Walmart Mng. Dir. building wellness brand centered around high-antioxidant OVOO

Welcome to the 78th edition of the Geeks Of The Valley (GOTV) Newsletter, where we curate interesting early-stage startups (Series A and earlier) every week. If you enjoy and want to keep abreast with insights and interesting early-stage startups before they go big, subscribe to this newsletter ✌️.

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Geeks of the week

Startup Name: Kosterina (Please reach out for introduction)

Geography: US

One-liner: Wellness brand centered around high-antioxidant extra virgin olive oil and the Mediterranean lifestyle.

Founder(s) Background: Managing Director (Brand Incubation) at Walmart, General Manager (Home) at Jet.com, Founder at Manicube (acquired by Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spas).

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Startup Name: Pollen (Please reach out for introduction)

Geography: Singapore

One-liner: Sustainable B2B liquidation platform.

Founder(s) Background: Director of Business Development at ChinaCache (leading Chinese Content Delivery Network).

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Founders building in stealth

• Head of Growth at Hitch (acquired by Lyft).

• Co-founder at Lolly (backed by SV Angel, the former CMO of Sequoia Capital, former CEO of Apple, the CBO of Snapchat).

• General Manager at HipCamp (backed by a16z).

• Founder at Appiterate (acquired by Flipkart).

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Insight, Idea & Trend

Vivek Goyal @Goyal_Vivek

Great note by Mark Mahaney @ Evercore on the C2M / Business messaging opportunity at META Whatsapp / Messenger often overlooked by investors - 2B+ DAUs - 1B+ WAU interacting with a business - Early in monetization. Kakao/ WeChat ad ARPU $5-15 - Revenue potential $20-100B

Benedict Evans @benedictevans

The two generative AI questions I wonder most about (this week!): 1: How quickly can you do this locally on a phone (especially for narrow use cases)? 2: Given GPT4 is SO much bigger and yet made very little progress on 'hallucination', is there a clear path to changed that?

Ale Resnik @AleResnik

The advent of AI will give an even deeper advantage to hardware and real world operations founders.