Harry Stebbings

After 10 years and 150 seed investments, I realize we over complicate seed investing.

Find truly amazing people. Truly world class.

Invest in enough of them per fund. 30 plus.

Help where possible but do not get in the way.

Voila. Seed investing. 🚀

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

Odoo is the best company you’ve NEVER heard of.

Built out of the countryside in Belgium:

- $650m ARR 
- Over 5,000 employees
- 50,000 companies as customers

They never want to IPO. They never want to sell. They DON’T believe in titles.

Everything you thought you knew about management, is wrong. 

My 6 key takeaways Fabien Pinckaers👇

1. Why Odoo Will Never Sell

- We never want to sell the company.
- We are always buying shares, every funding round.
- That is why we don’t mind if the share price is low.

2. Why There Will Never Be an Odoo IPO

- I don’t want the constraints & complexity of being public.
- Public companies tend to refocus on the short term.
- We always want to build for the long term.

3. Why It Is Easier to Scale With Young People

- It is easier to scale when you don’t need to get the top people.
- We recruit a lot of young people, train them & make them evolve.
- It is much easier than spending too much time  looking for the best VP of a category.

4. Hire Talent from Tier 2 Cities

- The key to scaling a business is talent retention.
- There will be high turnover rates when you are next to Google or Apple.
- We do not have that issue in Buffalo.

5. The Danger When You Have Managers of Managers 

- They all have ideas & want to do something.
- This will push everyone to complexify the company.
- You have to fight back against that if you want to keep your company simple.

6. This Company Allows Everyone to Have Their Own Titles   

- Some people choose to be directors, other people pick funny titles.
- We do not care.
- I want to push the idea that it’s about what you do & not the title you have.

(links in comments)

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #seed #funding

Honestly, Lovable just breaks all scaling rules.

The fastest-growing startup in Europe.

🤯 $17.5M ARR in 3 months
💰 $2.1M ARR added every week
👀 85% Day 30 retention- better than ChatGPT
🚀 30,000 new apps built every single day

Just the start and my 5 Key takeaways with Anton Osika 👇

1. We Have Better Retention Than ChatGPT

- Our month-one retention on paying customers is better than ChatGPT’s.
- It is 85% and going up.

2. North Star Metric and How Many Hit It?

- We focus on how many users go all the way to site publish.
- We want them getting visitors to the sites they built.
- We have almost 40,000 paying users as the proxy metric.

3. When Your Comps Raise Big, Do You Have to Also?

- No, you can always bootstrap.
- They can outspend you on talent, customers & marketing.
- But the only thing that matters is execution.

4. Why Europe Is Not F***ed and Companies Will Be Mega Here

- Even though the US has a better startup culture, Europe has more raw talent available.
- I want to prove you can build a category defining company in Europe.
- We have a strong underdog mentality and that is crucial.

5. Why the Fastest Growing Company in Europe Turned Down YC

- We felt like at best we would get some acceleration but a lot of dilution.
- At worst it is a distraction to go to SF for all those events.
- We took some funding instead and focused on building talent.

(links in comments)

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #AI

In 2024 at 20VC we:

💵 Raised $415M

🎤 Released 104 podcast episodes

🦸 Brought 3 amazing investing partners to 20VC.

🦄 Made 15 investments.

📈 Had 100M downloads.

LFG 2025. It’s time to build.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

In Nov 2021, Doordash announced they were acquiring Wolt for a reported $8.1BN.

For their Series B Miki Kuusi was rejected by 70 VCs. The 71st, said yes.

Here is the wild story from our 20VC: 🔥 👇

1. Hire People Who Have Not “Done It”

Very few people do things twice in their life.

Hire for potential.

To build a successful company, you need to have a large group of people that do things for the very first time with you.

2. How To Use Compensation to Create Culture

People care about the things they own.

To make people care about your company, make them owners.

Make every single employee a stockholder.

3. The KPI of Success as a CEO

A CEO is the knight on a white horse, leading troops into battle from the front.

To build something big, you need to build a team that can succeed without you.

The biggest KPI:

If you die tomorrow, will the company still succeed in your absence?

4. Why Companies Should Act Like a Team, Not Family

A lot of companies say they want to be a family.

Wolt wants to be a team.

The difference is, a family will be a family no matter what.

Teams are defined by their capability to win.

5. The Biggest Sacrifice Founders Make

Founders have to sacrifice their mind, space, and freedom.

You will always think about what the company has to do next.

It can’t be turned off.

You have to learn to live with it.

6. Why Transparency Makes Leadership Less Lonely

In an environment with full transparency, teams come up with better solutions than a single person can come up with on their own.

This makes the job less lonely.

It makes the responsibility of leadership less heavy on your shoulders.

7. How to Build an Environment of Trust, Not Safety

A team is only as strong as the weakest player.

Give people the opportunity to learn and make mistakes.

If someone brings the team down, take them out of the game.

Create trust without a safety net for bad performance.

8. Why Growth Companies Are Glorified Recruiting Operations

Every senior person in a growth company has to be a great recruiter.

They have to get people as excited about the opportunity as they are.

9. What Makes a Good Company vs. a Great Company

The difference between bad and good companies is that bad companies don't know what to do.

With good and great companies, both know what needs to be done.

The difference is, only the great ones execute on the truly difficult things.

10. How to Create a Company Culture Where People Actually Care

Give people ownership over what they’re building.

Let them make decisions and have accountability.

The way you get people to care about the small things by giving them ownership over big things.

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #ceo #management #hiring #recruitment #sales #marketing #team

(Link in comments)

I started 20VC 10 years ago with one core belief that no one agreed with me on:

I believed a massive media brand could be used by a VC to help portfolio companies get the three most important things required for success:

1. Talent
2. Funding
3. Customers

Distribution is everything. Make sure you have it on your cap table. cc Din Bisevac.

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

I do not care how long it takes for a company to get to $1M in revenue.

But I do care desperately, how long it takes for a company to get from $1M-$50M in revenue.

The road to PMF is messy, post PMF, it is a game of execution and velocity (speed in a given direction.)

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

If you are starting the week and need some inspiration, 15 years ago my mother was diagnosed with MS and told her condition would worsen.

This weekend we walked back-to-back marathons on Saturday and Sunday.

She is a reminder to us all that only you set the limits of your abilities.

Make this week a great one.

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

The single best founders I work with share one trait:

They have a minimal time between decision and action.

Does not mean they decide fast. They can take a long time to make a decision but once decided, the speed they move at is unparalleled. No delays.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

10 years ago I was an intern at a fund.

I remember the first morning, one of the managing partners saw me waiting in the waiting room and took 30 mins out for a coffee and to welcome me.

Today, he pinged me after 8 years of not being in touch and asked for a favour for his daughter’s business.

I did it without pause. Problem now solved.

Karma is real. Be kind to the kid waiting in the wait room looking nervous.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

HOT TAKE: When raising for a fund or a company at the early/small stages, do not send a fundraising deck pre-first meeting.

Investors will make pre-conceived judgments about your market/product/pricing etc etc and you are not there to walk them through it.

Do not give them a reason to say no before the first meeting.

Share a short paragraph on the focus for the company pre-first meeting. Use the deck as an assist in the meeting if needed to aid the discussion. Then if the discussion goes well, use the deck as a reason to follow up post-meeting.

#fundraising #invest #business #finance #money #venturecapital #success #career #seed #founder #founders #entrepreneur #startups #brand #content

Project Europe has product market fit so much faster and so much stronger than even we hoped.

In the first 6 months:

- 10 cracked teams invested in

So what… of those 10:

- 1 acquired by category leader

- 1 up round from top valley VC

- 1 accepted into YC and crushing.

This is just the start. We are hungrier, we are more ambitious than ever.

Come build with us.

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

To everyone starting a podcast now, I give you one piece of advice:

It took 125 shows before 20VC gained over 1,000 plays for a single show.

2 per week for 2 years. 🤯

This is a game of who can survive the longest. Start and just keep going.

Consistency is everything.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

We just wrote a $4.5M check to lead a round in a company with no product, no revenue.

Why?

My single biggest mistakes in venture have been when the people were truly world class but something else (price, round size, market) prevented me doing the deal.

When you meet truly 1% people. Just do the deal.

They have the two traits I look for above anything;

1.) obsession. They are willing to do whatever it takes.

Move to NYC tomorrow? If needed, 100%.

2.) Aggresive on talent acquisition.

I suggested a mentor to help build their GTM. They baulked and said, “mentor, f*** that. We can hire the best.” Insane bar for talent and ambition to acquire them.

This one is going to ze moon… and our first lead check in Israel. Mazel Tov baby! 🚀

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

When I was 22 I was offered £18M (all cash) for 20VC media company.

With any tough decision, I went for a walk with my mother, she asked me one question:

“What would you do tomorrow if you did sell the company today?”

Without a seconds thought I responded:

“I would start The Nineteen Minute VC and use that as leverage to win in investing.

When the alternative to selling is doing what you would already do, never sell.

Bet on yourself. Go long.

It was the single best decision I ever made.

Thanks Mama!

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

We just wrote a $15M check after a 4 day seed round process.

fonio.ai did not have a deck. They were not fundraising.

This is the crime of poor VCs. They wait for companies to "raise".

The best companies do not ever "raise. You need to be aggressive and take them off the table before the world sees how good they are.

Fonio was so obviously so good.

The traction was insane, growing $1M per month. But the founders are next level.

Daniel Keinrath is such a good seller. Like so good. He is so good he could convince Sam Altman to buy into the Anthropic IPO.

Matthias Gruber is truly a genius. Like total nerd and I am here for it. None of this app layer BS. This man is innovating on models like no other. For downtime, he plays video games with his other half. I rest my case your honour. COOL!

Next crime VCs make, they do not go and spend real time in the offices of the company. So Paul Bonnet and I spent real time at the Fonio office.

The energy is palpable. The sales leaderboard feels like the Hunger Games of SMB AI sales. The outside is a s***hole (good to save on budget!) See pic below!

Venture is really simple. Find special people and convince them to take your money. I am so glad they took our money.

Time to build a massive company. LFG! 🚀

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

The best young people want to work in person, in office.

They want to optimise for personal growth and development.

Speed and quality of learning is 100% optimised in person.

The best young talent and CEOs all know this.

P.S. fully expect whining in the comments. Don’t worry, this wasn’t intended for you.

I started 20VC with $0 from my bedroom in my family home; with my mother downstairs in the kitchen.

She hasn’t seen me speak at an event in 6 years.

To have her come and see me speak at SXSW with Tara Keeney is a memory I will remember forever.

To all the proud mamas who sit in the front row and are always our #1 fan.

We appreciate you more than you know.

Call your mama today and tell her you are grateful for all the sacrifices she has made for you. ❤️

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

When I was a child, I would go to bed and hear my mother crying in pain as she went to sleep.

My mother was diagnosed with MS 17 years ago and was told she would be in a wheelchair within 5 years.

Today we start four marathons in four days. 170KM. The woman has defied all odds.

She taught me, “only you can tell yourself that you are not capable of something and even then, you don’t see your own strength.”

To the strength of so many mamas who hold families together. We love you and appreciate you. ❤️

(Link in comments) if you want to donate and help more amazing people with MS achieve what they are told they would not be able to do.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

Today is my 30th birthday 🎈

I thought I’d reflect on the decade that has been:

💵 Raised $1BN

🚀 170 investments

🦄 18 unicorn investments

🎙️ 2,500 podcast episodes

🌎 110M downloads

I have never been more hungry. I have never been more ambitious.

This is just the start. To my 30s.

LFG.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

The single greatest joy of my job is building friendships with some of the smartest people on the planet.

I have interviewed 1,000+ of the best CEOs over the last decade. Nikesh Arora is one of the best (alongside Nik Storonsky, Alan Chang).

Nikesh's story is insane. He came to the US with two suitcases, $200, worked as a security guard, took notes for students and flipped burgers to pay tuition.

Today, he is CEO of Palo Alto Networks, a $225BN cybersecurity giant.

He is a dear friend and we sat down to chat the other day and he said he was happy for me to release my biggest lessons from the discussion.

🚀 6 Lessons from Nikesh Arora on Building a $225BN Company

1. Product Builds Brand. Not the Other Way Around.

If you build a great product and execute well, brand follows. If you have a great brand and the product is poor, the brand dies.

Sun Microsystems had a brand. Yahoo had a brand.
It did not save them.

In tech, brand is not a substitute for product. Brand is the residue of product excellence.

2. Consumer AI Is About Breadth. Enterprise AI Is About Depth.

Consumers tolerate false positives. If ChatGPT gets something slightly wrong, you correct it, ignore it, or move on.

Enterprises cannot do that. If an AI agent is making independent decisions in a company, false positives are catastrophic.

The future of enterprise AI is deep context-rich intelligence.

3. Most Enterprises Are Using AI Wrong.

The real opportunity is to rethink the workflow from first principles and let AI do 80% of the thinking.

The winners will not be the companies that sprinkle AI on old processes.

The winners will be the companies that redesign the company around AI.

4. SaaS Had No Opinion. AI Applications Will.

SaaS applications are containers. You define the input. You define the output.

AI applications will have opinions.

That changes everything.

Nikesh thinks many G&A functions — marketing, finance, HR — could have half the people over the next three years because AI will make the average employee dramatically more capable.

5. AI Transformation Has to Be Top-Down and Competitive.

Nikesh runs a meeting twice a week called AIIO.

The point is simple: get the top technical leaders in the company in one room and force the conversation.

What are you doing with AI?
Why are you building this?
How are you using tokens?
How are you changing the product?
What have you done in the last three days?

The brilliance is not the meeting. It is the social pressure. That is how you transform a 21,000-person company.

6. In Technology, Miss One Trick and You Survive. Miss Three and You Are Obsolete.

Miss one trick, you can survive.
Miss two tricks, you are partially impaired.
Miss three tricks, you could be obsolete.
That is the CEO mindset in 2026.
Paranoia is not optional.
The speed of learning is now the speed of survival.

Thank you my friend. Forever learning from you.

(Link in comments.)

Series A is the worst place to be investing today.

Company progression from seed is minimal.

Pricing is 4-5x the seed round.

So the price to progress ratio is f******. Paying 150x ARR for little sign of PMF, at best.

Plus, the competition is mega both domestic and US.

Go early or go late.

The reality of venture in 2026.

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

I am worried by the constraining exit options for venture backed companies:

1. IPOs: You can’t IPO with less than $500M in revenue and even then, it’s not a slam dunk. Everyone that has so far has been a s*** IPO.

2. Acquisition by Incumbent: Yes but they are so specific. Very specialised in what they want. Not nearly big enough demand side for the supply of venture backed companies.

3. Private Equity: More closed than ever. Thoma, Francisco, Clearlake are on a portfolio of zombies that will likely follow the same fate as Medallia. Will cause them to pull back significantly from SaaS M&A.

This is not good.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

This is the big f**king deal.

Cursor acquired for $60BN by xAI

I sat down with Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll to discuss the deal, along with the biggest news in tech this week:

- Anthropic Hits $1TRN in Secondary Markets
- Anthropic Launches Claude Design
- Rippling Hits $1BN in ARR
- Cerebras Files for IPO

My notes below:

1. This $60B deal actually makes sense
The potential $60 billion acquisition of Cursor by xAI/SpaceX is an industrial "marriage made in heaven". Cursor has an exploding business with billions in ARR but "shitty" gross margins because they lack their own compute and models. Elon Musk has the massive Colossus GPU data center and a model (Grok) but effectively no revenue, making the vertical integration of these two companies a strategic fix for both.

2. How Claude Design Will Hurt Figma
Anthropic’s Claude Design is a full design application, not just a set of prompts or skills. It poses an existential threat because it allows product and engineering teams to bypass the traditional 30-day designer turnaround. By enabling "normal people" to design and move into production immediately, it will "maim and nibble" at Figma’s growth over the coming quarters.

3. I used to think MAUs and WAUs were the dumbest metric. Now I think it's the most important.
In the B2B world, usage metrics like MAUs, WAUs, and DAUs are now more critical than revenue. If usage isn't growing faster than revenue, it's a sign of a struggling startup or "stealth churn," where users have stopped active engagement despite the company still collecting fees. In the AI age, the ultimate test of a product's value is whether people are actually using its AI features daily.

4. Why the biggest fintech players are in for a shock.
Existing moats for fintech giants like Brex and Ramp are weakening as the selection criteria for vendors shifts. Customers are no longer prioritizing a dashboard's UI; they care which API works best with their autonomous AI agents. If a new vendor offers a superior API that allows an "AI VP of Finance" to automate tasks like collections, companies will switch vendors in a single week.

5. Agent fabric is the layer that manages all your agents
The defining 2027 challenge is the "agent fabric". The infrastructure needed to manage and secure hundreds of autonomous agents. This gives a massive advantage to incumbents like Salesforce. They are positioning themselves as the trusted governance layer to guardrail agents and prevent them from going rogue.

(links in comments)

Getting a job in venture capital is incredibly simple.

1. Choose three VC partners that you like and would want to work for.

2. Study the type and stage of company they like.

3. Send them one company every other day that fits their stage and thesis. Provide one line on why it is interesting.

4. Do this for 60 days and 100% guarantee you will have a job offer.

Show the freemium version of yourself.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

My single best investment from 20VC Fund I broke advice everyone gave me.

Don’t write small checks. If it is less than 1% of the fund, it won’t move the needle.

Wrong.

I wrote a $50K check. Today it is marked at $8.7M with upside. (Fund returner)

You will always underestimate the size of your winners.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

The idea that you have to be in SF to build a world-class AI company is absolute BS.

One of the best companies I have ever invested in is Solve Intelligence, AI for patents.

$1M-$12M (ARR graph below) with some of the biggest blue-chip law firms in the world, all in 12 months.

The team is one of the best, most cracked teams in tech. No chest pumping on social, no BS, just execution machines.

Europe and London can build mega companies. This is our time. LFG. 🚀

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

I really need to find unhinged founders.

I'm not looking for intellectually curious.

I am looking for unwaveringly obsessed, borderline psychotic individuals intent on changing a generation.

When you have that as a bar, it makes investing and founder assessment a lot clearer.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

Last night my mother threw me a surprise 30th birthday party.

What you don’t see in this picture. This cake is the second cake she made.

24 hours before, she made the exact same cake. It takes about 6-8 hours to make.

She left it in a cool (or so she thought!) spot in the house and came back before she went to bed. Disaster. It had all melted and was ruined.

So she did what an epic mother would; stayed up, all through the night to remake the cake, to perfection.

This to me summarises what our parents do for us. The stress, the anguish, the tireless work we never see so we have everything perfect on the day.

The cake was perfect and as always she made my party incredible.

Please please, call your mama today, no matter where she is in the world, tell her what she means to you. You will never regret that call.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

The SaaS bloodbath has been beyond brutal.

Wix for more than any other. This company is doing $2.1BN in ARR and they are valued at $2.1BN.

Like WTF. And, they have Base44, one of the leaders in vibe coding, now doing over $170M in ARR.

What is going on? How is this being priced at $2.1BN?

I sat down with Avishai Abrahami and have shared the biggest lessons below.

1. How Public Markets Are Getting Both Wix and SaaS Wrong

Public markets routinely misprice tech cycles, hyping vibe-coding startups while discounting core SaaS engines. They ignore the moat of enterprise trust. Giants like Salesforce win because institutions trust them with sensitive data, creating security and compliance barriers automated code projects cannot easily replicate.

2. Was the Buyback a Terrible Decision?

Timing the stock market is a fool’s errand. If your balance sheet has cash and your team is focused on core products instead of distracting M&A, a buyback during a dip can be rational. Capital allocation should be judged over three years, not a three-month panic.

3. How Do You Keep Talent When Your Market Cap Is Cratering?

Stop treating talent attrition as a failure. It can be a healthy refresh. Bull markets make companies forget that elite teams are forged by solving hard problems, not coasting. When market caps fall, protecting your top tier can uncover hidden stars and make room for a hungry new generation.

4. How Do the Business Models Compare Between Wix and Base44?

Scaling newer AI platforms requires ruthless focus on unit economics over expensive, generic LLM usage. The margin breakthrough comes from fine-tuning and combining smaller, custom models to match top-tier performance. Within two years, infrastructure cost declines could make AI COGS a non-issue for platform margins.

5. Why Wix Customers Will Not Churn to Vibe-Coded Solutions

Mainstream SMBs have neither the desire nor capacity to build their own tech stacks with automated coding tools. Seemingly simple workflows, like vertical business logic for a hair salon, are surprisingly complex. Even elite engineering teams struggle to rebuild them quickly, proving vertical SaaS remains highly defensible.

6. Why Teams of the Future Will Not Be as Small as People Think

The idea that future tech giants will run on skeleton crews managing thousands of AI agents is overhyped. The ecosystem gives too much credit to standalone AI capabilities. On granular business workflows, models still stumble, which means dense, capable human teams remain essential.

7. I Would Be Terrified if I Were in University Today, and My Advice to Students

Entering the workforce today is uncertain, but current LLMs will not instantly replace white-collar jobs. Today’s models are strong at reframing data, not deep reasoning, and still make frequent mistakes. True disruption to human capital likely requires two or three more major breakthroughs.

(links in comments)

Two reasons why 99% of seed stage companies don’t make it to Series A:

1. They don’t build something people want.

2. Co-Founder breakup.

Avoid these two and you are the 1%.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

I am going to piss off so many friends by saying this but if I could invest in one emerging manager sub $50M fund, it would be Joshua Browder.

A few things you need to know about Josh:

- He makes the founders he invests in live in his spare room at the Four Seasons until they raise their seed
- He turned his $100K Thiel Fellowship grant into a $10M angel portfolio
- He was one of the first cheques into Micro1, Yuzu and many more
- When he found out his father had been taken by the Russians, he was playing poker… (legend!)

I have never had founder references like the ones I got on Josh. I spoke to 12 founders. He averaged 9.2/10 across all 12.

This is one of the best episodes we have done in a long time and my notes below:

1. Why I Believe Young Founders Make the Best Founders
Young founders have no safety net and no option but to win. Corporate engineers often default to hiring big teams, while young founders stay focused on building the product. Their grit is much higher. Without that level of dedication, most people quit at the first real obstacle.

2. How I Test Founder Commitment Before Investing
To filter out tourist founders, schedule a pitch meeting at 11:00 PM. Elite founders accept immediately. Mediocre ones push it out by weeks.
During the interview, ask rapid-fire questions. If they claim a specific revenue number, have them pull up their live Stripe account on the spot. Look for tactical customer acquisition goals, not vague partnership promises.

3. Why I Make Founders Live With Me After Investing
The best early investments come from deep day-one relationships. Living together creates a focused, one-person accelerator where founders get a three-week crash course and avoid years of mistakes.
The rule is simple: co-founders share one room near the Four Seasons and cannot check out until they raise an institutional seed round.

4. Why Pre-Seed Companies Fail
Startups usually fail for three reasons: they run out of money, they run out of hope, or the co-founders break up.
Money problems usually come from weak pitching, which is why founders should drop the deck and show the product live. To maintain hope, ignore Silicon Valley vanity signals and focus on customer progress. To avoid team blowups, handle mechanics like vesting early.

5. What Founders Need to Know About Signing With a VC
VCs will say almost anything to get you to sign on the spot. They reverse-engineer your desires and claim they know every customer you want to meet.
Impressionable founders fall for it, but the promised intros often never happen. Never sign in the room. Take the night to think clearly.

6. My Biggest Lesson on Reserve Investing
Holding back reserves for later rounds has a huge opportunity cost. The biggest value creation happens at pre-seed, so saving capital for a Series A follow-on can limit your upside.
Deploying upfront into 20 to 30 pre-seed companies can produce far better long-term returns. Go all-in early.

(links in comments)

The best, most obsessed founders do not angel invest.

I asked a Founder/CEO the other day:

"Do you angel invest?"

They responded:

"Are you kidding me. To have the cash to angel invest I would have to sell stock in my own company to fund it.

Do you really think I believe any other business is a better investment than the dollars in my own?

So no, I do not and will not angel invest. Long my company."

That is a CEO I want to back up the truck on.

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

I get in a lot of trouble for saying that triple, triple, double, double, is not enough for the next wave of venture.

About 6 months ago, Paul Bonnet and me went to Vienna to do everything in our power to give Fonio $15M. (see pic below, I was nervous about winning the deal!)

Since they have gone from $1M to $10M ARR.

They will hit $100M in a further 18 months.

They have scaled to thousands of customers with only 60 team members.

Incredibly fast revenue scaling, very high revenue quality.

The perfect combination of sales-led CEO Daniel Keinrath and a world-class CTO Matthias Gruber.

Fonio will be one of the breakout companies of Europe. Watch this space...

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

For the last 10 years, I have committed to being unwaveringly unbalanced.

I have not prioritised my mental health, I have missed birthdays, weddings, had heart palpitations, psoriasis and more come.

There is no way I would have achieved the success I have without such commitment and focus.

To build something truly special, you have to sacrifice what so few are willing to. That is why it is hard.

Do not listen to the BS that says you can have it all. You cannot.

Lock in, focus, be prepared for what is to come.

Mr Beast says it well below.

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

One of the biggest mistakes founders make when pitching investors.

They speak badly about incumbents/competition. DON’T.

They have done something right to get to where they are.

State to investors:

1. Where they have done well?

2. That you have analysed their successes as well as their failures.

3. State a plan for how you build upon their successes and learn from failures.

The best founders are students of history.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

One of my best investments ever is 50x+ and was pure luck that I managed to invest.

Let me tell you the story of Lovable.

I was selling Anton Osika on investing in Project Europe. I was saying how we would become the talent magnet for the best young founders in Europe etc etc.

He invested. He then said...

"Do you want to invest in Lovable?"

Without a moment of hesitation, I said "yes, count us in".

Today, they announce their $400M Series C at a $13.3BN valuation and a 50x+ on that first check!

Anton, you are building one of the most consequential companies of our time and I am so proud of you my friend. LFG!

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

I just interviewed a CEO who said three things that blew my mind:

1. We replaced our $600K Salesforce contract with a vibe-coded CRM, built within 3 weeks.

2. We will get rid of 80% of the SaaS we use internally.

3. If Anthropic doubled pricing, we would not change usage in any way.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

Four core pillars to win in venture capital:

1. Sourcing (finding companies)
2. Selecting (picking companies)
3. Securing (winning the right to invest)
4. Servicing (helping them be the best)

If you are not using technology efficiently to do the above four, you will lose.

We found a company through Harmonic, within 24 hours, we had written them a term sheet for $5M.

One friend of mine has sourced 4 out of their last 9 deals through Harmonic.

If you do not innovate, you will be outcompeted. In venture, every 1% advantage counts.

First episode of my chat with Max Ruderman 👇

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #entrepreneur #startup #investment #20VC

"Attention is the currency of the future".

If you have a mega platform and are willing to write collaborative checks, you will crush the next decade of venture capital.

Jake Paul and Geoffrey Woo will outperform 99% of VCs in the coming years.

- Invested in Ramp Seed round, now valued at $32B.

- Invested in Chronosphere seed round, acquired for $3.35B in November.

- Invested in Anduril $8.48B series E, now valued at $40BN.

- Invested in Olipop $200M series B, now valued at $1.85B.

- Invested in Cognition.ai $2B series B, now valued at $10.2B.

For those who can effectively leverage distribution, the next decade will be extremely lucrative. 🔥

🔥 episode to come shortly. Stay tuned....

Every week I meet three new LPs (investors in funds). Every week. Even when I am not fundraising. And... I never ever sell 20VC to them.

Why? The single biggest reason VCs struggle with fundraising is they do not build relationships in between fundraises.

They treat it like an on/off switch. This is wrong. You have to continuously build relationships and trust with LPs over time.

I never sell 20VC to LPs. I understand what is important to them, what they like, what they do not like, how they think about building a venture portfolio. I then advise them. I try to provide as much value to them as possible, with nothing in return.

I always get their Whatsapp at the end. Relationships are built, deepened and sustained when you get off email and onto Whatsapp.

I also ask them, what three other LPs do you most respect? If I do not know them, I ask for an intro? Every week, I get 6-9 new LP intros from the LPs I meet.

Lines not dots. Build relationships over time. Play the long game.

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

OpenRouter is one of the most insane stories in tech.

Co-founded by OpenSea founder, Alex Atallah. It has become one of the most important companies in AI.

Scaled to 100s of millions in revenue and wildly profitable.

They process 25 TRILLION tokens every week and will do 1 QUADRILLION tokens this year.

As a result, Stripe have reportedly offered to buy them for $10BN.

Last round was $1.3BN just months ago… so what happens now?

I sat down for a chat with OpenRouter Founder, Alex Atallah and have summarized my notes below:

1. This Is Going to Be the Biggest Market in the History of Tech

AI model inference is set to become one of the largest markets in technology. Even as token prices fall dramatically, Jevons Paradox means usage can grow far faster than costs decline, driving massive overall compute consumption across an increasingly multi-model future.

2. Why None of the Routing Products Being Created Today Will Compete With OpenRouter

Building AI gateways has become trendy, but copycat routers that treat routing as a side feature are playing to exist rather than to win. True routing requires relentless focus on optimizing latency, cost, and constantly shifting model quality while giving developers maximum flexibility.

3. Model Labs Have Every Incentive to Come After Your Startup Eventually

Startups building thin wrappers around AI models face an existential threat if they occupy workflows that frontier labs consider strategic. Releases like Claude Design show how labs can move up the application layer, absorb valuable use cases, and lock entire enterprise teams into their ecosystems.

4. America Is Still Very, Very Behind in Open-Weight AI

The U.S. remains significantly behind China in the race for open-weight models. Chinese labs benefit from aggressive state support and open-source momentum, while American efforts face business model and capital constraints. Closing the gap will require dedicated access to compute and sustained investment.

5. How Open-Weight Models Are Rapidly Closing the Gap on Frontier AI

Models like Kimi K3 and the 5.2 generation show how quickly open-weight intelligence is closing the gap with proprietary frontier models. Using low-cost open models for deterministic subtasks beneath a frontier orchestrator can maintain output quality while sharply reducing inference costs.

6. Why We Need to Think About Employee Cost Completely Differently

In the AI era, employee cost is no longer just a fixed salary. It increasingly includes the variable inference spend of the AI tools each employee deploys. Companies will need to evaluate workforce performance through a cost-to-productivity lens that accounts for both human compensation and AI consumption.

(links in comments)

Seed investing is really very simple.

1. You have to invest in unwaveringly obsessed, unhinged founders. Very good does not cut it. Super smart, that is not it either. They need to be compelled beyond anything. Machines. Great examples; Jack Zhang, Alan Chang. Two of the greatest of our time.

2. They have to be in mega markets. Funds are larger than ever, outcomes need to be larger than ever also. $1BN exits do not return most funds. Size of market and speed of market growth matters massively.

If you have a beyond obsessed founder in a mega market that is growing, write the check, say thank you and help where possible.

It is that simple.

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

Founders, I am sorry but press/media do not care about your $3M seed round.

Don’t bother trying to convince them. They don’t care.

Focus on finding PMF, making customers love your product, building a personal brand (which you own and control) and creating value.

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

My team always tells me off for these types of posts, but age or arrogance, I do not care anymore.

I have interviewed 1,000 of the best founders over the past 10 years. None has impressed me as much as Nik Storonsky at Revolut. He scaled Revolut from nothing to $9.3BN in revenue this year.

I have gone over my episode with Nik to condense my biggest lessons from the discussion.

🚀 6 Lessons on Building a $75BN Company:

1.⁠ ⁠Build a "Self-Guided Missile" Team
Nik classifies talent into four tiers: Excellent, Strong, Average, and Below Average.

The Goal: Hire "Excellent" people who act like self-guided missiles—they select the goal themselves and reach it without intervention.

The Filter: Strong people need to be shown the goal but reach it alone; average people require weekly iteration.

The Rule: If someone isn't delivering within the first three months, they likely never will. "When there's doubt, there's no doubt".

2.⁠ ⁠Radical KPI-Led Leadership
Revolut is one of the most KPI-driven companies in the world.

Cascading Goals: They set 5–6 company-level goals per year, then quantify and cascade them down to the department, team, and individual levels.

Quantifiable Success: Every person and team is judged quarterly based on hard metrics, skills, and cultural values.

3.⁠ ⁠High-Velocity Product Betting
Revolut manages innovation like a venture portfolio.

Parallel Bets: They often run 20+ product bets in parallel with small, independent teams of ~10 people.

The 20% Rule: Out of 27 recent bets, roughly 5–6 became massive hits, 5–6 failed, and the rest fell in the middle.

Scaling: They only add resources to products that show immediate "up and to the right" growth in the first few months.

4.⁠ ⁠Embrace the Work-Life "Imbalance"
Nik challenges the conventional wisdom of a balanced life.

The Secret to Success: He argues that a disbalanced life is what actually allows you to achieve audacious goals.

Focused Sacrifice: The more imbalanced and focused you are on your objectives—sacrificing other areas—the higher your probability of success.

5.⁠ ⁠CEOs as Resource Allocators
The best CEOs "squeeze a lot of IRR out of very little resource".

Brainpower > Capital: Throwing money at a problem is a sign of the "wrong people." Real power comes from forcing yourself to find the most cost-effective and efficient solution.

Efficiency: Despite their scale, Nik remains highly cost-conscious, viewing people and marketing as the only significant overheads worth investing in.

6.⁠ ⁠The "Bar Raiser" Hiring Strategy
Nik admits he was "terrible" at hiring for roles he hadn't worked in before (e.g., Compliance, HR).

Market Intelligence: Before hiring for a new function, he now interviews the entire market to learn how the job is done.

Competency First: You cannot assess who is "good" until you have first acquired enough knowledge to evaluate their specific skills.

#founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

Jude Law generated $50M in sales pipeline.

Legora is onboarding 50 people every 14 days. 3.6 per day!

$100M in ARR in 18 months. $275M by EOY 2026. Wow.                                                         

Paul Graham described them as “ the most impressive startup I've been to visit in years.”

I sat down with Legora’s CRO, I took some notes and have added them below.

1. Implementation Change Management
Success is defined by change management, not just software. Legora focuses on helping customers adopt AI into workflows, which is fundamentally difficult. You must lead the customer through the “hard yards” of organizational change.

2. Why FTEs are Required in Enterprise
High-end AI needs human experts. Legora uses Forward Deploy engineers and former attorneys, known as Legal Engineers, to bridge the gap. They solve the “blank page” problem by showing exactly how a workflow looks with agents.

3. Throwing out the Traditional Sales Playbook
Old SaaS held demos back. Now you must demo early to show the future. Reps must be audible ready, asking deep questions and building agentic workflows off the cuff during the meeting. AI literacy is low, so the product must lead the way.

4. Brand Awareness as a Performance Driver
Brand awareness is a powerful driver of business, not “fluffy bullshit.” A campaign with Jude Law generated over $50M of qualified pipeline in one month. In category creation, if you are not “in the room,” you lose.

5. Price Integrity over Free
Legora does not give software away. If a customer is not spending money, they will not commit the resources needed for change. Price integrity ensures both parties have skin in the game and value the partnership.

6. Scaling Talent at Unhinged Speed
Legora hires 40 to 50 people every two weeks. Immersive training in Stockholm gets reps ready to sit on calls by week two. They use AI to score demo quality, identifying within 45 days whether a rep will make it.

7. The Lulucast vs. The Bet Your Life Forecast
Effective forecasting requires two perspectives: the rep and manager commit, or the bet your life number, and the Lulucast, which is the weighted math version. Accuracy depends on tight entry and exit criteria for every sales stage.

8. Momentum and Pressing the Advantage
Product-market fit is unwavering. When you have it, you know it. When you find something that works competitively, document it and press the advantage. In an unhinged market, you must play defense and offense simultaneously.

(links in comments)

Companies will spend more on tokens than they do salaries very soon.

Application layer companies have no defensibility, the model is the product.

Hiring researchers will cost you tens of millions of dollars today.

Everything you think you know about defensibility, token spend, labour displacement, will be changed following this discussion.

I condensed the core ideas which changed my thinking in my conversation with Brendan Foody @ Mercor below.

1. Why Frontier AI Labs Could Become $10TN Companies

Critics once questioned whether frontier labs could keep pricing power in a competitive market. Their revenue velocity now suggests the opposite. The opportunity around leading frontier models is so large that it could absorb a major share of macro demand. At least one AI lab may become a $10TN company within 5 years.

2. The Capacity Bottleneck: Demand Doubling Overnight

For top infrastructure and data providers, growth is no longer limited by customer acquisition. It is limited by execution. Demand is scaling so fast that leading companies could double revenue overnight if they had enough capacity. The challenge now is how quickly they can mobilize specialized human networks and build high-fidelity environments for enterprise demand.

3. Is the Stated Revenue Really Revenue or GMV?

The stated revenue is not GMV because the talent network is only one part of a vertically integrated value chain. Customers buy complete tasks for model improvement, not simple marketplace listings. With 30% to 40% gross margins, the business owns the full lifecycle, from sourcing experts to deploying AI project managers and running quality checks.

4. The Inversion of Corporate Opex: Token Spend vs. Salaries

In high-growth AI companies, token spend for internal agents has already surpassed employee headcount costs. As operations, interviewing, accounting, and fraud detection move to agents, capital allocation shifts from salaries to inference compute.

5. Why Token Spend Inside Companies Will Keep Increasing

Driven by Jevons Paradox, enterprise token consumption will keep rising as models improve and costs fall. Companies will use more compute to unlock higher-order reasoning, not less. F500s are responding by building evaluation systems that let them hot-swap models and optimize inference budgets.

6. The Tens of Millions Talent War for AI Researchers

The market for top AI researchers is severely supply constrained, with demand far above available talent. Companies are offering compensation packages worth tens of millions in stock per year to secure elite researchers. This wage spike shows that world-class research talent remains the core bottleneck in AI.

(links in comments)

90% of founders make this one mistake when fundraising and it can kill the whole raise:

Good or bad; VCs like the illusion of something being “hot” or coveted.

When they ask; what is the timeline for the fundraise.

You must strike the perfect balance.

Bad: we are closing on Friday. (Does not give people time to do the work. Locks you into a timeline.)

Bad also: looking to close before Christmas. (Long timeline suggests no heat and momentum.)

Perfect: “we are super grateful to have had a lot of interest for this round. It is really important for us that we choose the right partner but people are moving.” Humble, shows respect for partnership but suggests they need to move.

*Follow @hstebbings1996 on Instagram and message me for “Three Other Ways You Will Kill Your Fundraise Without Knowing It”

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup