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
🚨 Big news: We’ve raised $160M for @Work_Bench Fund IV to back Seed-stage founders with massive enterprise ambitions. Enterprise is in our DNA and with Fund IV, we’re quadrupling down.👇

At the end of a pitch meeting yesterday, a founder said something that really stuck with me: 🗣️ "This has been my best conversation of the day. I'm feeling super energized because you're asking the same questions that have been keeping me up at night for the last few months."…
Is this the Cambridge Analytica moment of vibe coding?
There is “I fucked up” And there is “I built an app and accidentally leaked the drivers licenses of thousands of women on the internet” level of fucked up RIP
Others said “Move fast. Don’t bother with the old guard. Tech is the future.”⚡️ Then the market reset in 2022: 💸 Budgets tighten 🫠 SaaS collapses ✂️ Big tech reduces headcount Suddenly, all those hot takes don’t hold up so well. But the new playbook? Not so simple…
Since it's earliest days this has been an incredibly impactful and engaging community, and seeing the way that @Rick_Zullo and team keep raising the bar is amazing! Can't wait for this year's event 🙌
1) Today, I'm excited to announce @EqualVentures' 4th Annual Emerging Manager Circle Summit! Last year, we hosted >350 emerging managers and LPs for one of my favorite events of the year and this year is going to be bigger and better than ever before🧵 newsletter.equal.vc/p/announcing-t…
Fun and different event format from @PathlightVC and @BananaCap_ at @tryramp A comedy night! @TurnerNovak welcomed everyone with some expense management jokes and then @Kaz_Khadem took a turn we definitely weren't expecting by talking about a Penn classmate of his... 🙈


Killer group! Pumped for the milestone and this event 🙌
AuthZed is turning 5! 🎉 We’re throwing the ultimate authorization event on Aug 20 – with product announcements, a peek into our "lab," and talks from some amazing folks including @andy_pavlo @JacobMoshenko @artieshevchenko & more Details and registration here:…
How the hell did we get here?! - Jews must have deserved the Holocaust? - Hitler was good? Wtf is wrong with people 🤬
“What if the Jews did something to the Germans”, “Hitler was trying to save the world”, “How do we take [the Jews] down?”, “Genocide.” This isn’t 1940s Germany — it’s a 2025 podcast. Suzette, a recent culinary high school grad from south Florida goes full Nazi and Pompano-based…
🤖 Introducing FireHydrant’s MCP Server, now in beta! AI assistants like Claude or Cursor can tap directly into your FireHydrant data, letting you can manage incidents, alerts, and retros using natural language. 🎉👉Check out the User Guide: firehydrant.com/blog/firehydra…
As I rattle uptown on the subway, I can’t help but wonder: Does @travisk ever ride this thing? Or is he strictly @Uber all day, every day? 🧐
Who should pay for board dinners? In the old-school VC playbook, startups picked up the tab - for investor travel and board dinners. But let’s be real: If you're an early-stage company watching every dollar of runway, why should your balance sheet be buying VCs bone-in ribeyes…
This is a great take "So much of the industry simply doesn't have the discipline. [...] They care more about having fun & trying to be famous than investing." "The hallmark of a great investor is someone who thrives in the mundane, who is perfectly fine doing one boring thing…
One of the simplest sources of alpha in VC is to consistently do the mundane: market research, screening companies, doing the diligence work, writing the memos, showing up in working sessions, sending follow ups. 99.9% of investing, even in VC, is boring; it's muck and grunt…
Zombiecorns: 💸Can’t raise 📉 Can’t grow 🤖 Can’t pivot to AI ‼️Now even their exec teams are on their way out So, who buys them? What happens next? 🎥90 seconds worth watching. Have you seen this play out? Let me know what you’re witnessing 💬
This view is way too myopic. The key footnote from the post is buried: "And maybe he didn’t need more money [after PayPal], but it was setting the right tone for the company." We have founders who are trying to pay for childcare so they can dedicate more time to work, founders…
This is so true, especially in these bizarre times with many founders acting like pure mercenaries. We have a few CEOs in our portfolio who refuse to take any salary or only draw the minimum needed to qualify for health insurance. Mad respect for them!🫡
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If you’re in your 20s in tech right now, a couple of years at OpenAI, Anthropic or a great AI startup will give you 10x the career juice of any MBA or graduate degree (and a lot less debt).
What. A. Week. 💥 At @Work_Bench we turned 12 last Tuesday, and this week was a perfect reminder that we’re just getting started. Here’s a peek at what went down: 🧠 Monday: Kicked off the week diving into a killer new startup during IC. 📈 Tuesday: Held our annual team…
AI is moving fast - and causing whiplash for founders and investors alike. But heading into the weekend, I’m feeling fired up after our @Work_Bench annual strategy offsite. We spent the day deep in conversation as a team, carving out rare but necessary time to zoom out and ask:…


Proud for @Work_Bench to be a day 0 backer of @ericho_goodfire given the incredible vision he has for the company 🙌 Listen to him on @sequoia's podcast
What if we could crack open AI's black box and see exactly how it thinks? @GoodfireAI CEO @ericho_goodfire reveals how his team is decoding neural networks and editing AI behavior, and he boldly predicts we'll fully understand AI minds by 2028.
Precisely 🎯 This is a negative tax on the innovation economy
This is the problem with the FTC antitrust policy. There are no consumers here to protect here. Nobody in tech or industry cares about this deal. There are zero concerns about the concentration of power, access, data, IP, or anything. Why are they waisting everybody's time.
"everyone's looking at the $2.4b number and missing the real story: a business doing $82m arr couldn't find a buyer at any price. that's not a success story. that's a warning. the margin calls are coming" What a 🔥🔥 read by @TheEthanDing. CFOs are going to be critical…
having claude write out my analysis on the windsurf situation -
Current state of VC: more opportunities, more heartbreak. This is the way @fendien