Hey y’all — I just got back from a week in Costa Rica with Beehiiv’s Tyler Denk and 7 other founders.

The group included YC founders, founders doing $6M in revenue with 0 employees, and with a total amount raised well over $100M.

It’s been a while since I helped run an IRL mastermind, and it has me more fired up to build than anything I’ve done in the last year.

The quality of discussions and learning from each other pushed my thinking forward, but also just getting to be around a highly curated group of killer builders for a few days was so refreshing.

I’ll be sharing a lot more from the retreat soon, and we’ll be running more throughout the year. Stay tuned.

Anyway, here’s today at a glance:

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Peter Walker on which funding amount US startup’s default to SAFEs (Link)

• Steph Nass on three things that prove you’re ready to raise (Link)

• Nick Ryan on how the pre-seed landscape has changed (Link)

Growth

• Steven Cravotta on when a user is bound to bounce (Link)

• Tobby_scraper on the 3 common threads from profitable niches (Link)

ICYMI

• Become a certified AI consultant and deliver true ROI with AI when others are stuck in "perpetual pilot" mode (Link)*

• Austin Rief shares the worst advice for a founder (Link)

• Valeria Rozova-Rosenblatt reminds why you shouldn’t be afraid to pivot (Link)

• Rahul Nanwani shares everything he’s learned about startups in one post (Link)

• Nick Telson-Sillett on what the hardest startup phase is (Link)

💡 Opportunity: AI Agent Trust Scores

As the world gets more complex, change accelerates.

I know I’m not the only one who feels like every day I’m heads down on my business, I miss at least one major AI-related update.

This is how it feels during times of massive disruptive change.

Even at the founder retreat I just hosted, where we gathered a group of killer founders, the #1 topic of excitement and discussion was agentic AI.

But no one has time to keep up with it all.

Trust scores for agents (an idea I spotted on Ideabrowser), based on some centralized standard, rating them on qualities like how often they hallucinate, how much the actual functionality matches the marketing, and the quality of their outputs would be a valuable certification-style business to set up.

Spotted on Ideabrowser

🧠 Framework: 10-80-10 Rule

If you’re the founder, you don’t need to do everything.

Jeff Seibert (founder of Crashlytics) says to delegate the middle 80% of projects.

He wants to be involved at two places:

The initial 10% → Jeff wants to understand what the team is trying to do, why they’re doing it, the approach they’ll take, and if everyone is aligned.

The final 10% → Near the end, Jeff wants to check in on adding final polish, tweaking copy, perfecting the details, and making sure it feels well thought through.

It makes sense. Is that middle 80% really the highest leverage way you should be using your time? The messy middle is where you’re making hundreds of micro decisions that eat away at your mental bandwidth. And most of them are likely better suited to the people closer to the actual problem anyway.

The best leaders know when to show up.

📈 Trend: College-Educated Job Loss

Do you want your kids to go to college?

I wish I hadn’t gone myself.

Thankfully I escaped without much debt, but even over 10 years ago I could tell the value of my degree was trending down. And the social / network experience is something you can self-engineer.

As LLMs eradicate the old guard of entry level white collar work, we’re seeing the value decrease faster and faster.

It’s due to a combination of factors though:

• Degrees are easier to obtain (larger student body + easier grading standards) which makes them less likely to help you get your foot in the door somewhere after school

• Traditional entry-level work is less cost effective to have a human do, due to advances in AI (and the knowledge you’re being taught at most schools is already outdated in industry)

• Sky-rocketing tuition and related costs have dramatically outpaced wage growth

• Low-cost, accessible alternatives are rising, making the opportunity cost of a 4 year program feel larger

As layoffs accelerate (I bet a lot of other boards and CEOs saw the stock price bump after Block’s recent 4k AI-related purge), the value will plunge even further.

💬 Quote: Just Build It

In 2015 I was living in my hometown, Philly.

I was working as an engineer at a small healthtech startup.

In my spare time I was cofounder dating and thinking about ideas.

One time I had lunch with this founder who had an idea he was sure was going to be the next big tech company.

Or, at the very least, he was excited about it.

So excited, or so sure, that he was scared that someone would steal the idea.

He’s seen The Social Network and was just hoping to not become Eduardo Saverin.

So when we met up the first thing he had me do was sign an NDA.

I was to green to know it at at the time, but NDAs don’t really matter.

If you’re a tiny company, the last thing you should be spending your valuable time on (rather than talking to potential customers, building your product, or literally anything else) is litigation.

Plus… let’s be real, you probably have no money for it anyway. And any money you do have would be better spent elsewhere.

If you start spending on litigation around an NDA, chances are you’ll be out of business before you’re able to enforce anything.

So if someone’s approaching you with an NDA, it’s certainly a bad sign for their understanding of what they’re even trying to accomplish in the first place, and how hard it is.

More than that, even in a world where building products is easier than ever due to LLMs, ideas are only as good as how well you execute and grow them.

Don’t think about ideas.

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas.

No one cares about ideas.

Just build the thing.

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How We Can Help

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Hey y’all — Tyler Denk and I had a last minute opening for one more founder to join our mastermind in Costa Rica on the 25th.

It’s 5 days in paradise with YC founders, founders doing $10M in revenue, and just an incredible group. 10 founders in total in a mansion with in-house massages, surf lessons, and a private chef.

But we’ll mainly be there to go deep and work through our toughest challenges together.

Reply to this email with why you’d be excited to join and I’ll follow up directly.

Anyway, here’s today at a glance:

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Leon Eisen on why founders should stop treating VCs like angel investors (Link)

• Mash Bonigala on what happens when founders ask how much to raise (Link)

• Marcellinus Prevailer on the fastest way to lose investor confidence (Link)

Growth

• Kushal Byatnal on closing your first $1M ARR With founder-led sales (Link)

• Troy Aitken on the one change that increased replies (Link)

• Chris Orlob on the new way to do SaaS demos (Link)

• Vlad shares the best subreddits to promote your startup (Link)

ICYMI

• Turn your vision into an app. Start today (Link)*

• Tiffany Zhong on what she thinks about when founders tell her their doubling team size (Link)

• Peter Kazanjy on the best time to negotiate payment terms (Link)

💡 Opportunity: IVF Insurance Calculator

Until I came across this idea on Ideabrowser, I didn’t even know IVF insurance issues were a thing.

But I’d imagine that for the people undergoing the 432,000 IVF cycles that are completed in the US per year, they know it very well.

Turns out it isn’t very clear what’s covered by insurance, how much will be, etc. Basic questions.

A simple idea to help with this would be a calculator that understands and can correctly interpret various plans to let people know what to expect.

That part should be free, but then you can monetize by taking commissions on cases where they want to change their insurance to ensure they are covered.

Spotted on Ideabrowser

🧠 Framework: The 6 War-Fighting Functions

It’s no coincidence that one of the most commonly cited business books is The Art of War, by Sun Tzu.

We treat business as war without the violence.

We think in tactics, strategies, and how to win the day.

That’s why I like this framework from Chris Petkas, a navy veteran.

He thinks about his business in terms of “functions” — meaning a core operational capacity. Think of it like a bundle of tasks, people, processes, and systems working to complete an objective.

Chris says that in the military, they ask themselves which function is failing during chaotic times. Specifically, they look at the 6 war-fighting functions — and they can be applied to business as well:

1. Command + Control → Strategy, leadership, and delegation from the executive level (mostly). This is where you set your objectives, priorities, and authority.

2. Movement + Maneuver → This is how you position your “forces” to create an advantage. For example, building your product or fulfilling your service offering.

3. Intelligence → Finding the signal wihtin the noise. This is all about data collection and how we interpret it.

4. Fires → Growth, sales, and marketing — these are outbound forces working to achieve outcomes.

5. Sustainment → Your operational and financial work that keeps the business from feeling too much stress.

6. Protection → Maintaining your leverage and reducing your risk profile. Controlling your downsides.

📈 Trend: LLM Decreased Token Prices

“Intelligence” is cheap.

And it’s getting cheaper. Fast.

The price per token is decreasing at a dramatic rate across all foundation models:

This is the exact race to the bottom on price that we wexpected when I declared LLMs were over, over a year ago.

As tokens continue to get cheaper, what users can afford to do with LLMs will increase.

A combination of deflating prices and increased capabilities means value will accrue at the application and data layers rather than with the foundation models themselves.

It remains to be seen what OpenAI et al do to truly combat this. They want to be Apple or Google, and avoid becoming Sybase (exactly, you’ve probably never heard of them) or the AOL of this era.

💬 Quote: The World Rewards Audacity

It’s in the word.

Potential.

Potential energy doesn’t cause change.

It sits around waiting.

It only becomes kinetic through audacity.

Truly, it is audacious to do things.

These days everyone is saying “you can just do things” — and, to be clear, you can. It’s great that you can. But the reason that phrase hits hard is because doing things is also audacious, ambitious, and aspirational.

In a world where most people feel paralyzed by the lives they’ve allowed the world to design for them, founders are audaciously designing their own. And the world rewards us for it.

It’s good to have potential — it’s better to act on it.

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Hey y’all — what does an AI-native internet actually look like?

In last week’s issue I mentioned how OpenClaw feels like a new level of agency for AI.

Now, an LLM can have its own hands and feet — it can actually take action on your behalf, based on simple instructions, and use judgement to execute those instructions well.

The interest is obvious. OpenClaw rapidly became one of the most starred projects on GitHub of all time.

But what does this rise imply for the future of how we interact with our devices, or the way the internet is structured?

This week I’m diving in to explore what that future will look like…

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HireHarbour connects you with exceptional remote Executive Assistants trained at firms like McKinsey and BCG so you can focus on growth. Our clients save up to 40% versus local hires and reclaim dozens of hours each week.

Want to hire a McKinsey trained remote EA just like our recent client did?

Book a quick chat with HireHarbour Founder Ash to explore how a world-class EA can elevate your team

Book a quick chat

Hands & Feet

There are two big shifts we’ll explore here — one is the internet and how it’s structured, and the other is our devices and how we’ll interact with it.

They’ll happen in parallel, inching forward as the other does, rather than one being a dramatic change that pulls the other ahead. It stands to reason that the more obvious shift will be our devices though, so I’ll start there.

Our Devices: Command Centers

We all basically treat our computers and phones like workstations or personal productivity tools.

But agents change this — if agents can reliably take actions for us, we can do more by thinking about our devices not as workstations but rather as command centers.

Not as personal productivity tools, even, but rather as hubs to manage our swarm of agents.

Imagine a hierarchy of agents all on your phone, or laptop — some operate as administrators in a kind of OS layer for the agent swarm that allocates computer based on need and priority, manages interactions between agents, and enforces global rules or preferences you set.

Beneath that are highly specialized agents that each execute a singular purpose— interacting with specific APIs, browsing the internet, retrieving files, editing your photos, etc. The list goes on.

These administrators and executors will likely all be hosted and run locally on your devices. Cloud-based agents open your devices and workflows up to additional security risks, and they’re lightweight enough that having even a ton of them run locally won’t strain your device’s performance.

Even if you’re skeptical, imagine for a second that this actually works.

If these agents work in harmony and can produce good outcomes that would take you more time if done yourself. There will be many more of them than there are of you — and you can realistically only do one thing at a time.

The way you interact with your device changes. It’s not about surfing the internet or even using the apps you do today. It's about managing the agents. Making sure they’re performing as you want, and then consuming the information they surface for you (both at your request and proactively).

If they work, your laptop and phone become devices to orchestrate and deploy agents — command center, not workstation.

The need for a keyboard, standardized desktop UI, and mouse all fade away when you can communicate with your device by voice and it can take action for you (reliably).

It’s remarkably close to what OpenAI has discussed with their plans for a hardware device. For now, they plan to pair their (keyboardless, mouseless, UI-less) device with your phone, but it’s reasonable to expect that plans for a future version decouple the two.

Then the device captures your intent, the agents digest what you want, and then go find what you want from the internet. But what does that internet look like?

The Two Internets

If agents are the arbiters of what info from the internet makes it to the humans on the other side, how will sites on the internet reorient themselves to ensure they’re making it through the AI filter?

And will people even use the internet directly at all?

My position is that they will, and the internet will have a split experience: basically an AI-optimized backend with a human-optimized frontend.

Agents prioritize understanding and efficiency. They want a robust robots.txt file and to be able to find the right information as quickly as possible. PS — my team and I can help optimize your site for GEO and agentic use. Book time here to chat.

Human users prioritize engagement and joy. They want experiential design and visual storytelling like this.

If agents are able to effectively crawl sites and find what their human orchestrators are looking for, the purpose for a human actually visiting a website themselves leans more firmly into the category of getting a “feel” for the brand’s identity, or either one-off or recurring experiences.

Think brand activations, or games.

The need for social networks likely doesn’t change in this scenario — if anything, it increases. Humans can interact with each other online more if their agents are doing the grunt work in the background.

What This Means

My call to actions for y’all is to think about what you’d need to do to be ready for this future. It’s coming faster than we expect — OpenAI’s device is likely to launch this year.

And if you’re looking to start something new, there’s tons of ammo here aside from just an agent for some application-layer task. Build the administrators as they’ll be deeply embedded in workflows, retention will be higher if done right. Build agencies to help companies move into this world. Get ahead of it one way or the other.

A last note: one nice piece of this future is that accessibility of the internet will continue to rise. Humans who have impairments can rely on their agents to bring them the same information as quickly as anyone else is able to get it.

How We Can Help

Advertise in my newsletter to get in front of 60,000+ founders.

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

65% of new hires have no clear points of contact for questions.

Get the guide to avoid other onboarding sins.

Get the free Definitive Guide to Onboarding for 2026 and boost retention, engagement, and the ROI of your hiring efforts.

Get the guide

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Darren Marble on how to pitch your company in 60 seconds (Link)

• Mitchell Jones on why should stop trying to convince investors (Link)

Growth

• Jason Cohen on how the code is the enemy (Link)

• Victor Sankin on how a billionaire reads your cold email (Link)

• Steven Cravotta on how to steal your customer’s profitable ads (Link)

• Jerry Neumann’s Taxonomy of Moats (Link)

ICYMI

• Luis Chavez-Mattos on the AI agents every founder should use, live (Link)*

• Hiten Shah on what a founder’s job really is (Link)

• Omri Dan shares 3 ways to validate your startup idea (Link)

• Bindu Reddy on what companies will look like in the future (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Cross-Cloud Missing Photo Backup Checker

Aggregation theory lives on.

Between your company and your personal life, you probably have photos spread out across iCloud, Google Drive/Photos, Dropbox, etc.

A simple service that pulls those into a single dashboard and gives you a full-spectrum view of all image assets in your life could be genuinely more useful.

I mean, Apple’s new UX for the Photos app is pretty terrible anyway, right?

Spotted on Ideabrowser

🧠 Framework: Brand Strategy Framework

I founded a company where someone got a tattoo of our logo.

Building a product people love is what matters, but building a brand people identify with can bring them deeper into your product’s world.

It’s how WeWork was able to launch a school for kids while they were a just subleasing office space as their core product. Not everything works, but the point is having customer love and trust gives you room to try because they actively want you to succeed.

And now the perception of taste and brand is more important than ever, as AI makes iterating on products easier.

This brand strategy framework from Ebaq Design is a useful way to develop a brand, even early on when it feels like you barely have enough time to keep the lights on:

Write out this grid on a whiteboard with your co-founder(s) and fill it out. Start on the top left and move down, then right.

Try not to over-intellectualize it. It’s really easy to spend too much time figuring out your brand. If you deeply understand your customer and their problems, your instinct will often be closer to what they actually want to see from you than anything else.

📈 Trend: Hands & Feet

If you missed the Clawdbot, Moltbot, OpenClaw saga fully — catch up here (30sec).

For the initiated, we saw how insanely strong the appetite is for agentic AI. Clawdbot was being searched for on Google more than Claude Code.

An agent that can reliably go and do things on your behalf within the apps you use, by knowing how to navigate them (feet) and take action (hands), is an idea that’s obviously existed for quite a long time.

But OpenClaw actually feels like a new level of agency for LLM-based AI. It has real autonomy, persistent memory, and proactivity. Check check check.

It paints a pretty interesting vision of the future, which I’m going to go deeper on in Saturday’s issue.

💬 Quote: The Gap

Matt Paulson, who wrote the tweet below, has a private jet.

When you do $50M in annual revenue, a jet is a realistic way of getting more done IRL.

But while having a jet is flashy, Matt spent years grinding on building a newsletter-based business (yes, it’s a $50/year business still fairly centered around email newsletters) way before Beehiiv, Substack, and Kit made it cool.

It was contrarian.

It was not sexy.

It was (and still is) based out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota — not exactly a major startup hub.

Those 10,000+ hours to get to the point where a jet is an option are hard.

No one is going to be cheering you on most of the time.

How hard will you push? How will you handle the inevitable failures? Can you keep it all together?

The gap is where you find out exactly who you are.

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Hey y’all — in the early days of Uber Eats one of our biggest bottlenecks was changing pricing and how it was presented to users.

I led analytics for our marketplace org, and could prove we were leaving money on the table, but even clear analyses or experiment results took a long time to ship.

As founders we obsess over speed, but pricing is almost always deeply embedded in application logic. And as that grows in complexity, changing it becomes increasingly risky that engineers don’t want to bother with.

So even as your product matures and competitors enter the market, your pricing structure stays stuck in the past.

I met Fynn Glover in SF a few weeks ago, and he helped me realize this is actually a very common and limiting problem for startups. His hundreds of interviews with founders about the topic taught him that founders undervalue the impact of optimized pricing — they think of growth in terms of quantity of users rather than an equation of quantity * pricing optimization.

He’s solving this with his own startup, Schematic — which gives founders and GTM team members direct control over pricing, packaging, and entitlements to launch updates to pricing in days rather than months without risking any issues with the codebase by leveraging feature flags.

It seemed like a no brainer to me, so I had him come by our studio to share his story and talk more about:

• Why Stripe isn’t and won’t be solving this

• Why you should treat pricing the same way you treat product

• How any startup can iterate on pricing faster

He also is giving FJ readers free copies of the literal book he wrote on pricing, where he compiled his learnings from the hundreds of interviews he did.

Here’s his founding journey and how he raised $4.8M for Schematic:

You're Leaving Millions on the Table

Doesn’t Stripe Handle Pricing?

When I first met Fynn and he told me he was building tools to help teams manage their pricing my first thought was… don’t I do that with Stripe already?

Stripe is so pervasive in Silicon Valley, and has been for so long, that there’s an implicit assumption it does everything a startup needs regarding pricing.

But Stripe handles billing. Schematic handles what customers can actually do and get access to in your product (in fact, Fynn’s team built the product as a runtime entitlement layer directly on top of Stripe).

Without Schematic teams hard-code entitlements, stitch together usage tracking, and manage pricing logic in your app (which is why pricing changes take quarters rather than hours).

As your codebase gets more complex you get a tough choice: force engineering to deprioritize feature work or live with outdated pricing forever.

Treating Pricing as Product

The reason most founders think about pricing in a limited way is this it’s not really a day one problem — it’s one that emerges slowly over time.

In the early stages most startups run on simple, seat-based pricing or basic tiers, and a few hardcoded checks or homegrown admin panels do the job just fine.

But as your product matures and addds features, introduces usage-based elements, supports enterprise exceptions, or shifts toward hybrid models (seats + credits + consumption), that simplicity turns into fragility.

Suddenly your pricing no longer reflects the true value you're delivering.

Every new capability becomes a potential revenue lever, but without the right architecture, launching it means begging engineering for time, risking bugs in customer access, or leaving money on the table because changes feel too scary or slow.

We can learn from Fynn. His big insight with Schematic is that pricing shouldn't be a static artifact buried in code. It should be treated like product itself and be iterative, hypothesis-driven, and owned by the people closest to the market.

Initially that’s the founders but eventually becomes product managers and GTM leaders.

This mindset shift turns pricing from a bottleneck into a growth engine.

As Fynn puts it, the revenue equation is simple: price × quantity. Most founders obsess over quantity (acquisition, conversion, retention), when the other half is just as high-leverage, if not moreso in some cases.

How To Iterate on Pricing Faster

Once you’ve accepted pricing should evolve like product, the lift is surprisingly light.

With Schematic: generate an API key, drop it in your code, wrap key access points with real-time entitlement checks.

From there, product or GTM folks control everything via a no-code dashboard. Everything happens in minutes, hours, or days at worst — not months.

Fynn’s Journey

I always learn something when I talk with founders who actually lived the problem they’re solving, first.

After growing his first startup to $2M ARR and selling it, Fynn built the growth team and scale the business at a cybersecurity company.

Their business was growing rapidly, hit PMF, but hadn’t touched pricing in 2 years.

Fynn realized, sure, he could fine-tune growth levers to bring in more customers but he could actually have more impact by just updating their pricing to reflect all the new functionality they’d built in that time.

They were leaving literally millions of dollars in incremental ARR on the table.

He did everything right — he ran willingness to pay studies and sensitivity analyses to understand elasticity, but even though he had buy-in from other execs, actually getting the work on their teams’ roadmaps took over 6 months of begging.

Even at a company oriented around growth, changing pricing felt like too big of a lift with no true owner.

After pushing the changes through, eventually, Fynn left to do discovery and realized how common this problem was.

And it led him to the belief that powers Schematic: that a small set of commercial-focused owners (founders, product leaders, and GTM operators) drive disproportionate revenue when they can directly control pricing and packaging.

Here’s Fynn himself sharing more:

Highly recommend booking time with Fynn to chat about your pricing and packaging, not to mention picking up his book!

How We Can Help

Advertise in my newsletter to get in front of 65,000+ founders.

Hey y’all — what’s your growth strategy for 2026?

If you’re considering or curious about GEO or audience building, let’s chat.

My team and I create high-converting content for everyone from unicorn founders to Hollywood celebrities and big VC firms.

And I’m actively involved with everyone we work with. Unlike many other creator-led agencies, I’m not just a frontman who’s going to hand you off to an account manager.

Book a 1:1 with me:

Anyway, here’s today at a glance:

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Arohi Jain on how many LOIs You Need To Raise $1M (Link)

• Leon Eisen shares 9 Fundability Upgrades (Link)

• Evan H. Fisher on how top founders handle fundraising (Link)

• Olivia O’Sullivan on how fundraising isn’t a one-way interview (Link)

Growth

• Jon Brosio on what a good funnel is like (Link)

• Lenny Rachitsky’s interview clip on what the worth growth problem is (Link)

ICYMI

• Never Make Another Financial Decision Alone (Link)*

• Ayman Al-Abdullah on the 5 things CEOs actually do (Link)

• Chris Orlob on why most deals die (Link)

• KP on the 4 things founders need to win in a crowded market (Link)

💡 Opportunity: HVAC Failure Maintenance Platform

If you’re in the US, you know that we love our air conditioning. If you’re in Europe, I’m sorry but you’re missing out.

If you’ve ever had your HVAC unit break though, you know real pain.

If it’s a commercial system, neither the tenant nor the landlord often thinks they should have to pay for it.

If it’s residential, sometimes that still happens but the bigger problem is that the tenant has to actually live without it for some amount of time without another place to go.

But most failures are pretty predictable if only you were able to collect data on the system as it runs.

This data would save on having to do unnecessary checkups and also alert you to failures before they happen.

You’d need to produce a small hardware device to plug into HVAC units, but the costs would be more than covered by the pain saved down the road. You could sell subscription access to a monitoring dashboard + alerts as well.

I’d recommend focusing on the commercial market, likely in the southeastern US where usage is high and so is buying power.

Spotted on Ideabrowser

🧠 Framework: The 4-Question Close Framework

This one’s for the closers.

One of the easiest ways to get better at closing (deals, sales calls, investors, prospective hires, etc…) is to stop pushing at the end of calls or meetings.

Don’t let yourself live and die by the outcome — focus on the process.

Here’s a simple four question framework to help:

1. Based on everything we’ve discussed, what feels like the biggest obstacle right now? → reconfirms the pain point using their own words

2. If nothing changes in the next 6 months, what does that actually cost you? → reminds them of real impact of not saying yes

3. What would be different if the obstacle was fully resolved? → lets them paint their own better future

4. Given what you’ve shared, what feels like the right next step for you? → at this point, they’re basically closing themselves and you’re not being pushy

This is simple but it works because it follows how humans actually make decisions: problem → cost → vision → choice.

📈 Trend: Generative AI 3 Years In

In my lifetime there have been three major platform shifts:

1. From local machine to internet

2. From desktop to mobile

3. And now from “dumb” to AI-powered

I’ve seen a lot of direct comparisons in how fast these were adopted, like the chart below. (You can argue crypto should also be on it, with over half a billion users now.)

It’s undeniable that AI is being adopted and implemented at a pace we’ve never seen before but, personally, I don’t think these comparisons are fair.

AI is being adopted much faster largely because the internet already exists and has been widely adopted.

The internet didn’t have the internet to help it spread faster.

This doesn’t change the story — AI’s adoption, and the new discoveries that come about as a result, will continue at a torrid pace at least until there’s a bubble that bursts.

I was talking to a billionaire VC, who had been actively investing during the dotcom era, earlier this week and he estimated it would be another 3-4 years before we had to worry about anything imminent there.

💬 Quote: People Pay To Stop Feeling Pain

Startups solve problems.

And problems are only, you know, problems if they cause pain.

Sometimes we forget this. We think about solving a problem, or even a painpoint, as some sort of abstract mathematical equation.

Concern + solution = revenue.

But doing that removes the actual humanity of why startups are valuable in the first place.

It’s not overly grandiose to say that startups make the world a less painful place.

This is obvious in some cases, where a startup is directly addressing a physical or mental pain — even software like Calm or BetterHelp.

But think about social media.

Its societal function is obvious now, but a common joke 10+ years ago was to tease by asking what problem a platform like Facebook was really solving. And while not everyone would consider it a net positive for society, it’s clearly addressing a pain of loneliness and disconnection, among other things.

Even an upstart hardware device like friend.com (which I wrote about when they paid seven-figures for their domain name) is addressing pain. Their founder talks about it relentlessly.

An index of pain (volume * intensity) is a lens through which we should evaluate how effective a startup could be.

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Hey y’all — last call to join myself and beehiiv’s Tyler Denk in Costa Rica for our founder mastermind.

We’ll be working, vibing, and going deep together with structured mastermind sessions. Other details:

• Everyone will have their own private room and bathroom

• Private chef and food are all included

• All activities are optional but included (surfing, yoga, private boat, in-house massages, etc).

• Dates: Wednesday February 25th to Sunday March 1st

• Cost: $10,000 (business write-off eligible).

Expect killer founders, mindset-shifting conversations, and good times.

Anyway, here’s today at a glance:

65% of new hires have no clear points of contact for questions.

Get the guide to avoid other onboarding sins.

Get the free Definitive Guide to Onboarding for 2026 and boost retention, engagement, and the ROI of your hiring efforts.

Get the guide

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Nikita Blanc on how he earned with 0 warm intros (Link)

• Toby Egbuna on how to get your first 20 investor meetings (Link)

• Sunny Dhillon shares his pitch pet peeves that founders should never do (Link)

• Illai Gescheit shares points that will help when an investor is ghosting (Link)

• Sandry Kory shares his thoughts on investor scrutiny of Seed pitch decks (Link)

Growth

• Lotanna Ezeike shares a simple app growth loop (Link)

ICYMI

• Dmitry Shapiro on monetizing AI image and video generation, live (Link)

• Aman Goel shares how startups get acquired for millions (Link)

• Peter Yang shares 25 things he believes in to build great products (Link)

• Aditya shares The Startup Graveyard (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Elder Care App For Managing Aging Parents

With birth rates continuing to fall, we’re going to see more capital be allocated towards ideas that help seniors.

This makes sense — younger generations are busier than ever, more likely to live further away than in the past, and there are simply fewer of them but seniors will still need support managing parts of their health and lives.

The last thing they or their kids want is for them to have to manage a bunch of devices and notifications on their own.

An app that acts as an aggregator, that alerts and summarizes health trends for trusted members of their family, would be genuinely useful. It could also provide a more streamlined way of managing their own health, with all of their considerations in one place.

Spotted on Ideabrowser

🧠 Framework: The Delegation Flywheel

I know a bunch of founders who’ve hired assistants in the last year or two for the first time.

Only some of them actually made it work for them on an ongoing basis. It’s not that the others were lazy, they just never set up the right system.

They’d delegate some tasks, their assistant would make mistakes, and the founder would think it’s faster to just do themselves instead.

But delegation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It has compounding returns, when done right, and gets better every time you use it.

Here’s a simple framework from Aaron Hayslip:

1. Create a doc outlining the steps of a task or process you want your assistant to own

2. They execute it

3. You review the outcome and give feedback

4. The assistant updates the doc based on your feedback relative to their initial understanding

Most things you actually want to delegate to an EA are time-sucking, recurring tasks in the first place. One-offs exist, sure, but the highest leverage things an EA can do are the ones that free your time up in a meaningful, indefinite way.

📈 Trend: AI as a Healthcare Ally

Which of these stats from OpenAI’s internal research surprises you the most:

• Over 5% of all messages sent to ChatGPT are about healthcare

• 1 in 4 active users of ChatGPT ask it healthcare questions every week

• Over 40 million people ask ChatGPT about healthcare every day

Regardless of which you picked, it was shocking to me at first that healthcare makes up that big of a chunk — but it makes sense when you think about it.

Healthcare is super complex, high stakes, and interacting with just about anything in the industry is a terrible experience.

Obviously, healthcare is a highly regulated industry and so breaking into it with new products has unique challenges, but it’s clear the opportunity is here — just like with anything else, asking ChatGPT is good but interacting with an LLM-based product specifically engineered for the industry / problem is better.

💬 Quote: Risk Is Opportunity

The best things in my life have always come from the times when I’ve taken the most risk.

• Moving to a new city without knowing anyone and meeting incredible, lifelong friends.

• Putting $25k on my credit card to rent an Airbnb for a month, without a job at the time, that ended up turning into a company we raised $23M total for.

You get the idea.

Real opportunities close fast (especially in startups, where billions of dollars in VC capital is actively looking to jump on them), so you have to be willing to take risk in order to achieve great things.

You won’t always be right, and failure hurts, but if you take the time to understand why you failed it will do more to help you (by training your risk assessment skills) than hurt you in the long run.

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How We Can Help

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Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

65% of new hires have no clear points of contact for questions.

Get the guide to avoid other onboarding sins.

Get the free Definitive Guide to Onboarding for 2026 and boost retention, engagement, and the ROI of your hiring efforts.

Get the free guide

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Waseem Khan on bootstrap vs. VC vs. revenue-based financing (Link)

• Sara Anjum’s most important fundraising step for deeptech founders (Link)

Growth

• Chris Pisarski shares one thing to get much better at sales (Link)

• Jeremy Haynes on how to build $1M/month funnels in 2026 (Link)

ICYMI

• Liberate yourself from self-doubt with this 5 step guide (Link)*

• Mike Chambers gives advice to anyone thinking about starting a company (Link)

• Andrew Gazdecki on the best thing you can do for your future exit (Link)

• Rubén Domínguez Ibar on Ben Horowitz’s “The Struggle” (Link)

• Jimmy Kim on how people are better at telling you what they don’t want (Link)

• Tech trends to watch in 2026 according to VCs (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Automated Music Copyright Clearance Platform

In college and for a little bit after, I worked as a DJ. I still do it for fun sometimes (peep my last mix).

One thing any DJ can tell you is that the music industry is intense about copyright. If you make a two hour mix and one track gets flagged by one label, the whole thing comes down.

I get it, honestly. Music is a tough asset to own because it’s so easy to distribute, copy, and devalue. They have to protect their investments.

But DJs are a bad market — most don’t make a lot, they tend to find ways to get by, and have a low willingness to pay because the actual stakes are pretty low.

But wedding videographers have high stakes. They’re capturing some of life’s most important moments for many. And they build their businesses on referrals, so delivering a good experience is important.

They can’t afford to have their clients’ wedding videos get taken down for copyright, but they also want to make sure they use the right, memorable song(s) in the videos they create.

An LLM-based agent that works on their behalf to clear copyright concerns via micro-licensing deals (that would be low ROI on the time it takes a human to negotiate) would allow them to create more compelling videos without risk.

Spotted on Ideabrowser

🧠 Framework: The 1,000 People Framework

Trying to build a product for millions is impossible.

If an opportunity is that common, it’s already likely been solved for by another product.

The products that are eventually used by millions get there because the market grew quickly, not because it started out that big.

Instead, start with a small market. This framework from Greg Isenberg can help:

1. Picture 1,000 people who have unique similarities

2. Build personas to understand them

3. Ask what they’ll pay for every year

4. Map out how to reach all 1,000

It’s not about your TAM, it’s about your clarity.

📈 Trend: The Vanishing Sub $5M Round

Seed rounds have been growing in size for years, even as MVPs and initial growth strategies have gotten cheaper to execute on.

Why is that?

The truth is that capital markets have moved upstream.

Large, multi-stage funds have increasingly started writing earlier stage checks in the hope of better returns. For them, a larger bet is actually what’s required to make it worth their time.

And founders are more than happy to take more mooney, especially if it comes from reputable names who can help them out in future rounds too.

You can see where this is going.

Startups get overcapitalized before proving the fundamentals of their market, and they get pressure to scale before they’re ready.

This is rational behavior, though, in what’s becoming a twisted market dynamic.

💬 Quote: Hire For Jobs You Know How To Do

If you can’t understand something, it’s hard to know if the person you’re paying to do is worth what you’re paying or not.

This is essentially where the old idea of not hiring for a role you haven’t first tried to do yourself comes from.

Even in a case where the business may have a growing need, if you and no one else on the team can honestly assess someone’s aptitude and, eventually, performance then you’re setting yourself up to make a bad decision.

Maybe you’ll get lucky…

I get it though — when you’re growing fast you have to hire fast sometimes. I know, I know, we say hire slow and fire fast. But life doesn’t always give us the flexibility for that.

But, in those cases, loop someone else from your network into your interview loop. Even if they don’t work for you. Just having a voice in the hiring committee room who you trust and who actually knows the role and what’s required to do well in it will be huge.

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How We Can Help

Advertise in this newsletter to get in front of 65,000+ founders.

Hey y’all — for the first time maybe ever, I took things a bit slower during the holidays this year (and bought a house!), but we are so back.

Also Tyler Denk and I still have a couple spots open for our founder retreat in Costa Rica next month.

We’ll be working, vibing, and going deep together with structured mastermind sessions. Other details:

• Everyone will have their own private room and bathroom

• Private chef and food are all included

• All activities are optional but included (surfing, yoga, private boat, in-house massages, etc).

• Dates: Wednesday February 25th to Sunday March 1st

• Cost: $10,000 (business write-off eligible).

Expect killer founders, mindset-shifting conversations, and good times.

Anyway, here’s today at a glance:

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Clive Butkow shares fundraising tips in the AI world (Link)

• Sophie Ann M. on what usually causes hesitation from investors (Link)

• Rohit Mittal on the importance of understanding valuations (Link)

• Stephane Nasser shares 12 deadly VC clauses to look out for (Link)

Growth

• Steven Cravotta on why you should stop using a soft paywall (Link)

• Peter Kazanjy on the best time to negotiate payment terms (Link)

ICYMI

• Get the AI agent certification built for founders — 50% off this month with code FOUNDER → (Link)*

• Jonny Boyarsky on how startup building is ignoring conventional wisdom (Link)

• Marc Randolph’s most important part of early-stage entrepreneurship (Link)

• Matt Shlosberg on why humans hate good ideas (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Automated Hotel Concierge Platform

2025 was the year we saw the LLM revolution move firmly into the application layer.

LLMs themselves, and building them, are in most cases no longer interesting (as I wrote about last February in “LLMs Are Over”) — what’s interesting is building a company that applies LLMs to a specific problem or vertical.

And the most interesting way to apply them is at a high leverage point that creates an interface layer governed by an AI that decides whether or not information is allowed to get through, and how it is presented once it does.

My belief is that these types of companies, which I call arbiters and defined extensively at the beginning of last year, will be where the biggest winners of this funding cycle emerge from — much like aggregators (Google, Facebook, Uber, etc) were for the last generation of the internet.

All of that is to say that one vertical without a clear arbiter winning the market yet is hotels, but they’re exactly the type of business that a good arbiter could significantly help every stakeholder in.

I’ll be writing a lot more about arbiters this year. Stay tuned.

Spotted on Ideabrowser

🧠 Framework: L.E.K. Strategy Framework

What percentage of strategies are actually successful when implemented?

10% is probably a generous guess.

There are numerous reasons strategies fail, but an underdiscussed one is because the steps you’re outlining don’t fully connect to each other.

The L.E.K. strategy framework is a surprisingly simple (considering it comes from a consulting firm) approach to setting strategies that don’t leave gaps:

1. Start with clear goals → What’s the vision? The mission? The outcomes?

2. Figure out how to win → What makes you different? What does the market want? How will you get in front of them in the right way?

3. Configure yourself for success → What’s your operating model? Can you find the right talent? What about outside capital?

4. Hold people accountable → Who owns what? How will they communicate? What happens when failures occur? Set your priorities, targets, and budgets.

5. Get it done → Are you avoiding shiny object syndrome? How are you tracking progress?

Internalize this for yourself this year when you’re going after something new — it’ll keep your team aligned and moving.

📈 Trend: Non-Traditional Capital

Most people think that startups have to raise from VCs, but historically startups raise about 2x of what VCs raise in fund commitments — and in 2025 that shot up to an abnormal 5x.

Granted, when you reach the growth stages and beyond there are only a limited amount of capital allocators (mostly VCs) who are both well capitalized enough and willing to make a bet on a still-private startup.

But the gap has mostly, historically, been filled by two types of sources:

1. Non-traditional investors (for startups) — think crossover funds, corporate funds, and industry-specific strategic investors

2. High net worth individuals and family offices

This past year we saw another extreme figure that’s driving this trend — 40% of capital raised in 2025 was raised by just 10 companies. Think about all the mega rounds into OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies that included massive checks from corporate interests like NVIDIA, etc.

Without those 10 companies, the ratio drops to roughly 3x.

That’s still above average, so there are clearly more investors making direct bets into AI startups than what they’ve traditionally done — putting LP checks into VC funds and delegating the actual capital allocation decisions.

💬 Quote: It’s Your Job To Believe

Say it with me: an investor’s lack of belief does not invalidate your own.

We’ve all heard the countless stories about how founders talked to hundreds of VCs, got a “no” every time, and then one person believed, or something clicked with the product, or some cultural event happened that changed people’s understanding of the market and those “no” answers started turning to “yes.”

That doesn’t mean you should be delusional — if things aren’t working and you don’t see a path to success, that’s one thing.

But the founder is the person who sees that path when no one else can yet.

That’s just what we sign up for.

So for 2026, think about what that path is for your startup. Adjust as you need to (a year is a lifetime). But stay the course.

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How We Can Help

Advertise in this newsletter to get in front of 60,000+ founders.

Hey y’all — ICYMI I’m hosting 7 founders in Costa Rica with my buddy Tyler Denk in February.

We’ll be working, vibing, and going deep together with structured mastermind sessions. Other details:

• Everyone will have their own private room and bathroom

• Private chef and food are all included

• All activities are optional but included (surfing, yoga, private boat, in-house massages, etc).

• Dates: Wednesday February 25th to Sunday March 1st

• Cost: $10,000 (business write-off eligible).

Expect killer founders, mindset-shifting conversations, and good times.

Anyway here’s today at a glance:

Considering a shutdown? The new year changes the stakes.

How you wrap up a company matters more than many founders realize. Investors pay close attention to how shutdowns are handled, especially around timing, communication, and returning remaining capital. Letting a company linger into the new year can complicate books, delay documentation, and create unnecessary friction.

SimpleClosure helps founders shut down their companies cleanly and compliantly. They’ve helped over 2,500 founders close with clarity and care. For founders already considering a shutdown, completing it before year end can help preserve investor relationships and allow everyone to start the new year on solid ground.

Learn more

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Zoe Zou shares fundraising mistakes she made so you don’t have to (Link)

Growth

• Ernesto Lopez on 4 things you should study before launching your app (Link)

• Lars Heidenreich on the advantage of a one-to-many motion (Link)

• Namya Khan shares SaaS landing page headlines that convert (Link)

• Robbie Richards on what the real buying sequence looks like (Link)

ICYMI

• Get the AI agent certification built for founders — 50% off this month with code FOUNDER (Link)*

• Ayman Al-Abdullah shares the best tip he can give first-time founders (Link)

• Jai Dolwani on the startup rollercoaster (Link)

• Rohit Mittal on what founders must learn before trying to sell their startup (Link)

• Mert on the most important piece of advice he doesn’t hear often (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Financial Sync Tool

Making it easier to code (thanks to LLMs) means we should expect societal trends made more popular by people building software products to continue to proliferate.

That includes digital nomading.

I’ve personally been a nomad for the last year and, let me tell you, the last thing you want to be worried about while you’re on the road and managing travel logistics is your bookkeeping.

This ICP has high average complexity for payments and revenue streams, so it makes sense to offer them a more tailored product.

Spotted on Ideabrowser

🧠 Framework: The Creative Act

Most of our frameworks come from folks in business, but this week it comes from the legendary music producer, Rick Rubin:

@60minutes

“I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music.” Music producer Rick Rubin says he can barely play any instruments, but says... See more

His book is one of my favorite reads from the last few years because it breaks down how to do great, creative work into universal principles. And I don’t think it’s unfair to argue that building a startup inherently requires creative work, not just tactical work.

Ryan Yockey pulled out a few key insights into the infographic below:

📈 Trend: Mobile Apps Are Back

After the mobile gold rush (now 10 years ago, wow) we saw a stagnation in terms of the new apps published each year.

But that’s changing.

The rise of vibe coding (making it easier to create apps) and the new paradigm shift towards LLM-centric software has finally reversed the decline of new app development.

I expect we’ll see a rise of vibecoding tools for mobile specifically in 2026 (it’s already happening, I’ve seen some interesting pitches that I unfortunately can’t share).

💬 Quote: Understand Psychology

To have a business, you need to make money.

To make money, you need to solve a problem.

To solve a problem, you need to understand your customers.

To understand your customers, you need to get inside their heads.

To get inside their heads, you need to understand their psychology.

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How We Can Help

Advertise in this newsletter to get in front of 60,000+ founders.

Hey y’all — I’m renting a house with Tyler Denk (co-founder of Beehiiv) in Tamarindo, Costa Rica in February with room for 7 other founders.

We’ll be working, vibing, and going deep together with structured mastermind sessions. Other details:

• Everyone will have their own private room and bathroom

• Private chef and food are all included

• All activities are optional but included (surfing, yoga, private boat, in-house massages, etc).

• Dates: Wednesday February 25th to Sunday March 1st

• Cost: $10,000 (business write-off eligible).

Expect killer founders, mindset-shifting conversations, and good times.

And now here’s today at a glance:

Benchmark smarter. Hire smarter.

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With actionable insights tailored for scaling startups, you can make data-driven decisions that balance growth with financial discipline. Use benchmarking to confidently expand your team and outpace the competition.

Access the data

_{Want to stop seeing ads? Upgrade now. Want to get in front of 60,000+ founders? Go here.}

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Euclid Ventures on the quiet death of VC-Founder alignment (Link)

• Robert Harary shares something that’s easy to forget when raising (Link)

• Tony Beebe on the startup funding funnel (Link)

Growth

• Olivia O’Sullivan on the LinkedIn GTM opportunity for founders (Link)

• Christian Oland on how 90% of failed startups could’ve been saved (Link)

ICYMI

• Jonathan Nwosu on why being a founder is not the flex people think it is (Link)

• Klaas on how to validate almost any startup idea (Link)

• Elizabeth Yin shares a great metric to track at a startup (Link)

• Jason Levin on what to build if you’re not sure where to start (Link)

• Blaine Vess on the only reliable sources of leverage (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Email Lead Recovery Tool

Email spam is rising (always, but faster these days due to LLMs).

Ironically, there’s probably also some actually useful emails that get incorrectly categorized as spam.

I check my spam folder every month or two for this reason.

But if the email’s time sensitive (especially warm leads), I’m out of luck.

You can’t fix this problem for Gmail, or Outlook, etc. But you could build an LLM-based tool that analyzes what else is in your inbox and then uses that, along with industry-level patterns, to automatically pull those out of spam and put them back in your main inbox.

Spotted on Ideabrowser

🧠 Framework: Go-To-Market Sequencing Playbook

Sometimes it feels good to flail around a bit.

If you’re not sure how to approach growth, it’s easy to fall into this idea of just launching a bunch of different channels.

You hope at least one works.

You might not be able to explain why though, if it does.

And if it doesn’t you’ll probably move onto a new one rather than refining it.

There are hidden costs to this.

As you expand to more and more surfaces, resources get strained. You aren’t able to keep up with any one of them to really learn and improve it.

Eventually you wonder why none of them are working. Even if they do work, you’re not set up to scale.

The GTM sequencing framework can help with this from the beginning. It prescribes:

1. Narrowing your focus initially

2. Identify your beachhead and develop a process to consistently win their love

3. Expand, now that you’ve earned the right to, by either extending to neighboring customer types, expanding within existing accounts to other use cases, or enter similar verticals to your early winners

If you do it right, it makes entering new markets feel inevitable, not frantic.

📈 Trend: Voice Cloning

Pretty soon every audio message, phone call, etc will have you wondering

Voice AI is something I flagged as one of the trends to watch in 2025 (way back in Dec 2024), and from what I could dig up it looks like startups building in the space raised over $500M this year as the space shifted from just infra to also having practical apps gain traction.

Vocal cloning is a big part of that — I expect we’ll see this trend continue to spike in 2025 as some of these existing startups mature enough to take on truly massive rounds, and more voice-first applications gain preference among consumers.

💬 Quote: It’s That Easy

Startups are hard, but we overcomplicate them at the same time.

We get distracted by shiny things, or overoptimizing our workflows.

I see founders building impressive AI workflows that don’t actually help them learn about their customers, they just automate internal processes.

But then they have to maintain those systems as the business changes.

It ends up sometimes going beyond useful work and trending into busywork territory.

Instead, change “idea” to “hypothesis” in the tweet below and you have a simple formula to work with:

Twitter tweet

How We Can Help

Advertise in this newsletter to get in front of 60,000+ founders.

Hey y’all — these days, under the stewardship of YouTube king Garry Tan, Y Combinator puts out a ton of content across all channels (even their Instagram has 525,000 followers).

They’re a content behemoth.

But it wasn’t always like that.

For most of YC’s history they mainly published posts on their own website, sort of like how their co-founder Paul Graham posts his legendary essays on his site.

Today, these posts are a little harder to find than their video content, but there are so many classic gems in there that this week I wanted to highlight 10 I’d recommend to any founder. Check them out below…

If you are tapping into AI to help with the early stages of your founder journey or fundraising, you'll need more than a general LLM. You need AI that actually goes beyond surface level responses. DeepSky’s AI Superagent conducts deep research, synthesizes signals, and recognizes patterns from Crunchbase, FactSet, Polygon, turning that intelligence into investor-grade analysis the way top-tier VCs do.

DeepSky handles market sizing, competitive mapping, product and GTM strategy, and recommends positioning and narrative based on real-time VC signals. It also creates business plans and fundraising decks that hold up in partner meetings.

And because it reasons like an operator, it executes real business tasks: pitch slides, GTM plans, financial logic, interactive webpages.

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10 Curated Guides From Y Combinator

A Guide to Seed Fundraising | link

Concise and actionable — this guide from former YC President Geoff Ralston covers everything from what not to do when talking with investors, to when to actually raise in the first place.

Biggest Mistakes First Time Founders Make | link

Former YC CEO Michael Seibel reminds you why things like actually launching, talking to users, and caring about the problem you're solving actually do matter.

How to Succeed with a Startup | link

In 20 minutes, Sam Altman shares a comprehensive list of 25 things successful startups do (and why they matter).

How to Design a Better Pitch Deck | link

A very in-the-weeds guide on how to get your pitch deck ready for investors and the limited time they have to read through it.

How to Build the Future (with Elon Musk) | link

Sam Altman and Elon discuss the 5 biggest problems to focus on in society and more in a wide ranging conversation.

How to Launch (again and again) | link

YC Partner Kat Manalac sets the record straight on launching: No one probably cares about your early launches, so ship new products and features continuously.

How to Talk to Users | link

Talking to users is how you learn what people want from your startup, which lets you build something that will actually work as a business. Here's a framework to do that most efficiently.

How to Work Together | link

Building a startup from nothing with someone else can be stressful, but maintaining a healthy relationship with open communication is essential. YC Partner Kevin Hale talks about how to make sure that happens.

How to Win | link

No, this isn't a guide on how to grow faster or be more impervious to competition. It's about the other side — your health and mentality as a founder — and why that plays a bit role in startup success.

How to Evaluate Startup Ideas | link

You're going to work on your startup for years and think about it constantly during that time. It makes sense to have a framework for evaluating which idea you actually choose to work on.

How We Can Help

Advertise in my newsletter to get in front of 60,000+ founders.

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_{Digital currency is not legal tender, is not backed by the government, and BIA accounts are not subject to FDIC or SIPC protections.}

_{Crypto loans are offered to U.S. borrowers by Figure Lending LLC. This product is not available to U.S. residents of DC, ID, IL, KY, MD, MS, SD, TX, VT, or VA.}

_{Crypto loans are offered through Figure Markets Credit LLC to residents of the state of New York and to international customers except in the following jurisdictions: Crimea (Ukraine), Donetsk (Ukraine), Luhansk (Ukraine), Afghanistan, Albania, Belarus, Central African Republic ,Congo (the Democratic Republic), Cuba, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Myanmar (Burma), Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of), Pakistan, Palestine (State of), Russia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, Yemen, or Zimbabwe.}

_{The interest rate on Figure's Crypto-Backed Loan is 8.91% (9.999% APR) at 50% LTV or 11.50% (12.62% APR) up to 75%. The advertised Annual Percentage Rate (APR) is based on a $5,000 loan amount and contemplates the payment of 1% origination fee, which would yield a monthly payment of $42.47. Rates will be higher for applications secured by assets with a higher LTV ratio. The Figure Crypto-Backed Loan has a 12 month interest-only repayment term and allows for a maximum initial LTV ratio of 75%. Interest rates change frequently so your exact interest rate will depend on the date you apply and may depend on many factors such as LTV ratio.}

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Anuhas Athapaththu on 6 uncommon pitch mistakes made by founders (Link)

• Kevin Benoit on the biggest mistake founders make in the 1st meeting (Link)

Growth

• Kody Nordquist on a test to run for more profit from ads (Link)

• Preston Rutherford on the brand lifecycle (Link)

• Rohit Mittal shares a new playbook that wasn’t possible 5 years ago (Link)

ICYMI

• What works in tech recruitment: our data from 11 channels vs. ChatGPT estimates (Link)*

• Peter Kazanjy on the 3 clear narrative parts for each competitor (Link)

• Hubert Thieblot on the founder trap (Link)

• Andrew Faber shares 10 phrases that work when delegating (Link)

• Natia Kurdadze shares solutions to common startup problems (Link)

💡 Opportunity: SMS Assistant For Event Organizers

I’ve probably organized 500+ IRL events in my career.

And, almost always, managing them in the moment is fun but chaotic.

What you want attendees to take away from an event is how special it was. One of the best ways to do that is to be attentive to their needs as a host.

However too many times hosts aren’t able to focus on elevating the experience for guests and, instead, get bogged down solving small problems, answering simple questions, and managing ops.

A lot of those simple tasks could be offloaded to an LLM-based assistant who everyone at the event gets access to via text. That leaves the host free to do the things only they are uniquely able to do to elevate the experience.

You could charge event organizers a SaaS-style subscription fee or, more likely, use usage-based pricing.

Spotted on Ideabrowser

🧠 Framework: Business Acquisition Framework

Interesting take from Greg Isenberg last week.

He says that there’s an opportunity right now to build mini holdcos by acquiring niche businesses and increasing A) margins by using AI and B) customers through internet-based distribution.

Then, using the incremental cashflow to rinse and repeat by buying more businesses.

It’s a simple flywheel but, if you have the initial startup capital and understand how to build distribution, one that seems relatively undeniable right now.

It’d be interesting to see someone’s criteria for assessing the right types of businesses for this model.

Something that comes to mind for me is Constellation Software, which built a $10B business on the back of this type of acquisition strategy specifically for vertical SaaS companies.

What types of businesses could you replicate that with over the next ten years?

Ones with proprietary data, rather than verticalized software? Ones with sticky workflow integrations?

Hoping to see a few folks try this model and find out.

📈 Trend: US Startups Are Pulling Ahead

Patrick Collison, cofounder of Stripe, may be from the EU but he’s shared some data that would make anyone bullish on American startups.

Specifically, Stripe’s payment processing data clearly shows that US-based startups are growing so fast that it’s created an increasingly-large gap to the growth rates of startups from other regions.

It’s not just that they are growing more quickly, it’s that as time passes the growth rate gap is getting larger.

The chart below shows the US in comparison to the EU and UK, but Collison noted it’s also true for other regions.

The easy thing to do would be to attribute this to the amount of VC money flowing into AI companies in the US, but even when you entirely remove AI startups from the data the pattern holds true.

What seems to be happening is that because US-based startups have fewer regulations to deal with, they are able to more quickly adopt new technologies like AI and stablecoins, which are then helping them grow faster.

💬 Quote: One Business Away

One of my favorite quotes is from investor Peter Lynch. He says “selling your winners and holding your losers is like cutting the flowers and watering the weeds.”

This isn’t just true about investing. It also applies to founders.

Any good founder knows you only need to be right once.

Most people who have created self-made generational wealth has done it by being correct about one thing, and that thing has been correct to a very large degree.

So if what you’re doing isn’t working, don’t be afraid to cut the weeds instead of holding onto them.

You have a limited amount of time and mental bandwidth.

There are caveats to this, but at a base level if your business isn’t growing, and you’ve legitimately tried everything to the best of your ability, focus on giving yourself the room to find something that will achieve your goals.

Twitter tweet

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Hey y’all — where do LLMs go from here?

Way back on February 1st I explained why LLMs were already “over.”

My point was that LLMs were doomed to a race-to-the-bottom in terms of pricing, which would lead value to accrue elsewhere in the stack.

And this is exactly what we’re seeing.

A growing percentage of startups that a16z looks at (16-24% according to partner Martin Casado) use open source Chinese LLMs rather than or in addition to the American brand-name versions.

Presumably any difference in quality is accounted for by robust prompt engineering or, maybe more likely, at the early stages of a new company it (and data security) actually doesn’t matter that much and price is more important.

This week I’m taking a look at some of the logical questions that come up from this trend like:

• Why is this happening?

• What does this mean for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc?

• Where should you be building / where will value accrue?

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Where We Go Post-LLM

Why LLMs Are (Still) Over

Let’s briefly play out the relational database example.

In the 90s Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft charged premium prices for relational database management systems.

Eventually, free open-source alternatives like PostgreSQL and MySQL became viable competitors and completely commoditized the market.

As the market evolved, the cost of running software built on top of relational databases went to near-zero and value accrued where differentiation remained — which was in the data itself (the data layer) and how that data was used (the application layer) rather than the database itself (the infra layer).

Today we see the same dynamic playing out:

• GPT-5’s release demonstrated the already-diminishing returns of model quality due to the lack of new data to train on. We’re already at the iPhone 12, not the iPhone 5. Without a true breakthrough, this will continue.

• Open source and Chinese entrants will continue driving pricing down.

• Google is loving this because, due to their cash position, they can outspend the relative upstarts like OpenAI forever — creating challenges for OpenAI to reach their aggressive capital commitments without eventually taking on substantial dilution.

What This Means & What Happens Next

The subtext here is sort of “does this mean OpenAI, et al are doomed?”

The answer is no.

LLMs may not be where the value will accrue over time, but it doesn’t mean building them is pointless or that OpenAI and Anthropic will live and die by the value of LLMs alone.

Anthropic’s strategy appears to be building for the enterprise. They want to deliver the best experience to, and lock in partnerships with, large ACV enterprise players. My guess is they see that as the foundation and anything else as downstream.

They already server over 300,000 enterprise customers and have focused internationally by emphasizing their safety-first approach.

OpenAI’s focus seems to be more about venturing into the application layer, hardware (both in terms of data centers and consumer devices), and other bets themselves.

Their phone “companion” device, designed by Jony Ive, will at least be formally announced next year, their Stargate data center project is reportedly $500B, and their software focus is clearly shifting towards applications and agents around coding and more.

Both strategies are more than just a hedge against the issues with the future of LLMs we’ve noted, but rather the logical next step for companies in their position.

Where You Should Be Building

If LLMs are the new PostgreSQL — ubiquitous, cheap, and increasingly interchangeable, then the real winners for 2026 will be in things like:

• Curating unique data

• Applications that embed AI into sticky, retentive workflows

• Agents that act rather than just chat

Martin Casado from a16z has flagged in recent talks that the AI stack is maturing just like the internet did with commoditized infra at the base and moats higher up at the data and application layers. The difference this time is that there will be a third valuable layer: agents.

Target verticals where there’s either a scarcity of data (and you have a way to acquire it) or the workflow is super painful (and LLMs can make it better). Ideally both.

Most importantly, iterate through your ideas quickly. With decreasing model costs, you can afford to.

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Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

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This BFCM, unlock your site's potential. Get 50% off for 3 months + 50 free migrations.

Use code: BFCM5050 Deploy faster. Grow smarter. The offer won't last.

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Niclas Schlopsna on what founders don’t know about large VC economics (Link)

• Michal Bukovy on why fundraising should be the last thing you do (Link)

• Muadh Dliaa on running if an investor asks about traction in pre-seed (Link)

• Peter Walker shares end of year founder fundraising data (Link)

Growth

• Ernesto Lopez on his exact process to take apps from $0 to $10k/month (Link)

ICYMI

• Unlock global growth with Justworks EOR (Link)*

• Rohit Mittal on the 3 stuck founder archetypes (Link)

• Justin Mazeka Vogt shares a simple starter matrix for delegation (Link)

• Justin Mateen on why the first mover isn’t always the best bet (Link)

• Jasiel Martin-Odoom shares a founder tip about investor intros (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Brand Consistency Checker

People have subjective judgement.

And mistakes happen.

Especially as teams and orgs grow.

Do big or even mid-sized companies really even have a consistent brand voice across all of their surfaces?

Of course, they have consistent brand guidelines… but how can you be sure those guidelines are being followed in the same way all the time?

Is each marketing manager interpreting them the same way?

Probably, realistically, not.

It’s not a problem any one person or simple system can solve.

But LLMs could.

Imagine an arbiter that you feed your brand guidelines into, and then it integrates with your creative tools (Canva, Figma, etc) and also your customer-facing surface tools (social media schedulers, email comms, etc) to validate if something is on brand or not (and how to fix it if not).

It would both increase consistency and also reduce the need for human reviews, directly saving time and money that could be more easily mapped to the P&L.

If I were building this, I’d start with social — that’s where mistakes are most costly.

Spotted on Ideabrowser

🧠 Framework: BRIDGeS Framework

This might be the most fully built-out framework I’ve ever shared.

It even has its own official FigJam file?

It’s a decision-making framework that’s highly structured, which makes it particularly useful for complex or ambiguous problems that involve a variety of stakeholders.

Their official descriptions are a little buzzwordy but TLDR:

It breaks decisions down into a problem space and a solution space.

In the problem space, you’re exploring Benefits, Risks, Issues, Dependencies, Goals, and the effects on the Subjects who will be impacted.

Start by identifying the Subjects and then filling in the other areas in relation to them.

Once you’ve explored that, you enter the solution space where you run through three steps in order:

1. Solution Variations → These are the different high-level approaches you can take to achieve the Benefits and Goals (ex. building something in-house vs partnering with someone else).

2. Decompose Your Solution → After you’ve chosen a solution, break it down into large chunks for teams to work on. Typically, each chunk should be tied to a specific hypothesis you’re testing.

3. Roadmap → Now we’re in familiar territory — you’re just building your task-level product and operational roadmap.

There’s a lot going on here, so I’d only say to break this one out for large problems on large teams, but it’s worth keeping in your back pocket.

📈 Trend: Fewer Junior Hires

Remember that chart that showed the pandemic-era rise and subsequent fall in job listings for software engineering jobs?

It was everywhere.

Many people attributed the fall, at least partially, to the rise of LLMs and extrapolated that it was likely mostly junior roles (which make up the bulk of job listings) being impacted.

Turns out that was exactly right.

Twitter tweet

When we look at actual employment data, we can see that the job listing trend is matched by actual jobs.

And, in fact, senior roles have continued to increase at roughly the same indexed rate as they have since at least 2015. Maybe slightly slower.

It’s very clear that it’s becoming harder to break into existing companies in your early career years.

What does this imply?

I think it’s another datapoint in favor of something we’ve been talking about for well over a year — a forthcoming massive rise in micro-entrepreneurship.

The rise of the Silicon Valley Small Business.

More talented people going their own way. More variety in products and offerings available.

If you have friends who are AI doomers and say it will make us unemployed and purposeless (when it comes to work, at least), use this to reframe the conversation.

The new AI-powered economy will be very different, but we’re not all going to be sitting around. In some ways, we’ll actually have more on our shoulders.

💬 Quote: Launch It Anyway

This tweet is pretty simple, which made me sit here and wonder what to write about it.

Ironic.

I talk a lot about the importance of action, and motion, to help you make progress.

Every time I do, I get a response from someone saying it was just what they needed to hear.

So, today, let’s keep it simple.

If you’ve been waiting on something, stop waiting.

If you haven’t launched yet, launch.

It it’s not ready, it’s ok.

No one remembers.

You’ll launch again.

Just get it in front of people.

See what they notice.

See what they don’t care about.

It might surprise you.

Failing now might save you time later.

Twitter tweet

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Hey y’all — not many founders will ever know what it’s like to build a startup that eventually IPOs… let alone two.

But Mike Cagney does.

He co-founded Figure.com with his wife, June, in 2017 and their blockchain-backed home equity lines of credit and other financial products led them to a booming IPO this September. Shares are up over 40% since.

Before Figure, he co-founded SoFi, which raised what at the time was the largest funding round in history — $1 billion from SoftBank’s Vision Fund in 2015 — and later IPO’d as well.

I caught up with him this week and he shared 5 key lessons that have guided his journey as a founder and led to massive success:

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5 Lessons From Mike Cagney’s Two IPOs

#1: Don’t Fast Follow

Paul Graham says that the primary differentiator of a startup vs any other type of company is that it is designed to grow fast. So, following that logic means that founders who are building startups want to change the world.

But how do you actually change the world? It’s interesting to think about this, but many founders don’t apply this type of thinking to one of the most important decisions they make:

Choosing the market they’re going after.

Mike called out that there are two types of mistakes founders make here:

1. Going after a crowded market or one someone else fully owns, without any disruptive advantage

2. Copy/pasting a playbook that worked in one market into another and hoping for the best

In the first case, it echoes Peter Thiel’s classic take on why startups should focus on a small market rather than a large one:

In the latter case, ten years ago everyone was building “Uber for X” — they were taking a model that one startup had proved out, and trying to apply it to every other market under the sun.

Even today, I bet you can find startups founded in the AI era that are following this playbook.

“Uber for X” did yield some big companies, but mostly misses. I’d bet the hit rate of companies that reached IPO was lower than the average for startups that successfully raise at least some venture.

The lesson was to not bet your career on an iteration of someone else’s idea.

With Figure and SoFi, Mike focused on creating new markets by connecting sources and uses of capital directly, first through student loans and now via blockchain.

And his advice was to ask what problem you can solve that no one else is tackling. Find the whitespace. Find a market when it is early, but has the potential for rapid growth. And then move as fast as you can.

This is hard to do, but it’s how unicorns are built.

#2: Embrace the Unpredictable Path

Have you ever watched The Price Is Right?

It’s a classic American game show that has a bunch of “mini-games” that contestants play in order to win prizes.

One of those is called Plinko — and Mike compared a founder’s journey to the path of a Plinko ball on the board.

This is Plinko:

You go to the top of the board and drop a very bouncy ball into a minefield of bars that block its path. When it reaches the bottom, you get the amount of money that’s marked on the area of the board it falls into.

No matter how well you try to line up where you drop the Plinko ball with the slot at the bottom of the board, it’s going to bounce around and likely end up somewhere totally different. It’s impossible to predict.

Mike’s point was that you can’t predict where you’ll end up, but what you can control is your own North Star.

You have control over your mission, your vision, and your intrinsic driving force.

Stay committed to those, but flexible in execution, and realize that hard pivots can happen within the context of a bigger mission.

For Mike, his mission (even from companies he built and sold prior to SoFi) has been to connect the sources and uses of capital in society more efficiently. Primarily, he’s done this by removing middlemen and creating more control and opportunity for people on both ends of transactions.

Articulate what that is for you and stick to it.

#3: Don’t Fear Rules

Most founders I know avoid heavily regulated industries.

And I get it. They seem scary, and like a recipe for a slow-moving company or situations where incumbents can more easily crush you.

Bill Gurley’s incredible talk 2,851 Miles from the All-In Summit a couple years ago goes into some horror stories about regulated industries:

But they can also be exactly where a startup’s main advantage — speed — comes into play the most, if you can navigate around the land-mines.

This isn’t to say you should skirt the rules, but rather that you’re likely underestimating how slowly existing players are moving.

On one hand, regulation is the friend of the incumbent but, on the other, the resulting inefficiencies in regulated markets lead to complacence by incumbents. That’s opportunity.

Mike flagged that while you won’t be moving as fast as you would in a less regulated space, but you’ll be moving at a faster relative pace compared to your competitors.

Both Figure and SoFi operate in heavily regulated financial services spaces. Figure, in particular, has also successfully navigated the challenging and unclear regulatory environment for blockchain.

But because the opportunity is so large, Mike built a business that demonstrated blockchain’s value to both the regulators and the markets.

Mike’s POV here reminded me of how Palmer Luckey has approached the defense sector with Anduril, which is now worth $30 billion.

Defense tech wasn’t sexy in Silicon Valley for years. The New York Times even wrote about how Google employees were protesting a project that could have been potentially used for military drones in 2018.

And yet, 7 years later we have the Gundo and a16z writing about “investing capital to defend the nation” and raising billions to invest on the back of their American Dynamism thesis.

There are tons of regulated markets out there. And opportunities in them exist since most founders avoid them.

#4: Cut Out Middlemen

Mike’s vision for blockchain at Figure wasn’t about tweaking an existing system, but rather about eliminating entire layers of financial infrastructure.

Middlemen love to insert themselves into markets. For years, if you’ve been able to position your startup as a “tax” on an industry you’d be more likely to be able to attract funding.

Stripe is the best and most successful example of this — they are a tax on payments on the internet.

LLM credits are a tax on building AI tools.

The model works, but if we just endlessly add more middlemen, eventually everything will become too expensive.

It’s death by a thousand fees.

However removing these middlemen without sacrificing functionality, performance, or any other relevant metric in a given market will not only be lucrative but also build intense customer love and loyalty.

The trouble is that these types of opportunities are more rare to find and challenging to build.

But your chances of defining a category are much higher when you’re not putting lipstick on the pig, and instead aiming for structural disruption.

The best way to do this is to build a system that removes the need for middlemen entirely. Design your product and offer to remove, not enhance or piggyback off of them.

#5: Use Capital To Win

Masayoshi Son offered Mike $1 billion at SoFi instead of the $200 million Mike wanted, but he took it anyway.

You might think that sounds like an easy decision, but Mike told me it actually wasn’t an obvious choice (more detail on this in our full interview), but once he made the decision it allowed him tremendous flexibility.

All of a sudden he had capital to make principled, bold bets and experiment in ways competitors could not afford to. He was using capital to run faster than anyone else, and SoFi won the market as a result.

The lesson here is to not be afraid of taking on funding even if you don’t necessarily have it all figured out upfront.

The sheer leverage you gain from it will allow you to open up new opportunities for your startup, as Mike is proving once again with Figure.

How We Can Help

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_{Figure Lending LLC dba Figure 650 S. Tryon Street, 8th Floor, Charlotte, NC 28202. 888) 819-6388. NMLS ID 1717824. For licensing information go to www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org. Equal Opportunity Lender}

_{Digital currency is not legal tender, is not backed by the government, and BIA accounts are not subject to FDIC or SIPC protections.}

_{Crypto loans are offered to U.S. borrowers by Figure Lending LLC. This product is not available to U.S. residents of DC, ID, IL, KY, MD, MS, SD, TX, VT, or VA.}

_{Crypto loans are offered through Figure Markets Credit LLC to residents of the state of New York and to international customers except in the following jurisdictions: Crimea (Ukraine), Donetsk (Ukraine), Luhansk (Ukraine), Afghanistan, Albania, Belarus, Central African Republic ,Congo (the Democratic Republic), Cuba, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Myanmar (Burma), Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of), Pakistan, Palestine (State of), Russia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, Yemen, or Zimbabwe.}

_{The interest rate on Figure's Crypto-Backed Loan is 8.91% (9.999% APR) at 50% LTV or 11.50% (12.62% APR) up to 75%. The advertised Annual Percentage Rate (APR) is based on a $5,000 loan amount and contemplates the payment of 1% origination fee, which would yield a monthly payment of $42.47. Rates will be higher for applications secured by assets with a higher LTV ratio. The Figure Crypto-Backed Loan has a 12 month interest-only repayment term and allows for a maximum initial LTV ratio of 75%. Interest rates change frequently so your exact interest rate will depend on the date you apply and may depend on many factors such as LTV ratio.}

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Peter Walker shares location data on $500k-$1M SAFEs (Link)

• Evan Fisher on what most founders miss about in-house rounds (Link)

• Chris Smith shares 3 distinct ways to play the VC game (Link)

• Eddie Lou on 3 things he looks for in startup investing (Link)

Growth

• John Rush on how he got his first 100 users for each of his startups (Link)

• Steven Cravotta on the new TikTok growth marketing guide (Link)

ICYMI

• Gokul Rajaram on weekly founder emails (Link)

• John Rush shares lessons learned from failing 30 startups in 20 years (Link)

• Dylan Ander’s hot take on having the opportunity to sell a company (Link)

• Mike Vilardo on the bad (and one good) reasons to become a founder (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Networking Event ROI Tracker

My good friend Andrew Yeung runs the best tech events in NYC through his company, Fibe.

With his events, you can trust your time will be well spent because he curates interesting groups of people.

But unless you trust the organizer, “networking” events are generally hard to directly attribute an ROI to unless you denote the specific event you met a sales lead at in your CRM.

As a result you’re likely going to fewer events than you should, and/or the wrong ones.

But if you had a way to more directly attribute leads, deals, and revenue to specific conferences or happy hours that would change fast.

You’d need a layer that integrates with both your CRM and event platforms, or lets you import attendee lists (that you’d have to secure).

Spotted on Ideabrowser

Integrating with CRMs is the easy part though.

The key, of course, is securing partnerships with commonly-used event platforms like Luma, Partiful, and the others.

Their APIs don’t allow non-hosts to collect and use info on other attendees. You could likely scrape event pages for names and potentially some other info, but accuracy without email would likely be spotty at best unless you compared the event’s attendee list as a sort of micro social graph against what you can publicly find about people’s connections through LinkedIn.

🧠 Framework: Ladder Of Proof

One of the most often underrated content creators in the startup world is the venture firm NFX.

They’ve consistently been putting thoughtful posts with a unique POV on their site for years.

One of their frameworks is called The Ladder Of Proof. It’s a way to think about how investors will be evaluating the investment opportunity you’re presenting to them.

Here’s how it works:

Each rung on the ladder is something that helps your startup get a “leg up” (get it?) in the market. Therefore, any run that you don’t have covered and is instead “broken” means it’s a potential reason to not invest in your company.

The rungs at the bottom are foundational. You can’t get to the point of even worrying about the ones that are higher up unless you’ve stepped past the initial ones.

And any rungs you haven’t reached yet might be broken, you just won’t know it yet.

Investors actively want to write checks, but they run through these rungs in their head as they try to understand how far you are in your journey, they need to understand how much of your journey has been de-risked, and if there are any broken rungs you’re not fixing as you go.

Note that some rungs are in red — you can argue two things here:

1. Some would say these rungs are more important than the others

2. Other investors might not, though

The point of the red rungs is to emphasize that investors will index on specific rungs based on how they understand risk broadly and also in your specific case. When you’re talking to them, try to suss out what the red rungs are for them by noting what they ask questions about or otherwise comment on.

📈 Trend: How Search Is Changing

I’ve talked a lot about how LLMs are impacting SEO and how consumers are using LLMs for a rapidly-rising share of their search queries.

But there’s also another layer to how search behavior is changing: the types of searches people are doing.

One of the primary uses of Google has historically been to get you to the right place. It’s basically the entirely point of the PageRank algorithm that powers Google’s results.

But LLMs are making it less important to navigate to websites to get the information you’re looking for. In fact, the LLM will probably be able to format it in a way that actually delivers the answer to you more efficiently than the website it came from.

It’s a more personalized, tailored experience for the user.

As a result, the overall share of searches that are navigational in nature are dropping fast, and people are instead interested in more top-of-funnel, informational queries.

Something to think about as you craft your SEO and GEO strategy. Book a quick call with me and we can chat about what this should look like for you specifically (yes it’ll actually be me on the call).

💬 Quote: Let The Shipping Do The Talking

I’m gonna let the quote do the talking this week.

Skip your next meeting and get back to shipping :)

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Hey y’all — here’s a puzzle for you:

Your startup’s product has highly engaged users who love it, but there’s no obvious common thread among them.

And without a clear ICP you’re not sure how to market the product, whose feature requests to prioritize, or what the longterm vision should actually be.

To make matters more confusing, each cut of the data you do also has a bunch of similar users but who are dramatically less engaged with the product.

A founder friend recently ran into this scenario and asked for advice. Here are a few ways I advised them to find your ICP in this type of scenario (and how you can too)…

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3 Reasons You Can’t Find Your ICP

Ignore Personas

Most startups define their ICP based on the persona of their users.

Who are they? What are their job titles, or demographics? You create an avatar based on these, maybe even with a name.

You build the product for this persona specifically, asking yourself whether a proposed feature would be something this persona would use and love or not.

But there’s another way to group users, which is sometimes a better fit:

Their goals.

More specifically, defining your ICP by what your users are trying to use your product to accomplish rather than who they are.

The most well-known framework for this is the classic Jobs To Be Done framework from Clayton Christensen:

While JTBD has gotten some pushback in the last few years, most notably from former a16z GP Sriram Krishnan (see below), it can be useful in this specific scenario.

There’s precedence for this.

Notion became a unicorn despite not having a clear initial user persona.

Their early users weren’t the 25-40 year old knowledge workers who dominate their usage patterns today. Instead, they were a wide variety of people who were trying to replace messy personal wikis, spreadsheets, and docs with a single flexible system.

To find some signal here, look for shared context or triggering moments that are commonly mentioned in user interviews. Find similarities in quotes and go deeper with users to understand them more.

But here’s the counter argument for JTBD more broadly, as well:

You’re Earlier Than You Think

Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one.

It might just be that you’re not missing an ICP, you’re just still in the discovery phase where multiple use cases are working but none is dominating (yet).

It could be that you’re not seeing how to cut the data the right way or, more simply, that the product isn’t mature enough yet.

A good way to get out of this phase is to look at specific high-growth adjacent data:

• Highest x-day retention

• Fastest time-to-value

• Highest referral rate

Focus on building the product to increase these things and see which users respond most positively. It’s potentially one of the few cases where adding “just one more feature” actually will get you closer to PMF.

The Market Velocity Isn’t Happening

Another option, however distasteful, is that the market you are trying to capture simply isn’t emerging quickly enough (or, in a worst case scenario, much at all).

This is the only truly bad scenario of the three because there’s no solution.

We know that Peter Thiel says to build a product for a small, fast-growing market but the key word there is fast-growing. Small is bad if it’s staying that way.

If the market is not going to reach venture-scale in a reasonable time-frame, you are best served to pack your bags and go back on the hunt for a new one.

Hopefully some of what you’ve built can be repurposed for it.

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🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Jason Freedman on common Series A planning conversations right now (Link)

• Jimmy Acton shares Vinod Khosla’s brutally honest quote about investors (Link)

• Jack Mcclelland shares the flow of how a founder told their story (Link)

Growth

• TJ on how CRM reporting is an underrated sales method (Link)

ICYMI

• Hire rockstar devs your investors wish you hired first (Link)*

• Rohit Mittal on why many vc-backed companies end up in the same place (Link)

• Matthias Schmidt on why his company doesn’t use AI to code (Link)

• Steven Cravotta on the 3 rules that every good app idea follows (Link)

• Chris Tottman shares 15 startup mistakes to avoid (according to YC) (Link)

• Greg Isenberg shares 30 ways to find your next $10k+ MRR idea for 2026 (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Human-Only Social Media

Social media is getting worse.

Some people will joke and say “I didn’t think that was possible” but the truth is that billions of people use social media platforms every day in ways that have become essential for their lives.

Negative impacts or not, you’d be hard pressed to make the case that there haven’t also been huge positive ones.

Perhaps the most important way is through connecting with one another. It’s why I spend a couple hours writing this newsletter each week, myself, even if I get delayed to midnight the night before — to connect with all of you.

But now an increasing share of content is being created by AI.

Discerning humans can often tell when this is the case, but not everyone can. And, regardless, even the discerning among us likely don’t love having to scroll past or interact with AI “slop.”

As that slop becomes more common, where will the humans go?

It’s rare that there are true preference shifts among such a large share of social media users, but preferring a place where only human-generated content exists may be one.

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The hard part here is verification. You won’t likely be able to keep up with all the ways bots will believably pretend to be human.

Instead, you need to verify that humans are human. Worldcoin is actually ahead of the game here.

🧠 Framework: The Pitch Iceberg

You’ve probably heard of iceberg theory. Made famous by Ernest Hemingway, it says the best stories leave much under the surface.

It emphasizes subtlety rather than bombarding the reader with all the information. It’s not about hiding things from the reader, but rather elegant concision.

The same idea should apply to your pitch. What an investor is presented with is the output of many, many things that went into the pitch but don’t need to explicitly be included in it.

I don’t agree with everything on the image below, but the principle holds true — your pitch is a sales meeting, and your desk is a sales document.

As with anything else in sales, you want to be truthful first and foremost. You just don’t need to spill your guts to get your point across (and doing so would likely muddy it).

📈 Trend: Vibecoded Video Games

Vibecoding SaaS is out.

Vibecoding video games is in.

We’re about to see an explosion of hobbyist video game designer and builders who create their first games. Some will go viral. Millionaires will be created.

And it’ll happen sooner than you think.

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Where this gets really interesting, though, is when you consider the new features games created by LLMs can have.

Vibecoding them is just phase 1.

The real innovation will come in the form of endlessly refreshing game experiences.

Think of a puzzle game with no end to the new levels you can play. Or an open-world GTA-esque game that has an endless map and where each location truly does have different things happen every day.

Those are just the obvious ones.

Any big game studio that is working on new titles without considering innovating with LLMs will be left behind in 5 years.

This was already happening before LLMs — it’s been 12 years since the last GTA game, there’s no sign of Destiny 3 in sight, and studios are consistently looking to milk as much additional lifespan and revenue out of existing titles as possible.

LLMs are just going to supercharge it.

💬 Quote: Be Ambitious

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been mentoring a startup here in Charleston, SC (where I’ve been living since July — side note, it’s great here).

I got matched with them to help them with a local pitch competition, which they went on to win and get $800k in funding from.

They have a great business, with a shot of owning a niche with their vertical SaaS product.

And while they were being encouraged by others to aim to raise VC, there were few folks who were pushing them to aim as big as possible.

Silicon Valley is a unique place — for most investors a $50-100M exit would be a great outcome for a startup they invest in but, for folks in Silicon Valley it’s basically a writeoff.

This isn’t delusional, or just trying to go big for the sake of going big. Not every company has the potential to become large enough to generate Silicon Valley sized returns.

Rather it’s a practical response to having the opportunity to invest in companies that actually can become decacorns and beyond. The SF ecosystem is dense with opportunity.

In most other ecosystems this type of thinking doesn’t really exist, and changing that is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem:

Aggressively-minded capital inspires founders to think bigger, and founders who think bigger attract investors who are aggressively-minded.

The solution is for founders, as always, to lead.

Pursue problems in markets that can become large enough to support true venture-scale returns. Forge a path to capture that market. And think big along the way.

If you’re based outside of Silicon Valley, this will be harder. Investors may even fight you or say it’s too risky for them, or that you’re delusional.

But if you present a compelling vision and prove it step-by-step along the way, eventually they’ll know not to miss the next one.

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How We Can Help

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Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Troy Kirwin on writing a memo for investors after your first meeting (Link)

• Mike Vilardo on why hoarding equity is not a good strategy (Link)

• Nick Katz on what investors are actually evaluating (Link)

Growth

• Inkko on how to get people to actually use your app (Link)

• Hunter Isaacson on the importance of onboarding (Link)

ICYMI

• High-impact accounting and CFO services that scale (Link)*

• Anastasia Zik shares a trap you don’t want to fall into (Link)

• Saïd Aitmbarek’s advice to first-time founders (Link)

• Ross Hendricks on LLM negative unit economics (Link)

• Guillaume Moubeche shares startup lies (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Compliance Automation Platform

Legal requirements are a lot easier to add to most industries than to remove.

As a result, every year there are more rules. More compliance checks that need to be done. More tedious work.

There are companies that help with ensuring you’re compliant, but what about knowing when you need to become compliant in the first place?

There’s an opportunity for a platform that alerts you to any new compliance requirements, or any deficiencies in the way your company is operating, automatically with LLMs.

Founders won’t catch the edge cases themselves, most likely, but they will pay for something that does (as long as it doesn’t take up a lot of their time).

Spotted on Ideabrowser

🧠 Framework: GAIN Framework

One of the most challenging parts about getting feedback from users is interpreting it.

And that’s because most people suck at giving feedback.

It’s not their fault — most of them aren’t trained in how to assess feedback, so they don’t know how to give feedback that’s actually useful and easy to understand.

So one of the biggest 80/20 things you can do when interviewing users is briefly teaching them how to give good feedback during your session, at the beginning.

And the GAIN Framework can help with that.

Instruct your users to:

1. Goal → Focus primarily on future potential improvements, not current pains. This is counterintuitive for them since they probably don’t believe you’re aware of the pain points and, frankly, they just want to be heard. But what’s more valuable for you is hearing about what would make it better for them, not just that it exists. Push the conversation in that direction.

2. Actions → Include observations of actions and their impacts, rather than judgements. This is where you take it one step further and try to understand what actions you’ll need to take in order to get them to their goal state. Be specific here.

3. Impacts → Once you’ve identified the actions you’ll need to take, you need to understand how this will benefit users. You’ll need to make the case to your team that this is worth doing, after all. Ask the user about a perfect world scenario and what that would enable them to have happen, and why that’s important to them.

4. Next → Close with clear, concrete next actions. Make this specific — who will do what by when to start addressing their concern? This builds trust and is also useful for you.

📈 Trend: AI Product Management

Once upon a time, I was a Product Manager at Airbnb.

As most PMs will tell you, the role is actually kind of hard to describe even when you’re doing it (and can vary a lot from team to team).

In fact it’s sort of like this:

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You’re being paid to take in a lot of varied inputs and use your taste to direct that energy into improving the product in specific ways.

This makes it an interesting role for AI tools to make an impact on — taste is one of the hardest things for AI to replicate right now, and giving it enough context may be a challenge.

Yet interest is growing:

But the truth is that there are tedious aspects of the job.

One tool I’ve liked is ChatPRD. A PRD is a long and detailed doc meant to outline the requirements of new products and features. It’s what a PM writes before handing it off to eng and design to build something.

While precision obviously matters with that process, a lot the docs are more paint-by-numbers than anything else and could likely be sped up with a tool like that.

Some other areas of the job that could be improved with AI:

• Context gathering

• Proactively flagging users who may be worth talking with

• Automatically disseminating strategy updates from execs to the rest of your team with relevant context for your product

With every other role getting AI superpowers, PMs should too.

💬 Quote: Don’t Worry About Anyone Else

It’s true you should listen to your users (most of the time).

But before you even have users, you’ll already be getting lots of opinions from folks.

And once you do, the non-user opinions will increase.

Something I see founders get tripped up on a lot: even smart people can give bad advice.

Even if they are well-intentioned and experienced, they aren’t in the weeds with you and it’s likely impossible to communicate all of the relevant context to them that you see.

I try to be cognizant of this when I’m advising founders, but it’s not really the outsider’s job to be.

It’s the founder’s job to distill what’s signal and what’s noise.

Some people would say that’s a good reason to never bother getting advice from outsiders, but I disagree.

They can provide value, even if it often isn’t exactly in the way they intend.

They may be trying to tell you how to do something, but what’s valuable might just be what they’re calling out as something to think more about.

At the end of the day, don’t worry about what they think — be aware of it, but trust that you know your market.

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