digitally native vertical boy | partner @slow | writing a weekly newsletter
Brooklyn
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In the last few weeks Goldman, Sequoia, and Barclays have all put out equity research that says “the AI capex boom doesn’t make sense”. That feels like a pretty significant harbinger of a major sentiment shift.
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Friends inside Twitter tell me that Ruhal Ligma’s boss, Dinesh Sukondeez has also been laid off and is walking out of the building now. #TwitterTakeover
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This all feels wrapped up in some weird ED culture. Truly cannot wrap my head around it tho. Is the issue that it’s rude? That’s its unsightly? That it’s inconsiderate? What’s the rationale
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Vanguard doing site maintenance at market open on a monday in the midst of a massive selloff is absolutely iconic. Pure commitment to the do nothing indexor worldview. How can you not love it?
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signing a lease for 30% of your pretax income after seeing the apartment once for 15 minutes
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Trump is the anti-abundance, decel president
-Banning port automation
-Halting renewal energy projects
-endings the CHIPs program
-shutting science and research funding
America needs forward looking leadership that cares about innovation and state capacity.
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Watching tech people rush to support Trump and then quietly backpeddle b/c of "the vibe shift" is pathetic. Easily influenced, no substance, unprincipled - just enamored of power and momentum.
It says a lot about the culture of investing and building - none of them good.
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“Homeowners” and “those working hard to become homeowners” are on opposite sides of a one time, zero sum transaction. Your equity appreciation is my monthly payment. They are oppositional to one another.
Opendoor’s goal is simple: to tilt the world in favor of homeowners and those working hard to become homeowners.
That's our job. We'll do it with extreme aggression because if people can't own a home they love to raise their family then the promise of West is not fulfilled.
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i feel like we're really glossing over the fact that a parrot can have a conversation
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Don’t ask “what do you do?” at parties
IMO also avoid "what's your story?" and "so how do you know [host]?"
Better options:
- when was the last time you cried
- how do you feel about your body?
- did Epstein kill himself?
- do your parents still love each other?
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Alexandr Wang is basically N of 1 because all the highest-potential founders of his (our?) generation got one-shotted by crypto scheming instead of building real businesses in their 20s.
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$2.6B as the most valuable startup in a country of 130M people.
Crazy.
Tokyo-based Sakana AI becomes Japan's most valuable unicorn at a ~$2.6B valuation, following a ~$130M raise from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial and US VC firms (Nikkei Asia)
asia.nikkei.com/business/tec…
techmeme.com/251116/p6#a2511…
📫 Subscribe: techmeme.com/newsletter?from…
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Miami was never gonna happen. It's just SF and NY and no other startup city matters.
SF is a better city to build a startup in than NYC. Duh
The chest thumping just looks desperate and undermines the fact that NYC is really great for startups and is a better city overall.
There is a clear hierarchy and basically nowhere else matters after SF (#1) and NY (#2)
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If Elizabeth Holmes were alive today, Theranos would be SPAC’ing at 14x 2024 revenue with a 140% 2021-2026 CAGR.
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They’re literally all taking “the geriatric spice.” They can just say that’s why they look young. One line of dialogue and problem solved.
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Midas list general partner at a board meeting giving product advice to a technical team
David Perell
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A week ago, OnlyFans posted that they had paid out $700M to creators lifetime to date. Now the headline image says $725M. At a 20% take rate and with the approx timeline, thats ≈$800m-1.5B GMV run rate and $150-300M revenue run rate. This is a billion dollar media company.
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Some very happy and surprising news: I'm a Partner at @slow :)
In an interview @KevinColleran asked me “where do you see yourself in five years” and I answered “not at Slow!”
But big things take time and now I have more time to see things through.
We're excited (and shocked) to announce that @yrechtman is being promoted to Partner.
As an explicitly non-expansionary firm there generally is no defined ‘path’ to partner / we don’t really do that. But most great things are exceptions to hard rules
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Talking to new pre-seed co we backed. Feels like the most succinct “working with me” doc I can write
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It’s worse than we thought
Friends inside Twitter tell me that Ruhal Ligma’s boss, Dinesh Sukondeez has also been laid off and is walking out of the building now. #TwitterTakeover
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I’m supposed to get coffee in Carroll gardens at 230 today but I have no idea with whom or where I’m meeting them.
It’s purple so I know it’s an investor. Please let me know if this is you.
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Every industry needs a Plaid.
Instead of building vertical ERPs, startups should just abstract them away.
ALT Every Industry Needs a Plaid ### Instead of building industry ERPs, startups should just abstract them away Every industry and every org within every company has a system of record that winds up as both an app and a database. Usually it’s a specialized ERP but sometimes it’s so specialized it becomes its own thing all together: * Real estate: PMS * Airlines: PSS * Mortgage: LoS * Healthcare: EMR * Sales orgs: CRM All the important information and workflow lives within this SoR so any other apps need to go through it. The more integrations and external apps/point solutions companies use, the more locked in they become. These tools are generally old, kind of shitty, and incredibly complex. Far too complex for any startup to come in and replace; they've had years or even decades in market to build for every imaginable corner case and oddity their clients have presented. So companies are completely locked into their SoR with no path out and rising costs (hard dollar and soft) in the f
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Founders Have to Be Specifically Right.Not Directionally Correct.
Remember, VCs get to make 5+ bets a year and founders get to make 1 bet every 5+ years.
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wrong.
Expected value* of the SGA shot: $38,565
EV of the curry shot: $63,750
*using career percentages. If it's in an open gym curry's percentage will be even higher
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We're at the start of a new private equity X venture capital supercyle:
Whether it’s PE funds buying venture backed companies, venture funds launching PE strategies, or startups using PE-like approaches to buy their customers, something big is going on.
There's four separate but related things happening at once that are driving PE and VC inexorably closer together.
1) Category maturity. As software has become now fully legible it's just another low growth category for PE to buy and fix.
2) Limits on organic growth. As pure play (application) software hits limits on growth and adoption in the real economy, companies are looking for new ways to deploy their products. ~Buying real businesses and transforming them with software is just a different business model (value capture) for the same basic products (value creation)~ we've always seen.
3) Asset class maturity. Because of the massively increased AUM multistage funds over the last few years "just do private equity" is becoming a hot trend for VCs to just deploy big dollars.
4) Entrepreneurial culture. Founders are increasingly keen to control their own destiny and find faster, more efficient paths to profitability and independence.
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Losing 10s of billions of revenue instead of reaping hundreds of billions in exit value. A normal, profit minded thing for a company that’s not an influence operation to do.
BREAKING: Reuters reports that TikTok's owner ByteDance would prefer to 'shut down' its app in the US rather than sell it if all legal options are exhausted
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Runway won’t make you safe. Spend the money.
If you haven’t done something important in 18 months, the 19th month is very unlikely to be any different.
Conservatism costs a lot more (36 months for nothing) is than aggression (we burned out after 12).
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VCs are too nice and conflict averse. So there’s insufficient consequences for bad behavior.
Everyone is too worried about closing off opportunities to “work together soon.”
It’s important to keep an enemies list and black ball VCs who mistreat founders/act in bad faith.
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Metropolis.io raised a $1.7 billion Series C to buy and transform SP+.
Metropolis is a great case study of the “vertical SaaS buyout” where a software company buys and transforms operating companies. This is the future of vertical SaaS and how software eats the world
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The age of the Software-Led Growth Buyout is Here.
Bringing software to industry remains the biggest opportunity for software to orchestrate/accelerate GDP but only if we can work beyond vSaaS biz models and capital structures.
Our deck and thesis:
docsend.com/view/cc6cxd7va7n…
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Some news! Today is my first day w the @Slow team. I’ve gotten to know @wquist @lessin @KevinColleran @crabbylions and the gang over the last year and I’m so stoked to join. I’ll be supporting seed stage companies across fintech, healthcare, marketplaces - and following my nose
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When your public company salary effectively gets slashed 50% and any new role at a startup comes with underwater options, the risk:reward about starting a company yourself changes drastically. Lots of good folks are going to take the leap who wouldn't have done it 2 years ago.
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Signing into iMessage on a Newark airport iPad is a level of chaotic evil I can’t really process
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This is pretty much and increasingly the only thing I think matters. Evidently grass roots donors and ground game don’t matter at all or at the very least are profoundly inefficient/ineffective relative to the media ecosystem you cultivate.
the fundamental problem Democrats have is that while the right has an entire media ecosystem built to bash Democrats the left also has an entire media ecosystem…built to bash Democrats
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The idea that 10x’ing outbound with AI will bring CAC down is insane.
Deep trust within your category will be essential to have credibility to get a meeting, let alone to sell. This will drive a huge change now only in how companies are built but in what models are viable and who builds/runs them.
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If you haven't seen it, you gotta watch his congressional testimony about public television piped.video/watch?v=fKy7ljRr…
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Today, we’re launching the Slow Ventures Creator Fund: a $63 million fund to back ambitious creator-entrepreneurs building businesses for their audiences.
In a world where paid growth doesn’t work and trust, distribution, and audience are everything; the playbook to build a company completely inverts.
Rather than building a product and then inorganically finding (paying for) an audience, the next generation of great (consumer) brands will organically find an audience and then build a product.
Slow is launching our first Creator Fund—backed by institutional LPs—to support creator-first founders and redefine the future of entrepreneurship.
Why does this matter? Because creators aren’t just glorified ad space anymore. The world is finally waking up to the real value they bring. Investors are seeing the returns, validating what we’ve believed all along: creators aren’t just influencers—they’re industry-shaping entrepreneurs with the power to build the next big thing.
Shout out to the team @mmlightcap @lessin @KevinColleran and Billy Parks
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Now you can mass unsubscribe from emails from within the Gmail app.
This is the first really good gmail feature release since they killed Inbox.
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Maybe once or twice a week I get asked for advice about how to get a job in VC. I always give some version of the same answer: don't.
Here's why.
99d.substack.com/p/dont-work…
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The biggest surprise of Beff Jezos is that he’s not a LARP. I expected him to be a 25 year old at Bain who just lost it.
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Big venture platforms are launching PE funds for the same reason big PE platforms launched venture funds the last cycle. Asset managers want to manage assets. Multi manager HFs, mega PE funds, bulge bracket banks, and multistage VC platforms are increasingly indistinguishable.
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We Don’t Believe in VC Value Add or Platform Teams
1. it selects for worse founders
2. it hurts your reputation by overselling and underdelivering
3. it makes you less aligned with founders
How we actually help founders
1. WE GIVE YOU MONEY. Duh.
2. We help you raise more money
3. We help you think about how to spend the money
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SF is a better city to build a startup in than NYC. Duh
The chest thumping just looks desperate and undermines the fact that NYC is really great for startups and is a better city overall.
There is a clear hierarchy and basically nowhere else matters after SF (#1) and NY (#2)
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At a large enough scale, every startup becomes at least one of the following:
1) a marketplace
2) B2B
3) financial services company
Debate me, cowards.
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The Future of Software Looks Like Services
There are increasingly no moats and infinite competitors in application software. Building a big high-quality business requires finding something else defensible and novel to pursue.
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She’s way too lowkey to be on here but I’m just thrilled for Liu on the public launch of Sunflower and her second $150M (!!!) fund.
She’s a phenomenal person to invest with and I look forward to working with her for a long time. 🌻
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Investors, take note. This is how you add value and get into hot AI companies like @every. I’m gonna be a billionaire because of the tagline I wrote.
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I’ve given a lot of negative career advice (don’t work in VC, don’t be a generalist) so here’s one thing I think early career people **should** do: be a janitor (make others’ lives easier) or a star (deliver unique value). Don’t do replacement level work. 99d.substack.com/p/be-a-star…
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We led a $7 million funding round to build the next great American home services brand.
The opportunity for software to eat the world, transform the real economy, and turbocharge the productivity of real businesses is massive and untapped. But often that will mean building and using software to own the upside, rather than selling it.
Today Craftwork is expanding organically (opening and growing its own territories) and building systems for scale. Tomorrow, there are opportunities for growth inorganically (buying businesses as a path into market), and as a franchisor (licensing its brand, technology, and operating system).
This the the type of hybrid, real world business that only a rare kind of seasoned founder can build.
Excited to announce Craftwork’s Series A funding!
Huge thank you to @yrechtman at @slow and @pioneer_fund for joining us, and to @lachygroom, @louisberyl, @nicoleahjohnson at @ForerunnerVC, and @ycombinator for continuing to back us!
axios.com/local/charlotte/20…
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I have been plagued by awful management for years across multiple apartments. The only time it’s been good when renting from A Dude was when it was in a co-op with hardcore rules. I’d gladly live in a megacorp building if they owned cute brownstones
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Request for startups: I want to get long mold
Mold is super hot right now. It’s like the protein of environemtal contaminants. It’s in everything with no signs of going away. It’s literally in the air!
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Also his Emmy speech. It'll get ya piped.video/watch?v=Upm9LnuC…
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“Writing on the internet” as a whole personality/personal brand is just an MLM for tech bros. Change my mind.
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We’re hiring (Slow.co/jobs) right now so i’m finding myself explaining the job of a VC a lot. So here’s the skinny on this very weird “profession” - good, bad, and other.
On one hand, you spend all your time with awesome people. OTOH it's a super lonely job.
On one hand it's not a very hard job. OTOH almost everyone is bad at it.
One one hand you switch quickly between ideas. OTOH it's a maddeningly slow pace.
On one hand you get to be close to lots of cool companies. OTOH you don't work at any of them.
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Really hoping prophecy makes this clear. Funny enough if they’d use the word “jihad” it would drive it home better for western audiences but they can’t/wont….
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It’s AAPI heritage month and all the white women in fort Greene are celebrating by chasing after their dogs Miso, Nori, Daikon, Bento, and Mochi
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I'm bearish on CPA firm rollups and buyouts.
We have met 10+ of these companies over the last 24 months. Not an exaggeration. So these assets are going to be insanely competitive and we don’t think it’s worth doing.
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My 7 part plan to make Resy into a great American company
Like most venture capitalists, I’m not qualified to do anything but my current job. That is, except for one thing; I would absolutely kill it as the CEO of Resy.
Your move, @AmericanExpress.
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Being ok looking stupid is a superpower.
Literally no one cares about anything you do except for you and no one will remember your failures as long as you eventually get it right.
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My beloved Mommom passed away yesterday morning. I had just been down to get her settled in a new apartment a few weeks ago. In the last weeks of her life she was happier and more active than she had been in a long time. As her health got worse I was mourning for the last few years. But I miss her very much.
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The murder mystery/crime caper comedy is making a glorious comeback and I am so excited. This is one of my favorite types of movies.
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Pre-seed is a unique beast as distinct from seed as seed is from A+. It's got some really attractive qualities for those patient enough to spend time there.
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Three associates at Slow and none of the have watched Silicon Valley. This is now required reading.
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Most Vertical SaaS is just a basic CRM with a few custom fields.
A composable/headless CRM would transform the category.
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I am legitimately terrified of millennials’ and zoomers’ fascination with day trading and stock picking as a salve for wage stagnation and the death of defined benefit retirement plans.
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I’m tired of commuting into Manhattan for startup events.
Finally warm out so I'm gonna host an outdoor hang in Brooklyn in the next few weeks.
Founders, operators, etc. in BK hmu! Margs, tacos, sunshine on me 🍹🌮🌞
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Lmao my family got here from Germany around the same time… wonder what makes us different? Can’t quite put my Jew-y finger on it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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