Hannah Grey VC

Early-stage marketing plans should extend far enough to create direction, but remain flexible enough to reflect how quickly a startup changes. In this clip from The Download Series, Matt Handy, founder of HazelGray, explains why he plans around a three-month window. It gives the team time to address urgent needs, identify quick wins and build toward larger priorities without pretending it can predict what the business will need a year from now. The plan is also valuable for what it leaves out. Startups have no shortage of potentially good ideas, but limited time and resources. Sometimes the most important marketing decision is: “That’s a great idea, but not right now.” ______ The Download Series is an exclusive educational series for Hannah Grey founders, featuring candid conversations with founders, operators, and industry experts. Our goal is to help founders accelerate growth, avoid costly mistakes, and build category-defining companies.

Hannah Grey VC is proud to participate in Blee’s latest funding, bringing the company’s total capital raised to $27 million, including a $20 million Series A co-led by Fin Capital and SMBC's Atlas Beyond Ventures. Blee is already used by dozens of Fortune 500 enterprises, with customers including SoFi and Expedia Group. The company grew annual recurring revenue 10x between June 2025 and June 2026, reflecting how urgently enterprises need a better way to govern the growing volume of content reaching their customers. AI has made it possible for teams to create more content, across more channels, faster than ever. But the legal and compliance teams responsible for reviewing that content still largely rely on manual processes. That gap will only widen as AI-generated content becomes the norm. Blee is building the content governance layer enterprises need to keep pace. Its AI-first platform reviews content before publication, monitors it after it goes live, and gives legal, compliance, marketing, and brand teams a shared system of record. Customers are already reducing review times by up to 65% while bringing content to market faster. Congratulations to Guy Shahar and the entire Blee team on this milestone and the category you are building.

AI is changing more than what founders build. It is changing the cognitive profile required to build at the frontier. Using VibrationsOS and our proprietary founder-evaluation frameworks, Hannah Grey analyzed more than 40 breakout founders from the previous technology cycle alongside more than 150 founders building AI-native companies today. In her latest article, Jessica Peltz-Zatulove explores five shifts that emerged:  1️⃣ Identity: Engineer-Entrepreneur → Scientist-Entrepreneur Founders are increasingly translating advances in fields such as model architecture, robotics, computer vision, and data science into commercial opportunities. 2️⃣ Edge: Known Paradigms → Contrarian First-Principles Thinking Their advantage often begins with questioning a technical limitation or accepted assumption that others treat as inevitable. 3️⃣ Resilience: Business Setbacks → Intellectual Uncertainty and Societal Responsibility Founders must adapt as the science evolves while confronting questions around bias, safety, employment, privacy, governance, and trust. 4️⃣ Network: Built to Dominate → Built to Compound Research, open-source tools, benchmarks, and technical communities can create ecosystems where credibility, adoption, and talent compound over time. 5️⃣ Thinking: Business Models → AI Systems Founders must reason across models, data, infrastructure, governance, economics, and human behavior, understanding how a decision in one layer affects the entire company. Swipe through the carousel for a closer look at the five cognitive shifts defining the AI-era founder, then read Jessica’s full article at the link in the comments.

If prospects visit your website and still ask whether you sell software or a service, your messaging is not doing its job. In this clip from The Download Series, Matt Handy, founder of HazelGray, shares a simple diagnostic for startup messaging: pay attention to the questions you repeatedly answer after someone has encountered your brand. Those questions reveal what your messaging should have explained upfront. The goal is not to say everything. It is to make what you do immediately clear, using language anyone can understand. ______ The Download Series is an exclusive educational series for Hannah Grey founders, featuring candid conversations with founders, operators, and industry experts. Our goal is to help founders accelerate growth, avoid costly mistakes, and build category-defining companies.

Every startup is told to find Product-Market Fit, or PMF. However, founders building category-defining companies often need to find a different PMF first: Persona-Message Fit. Why? Companies creating entirely new markets are asking people to rethink what is possible. They are introducing products that have no obvious comparison and challenging long-held ways of working. As AI accelerates the pace of innovation, this is becoming far more common. In those situations, the first questions people ask are rarely about the technology. They ask what this innovation means for them. Will it change how they work? Will it make them more effective or make them obsolete? Is this a welcome opportunity or another disruption they need to navigate? Those questions are rooted in emotions. That is why talking about features is sometimes too early. Before people can appreciate how your product works, they need to understand why it matters in the context of their own lives. That is where Persona-Message Fit comes in. It is about finding the message that creates immediate resonance with the right audience by framing the emotional tension they already feel and the resolution your innovation provides. We put together this simple framework to help founders decide which messaging playbook their company actually needs.

How do you spot AI legal risk before it becomes a problem? According to Tiffany Morris Palazzo, founder of Pragnetic Partners, it starts with understanding how AI is actually being used inside your company. In this clip from a recent episode of The Download Series, she shares two practical recommendations for founders: 🔵 Maintain an inventory of AI tools being used across your organization, including unofficial or personal tools that may expose company data. 🔵 Make AI governance part of your product development process by documenting where AI is used, evaluating potential risks, and making informed decisions as products evolve. ______ The Download Series is an exclusive educational series for Hannah Grey founders, featuring candid conversations with founders, operators, and industry experts. Our goal is to help founders accelerate growth, avoid costly mistakes, and build category-defining companies.

Rob Gregg and the team at STAND+, a Hannah Grey VC portfolio company, have earned a place on the 2026 Inc. 5000, recognizing America’s fastest-growing private companies. STAND+ has reimagined footwear around a simple but overlooked insight: shoes should protect the health of people who spend their days standing, walking, and moving. Its energy-recovery footwear is engineered to reduce impact and relieve joint stress for healthcare professionals, hospitality workers, athletes, and everyday movers. Congratulations! We're proud to have supported you from the beginning! #inc5000

Hannah Grey VC has been selected for the 2026 RAISE Select, recognizing 101 emerging managers chosen by a committee of more than 70 leading limited partners. We look forward to joining RAISE Global and more than 330 LPs at the RAISE Global Summit on October 22 at The Presidio in San Francisco. Registration link in the comments. 

"Heavy discounts on secondary sales are an inefficiency tax, a failure of process that can and should be avoided." Kate Beardsley, Founding Partner at Hannah Grey VC reframing liquidity as a relationship problem, not a finance one. Read more 🌶️ takes below

In her latest article, Hannah Grey VC’s Jessica Peltz-Zatulove explores how AI is changing the cognitive profile required to build at the frontier. Using VibrationsOS and our proprietary founder-evaluation frameworks, we analyzed more than 40 breakout founders from the previous technology cycle and compared them with more than 150 founders building AI-native companies today. The analysis surfaced five cognitive shifts shaping the AI-era founder: 1. From engineer-entrepreneur to scientist-entrepreneur 2. From execution within known paradigms to contrarian first-principles thinking 3. From business resilience to intellectual uncertainty and societal responsibility 4. From networks built to dominate to ecosystems built to compound 5. From thinking in business models to thinking across entire AI systems In the article, Jessica examines what these shifts mean for founders building in this cycle and for the investors seeking to recognize exceptional founders earlier.