu and I: https://lnkd.in/gaH7U9ET

Related Questions

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Derek Chu
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Experience

Principal at FirstMark
Includes roles at Hopin, Airbnb, Menlo Ventures, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Ennovance Capital LLC, Trophy Point Capital

Education

The Wharton School, 2008 - 2011

Location

New York, New York, United States