“God is in the details,” reads one of Stephen Sondheim’s rules of writing.
Sondheim was a lyricist, but it’s a rule I believe is broadly applicable. And I brought this up to Lila Tretikov, former Microsoft former deputy CTO, on a recent Zoom call—we were talking about the fine line between success and failure, and how small changes can make a big difference for a company, especially in AI.
“I joke with my son all the time that I really wish he could download everything that I know now versus when I started my company at his age,” she told Term Sheet. “You can’t do that…but you can help founders with that experience growing companies because, a lot of the time, it’s the few small tweaks that make the company what it is.”
Tretikov, previously both the CEO of Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia Endowment and a founder herself, just joined New Enterprise Associates, exclusively speaking to Fortune about the move. At NEA, she’ll be both a partner and the firm’s head of AI strategy. And she says, yes, my affinity for Sondheim’s “God is in the details” adage applies.
“It’s a beautiful quote,” she told me over a Zoom call. “Devil’s in the details, God is in the details—it’s finding that needle in the haystack. That’s the center of venture capital, right? But you have to have perspective on where those needles are, and where they might be moving.”
Which starts answering what, to me, is a natural question: What exactly is a head of AI strategy and why does NEA need one? What does that day-to-day entail? It strikes me as a cryptic title, and I tell Tretikov as much.
“I see myself as like an energy booster, coming up with frames,” Tretikov told Term Sheet. “It’s going to be looking at different companies, one company at a time, but at the same time, it’s having a thesis of where change, and inflection points, are going to occur.”
Tretikov, who was born in the then-Soviet Union and moved to the U.S. at 15, began focusing intensely on AI while at Microsoft after an exchange with CEO Satya Nadella a few years ago. She asked him: “What will your legacy be?…I want to work on that.”
“I ended up at the center of that [AI] transition, witnessing the enormity of it,” she said. “From these large hyperscale organizations, you can see the ripple effect…But it’s like being on a very fast jet, where you can really only see the clouds. Or, you can be outside, and see all kinds of jets going by, innovation happening left and right.”
Then, for Tretikov, it was a matter of taking a gamble: “Do you bet on the big jet that’s already in the air? Or do you bet on these rocket ships starting to take off from the ground?”
It’s easy to see where Tretikov landed. NEA’s portfolio already has a fair slice of the AI action, including Databricks, Perplexity AI, DataRobot, Orby AI, and Uniphore.
Since Tretikov’s been surprisingly game for my oddball musical theater references, I pushed my luck one more time, telling her about Sondheim’s paramount writing rule—that all is “in the service of clarity, without which nothing else matters.” Can this also be applied to the AI boom?
“I have a parallel degree in art, and we always used to say that simplicity’s the hardest thing,” said Tretikov. “It’s getting to that razor’s edge, where the simplest solution is most likely the best one. But finding it? Boy, it’s hard.”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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Joe Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.
VENTURE DEALS
- Siolta Therapeutics, a San Carlos, Calif.-based biotech company developing products designed to prevent the onset of atopic diseases in newborns, raised $12 million in Series C funding. SymBiosis and Khosla Ventures led the round and were joined by existing investors TIME Ventures, Seventure, and Global Brain.
- Carbonated, a Los Angeles, Calif.-based video game studio developing a globally interactive mobile game, raised $11 million in Series A funding. Com2uS led the round and was joined by a16z, BITKRAFT Ventures, Cypher Capital, Blocore, Goal Ventures, and WAGMI.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- Stonepeak took Textainer, a Hamilton, Bermuda-based lessor of storage and transportation containers, private for $7.4 billion.
- Great Hill Partners agreed to acquire a majority stake in an agreed merger between Vivup, a Farnham, U.K.-based provider of health and wellbeing benefits, and Perkbox, a Sheffield, U.K.-based benefits and reward platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.
- New Mountain Capital acquired a majority stake in Grant Thornton US, a Chicago, Ill.-based provider of audit and assurance, tax, and advisory services. Financial terms were not disclosed.
EXITS
- A group of investors led by Sixth Street acquired Greensky, an Atlanta, Ga.-based financial technology platform where banks and merchants provide loans to consumers for home improvement, health care, and other uses, from the Goldman Sachs Group. Financial terms were not disclosed.
IPOS
- Contineum Therapeutics, a San Diego, Calif,-based biotech company developing therapies for neuroscience, inflammation, and immunology applications, filed to go public on the Nasdaq. The company posted $50 million in license revenue for the year ending December 31, 2023. Versant Ventures, Baker Brothers, and Sectoral Asset Management back the company.
FUNDS + FUNDS OF FUNDS
- Westbound Equity Partners (formerly Concrete Rose), a Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital and private equity fund, raised $100 million for their second fund focused on companies founded by underrepresented people of color.
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