I don't know if it's AGI but I think we've gotten to the point where the average human make more mistakes than the average frontier model AI agent

Founders: never, ever use the corporate treasury for personal expenses 🤦 I can’t believe the comes up at least two or three times a year. 🤯 People always find out eventually

Workouts are painful. Controlling your diet takes effort. Building a business is stressful and uncertain. Self improvement is not about feeling good. It's about embracing the fact that there will be pain.

in the coming years were all gonna be looking at kalshi and polymarket the same way we looked at juul and the people involved will be rushing to hide their involvement in the company

all successful founders i know work every waking minute

Sooo. many. startups. But all investors want to invest in the same 10-30. This has always been true, but probably never to this extent. Hyper power law.

Want to help someone break in to an industry? Cosign them. Want to promote someone you think doing is important work that should get more recognition for it? Cosign them. Want to tell someone that you think they have amazing potential, or that you’d back their startup if they started something? Cosign them.

As someone who has had a mega lab(s) build a copycat product within < 3 months of launch Instinct needs to focus exclusively on its best ICP now. Only way it can work. Even it it builds a better product, the mass market battle is over. Ggs muse

Venture capital has spent years making access artificially difficult. Warm intros. Closed networks. Private dinners. “Proprietary deal flow.” Then everyone complains they're seeing the same founders and the same companies.

If investors want genuinely different founders and ideas, they may need to widen where and how they look for them.

VC sometimes is another 9-5 disguised as $

If you find the answer let me know. I'm unknown at least & even top-tier according to my mom 😄 But I agree, if you have the right contacts you get +100M in pre-seed, otherwise (almost) nothing. I also apply for grants as I'm in AI safety, but most grants go to known "friends"...

Strongly disagree.. I am just 18, living in Dhaka, Bangladesh... zero network so zero warm intros. I just cold applied my way into the Entrepreneur First SF final round, an Antler interview, and a Demo Day with 350+ VCs including a16z even last day talked with philip adler and also now have proper grip of vc Closed networks. The gates aren't closed. Founders just use "warm intros" as an excuse for not building something undeniable.

Publish clear investment criteria and let founders approach you directly.

Y-combinator took one look at my (37) old ass and said nope. By December we’ll be doing more in MRR than every cohort member they had for summer 26. They can still go fuck themselves for not even leaving feedback when we have a crazy product and solid traction.

Exactly. Being pre seed right now, it seems VCs want you to do the hard work and deal with uncertainty and do all the growth yourself, and only once your company is clearly growing in an exponential rate that’s when they want to give you the check. By then, the price will be 10X as well.

One of the hardest things for a founder is admitting that something which used to work doesn’t anymore. The product got you here. The sales motion got you here. Maybe even the market got you here. That doesn’t mean any of them get a lifetime contract. Startups have a nasty habit of making yesterday’s good decision tomorrow’s problem.

What got you here won’t always get you there. Knowing when to change is probably one of the hardest parts of building.

In my opinion too much of the ecosystem wants to focus on those same deals. A lot of venture capitalists don't have the balls to talk to founders or research companies outside of what's already hot

“but now we’re fixing this. tearing down the country club, we vibe coded a two sided marketplace for founders to meet investors. (btw we’re raising)”

Closed networks create closed deal flow and then everyone acts surprised when the pipeline looks identical