i’ve said it multiple times in the past, will say it again: the og startup podcast by @harris is still one of the best out there for founders one of the main reasons i got into yc was because i learned about startups listening to this podcast on my walk to and back from every

reaching out to people for help is the simplest hack to success. most people keep spinning wheels and don’t send a message. it’s schlep blindness of sorts. we are used to solving problems solitary on our own and treat everything like a zero sum game. but building startups is

this looks really good one of the examples of we've barely scratched the surface of innovations with AI many many more small and big innovations to come

i have this counterintuitive theory: it’s more difficult to kill small companies. most people think small companies are fragile i think theyre wrong a company doing 500k arr with sticky customers is weirdly hard to kill revenue drops but then it stabilizes. always does. the

i always tell founders the same thing build the biggest company you can. aim for the biggest vision. dont limit yourself based on capital or ownership or whatever else youre worried about the odds are low but if you want to build anyway then do it do it over and over based on

gemini improvements happening faster than i can keep track - chrome integration (multi-tab support) - multi-doc context (can just tag multiple docs from drive while in a doc) - ai in google sheets that actually work (writing fomulas for everything) - gemini on mobile chrome

markets are way bigger than the early winners make them look vanta launched in 2018 and dominated SOC2 compliance automation then oneleet shows up in 2022 - just raised $33M at 750+ customers and $7M+ ARR delve founded in 2023 - already at 500+ customers and just closed $32M

been talking to vertical ai SaaS founders and seeing this pattern over and over: founders trying to reverse engineer success by studying which verticals are “hot” right now they see some company raised a series A for AI in construction or AI for restaurants or whatever they

the vertical AI founders winning right now fall into two buckets bucket 1: been in some boring industry for years, saw AI coming, built for their own problem bucket 2: picked the most obvious massive category and decided they’ll just be better than everyone else through pure

seen five ai rollup acquisitions in the last year across insurance and payments two are growing. three are struggling or seeing negative returns the difference isnt the ai. its whether the operator spent time learning the business first the ones working: operator spent 6+

More hot takes like these on the pod: https://t.co/Y77nrBddME

got this message from someone who got into YC after i did a mock interview here’s what most founders don’t get - the people who help you for free often become your strongest network later not because they expect something back but because helping others succeed creates compound

traditional PE strategy: buy at scale, do financial engineering, extract value new opportunity: buy small, do product work, create value, sell to PE who wants the growth engine (or hold forever) the companies that fail to scale for VCs are perfect raw material for operators who

a lot of investors sold their companies for decent outcomes when they were founders maybe 10m, 20m, maybe 50m, maybe 100m. good exits but not unicorns now they tell founders to never think about exits. just keep building. never settle. only shoot for the moon funny how that

tracking the PEfication of VC Funds raised or deployed for AI-enabled buyouts: - General Catalyst: $1.5B creation fund - Thrive: actively rolling up (Savvy Wealth $72M) - Khosla: exploring deals - 8VC: multiple deals done - Slow Ventures: active - Bessemer: backing accounting

This is not to say that you shouldn’t start a startup. You should want to start a startup in spite of the tough odds. If you strongly want to build a company, you should definitely do it. The people who change the world are the ones who think they can.

most venture-backed companies end up in the same place: raised 3-4M seed (or 10-15M series A) built real product got to 300-500K ARR (or 2-3M ARR) VCs stopped caring founders stuck with high pref stack, can't raise more, can't exit, can't even shut down cleanly these aren't

Three ways acquirers don’t pay founders their earn outs post sale: - Restructure your business unit right before earnout payments hit - Fire your team and claim “strategic pivot” to avoid milestone payouts - Change accounting methods so your performance “misses” targets you

high quality founder trapped in: - wrong market size - broken cofounder relationship - bad timing - overcapitalized deal - underwater cap table most venture startups fail not because founders are bad but because theyre stuck in the wrong cap table. small acquisitions give