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Today's word count: 413

Read time: 1 min 51sec.

You have 12 shots in life by

The Chinese concept of 天 地 人 (Tian-Di-Ren) captures the three forces that shape every great work: Heaven (mastering timing), Earth (the right environment), and People (who you build with).

Across a 50-year career, you likely only have 12 shots at creating something truly great. You only need to be right once. But to win, you have to know how to spot a “live” shot early.

The best opportunities feel like a pull, not a push. Momentum should be self-evident where people sprint without being asked and energy compounds daily. If you’re grinding just to convince yourself that something is working, that’s likely not your shot. You already have what you need to start; anything else you lack will be acquired through the sheer gravity of your momentum. If it feels like constant friction, stop pushing and wait for the pull.

There will only be four jobs by

AI is collapsing the traditional middle-management and “information processor” layers of tech companies. Yoni argues that we are reorienting into four primary archetypes:

• Slop Cannon (Vibe coders): High-velocity generalists who use AI to ship products and features at 10x the traditional speed.

• SREs/Infra: The deep technical experts who stitch the massive output of “vibe coders” into stable, secure, and robust systems.

• Hot People (Sales/Evangelism): The human face of the brand. In a world of automated “slop,” authentic human connection becomes a premium asset.

• Adults (Ops/Governance): The few remaining people responsible for keeping the chaos organised and the business on track.

You need to decide which of these four buckets you are filling before the market decides for you

If You’re Not First, You’re (Maybe? Potentially? Probably?) Last by

In emerging markets with mercenary capital and no lock-in, being first means nothing. But once a market matures and a leader has built compounding advantages such as liquidity, trust, network effects, you can quickly go from 60% share to 80 or 90%.

The lesson for founders: worry less about whether you're first, and more about whether the mechanisms you're building can compound over time and build structural advantages.

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Abhi

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Today's word count: 577

Read time: 2 min 42 sec.

AI will not make you rich (disclaimer: long article)

In this article, Jerry Neumann (a legendary ex-VC) makes the analogy that the current AI market closely resembles the shipping containerisation wave more than the consumer PC market where everyone can see the obvious benefits, but immediate competition prevents moat-building. (It’s worth reading the article if you want to go deeper into the analogy)

His view is that we’re investing in the wrong layer and should be focused on AI returns that will flow to businesses that leverage productivity gains strategically, e.g., IKEA or Walmart leveraging containerisation to streamline operations and build new retail business models.

I’ve explored this in a few prior articles and it’s similar in thinking to the growing AI-enabled rollup strategy pioneered by Thrive, Slow Ventures and a few others.

As an aside, I’m working with a few companies on this at the moment, and keen to work with more around narrative formation, product and fundraising. Feel free reply to this email or book in some time here to chat!

Doomprompting

nails something I've been feeling but couldn't quite articulate: doomprompting as the new doomscrolling. We think we're being productive having conversations with AI, but we're actually outsourcing our thinking while feeling clever about it.

I've been helping friends write more, and where the big barrier used to be writer's block, it’s now getting stuck in a doom loop of prompting. Despite having genuinely strong ideas, their first instinct is to funnel everything through AI and tweak with clever prompts. In the end, the output is soulless, incoherent and stripped of their voice.

AI works great for brainstorming and pressure-testing ideas, but fails at the messy middle where actual creative work happens. The constant back-and-forth prevents the silent, difficult thinking that leads to genuine breakthrough insights.

I think the best AI tools will be those that force you to do the cognitive heavy lifting yourself, not those that eliminate it. With this in mind, I’ve been building a few tools that prompt me on certain things when I get stuck, or force me to think deeper versus doing the thinking for me.

Poke by Interaction

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about new product experiences that leverage AI to create customer love/joy in unique ways. This week I came across Poke by Interaction.co, a life management/productivity product with a genuinely unique onboarding mechanism.

In short, it collects context on you and then forces you to haggle with it to get access to the tool. You have to prove your value to it as an early user and based on how persistent you are, you can haggle the price down. As an ex-VC it initially quoted me $1,997 a month and I managed to get it down to $5. I know people who have got it down to $2.63 a month, so give it a go and reply to this email with how low you got it!

This represents a shift from AI as passive assistant to AI as active participant with agency. Poke's AI negotiates well, makes demands, and has personality. To be honest, it got a bit old quite quickly and it wasn’t an entirely valuable interaction either so I’m split on whether this is pure gimmick (and a content viral loop) or actually genius.

Forward this to a founder who needs better signal.

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Today's word count: 502

Read time: 2 min 18 sec.

The API-fication of Work

This was an interesting way to think about how to think about mapping specific role functions to API calls. The more a task can be broken down into discrete, atomic parts with verifiable success metrics (think categorizeExpense() or generateContract()), the faster AI will eat it.

Coincidentally, I also came across this podcast by the gtm engineer where Anshul, the founder of Actively, talks about the cognitive architecture required to build a world-class agentic GTM motion. His core insight is that a GTM engineer’s job is to codify a salesperson's intuition by turning their mental model into a data model where the account becomes the "unit" of work.

The Future of Education and EdTech

Coming from a family that has prioritised education above everything else (my grandfather started his own school and my mum was a chemistry teacher), I’ve always been fascinated with how people learn and why they learn anything. I started my own tutoring business in uni and now I'm building AI tools to accelerate my own learning across various domains.

The dream of rigorous personalised tutoring or coaching has previously been cost prohibitive. You might take music lessons once a week but to do it everyday is expensive. We’re seeing this shift with AI.

This profile of Joe Liemandt and how he built Alpha School is a perfect example of that. By investing a billion dollars into an AI-powered tutoring system, he's creating a K-12 school that is teacherless, homework-free, and radically efficient. Students learn 2x faster with two hours a day of focused effort working towards mastery of each subject. The rest of the day is spent on “workshops, learning things like how to run an Airbnb or food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production, or build a business or drone.”

Speaking of AI EdTech tools, Oboe just launched today where you can create your own personalised course about anything! I’ve been waiting for this launch for a few months now so keen to dive in. Let me know if you check it out.

you are not late

This one resonated with me personally, especially as I’m pursuing a few different paths and options at the moment. It’s too easy to get caught up in the hype of social media and chase shiny objects, whilst simultaneously feeling like you’re behind everyone else and scrambling to keep up. This article was a great reminder that the best time to do something new is always now.

Don’t Ship Your Pitch Deck to Your Website.

This is my top founder advice pick for the week from First Round. I’ve found that many pre-seed/seed founders aren’t clear enough in differentiating their messaging between investors and customers. A pitch deck sells a dream, but a website has to sell a solution to your customer’s immediate problem.

from MKT1 is great at breaking down how to adapt the information on each pitch deck slide for your website.

Forward this to a founder who needs better signal.

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Abhi

This week I’m trialing a new format where I curate the smartest takes on startups, AI, and capital allocation from the 75+ articles I read every week. I’ll give you the key insight from 4 of the best pieces that I consumed over the last week that you can immediately apply to your business (in <2 minutes).

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Today's word count: 325

Read time: 1 min 37 sec.

Over the last couple of months I've been working closely with a number of founders on navigating the VC fundraising process and on a variety of 0 to 1 problems (GTM, Product, Operations).

It's something that I've always done as a VC during my nights and weekends, and now it's even better to be able to do it full-time.

Whether you're preparing to raise, stuck on positioning, or just need someone who's sat on both sides of the table to pressure-test your thinking, I'd love to help.

Feel free to DM me on Linkedin, hit reply on this email or book in some time via my Calendly below.

Book in a quick chat!

Multiple Axes of Non-Consensus

With AI, we are in an environment where everyone wants to build cutting edge technology. Unfortunately, in a competitive market, that’s not enough to stand out, or non-consensus enough. writes that at the moment “capital is heavily overweighted toward tech non-consensus - leaving room for under-the-radar entrants that win through market, model, and cultural non-consensus, or better still, unique combinations.”

It’s so clear that this is the case, that it makes no sense playing the same game as everyone else. Combine 2 or more axes of non-consensus (see table above) if you want to win.

Cursor’s Pricing Problem

The topic of VC-subsidised AI credits was always going to emerge as it has in previous cycles with subsidised Uber rides or ‘Unlimited’ pricing with MoviePass. Whilst I’ve spoken about the impacts this has on unit economics, in this article, Chris Paik goes further and questions whether Cursor even has PMF despite being valued at $10B+, or whether users only use Cursor for the subsidies on tokens. The current meta of pricing your AI product at $20 a month will eventually run its course. It’s better to think about your business model and pricing sooner rather than later.

AI UX needs to evolve beyond chat

Chat interfaces are the training wheels of AI, they’re useful for getting started and building horizontal use cases, but “sucks for workflow, depth and longitudinal data.” I really enjoyed this article as Yoni’s article reinforces (+ adds a lot more colour & examples) to what I’ve written before about the need to reimagine AI user experiences from the ground up.

Deep Research for GTM

This one was my favourite practical read this week. Kyle Poyar presents prompts that help founders use AI Deep Research to help with GTM research. Good prompting is centred around extensive planning, defining constraints and supplying appropriate context. Kyle’s guide is a masterclass in crafting prompts that do just that.

Forward this to a founder who needs better signal.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you thought about the new format. Feel free to answer the poll above or hit reply and let me know , I respond to every email.

Abhi

It's something that I've always done as a VC during my nights and weekends, and now it's even better to be able to do it full-time.

Whether you're preparing to raise, stuck on positioning, or just need someone who's sat on both sides of the table to pressure-test your thinking, I'd love to help.

Feel free to DM me on Linkedin, hit reply on this email or book in some time via my Calendly below.

Book in a quick chat!

During my podcast episode with Chris from Linkby earlier this year, he lightly teased that they were going through a Series B fundraise. Since then, Linkby, a Performance PR platform helping brands connect with publishers, newsletters and creators, successfully raised US$15M from Volition Capital, a Boston based fund which is an awesome achievement.

As a founder, you’re never really certain how a fundraise will pan out.

There are so many weird incentives that VCs are guided by, and sometimes it can feel like a game of luck.

That was the problem that I sought to solve when writing The Fundraising Blueprint, but even so, it can be hard to see how the tactics might apply in real life.

And so today, by taking an inside look into Linkby’s Series B raise, we’ll add more colour to the tactics covered in my book, and see firsthand how these can help you drive towards a really successful outcome.

"We thought the seed would be easy. It turned out to be hard. Then I thought the Series A would be easy. It turned out to be harder than I thought. So I thought the Series B would be hard, and it turned out to be actually the easiest raise out of the three because we were so well prepared" - Chris

Building Strategic Clarity

I’ve spoken about the importance of pre-work before, and even have a full section dedicated to it in my book.

The purpose of breaking your business down into different sub-categories (market, context, product, team etc.) isn’t about building a better pitch deck or collating enough information to fill out your data room, but rather, intimately understanding the business that you are building.

This clarity reveals your unique market leverage which in turn helps you build a stronger business and craft a more compelling fundraising narrative.

Some founders already have this clarity and can skip the deep analysis, but most need to work through it systematically.

In the case of Linkby, their pre-work was largely centred around category creation.

If you have not heard about category design and ownership before, in short, it is the strategic practice of defining and dominating a new market segment rather than competing in an existing one. The purpose of doing this is to ensure that your customers believe that you are the only player in a certain category even if you might have adjacent competitors. (Check out Play Bigger to learn more)

Between Linkby’s Series A and B, Chris had a realisation that they weren’t sharp enough on what category they distinctly owned, and instead had been trying to fit into existing categories, or shape their narrative based on the current investor zeitgeist.

"I think in the seed and the series A, I hate the term impostor syndrome, but I would say that I've always felt that because we're not building enterprise SaaS, there's this need to kind of try to dress ourselves up as something that we're not."

The breakthrough came when they settled on their category title "Performance PR". It was a category that they had created, and flew in the face of what PR is traditionally seen.

As Chris put it: "It's exactly what we do, and no one in the world does this better than us."

This allowed Linkby to get clear on their specific value proposition, and also gave them a distinct tagline that they could run through the fundraising campaign.

From here, the second piece of pre-work that was particularly needle-moving for Linkby was how they communicated their traction and the operational leverage that they had built within the company.

This part is similar, yet different across various funding stages as investors have varied risk tolerances depending on company maturity.

As I've covered before, Series B investors typically underwrite two key risks: can you scale your go-to-market strategy, and can you expand your addressable market (either geographically or by moving upmarket)?

Indeed, proving these capabilities takes time and intentional execution post-Series A and so Chris made the counter-intuitive decision to turn down early investor interest and delay Linkby’s fundraise by several months until they had undeniable proof points.

Once ready, Chris documented these proof points within their financial model, to show that they had:

• a proven sales playbook, where sales reps ramping up quickly and consistently generating $100K/month in platform revenue within a few months of starting

• strong signs of US traction, with 100%+ YoY growth

• and a strong view on where they would deploy further capital to accelerate growth

Designing Your Fundraising Process

Unfortunately, the planning doesn't end with pre-work.

The key to any fundraise is to always be building momentum, both within the business and for the fundraise itself. While most founders nail the pre-work, they often rush into investor meetings without proper orchestration of the process itself.

Chris focused on three specific preparation tactics:

1. Target list development: Building and enriching a list of investors based on their interest areas and existing investments

2. Meeting scheduling: Booking all investor meetings 3-5 weeks in advance to ensure they happened within a concentrated timeframe

3. Answer vault creation: Documenting responses to questions from previous raises and practice pitches with existing investors along with a detailed dataroom that’s finalised before your first meeting.

Out of all of these, Chris felt that the answer vault made the most difference during the actual fundraise process.

By running through practice pitches and writing out answers to past questions, Chris felt like this helped reinforce the pitch in his own mind, and made him more prepared for curveball questions, almost like studying for an exam.

Chris was so obsessive over this that he "literally practiced [his] answers in the shower every morning. By the time we started meetings, [he] could answer anything in [his] sleep".

I'm not sure if I've ever met a founder who's actually gone to such lengths before, but I think it does set the gold standard for founders out there.

Building and Maintaining Momentum

By scheduling all your investor meetings within concentrated blocks, you get the benefit of being able to run a true auction process where the goal is to get a few funds to crescendo into a term sheet around the same time.

Chris organised his investor blocks as follows:

Week 1: International investors (morning: East Coast US, afternoon: West Coast US)

Week 2: Australian investors (face-to-face meetings where possible)

Week 3: Completed initial target list + second meetings

By week 3, Chris could identify serious prospects and nudge others along by following up with additional context about how fast other investors were moving. This forced the slower investors to either commit to another meeting, or drop out of the process entirely.

It’s absolutely necessary to have real momentum with at least one fund to get to term sheet stage. Any hiccup or delay at any stage risks killing the deal. You might think I’m exaggerating, but believe me on this one.

From past experience, this was something Chris understood and was able to act on proactively by creating his ‘Answer Vault’. This meant that through the fundraise, Chris was able to maintain the momentum by responding to investor requests quickly, within hours versus days.

"Everyone's heard stories of fundraises that have dragged on and then metrics change or something changes in the business. So you have a bad month and all of a sudden, the investor gets spooked."

The other interesting bit of feedback from Volition was that: "One of the intangible data points we've always seen in our successful portfolio companies has been companies that during the raise process got back information and answers quickly."

Fortunately for Linkby, they smashed the fundraising process out of the park, securing four offers and term sheets from their process. Whilst Linkby had interest from a wide group of smaller investors too, the team decided to select Volition Capital on its ability to close out the rest of the due diligence (legal, financial etc.) within a month and offered a more attractive valuation as well as the appeal of their experience with marketing tech and US base.

The Sankey diagram above shows you exactly what an efficient fundraising process looks like when executed properly. Notice how Chris didn’t waste time chasing every possible investor and just focused on the ones that were truly engaged and willing to lean in further. A targeted approach allows you to build and maintain momentum with the investors that matter, and also drive to a great deal at the end of the process.

Key Takeaways

Being able to raise any amount of capital, whether it’s $500K or $15M is a truly awesome achievement and can be equally hard. Linkby’s raise wasn’t only a product of the work that Chris undertook in the months leading up to the raise, but a compound effect of their ability to execute since inception.

In saying that, by taking a systematic approach to raising capital, Chris positioned the business for success. In this case, the most replicable elements from their process are:

1. Pre-fundraise preparation leads to pitch perfection. Chris intentionally delayed Linkby’s fundraise to get clarity on their category and to build undeniable proof points. This groundwork meant he could answer any investor question with conviction rather than scrambling to build credibility during meetings.

2. Momentum is fragile and requires active management. Talking to the right investors, qualifying them early and responding quickly to requests helps maintain momentum through your fundraise.

3. Compressed timelines create real competitive pressure. By scheduling all meetings within a 3-week window, Chris forced investors to make decisions rather than defaulting to "let's circle back."

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Similarly this week, Ethan Ding also wrote a great article on "levered beta" that captures the current competitive climate in terms that a finance bro would understand. TLDR; companies and investors are essentially betting on foundation model improvements with different levels of leverage rather than building genuine technical advantages.

He also succinctly summarises the two options open to AI companies at the moment, with Option 2 being the better choice:

option 1: wait until the llm actually works, then scramble to build your chatgpt wrapper alongside everyone else who just realized the same thing.

option 2: start now, while the tech is still garbage. lie about how good it is. burn money on marketing. claim the territory while everyone else is still laughing at you.

The messaging is extreme, but also largely correct.

The Lovable vs. Replit battle is an interesting illustration of this.

Lovable just hit $100M ARR in eight months (slight caveat being they launched a few times with little traction, so have really been around for 18+ months). Replit took seven years to reach $100M ARR, finally reaching the figure last month.

Despite grinding away, building far superior backend infrastructure, and having an enormous head start on customer acquisition, Replit was really only able to exponentially grow and monetise from the same tailwind as Lovable, namely the launch of Claude Sonnet 3.5.

Whilst Lovable didn’t necessarily wait until the LLMs got better, (they had tried and failed prior to Sonnet 3.5) they did time their third launch to perfection meaning they were best placed to ride the tailwind, similar to other competitors like Bolt and Cursor.

On the other hand, Replit had the user base and a more sophisticated product, yet only saw a 10x increase in ARR ($10M to $100M) over the same time period. (As a side note, it’s wild to me that I just wrote that sentence with ‘only’ but such is that time we are living in).

From a pure business strategy perspective, Replit clearly missed an opportunity to capture more revenue given their head start. But when every company benefits equally from the same model improvements, timing and positioning become everything.

When foundation model improvements lift all boats equally, traditional competitive advantages dissolve. To build something durable in this environment, AI startups need two strategic capabilities to avoid commoditisation: Counter-Positioning and Process Power.

product design → business model → counter positioning

This is where we are seeing the most change, but also where there is less durability created than ever before.

Traditionally startups could play into the whole Counter Positioning narrative where they were building products and solutions that large incumbents couldn’t do. That’s kinda out of the window, with incumbents able to move quicker and reach feature parity much quicker regardless of core business model.

Startups have gotten too good at being memetic and following playbooks. The current memetic trend is to have taste. Everything from individual components, to the header to the typography needs to look ‘clean’.

My view is that this is completely missing the point.

To support my work and unlock the full article, become a premium member now. For just $5/month, literally less than a cup of coffee, you'll get the fundraising frameworks, distribution playbooks, and scaling systems that help founders build startups that turn into unicorns.

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This week, one of my close friend’s launched a new mini-OS for iPhones that makes your smartphone dumb!

It’s awesome to finally see it live, having seen all the effort that’s gone into building this from the ground up. Congrats to the Minimis team!! 🎉🎉🎉

As an Android user, I’ve had the privilege of using Minimis over the last year and it’s saved me hours and days from just doomscrolling on my phone. It’s beautifully minimal, super functional and has fun ways of locking away addictive apps!

Get Minimis here - you won't regret it!

Every year I make it a point to rewatch Peter Thiel’s famous Stanford lecture “Competition is For Losers”. It’s by far one of the most impactful pieces of startup content that I’ve consumed, and each time I watch it, I always pick up something new.

It is a basic economic theory that perfect competition drives profits toward zero, and monopolies capture lasting value. And whilst it’s really hard to build a true monopoly, it is entirely possible to dominate as a startup in a market and category that you create, which is the ultimate point Thiel is trying to make here.

However, as AI reshapes entire industries, dramatically reframes timelines and changes the urgency and structure of how large incumbents react to being disrupted, is competition still for losers? or does having horizontal and vertical breadth matter more to be able to win the hearts and minds of customers?

In 2015, Figma was a design tool focused on enabling greater web-based collaboration amongst designers.

In 2025, Figma is now a “system of record for design and product development” and is the perfect case study in how AI enables aggressive product bundling.

From Figma’s recent S-1 filing:

Since then, we have added products and features to support the process of going from idea to product. In 2021, we launched our second product: FigJam, an online whiteboarding tool [...] In 2023, building on years of bringing design and code closer together, we launched Dev Mode, a product tailored for developers [...] In 2024, we introduced Figma Slides to give teams a new tool to drive strategy and alignment along the way.

In 2025, we doubled our product portfolio with the launch of four new products: Figma Sites, Figma Make, Figma Buzz, and Figma Draw [...] In 2024 alone, we shipped 180 new features and updates. Our customers recognise the benefits of the interconnectivity across our platform, with 76% of our customers using two or more products during the three months ended March 31, 2025

It’s interesting to see Figma expand out of its core monopoly and category to compete directly with PowerPoint, Canva, Webflow, Illustrator, and Cursor all at once, in the pursuit of owning the full, end-to-end workflow before one of these other platforms do.

But perhaps this is the rational response to AI-driven competitive dynamics where AI allows you to create more of the same. In the case of Figma, they are fortunate that many of their users aren’t only designers, but also engineers, operators, marketers etc,. and so have a higher chance of expanding revenue through feature sprawl.

However, this feature sprawl highlights a growing trend. Companies are now producing software faster than they can release it, and releasing software faster than users can adopt it.

Initially, it was clear that foundation models would be commoditised and interoperable (which in part is playing out), but now if everyone has the same feature set, does this mean vertical applications get commoditised too?

Not necessarily. This strategy can definitely work, and has certainly worked in the past (in less noisier times). One of the best examples of this is probably the launch of Microsoft Teams. Its success depended on structural advantages that many companies attempting similar strategies fundamentally lack:

1. Deprecation leverage — Microsoft could strategically sunset Skype for Business, effectively forcing enterprise customers to migrate to Teams. This deprecation control represents a unique form of market power unavailable to most software companies, who must compete for user attention rather than mandate product transitions. This foundational advantage enabled the other two strategic benefits.

2. Existing distribution — Microsoft possessed unparalleled distribution reach through Office 365, automatically placing Teams in front of hundreds of millions of enterprise users without requiring separate acquisition efforts. This eliminated the customer acquisition cost that typically makes bundling strategies economically challenging.

3. Switching costs — Enterprise customers had already invested heavily in Microsoft's productivity ecosystem, with Teams integration creating additional switching friction. The cost of migrating away from Teams wasn't just the communication tool itself, but the entire interconnected Office workflow that enterprises had built around Microsoft's platform.

These structural advantages created a bundling environment fundamentally different from the AI-driven expansion strategies we observe today.

Most companies pursuing AI bundling strategies have strong market power in their vertical, but lack this on a horizontal level and face the challenge of proving value for each new feature while competing against focused specialists who can deliver superior solutions within specific categories. For example, we literally have 100s of startups going after the holy grail of building the best AI coding agent in the world, alongside 5+ incumbents.

We’ve never seen this level of overlapping competition before and in terms of capital deployed and money incinerated, it makes the Uber vs Lyft battle look like child’s play by comparison.

And so, if you’re competing head on with anyone (startup or incumbent), competition is more for losers than ever before. It’s tough to build a strong distribution advantage in spaces that are rapidly commoditising, creating a perfect competition dynamic where profits asymptote towards zero.

Moreover, creating categories is also harder today than it was maybe a year ago. There are so many niche applications that exist, and so many variations and remixes of software and tools that defining your category, and subsequently educating users about it is incredibly hard (hence why capturing attention is key).

For startups, this creates a particularly challenging environment. The traditional advantages of speed and focus become less meaningful when incumbents can match startup velocity while maintaining their structural advantages.

So what does that actually mean?

The path to avoiding competition has changed, and simple category creation isn't enough to build a durable business. It is imperative that a startup looks to redefine and reinvent the game entirely.

This leads to two strategic imperatives for AI-era startups:

1. Master Counter-Positioning. At the moment, it feels like most AI startups are improving individual parts of a workflow, or are helping people automate steps 1 to 3, with a manual handoff for step 4 and 5, and sure, this is valuable, but it isn’t durable. Incremental improvement is important, but now, easily duplicated.

   Instead, your job is to discover previously impossible ways of operating, build a product that addresses this and then convince the market that your new approach is both right and easier than what they're doing now. Open-ended software (especially with in-built AI) is overwhelming. Constraint and opinionated workflows that deliver better end to end results are key.

2. Build Process Power. When feature parity is possible in weeks and months rather than years, durable competitive advantage comes from organisational velocity and the way your team uniquely creates value for your customers. This isn’t about have the most cracked engineers, or highly optimised processes or talented sales people, but its about building an organisational engine that can learn, build, and iterate faster than anyone else can match.

   Calvin French-Owen’s reflections on OpenAI article that dropped this week provides a very practical and candid example of this. In summary, OpenAI’s organisational structure (or lack thereof) makes it easier to pull people in from different teams to sprint quickly at a feature release that is showing internal promise. The ability to build conviction, corral resources and fully commit at launching something worthwhile is very unique and probably down to the company’s meritocratic ethos.

   This is something that can’t be bought, or rushed. It’s cultivated over time through culture, talent density and competitiveness.

The opportunity for founders who internalise this and are able to get this right is unprecedented. While everyone else is trapped in games of margin compression and aiming for feature parity, companies that do something entirely different and reinvent the game being played will be rewarded greatly.

Competition is certainly still for losers.

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This week’s edition of Superfluid is proudly supported by Notion!

Growth levers and loops are entirely enabled by systems and experiments. There’s no better way of organising and managing these than Notion! I run literally everything related to Superfluid through Notion, and I’m so excited to be able to offer any startup founder or operator, a free three month trial of Notion and access to Notion AI with no credit card needed. This is available to both new and existing free users of Notion.

Every founder dreams of going viral.

Of having that magical moment when you wake up and all anyone can talk about is your product.

Just take a look at Cluely. Their recent string of viral clips, crazy parties and unhinged posts on X has the tech community in a chokehold over whether this is actually a legitimate business or just buzz created by college dropouts for fun.

While viral moments can create overnight sensations, they rarely build lasting companies. The startup graveyard is filled with companies that confused attention for traction.

So far, Cluely has found a formula for consistently capturing audience attention. Through user-generated influencer content to consistently pumping out high quality viral clips, the company has built a strong growth lever that’s resulted in securing multiple seven figure enterprise contracts.

They’ve been able to do what many founders aren’t able to do on a consistent basis. Most founders can create one-off moments of growth, whether that’s through a viral post, a great month of sales or something else entirely. Very few can turn these into a true growth lever that can consistently drive growth on a daily and monthly basis.

At its core, a true growth lever is a specific, high-impact and repeatable action when successfully executed can acquire, activate and retain your core users. It must be three things:

• It is repeatable

• It is scalable

• It is sustainable

Let’s break down how Cluely’s strategy evolved from a viral moment to a real growth lever:

1. The team launched with a high production video on X. This generated a lot of buzz and if they stopped here, it would’ve just been a one-off viral clip

2. They then developed a viral content strategy, with planned controversies (parties, viral X posts), a full user-generated content (UGC) motion and regular high-production clips all designed to capture and retain attention

3. From here, they’ve been able to convert this to revenue as the consistent buzz has given them the brand awareness to secure enterprise contracts

This motion is showing signs of a growth lever:

• They’ve been able to repeatedly go viral at will as they snowball attention from one move to the next

• They’ve scaled revenue significantly with enterprise contracts, versus sticking to just servicing consumer

• So far, this motion has been sustainable as they scale, however, this is also where things might go awry if they get ahead of themselves.

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Breaking Down a Growth Lever

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“[insert industry or ecosystem] is chronically underfunded. If we want to push for real innovation, we need real capital deployed here”. - [insert multiple VC panelists]1

Being underfunded is an easy problem to blame because no single entity or person controls the entire funding market nor will anyone take responsibility for a certain sector or founder profile being underfunded.

Yet when you see another CRM software company raise $50M to fund a conference merch-driven marketing strategy, it becomes clear that this isn't about availability of capital. It is entirely about allocation.

Looking at this dealroom.co report, the data tells a pretty stark story about where VCs are actually deploying capital in 2025 and it’s not particularly surprising.

In 2024, AI and DeepTech split the total funding market equally at 33% each and I would wager that in 2025, this split has only grown from here.

As I (and many others) have written extensively about the shift in the VC business model as larger funds are raised, the commonality between AI and DeepTech as broad sectors is that 1) both of these sectors can absorb enormous amounts of capital and 2) for a select few startups, the size of the market is bigger than anyone can fathom (but let’s just extrapolate that across the entire sector because why not).

This leaves us with what I call the Forgotten Middle. Companies building businesses that don't fit neatly into either the AI hype cycle or the DeepTech high CapEx profile.

Funding for this style of business is already down 63% YoY and likely to fall further, as most founders make the glaringly obvious narrative pivot to AI.

Whilst this is happening in the background, the real capital is flowing to areas that typically hasn’t seen much interest from VCs historically.

Just this week, Sequoia plowed $100M into indie arthouse movie production company, Mubi, following Thrive Capital investing $75M in A24 last year.

Whilst not traditionally seen as AI companies, it is clear that the underlying investment thesis is that AI can help reinvent Hollywood and as VCs investing in pure play AI companies, why not invest in film studios as well.

VCs are hunting for markets that are ‘non-traditional’ tech, in the hope that they can invest in a severely underpriced company that can be engineered to be venture-scale with a dose of AI.

Put more bluntly, have a distribution wedge in a market that VCs don’t typically invest, add AI to your business to make it efficient and you’ll probably be able to raise capital.

Whilst I think these investments give each respective business a shot at pursuing an interesting growth journey, if this strategy is magnified at scale (which other VCs are undoubtedly going to follow) then we’re going to have swathes of businesses constrained to a journey that might not make sense for them (i.e., being forced to blitzscale).

This week’s edition of Superfluid is also proudly supported by Notion!

​​​Powering the world's best startups, Notion helps you build beautiful tools for your life’s work. In today's world of endless apps and tabs, Notion provides one place for teams to get everything done, seamlessly connecting docs, notes, projects, calendar, and email—with AI built in to find answers and automate work. Millions of users, from individuals to large organisations like Toyota, Figma, and OpenAI, love Notion for its flexibility and choose it because it helps them save time and money.

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So what should you do if you’re a founder building in the Forgotten Middle?

If you’re tossing up whether to raise capital or not and you feel like you are in a chronically underfunded bucket, then work through these prompts:

1. The current state of your unit economics and demonstrable growth

2. How complex is the problem you are trying to solve and how close are you to having a frictionless solution to this problem

3. How much of your problem is related to the physical world (i.e., atoms and not bits) or hard to digitise workflows

With increased competition across all markets, its only natural that the bar for companies that raise capital has also increased.

The VC path makes sense if you can demonstrate:

1. Very strong unit economics, and high growth (i.e., 300% YoY+)

2. High levels of complexity with multiple stakeholders and growing signs of product love

and finally, this isn’t mandatory but I think one that gives any startup an added layer of complexity and therefore defensibility:

3. Codifying hard to digitise workflows or recording physical world interactions that generate a valuable proprietary dataset are worth their weight in gold.

Even if your business doesn’t fit these criteria, you’ve got an awesome opportunity ahead of you, if you think proactively about your capital strategy.

The first thing to remember is that raising capital from VCs is not the only funding source available to you. Angels, family offices, non-traditional equity based funds, revenue-based financing and debt providers all exist to give you alternate sources of capital to a VC. Flashy VC backed newspaper headlines don’t make a great business.

Moreover, I actually think being underfunded can be a huge strategic boon. You’re forced to think more creatively and be more resourceful in how you approach solving problems. A great example of this is spinning up new revenue streams that can generate cash flow that you use to fund R&D in other parts of your business. I’ve seen 4-5 really great examples of this, which allow the business to breathe easier and provide more flexibility for the business’ growth journey.

Ultimately, the venture funding market is quite cyclical. What is forgotten today won’t be forgotten tomorrow and the market is going through its own structural shifts where investors are trying to figure out where their true incentives lie, when the game is actually about just backing strong fundamentals businesses.

So while it may feel frustrating to be in the Forgotten Middle, embrace the opportunity to build a sustainable business without the pressure of venture expectations.

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Life has a funny way of accelerating change once it starts.

In the span of three months, I've launched The Fundraising Blueprint, started a podcast, and literally a week ago, hopped on a 24 hour flight to move across the world to London.

It’s been exhilarating but also slightly terrifying (especially when I order a veggie burger for dinner and I convert the bill back to AUD!)

Last October, I wrote about how risk tolerance is earned through small acts of courage.

After writing that article, it actually sparked a journey of introspection on whether I was personally taking enough risk.

At that point, I’d just gotten married to my beautiful wife and we were finally settling into a new routine and lifestyle. We’d hit a really good steady state of comfort where it felt like things were in a great spot.

I was also busy building my dream career at Rampersand, surrounded by amazing people that nurtured my curiosity, provided invaluable guidance and afforded me freedoms that many workplaces would not. Working with Paul, Taryn, Andrew and everyone else at Rampersand will undoubtedly be a pivotal point in my career and certainly a highlight.

Something that I’ve always wanted to try and never really had the courage to do is Tim Ferriss’ notion of taking a mini retirement. As he puts it, mini retirements allow you to bring forward some of the activities you might do in retirement like slow, extended travel or deep learning while you're still young enough to let these experiences shape your perspective and career.

So far, a week into my London adventure, I've been blessed with amazing weather. Wandering the centuries-old cobblestone streets with the unstructured freedom of funemployment feels like being a kid again where time stretches endlessly and every corner promises a new discovery.

As it’s my first time in Europe, I’m hoping to be able to do more of this in the coming months through random towns and cities through the continent (would love all of your recommendations!).

In addition to traveling and exploring a new environment, I’m eager to build up a different set of skills and tackle a variety of other professional and personal challenges.

Whilst I’ve tried hard to define what these actually are, to be honest I’ve found it pretty hard to pinpoint what these could be.

The only point of clarity I have is that I’d love to keep working with startup founders of all stages in a strategic capacity.

As a VC, I gained a lot of energy and enjoyed working closely with founders on their fundraising narratives and on how to practically build momentum within a business through increasing velocity of product iteration and distribution.

Outside of that, I’ve always enjoyed helping founders think through the toughest problems they may be facing and coaching them through the challenges of early-stage company building.

My hope is that I’m able to do this in some capacity on a bigger stage and at a bigger scale in London. And whilst I might not be a full-time VC, I hope to also spend more time building my angel portfolio and supporting early-stage founders through a combination of capital and direct insight from my experiences.

I've already started meeting fascinating people in London and I'm eager to connect with more founders, operators, and investors who are building interesting things here (or anywhere in the world).

Whether you're working on early-stage challenges, thinking through fundraising strategy, or looking for strategic support, I'd love to chat. You can reach me on LinkedIn here or via email at abhishekmaran1997[@]gmail[.]com.

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Check out the Podcast here:

On Spotify

On Youtube

Chris is openly candid about the pros and cons of venture funding and the interesting dynamics and incentives placed on companies that take venture funding and how to navigate these.

He shares some really practical tips on navigating a fundraise and his secrets to getting investors bought in on the mission. I hope you enjoy this episode with Chris, and would love to hear your feedback in the comments.

This episode pairs well with my book, The Fundraising Blueprint. If you've been wanting a copy (or are looking to gift copies to family or friends), now’s a great time to grab a copy today on Gumroad, Amazon AU or Amazon US

This week’s edition of Superfluid is brought to you by Vanta!

Vanta helps businesses of all sizes establish trust by automating compliance needs across 35+ frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, centralizing security workflows, completing questionnaires up to 5x times faster, and proactively managing vendor risk. Over 10,000 global companies use Vanta to prove security in real time.

​​​Get in touch with the awesome Vanta team: Andrew, Konner & Georgia

Welcome to the Superfluid Podcast, where we'll explore the real stories behind successful fundraising rounds, hearing directly from the founders who've been there and done it.

For our inaugural episode, I'm so excited to feature Tim Doyle, founder of Eucalyptus. Tim and his co-founders have raised more than $100M from some of the best investors in the world across both the US and Australia.

You can also watch or listen to the episode on Youtube or Spotify.

Tim's journey offers invaluable insights into what it takes to build trust with investors and scale a startup through multiple funding rounds. His story embodies many of the principles I outlined in The Fundraising Blueprint but with the added texture and nuance that only comes from hearing someone's firsthand experience.

Each episode of the Superfluid Podcast will break down a founder's fundraising journey, exploring the strategies, challenges, and pivotal moments that shaped their success. My goal is to demystify the fundraising process by sharing these authentic stories and practical insights that you can apply to your startup journey.

Last Call: The Fundraising Blueprint Launch Party - Sydney

We’re nearly at full capacity (5 tickets remaining!) at next week’s exclusive launch party for my new book!

What's in store:

• Your personal copy of The Fundraising Blueprint, hot off the press

• An intimate gathering of Sydney's brightest minds in tech and venture capital

• Great conversations over artisanal pizzas and drinks

Check out the event here, and sign up quickly today!

Last week, my book, The Fundraising Blueprint launched as an Amazon Bestseller! If you've been wanting a copy (or are looking to gift copies to family or friends), now’s a great time to grab a copy today on Gumroad, Amazon AU or Amazon US

This week’s edition of Superfluid is brought to you by Vanta!

Vanta helps businesses of all sizes establish trust by automating compliance needs across 35+ frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, centralizing security workflows, completing questionnaires up to 5x times faster, and proactively managing vendor risk. Over 10,000 global companies use Vanta to prove security in real time.

​​​Get in touch with the awesome Vanta team: Andrew, Konner & Georgia

I'm so excited to announce the publication of my book, The Fundraising Blueprint!

Published by Encour Press, you can get the book today on Gumroad and in print on Amazon.

The journey to writing this book started from a place of deep frustration.

Four years ago, when I first entered the venture capital world, I was truly an outsider.

I had a naive and idealistic view of how VCs funded startups. It wasn’t immediately clear why some founders were able to raise ridiculous sums of capital and others had to scrounge around for scraps.

Like many founders I meet today, I didn't understand the true game being played.

The hard truth is that the VC ecosystem has evolved far from its original mission of funding breakthrough innovations.

The current game on the field is clear.

The most successful founders aren't just simply building great companies - they're masters of the fundraising game. They understand every nuance of the venture ecosystem, from market dynamics to investor psychology.

To an outsider, this can seem daunting.

However, once you learn the rules of the game you are actually playing, everything becomes much clearer. This is something that anyone can learn.

What started as a collection of articles, has evolved into something so much bigger.

I’ve spent the last year creating a comprehensive guide that uncovers the hidden nuances of raising capital and gives you actionable frameworks and templates for navigating this world.

This book isn’t just VC marketing spiel or a “how to pitch” guide.

It’s a detailed blueprint of everything you need to understand about raising capital from VCs, the hidden incentives at play and the language required to have a legitimate seat at the table.

To celebrate the book's launch, I’m hosting a party in Sydney on April 1st!

Date: Tuesday, 1st of April 2025

Time: 6 pm - 9:30 pm

Location: SoulTrap Bar, 70-72 Campbell St, Surry Hills NSW 2010

Ticket: $20 (includes a copy of the book, pizza, and drinks)

RSVP through the Luma event page here.

I’d love to see all of you there!

If you like what you read, please subscribe to Superfluid here:

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This week’s edition of Superfluid is brought to you by Vanta!

Vanta helps businesses of all sizes establish trust by automating compliance needs across 35+ frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, centralizing security workflows, completing questionnaires up to 5x times faster, and proactively managing vendor risk. Over 10,000 global companies use Vanta to prove security in real time.

​​​Get in touch with the awesome Vanta team: Andrew, Konner & Georgia

The game is the game is the game.

As humans, we naturally live in a state of delusion, assuming we know which game we're playing, and believing all games follow the same rules.

The true reality eventually hits us in the face.

In 2025, this reality is hitting harder and faster than ever and misidentifying the game you are playing is like bringing a tennis racket to a boxing bout.

"In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you're playing."

Kwame Anthony Appiah

This is a persistent error that even the most talented people make.

In most things, there is a game that is widely publicised and, at face value, makes sense.

It can be as simple as trying to get promoted at work. The logical approach would be performing at a high standard and ensuring your boss recognises your contribution.

The actual game of getting promoted likely involves being loud and vocal about what you have accomplished, networking through the organisation, and being visible to not only your boss but the entire team.

This misidentification scales brutally. What's true for individual careers becomes exponentially more costly for entire companies and industries.

Take startup building. Many founders approach it with a level of certainty that their initial product hypotheses are correct and that if they build a great product, customers will naturally adopt the product.

But what about AI companies in 2025? When 50 startups are building the same product, using the same foundational models, and targeting the same customers, it's brutally zero-sum. Your gain is literally someone else's loss.

In that same vein, I’ve written a lot about startup fundraising and the hidden nuances that exist. One such example is that founders are often taught that early-stage investing is all about the people and that if you have a strong team, you should be able to raise capital.

Whilst this is true to a degree, what isn’t captured in VC marketing-speak is that the real game of startup fundraising often involves timing, market conditions, and having the right narrative.

This fundamental misalignment between perceived and actual games manifests across all domains of life - business, relationships, career development, and personal growth.

The tragic part is that people aren’t intentionally failing due to a lack of effort or ability - it’s rather because they are playing and winning games that don’t matter. The cost of this misidentification is both in opportunity and exhaustion.

The challenge is that we naturally gravitate toward games we're good at. But comfort is often the enemy of success.

This week’s edition of Superfluid is also proudly supported by Notion!

​​​Powering the world's best startups, Notion helps you build beautiful tools for your life’s work. In today's world of endless apps and tabs, Notion provides one place for teams to get everything done, seamlessly connecting docs, notes, projects, calendar, and email—with AI built in to find answers and automate work. Millions of users, from individuals to large organisations like Toyota, Figma, and OpenAI, love Notion for its flexibility and choose it because it helps them save time and money.

​​​Startups get up to 6 months free with unlimited AI - over $6,000 in savings! Just click the link, fill out the form, select Superfluid from the drop-down list at the bottom and enter code STARTUP4110P49907 to redeem this offer.

​​​Get in touch with Alex Dam and the rest of the awesome Notion team here!

So, how do we avoid these costly misidentifications?

First, ruthlessly classify your game. Define the objectives, the stakeholders and the incentives that exist. Talk to people who have both succeeded and failed at playing the game and understand what they think worked/didn’t work. You’ll find some interesting lessons, but also be wary of being led down the wrong path if these people don’t actually know why they won or lost.

Second, look for ways to transform the game you are playing. This is what the best startup founders do. Whilst this is a rare example, Uber’s ability to attract capital and grow at all costs literally enabled them to beat out direct competitors and eventually reach a point where it is a strong business today. Instead of playing the current game on the field, it changed the competitive landscape and created a new playbook for companies operating in head-to-head competition, which we are now seeing play out between foundational model providers.

Third, know when to fold. This is perhaps the hardest skill to develop as you can literally waste years of effort due to falling prey to sunk cost fallacy. I've watched brilliant founders with impressive track records spend 18 months optimising products that showed zero signs of product-market fit after month three. This isn't persistence or resilience - it's delusion.

There's a quote frequently misattributed to Einstein that I like: "You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else."

This quote isn't just about mastering rules - it's about understanding which rules actually matter. You can't play better than anyone else if you're playing the wrong game.

The hard work isn't in the playing. It's in making sure you're playing the right game in the first place.

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Abhi

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"What is the most important trait for a founder to possess?"

Ask this question to any ten investors and you'll get various answers. But one word comes up more than any other:

Hunger.

The hunger to win.

The hunger to push beyond every obstacle.

The hunger to prove people wrong.

They're all wrong.

While these are all certainly important traits, I believe the most important trait is competitiveness.

Indeed, you might be wondering what the difference is between competitiveness and hunger. On the surface, both traits indicate a level of drive and a need to persist against all odds, but they are quite different under the hood.

Hunger alone drives you to grind endlessly.

Hunger alone will lead to directionless effort and exhaustion without result.

Hunger alone can never be satiated.

Competitiveness goes beyond this. It's the innate and obsessive need to win, to dominate, and to outperform. It requires context and comparison.

The nuance here is really around where this competitiveness is directed.

Competitive drive can be both a virtue and a vice. When directed internally, using comparison to drive team performance, often creates a toxic culture and misaligned incentives. Some startups succeed despite this internal competition, but they succeed despite it, not because of it.

External competitiveness manifests differently.

It means having a deep understanding of your competitive landscape - not just surface-level feature comparisons, but truly understanding why competitors make the strategic choices they do and how you're meaningfully different.

It means finding second place physically impossible to accept, not from ego, but from understanding that many markets naturally consolidate to one or two winners.

And perhaps most importantly, it means having the right reaction to competition - neither denial (read as “I have no competitors”) nor anxiety, but strategic clarity about how to allocate resources and turn market obstacles into advantages.

This is why competitiveness becomes such a powerful force multiplier for all other founder traits. Resilience without competitiveness just means you'll endure longer without winning. Resourcefulness without competitiveness means you'll find creative solutions that don't necessarily matter. Relentlessness without competitiveness leads to endless execution without strategic direction.

In the end, it's not enough to persist, create, or push forward. It is not enough to simply exist.

You must win.

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It's no secret that narratives rule the world, but at what point do they become oversaturated?

From a tech perspective, the last two weeks have been insane.

We've seen Trump's inauguration become a parade of tech CEOs willing to do anything to appease him in exchange for looser regulations and more business-friendly policies, and then pivoted straight to the release of DeepSeek and the various takes on what this means for AI safety, infrastructure and apps.

Every time I open any social media app, I’m hit with a deluge of posts on either topic that sounds more confident than the last. Everyone’s not only an expert, but they’re also the one who has finally figured out what it all means.

Hot takes and outlandish opinions are the recipe for going viral, but something really feels different about the last two weeks.

What I’m really intrigued about is the growing chasm between the level of open conviction and what they truly believe, and how they let that guide their actions and decisions.

Focusing on tech and VCs more particularly, many live by a common tech maxim "strong opinions, loosely held." Originally concocted as a way to have easily malleable conviction - a true paradox in itself, but necessary in a fast-paced technologically driven environment - its basically become a shield for reactive thinking.

In the case of DeepSeek, VCs' immediate responses mapped perfectly to their portfolio exposure. Investors who were heavily invested in AI apps celebrated it as a way to increase margins for their portfolio companies.

Meanwhile, foundational model and defense tech investors cried about it being a national security threat. Funny how that works for an open-source model.

This is what happens when your opinions are closely linked to financially incentivised narrative positioning.

However, the irony is that this makes actual conviction hard to maintain. The funding markets for early-stage technology are designed to be illiquid for a reason. It allows companies to experiment with the novel and explore uncharted territories through trial and error. It also forces companies to commit with conviction and build something meaningful.

When investors look to over-position the narrative, or worse yet, let the short-term narrative guide their longer-term advice, we’ll be stuck in an endless cycle of narrative oversaturation, where the strongest conviction is reserved for the meta-game of narrative manipulation itself.

Since this week’s article is shorter than normal, I thought I’d chuck in a few of my favourite memes about DeepSeek!

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Abhi