https://t.co/BT0rImIfNL is a tech-enabled investment banking improving on the grueling process of raising capital. We want founders and GPs focused on building great companies and less about chasing investors. Here's a quick blurb on what we're building

Check out our full chat for her playbook here:

Bets she likes: chatbots (real use, esp. therapy—trust/safety crucial), creator tools (cut “time-to-meme” to minutes), and new social. Distribution > dilution. Build with 1–2 power users until it sings. In crisis, hunt asymmetric moves.

Post-exit, she’s an AI VC. Thesis: • Infra: crowded, cloud-accretive • Future of Work: easy to commoditize • Consumer: brand + behavior + new graphs

Framework if PMF stalls: consider “build-to-get-bought.” Ship the roadmap big companies can’t move on. Strategic ≠ failure.

Founder mindset during M&A: finish the game. Sleepless data rooms, constant dread, yes. But getting it done separates builders from drifters and sets up your next chapter.

The pitch that landed: “Now is the time to roll up travel agencies.” Buyer used the deal to expand and raise at a higher valuation. Sell the narrative they can’t ignore.

The process: • Read The Magic Box Paradigm • List every plausible buyer • Bucket by motive (tech, market entry, ops, talent) • Set a hard deadline • Get the first LOI; momentum matters

She didn’t “wait it out.” She ran a sale process.

By 2019: ~$100M top line, high single-digit $M revenue. Then COVID took bookings from ~$10M/month to almost zero. Layoffs. Reality.

@ycombinator on a whim. @justinkan said: “You’re an idiot if you don’t do this.” She did. Then built around real users (e.g., Platzi), nailing SMB workflows: cards, approvals, bookings.

Cheat code: partner for distribution. @expensify plugged them into demand, so they raised only ~$4.5M while competitors raised 10–100x more.

NexTravel started as consumer travel. Tough and pricey. She pivoted to corporate, where pain is obvious and budgets exist. Customers showed up before launch.

Early lesson: skip prestige, chase learning. She joined LinkedIn out of college, helped bring in the first $, and learned to sell to businesses. That muscle paid for everything later.

Wen-Wen Lam went from MySpace superfan to LinkedIn PM, then cloned Airbnb in SE Asia and built Nextravel to ~$100M GMV, then sold in a pandemic and became an AI VC. Here’s how 🧵

ICYMI, check out our full chat here: https://t.co/eXwXm7cbpb Great insights

What started as a founder’s worst day became the spark for his next company. Dori raised $5.5M to scale Simple Closure, giving peace of mind to founders at their lowest point, so they can focus on what’s next. Because startups fail. But founders don’t have to.

60–70% of founders shutting down on Simple Closure are already building their next startup. The end of one company doesn’t mean the end of your founder journey. It’s just a lane change.

Lotsa founders don’t realize: How you shut down matters almost as much as how you build. If you bleed out investor cash with no plan → you kill your rep. If you close cleanly and return what you can → investors might back your next company. Simple Closure makes that possible.

On average, shutting down takes 9–12 months and tens (sometimes hundreds) of thousands of dollars. Even worse: many founders still get fines years later because something slipped through the cracks. Simple Closure fixes this.

Enter: @Simple_Closure The first platform built to help startups shut down properly, without founders wasting months or years battling paperwork, penalties, and bureaucracy. Because shutting down isn’t just “filing in Delaware.” It’s: -IRS -State payroll -Vendors -Employees