Instead of going public, every young, ambitious founder is now going to dream of selling a 49% stake to a Mag7 to cash out employees and investors while replacing yourself with a new CEO and moving over to run a lab

When a startup succeeds, I enjoy asking early investors about the seed round years ago. Half describe it as a hot, competitive round with clear interest. Half say it was ice-cold, securing one term sheet after pitching over 40+ firms.

I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok to research five early-stage, growth, and late-stage startups for investment (assuming 1.5x today's valuation). Here's the list: Early Stage: - LangChain, ChromaDB, Apptronik, Rewind AI, Inworld AI (ChatGPT) - Vivodyne, David Bars, Ataraxis,

The Series A is dying. AI startups raise a seed, scale quickly, then leap to $40-50M rounds, bypassing the $15M Series A. This trend is growing. VCs must rethink seed strategies: earlier, higher risk bets, or risk missing out.

The new AI startup math: More GTM than engineering. Cluely is there: 7 in growth, 4 engineers. In a world where anyone can ship, velocity and distribution are the moat.

Zuck’s move is brilliant. Every missionary has their price. Hire absolute talent magnets like Nat and top 0.001% AI researchers, let them cook on a global stage. Force your competitors to match these prices, but only Google has the cash flow to do so.

There is no such thing as a great investment. You either invest too much or not enough. I often think about this, from Avichal - Electric ϟ Capital.

Hot Startup Series A 39 out of 96 VCs (41%): no response 19 out of 96 VCs (20%): couldn't schedule on time There are so many views to improve the VC model

Founders you don’t want to compete against: – Move insanely fast – Talent magnets – Content game is elite – Customer-obsessed – Always shipping – Make “in-office” cool – Expect excellence

These are powerful ingredients for OpenAI: - frighteningly ambitious - pays a lot of attention to Twitter, connected to the voice of the customer - fluid: fast-moving, hyper-responsive - plugged-in leaders: inspiration and leading from the front

Video storytelling = alpha

What follows vibe coding for websites and apps? Once an entrepreneur launches a business website with Lovable, Bolt, or V0, they need vibe marketing, sales, and procurement to operate. Startups have immense opportunities to build these solutions for the vibe economy.

This is how you build a 10x+ fund

Handshake, from college job board to frontier AI model training, launched Handshake AI in Jan: 18M users 500K+ PhDs $30–$160/hr for experts Partners w/ OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. $100M run-rate by year-end. Underrated AI pivot of 2025.

We’re thrilled to announce early access to our newest release in AirOps: AI Search Visibility → Action Too many teams are stuck watching dashboards, unsure what to do next. Visibility doesn’t drive pipeline. Action does. Visibility insights and action are now together in

Every private software company growing 30%+ with $300M+ of ARR and good unit economics should be drafting their S-1 tonight

Power law in venture is immense. At $100 per share, Figma's VC returns: Index: $7B Greylock: $6.5B KP: $5.7B Sequoia: $3.5B 10x+ funds from one investment.

Much talk about the American Dream fading with declining marriage and homeownership rates. Surprising stat: the US added 1,000 new millionaires daily last year (UBS). 🇺🇸