We had the pleasure of hosting and moderating a fireside chat with Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon AI, yesterday in San Francisco. Swami is one of the foremost leaders in AI industry, has been with Amazon since 2005, and leads a team of “thousands”.

Last year Wing unveiled its inaugural study of the changing nature of early stage financing. This is based on our “V21” analysis, which includes only technology companies financed by one of a select group of the industry’s top venture firms. This year’s analysis reveals an acceleration of the trends that we measured last year. The Seed phase is rapidly expanding to encompass a broad segment of company development. Meanwhile, Series A investors are applying ever-stricter and ever-more mature investment criteria, looking for factors traditionally reserved for the Series B. Now more than ever, “Seed is the new A, and A is the new B”.

To our knowledge, SetSail is the first independent company to develop an AI-powered sales compensation system. The SetSail system is equally rooted in the fields of machine learning and behavioral economics. The ML part taps into primary data sources to make an objective measurement of deal status. Principles of behavioral economics are used to offer real-time incentives that reward forward progress, even before the deal closes.

The Wing Briefing is an expertly-curated summary of the most important news in tech as relevant to corporate executives, founders, and venture investors.

At this year’s RSA, we held meetings with CISOs/CSOs, entrepreneurs, and government officials over two days, and we hosted the inaugural Wing Summit on Security in an off-the-record, closed-door setting. In addition, we held pre-RSA research calls to understand key security issues and priorities.

During the week of February 11th, I worked with an active and prominent crypto angel and we surveyed 91 people in the crypto industry. The goal of the survey is to better understand the near-term market sentiment from people on the front lines. (Almost) everyone who participated in the survey is actively building, investing or studying in the crypto ecosystem.

We have been waiting to invest in precisely what Obsidian has built since the founding of Wing – Identity as the new Security Perimeter – as we are in a world where the traditional network-based security perimeter, aka the Firewall Complex, is becoming ever more irrelevant to the enterprise with the transition from On-Premise to SaaS Applications, Cloud Infrastructure, and Mobile Usage.

Wing is pleased to announce the Wing Summit on Security, taking place on March 4, 2019 at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. The Wing Summit is an exclusive, invitation-only meeting for senior corporate executives and prominent entrepreneurs to discuss and debate what’s next. The summit includes interactive content discussions and high-quality networking in an intimate, off-the-record setting.

The Wing Academy is an exclusive, invitation-only series for startup Founders and CEOs to learn on domain topics of critical importance to company-building. The Academy features a curriculum taught by leading entrepreneurs in Business Tech and delivered through a combination of frameworks, data sets, case studies, and interactive dialogue.

We are thrilled to welcome Rajeev Chand, long-time friend of Wing, as our Partner and Head of Research. At Wing, Rajeev will drive Wing’s thought leadership, connections, and visibility. He will conduct and present proprietary research, host exclusive summits and meetings, and build and manage a differentiated founder and executive network.

All of us at Wing are incredibly excited to welcome Sunil Chokshi as our Talent Partner. In this role, Sunil will proactively develop and support key talent relationships across a variety of functional areas, with the goal of helping our early-stage portfolio companies scale.

Over the past two months, Wing hosted the first two in its private dinner series specifically for tech CEOs. The dinner series is called “The CEO Vault” and is limited to 6 private company CEOs each.

Jake is an unusual talent, and has that rare combination of insight, judgment, operating skill, the learning mindset and deep partnering ability that we have found to be essential in early stage venture capital.

As a follow up to our recent crypto sentiment survey, we wanted to dig deeper into the sentiment across professional cohorts.

Industry observers seem to be looking for signs of a venture investment slowdown. We’ve been contacted by multiple journalists, analysts, limited partners and others with this question on their minds.