Rick Heitzmann

1/ We're proud to announce our newest funds, FirstMark VI and OF IV, with $1B+ in commitments

I heard the doorbell ring this morning and came downstairs to a delivery.

@rick has brought the idea of high attract, high repel to each of our board meetings, and this has illuminated the entire idea. thank you!

some personal news: i’ve joined @FirstMarkCap, where I'll be working with exceptional founders and leading the growth investing strategy alongside @abimbhet and @vverawang. FirstMark has backed some of my favorite companies of this cycle: @vercel, @ClickHouseDB, @WeAreLegora, @tryramp, @modal, @ro, @function, to name just a few, and i’m grateful to join a team I've long admired: @rick, @amishjani, @mattturck, @adamn, @DavidWaltcher, and the rest of the FirstMark family!

Some think of Yahoo! as an old business, decaying. But somehow @jlanzone and team are doing the unexpected - and really turning it around into a relevant modern juggernaut. Kudos to my friend Jim even if he sucks at fantasy football. great ROI for its investors too.

Today, Baba raised a $40M Series A. We give each Medicare member and their family a dedicated team of advocates and behavioral health experts to keep every part of their care moving forward. In a world obsessed with AI personal assistants, it’s never been more important to have expert humans in the loop to go the last mile, particularly in healthcare. Our advocates have moved mountains for their patients - finding safe housing for the near-homeless, recertifying Medicaid for those about to lose their benefits, and getting financial assistance for people cutting their pills to afford groceries. In the process, we’ve used AI to scale the impact this special team can have. And to truly teach AI to reason and execute like the best care coordinators, we’ve built the largest learning environment for the type of work that we do everyday. There is still a lot to do: we’ve served fewer than 1% of the 70 million Americans on Medicare. Baba does not lack capital or customer demand. Our ability to seize this opportunity is now limited by the capacity of our team. If you’re an exceptional engineer or operator in New York, come build with us: callbaba.com/join. Our Series A was led by @FirstMarkCap , with @CVSHealth, @valtruis, @generalcatalyst, @geniusventures, and @GroundUpVC investing alongside them.

Today, @BabaHQ raised a $40M Series A. We give each Medicare member and their family a dedicated team of advocates and behavioral health experts to keep every part of their care moving forward. In a world obsessed with AI personal assistants, it’s never been more important to have expert humans in the loop to go the last mile, particularly in healthcare.

Thank you to all of the wonderful founders and friends of FirstMark who joined us at Dante last night for the 2026 Founder Dinner. It was a fantastic night for all of the FirstMark community. See you next year! 🗽

Since I lived through it, I am often asked if the current AI infrastructure frenzy is similar to the dot.com era of the late 90s when the infrastructure of the internet was built. In the late 90s, telecoms such as Global Crossing (I was on the Board) and AT&T spent over $500 billion laying fiber optic cable in anticipation of rapid internet adoption. At its peak, the telecom bubble reached about $226 billion a year (in 2025 dollars), or 1.2% of GDP. In the AI era today, the Big 4 (Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta) and others (Nvidia) are projected to spend about $750 billion in AI capex in 2027, or about 2.2% of GDP. This is higher than 1.2% of GDP in the 90s but well below railroads’ 6% peak. What is different is that fiber is still in use 25 years later but AI spending goes mostly to chips which might have a useful economic life of 5 years. In the internet era, excess fiber capacity could eventually be used at a relatively low incremental cost. In 1998 almost no one could have predicted the eventual economic value of YouTube, Netflix, Facebook or modern cloud services. No matter if the hyperscalers recoup their investments at the current pace, the most interesting historical parallel may be that the internet and mobile revolutions produced their biggest winners after the essential infrastructure was in place. The best is yet to come!

Ask any founder. Building a company is a herculean effort. In health, very few have the formidable combination of deeply authentic, patient first leadership and sweeping, objective, and data driven domain knowledge. @ZReitano is a force.

Life satisfaction is highly consistent with personality traits. The top trait was "Have a lot of fun".