Recorded

Agentic VC Dojo Launch Session

Our kick-off launch session is an All-Hands of all Kauffman Fellows that are interested in developing skills and mastery over AI & Agentic Workflows. We want to catalyze self-organizing Working Groups that take on Projects. We aim to help all participants gain AI superpowers that benefit their personal productivity, professional trajectory, and firm-wide objectives. Elbow grease encouraged... participation and possibly some leadership necessary for true value. Casual observers welcome, but no promises.

When: Wednesday, APR 29 · 12:00 PM EDT · 60 min
Tags: Agentic-AIVenture-CapitalEmerging-ManagersCommunity

With

Speed-demo presenters

Marcus Brotman

Launch

Presenting on
Intake forms + OpenClaw + Notion for better deal-pipeline insights.
Wesley Barrow

Correlation Ventures

Presenting on
Zo Computer for portfolio & pipeline news monitoring.
Nicholas Cooper

Parslee.ai

Presenting on
Context management for sharper Agent Executive Assistants.

Hosted by Michael Staton & Emily McMath

The kickoff session for the Agentic VC Dojo.

We'll set the table for the year:

what "agentic" AI, or any kind of AI, can reasonably tackle.
how to best set up, configure, and use AI Tools, from basic through technical
how to evaluate and select the right tools for your workflows, expensive through free.
how to manage costs, personal and firm-level
the practices we've seen work (and the ones we've seen fail),
and how members can apply AI and Agents in a VC firm context.

Format

Time	Segment	What happens
5 min	Framing	The "Dojo" concept, goals, and structure
20 min	Inspiration Set	Four "speed demos" (5 min each) from guests and a Kauffman Fellow
5 min	Polling & Backchannel	Live polls and backchannel discussion
20 min	Town Hall	Bring an AI workflow you're trying to operationalize, or ideas and hunches to discuss
10 min	Q&A + Next Steps	Open Q&A, nail down follow-up actions, and next steps for our Dojo community

Who this is for

VCs from analyst to partner, Kauffman Fellows of course. No prior AI experience required. From "I use Chat GPT to write emails" to "I'm building an AI-powered investment assistant" — everyone is welcome.

You'll get more out of the sessions if you come with a real workflow you're trying to improve, but pure observers are welcome too.

We are kicking off a skill-based “peer learning” series on implementing AI Agents to help with Venture Workflows. Will be a “Dojo” series — interested folks can participate, contribute, and enhance concrete skills over time.

20m: An Inspiration Set: four “speed demos” (5min each)
3 guests and one Kauffman Fellow that have seen a small breakthrough in one of the many venture workflows we all drown in —-
1. Intake forms processing and data augmentation, from OpenClaw into Notion
2. Portfolio news monitoring,
3. Executive Assistant Agents with context improvements (for email and scheduling),
4. Investment memo generation.

The remainder of the time will be polls, discussion, and collaboratively developing tracks for further program development.

There will be a follow up at end of May to demo any work that came out of this session, and continue the iteration cycles.
Assuming all goes well, we will try to hold the Agentic VC Dojo the last Wed of every month.

Smaller teams and emerging managers, as well as anyone burdened with more work than they can handle, should benefit. If you don't have management fees to spend, or don't control them, hiring for challenges like these are not an option.

One day, maybe we can step off the rollercoaster between crushing it and burning out.

Hope we give everyone a few AI superpowers.

See you then,

Michael Staton & Emily McMath

Who's already in the room

A working room of VCs already building

60 Registered Kauffman Fellows + invited peers
37 Firms represented Distinct funds, on five continents
73% Already building Of survey respondents — workflows, agents, or both
40 Shared their context Survey responses we'll workshop together

Where the room sits today

Pre-event survey signal

40 registrants answered. Multi-select on the experience question, single-pick per tier on tools.

How they describe their AI/agentic practice

Lone-Wolf, Active Experimenting (prompting, simple automations) 17
Organizational, Active Experimenting 12
Building personal workflows (e.g., multi-step tools, APIs, or agents) 12
Internal conversations, little action 11
Building organizational workflows (e.g., multi-step tools, APIs, or agents) 6
No hands-on experience, curious 5
Consistent personal workflows with big impact 4
Consistent personal workflows with little impact 3
Consistent organizational workflows with little impact 2
Consistent organizational workflows with big impact 1

Tool stack — what they're already using

Simple Intermediate Advanced Not yet

Native LLM apps ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity

Local AI workspaces Ollama, LM Studio, MSTY

Agent workflow builders n8n, Flowise, OpenClaw, Dynamiq

In the room

37 firms already on the registrant list

Funds, family offices, and operator-led shops — early-stage to growth, North America to MENA to LATAM to SE Asia.

468 Capital
Acasia Ventures
Aire Labs
Alpha JWC Ventures
Amplifica Capital
Atlantica Ventures
Audaz Capital
Blueprint
Cherry Rock Capital
Cometa
Corner Ventures
Defined VC
Determined Capital
Domo Invest
Domo VC
DPI
Feature VC
FirstMark
Garage Capital
Genoa Ventures
iMena
Invest2Innovate
Josi Health
Kauffman Fellows
KB Partners
Last Mile Ventures
LoftyInc
M25 Ventures
Medici Capital
Mercury Fund
MGV
Monashees ×2
Motley Fool Ventures ×2
Novel GP
Prose Ventures
Walking VC
Wild Basin Investments

Voices from the survey

What this room is actually working on

Quotes are anonymized. Several of these are exactly what we'll workshop on Thursday.

Automating the horrible parts of being an emerging manager. Maybe we should create a Kauffman toolset.
— An emerging-manager GPBuilding now
An agentic VC stack for diligence, fund reporting, admin and portfolio support.
— A fund operatorBuilding now
End-to-end automations across sourcing, screening, follow-ups, and internal evaluation — with AI summarizing calls, extracting key insights, and keeping deal-flow data organized. The goal: less manual overhead, more consistency, a more responsive investment process.
— A LATAM seed investorBuilding now
Exploring an "agent-powered autonomous startup" — 4–5 PhD-level agents doing the research, as an experiment.
— An early-stage life-sciences investorBuilding now
Automating the grunt work: top-of-funnel curation, deep market research, market maps.
— An early-stage research-heavy investorBuilding now
Simple integrations across our CRM and enrichment tools to manage dealflow — plus an agentic workflow that scores each deal for prioritization.
— A growth-stage diligence leadBuilding now
Trying to combine various personal workflows so the whole organization can use them.
— A US Midwest seed investorBuilding now
Agentic workflows for deal triaging, due diligence, and memo creation.
— A solo investorBuilding now
We've built a basic IR/fundraising engine and audit/accounting support — game-changing for us. Co-pilot enterprise for MS integration and email; Claude Team for most everything else. On a 1–10 scale, we're still a 3–4.
— An emerging-manager GPAlready shipped

Voices from the survey

What this room is hoping to take home

Free-response answers to 'what do you most want to get out of this session?' — lightly edited.

Best practices for a solo GP to get 80% there with 20% effort.
— A solo GPWants to learn
Understanding output quality — that's what's lacking for me right now.
— A frequent-experimenter solo partnerWants to learn
Architecture, tools, and best practices for getting the structure set up in a secure and effective way.
— A research-driven seed investorWants to learn
Would love to see what others are doing for fundraising.
— An emerging-manager GPWants to learn

After the session

What this room said when the camera was off

8 attendees answered the post-session survey. Below: the numbers, the highlights, and the one piece of feedback we're acting on.

9.1 / 10 Insightful Median 10 · range 7-10 · n=8
9.0 / 10 Would recommend to other Fellows Median 9.5 · range 7-10 · n=8
+75 NPS 6 promoters · 2 passives · 0 detractors

Highlights

"Sharing best practices is the best way for us all to improve and leverage each other as a network."
"This session was absolutely amazing. I'm completely overwhelmed and have no idea how to do any of this, and I'm willing to learn."
"So amazing."

Getting better

We surface every piece of pointed feedback alongside the change it triggers. No defensive footnotes.

"One quarter of the hour was used by Michael ranting. I appreciate that he has unusual delivery style that has its own charm, but he should keep himself to some sort of timeline in order to focus on content."

Our response: Fair. Shut up and focus on the reason we're there. Next session will run on a hard timer for the host segment, with a co-host nudge cue if it goes long.