Laura's Recent LinkedIn Posts

Reed Jobs , This is exactly the kind of breakthrough Yosemite exists to accelerate. After 44 years studying cancer, Mariano Barbacid just achieved what many thought impossible: complete, durable elimination of pancreatic cancer tumors in mice with no resistance developing. THE SCIENTIST: • Isolated the first human oncogene (HRAS, 1982) - the discovery that proved cancer is driven by genetic mutations • US National Academy of Sciences member • Founded CNIO - Spanish National Cancer Research Centre , making it a world-leading cancer research center • Former VP Oncology Drug Discovery at Bristol Myers Squibb • Echegaray Medal, Brupbacher Prize, IACR Medal of Honor • H-index: 114 | 311 publications THE BREAKTHROUGH (PNAS, Jan 2026): • Complete tumor regression in all mouse models • No recurrence for 200+ days • Zero significant toxicity • Prevented the resistance that kills every other pancreatic cancer therapy THE OPPORTUNITY: $30M could accelerate clinical trials to begin within 3 years. The drugs exist (daraxonrasib, afatinib, SD36). The biology is validated. What’s needed is capital to optimize the combination for human trials. This is pancreatic cancer, the disease that took your father and mine. This is the rare convergence of world-class scientific pedigree, unprecedented preclinical results, and a clear path to human trials. Your mission is making cancer nonlethal in our lifetimes. This is where that mission can become reality. I don’t know him personally BUT I’d be honored to find a way to facilitate an introduction to Dr. Barbacid. https://criscancer.org/ #CancerResearch #PancreaticCancer #Biotech #Yosemite

When Praveen Arichandran and I were grinding it out at Facebook back in 2010, I knew he had something special. But even I didn’t predict he’d go from building products that connected billions of people to literally reshaping how entire cities move. After Facebook, Praveen went to work directly with Elon at Tesla. (Yes, THAT Elon. 😄) Now he’s building Argo , the world’s first fully vertically integrated, electrified transit system. Think: public transit that’s actually faster than driving, but as affordable as taking the bus. Already live in Bradford West Gwillimbury and Brampton, Ontario. So naturally, when Praveen and his team needed capital to scale across Canada and beyond, TheVentureCity jumped in! Praveen’s superpowers: Survived Facebook’s hypergrowth era ✅ ∙ Earned at Tesla’s trust✅ ∙ Convinced Canadian municipalities to let him reimagine their entire transit systems ✅ Built proprietary Smart Routing™ tech + custom EVs + full operations stack ✅ Some founders talk about vertical integration. Praveen and his team just builds the whole damn thing from scratch!! Public transit shouldn’t suck. And with Praveen at the wheel, it won’t. Andrés Dancausa Santiago Canalejo Lasarte Álvaro Sanz Sieteiglesias Elena de Lara Diaz Stephane Kokshoorn Verónica M. Ana O. Ricardo Sangion Garoe Gonzalez Parra Carlos Montes González Juan Pablo Treviño 🚀 $ARGH (TSXV) | $ARGHF (OTCQX) https://lnkd.in/eidZZjKy

We are looking for data team intern TheVentureCity we need someone who can turn messy startup data into insights that actually matter the work: build self-service analytics in Looker | design data models with dbt | automate workflows with Python & SQL | help us figure out what makes portfolio companies succeed (or not) you: comfortable with SQL & Python | bonus points for dbt/Looker experience | studying something quantitative | can explain technical stuff to non-technical humans | actually curious about startups the setup: 6 months | ~20hrs/week | remote | need to overlap 9am-1pm ET a few days | starts Jan 2025 Real problems, real impact, portfolio companies across deeptech in fintech, logistics, health & electric transit in latam/europe/US apply:

Will be in Barcelona next week for MWC and 4YFN… It’s been 5 years! Can’t wait ❤️

You still have time to learn something new this year! We start in 10 minutes. 👉 Laura González-Estéfani – Founder & CEO, TheVentureCity 👉 Antonia Rojas Eing – Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Attom Capital 👉 David Laroque 🌔 Managing Director, Stifel Europe Private Capital Markets 🗓 Dec 18 | 16:00 CET / 10:00 EST 🔗 Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/efnUAvWg #secondaries #startups #venturecapital #liquidity #growth #TheVentureCity

Bye Bye 2025: A Tale of Two Markets 2026 is going to be extraordinary! Here's what you won't hear from most VCs right now: while we're celebrating strong DPI and liquidity across almost every vehicle at TheVentureCity, fundraising has been incredibly difficult. US VC fundraising fell 35% in 2025 to just $66 billion, the weakest stretch in at least six years. IPOs remain scarce with only 66 public listings recorded the lowest since 2016. The exit drought everyone talks about? It's real. Yet here's the counternarrative: the secondary market hit $61.1 billion in Q2 alone, surpassing all VC-backed IPOs over the same period. For us, secondaries became a lifeline, we executed several last year, providing genuine returns to our LPs when traditional exits weren't an option. The venture industry loves to paint rosy pictures. At TheVentureCity, we'd rather be honest: 2025 tested us. Strong portfolio performance doesn't automatically translate to easy fundraising in a market where investors are concentrating capital in fewer, established firms. The reality? You can have great returns AND struggle to raise. Both can be true. And that's the market we're navigating. Our 2025 year in review captures the full story—the wins, the challenges, and everything in between 👇 https://lnkd.in/euUwicjq #TheVentureCity Santiago Canalejo Lasarte Andrés Dancausa Álvaro Sanz Sieteiglesias Elena de Lara Diaz Stephane Kokshoorn Verónica M. Carlos Montes González Ricardo Sangion Garoe Gonzalez Parra Juan Pablo Treviño Ana O.

Happening tomorrow, No Filters! Are you dealing with an activist board member? Do you need to clean your cap table? Have you sold any of your equity after 7 years? Are your investors pressuring you for liquidity? Secondaries can provide significant benefits for founders of scale-ups or funds. In fact, 50% of transactions in 2025 occurred via secondaries. Join us for a “no filters” conversation on how secondary transactions work in practice, when they are beneficial, and the impact they have on founders, teams, and investors. Joining the conversation: 👉 Laura González-Estéfani – Founder & CEO, TheVentureCity 👉 Antonia Rojas Eing – Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Attom Capital 👉 David Laroque 🌔 Managing Director, Stifel Europe Private Capital Markets 🗓 Dec 18 | 16:00 CET / 10:00 EST 🔗 Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/efnUAvWg #secondaries #startups #venturecapital #liquidity #growth #TheVentureCity

My friend Sean Bielat is #hiring. Know anyone who might be interested?

SimpliRoute is looking for a Head of Marketing. Great team & product… ohhh and company momentum!!

Congratulations to Ollie Hughes and the entire Count team on launching Count Agent! For builders and Data Teams you are going to ❤️ this: Count has addressed the infrastructure bottleneck that many AI analytics tools face. Typically, data warehouses throttle AI’s speed, but Count has developed a distributed compute layer that intelligently divides work across your warehouse, their servers, and local machines. As a result, 60% of queries now run on users’ browsers, allowing for scalable AI analytics without escalating cloud costs. The canvas approach is innovative. Unlike traditional chat interfaces that create black boxes, Count’s collaborative canvas enables humans and AI to work together transparently, showcasing the work, iterating in real-time, and producing assets that are editable, auditable, and reusable. This eliminates the need for “trust me” outputs. Count is enterprise-ready from launch. With Count Metrics (their semantic layer), version control, and enterprise security, this solution can be deployed across entire organizations. Notably, their biggest agent users are already in the C-Suite, demonstrating the potential to expand beyond just data teams. The technology is so effective that we’ve integrated it throughout our own data stack at TheVentureCity . For investors: This represents a deep infrastructure play with genuine technical moats that can create category-defining companies. The timing is ideal, as data teams have struggled to keep up with demand for decades. That dynamic has now shifted.