Buddy Foster

Met a founder He’s at $1 billion MRR With zero employees Uses AI to run his company Works 10 minutes a day Incredible The best part? I just made this guy up

we are being gaslit about AI on a societal level. Everybody is vibe coding but I haven’t seen one useful thing get produced. Everybody has agents doing something but nothing useful is getting done. Cool you had AI summarize a PDF and make a template. Nice

In Bessemer's original Shopify memo, the BEST case exit was $400 million. Shopify is worth $155 BILLION today. No VC model survives contact with a generational company. I imagine we will see this to an even greater extent over the next 5 years

AOC: Companies like Palantir are mining endlessly the data and privacy of the American people: keeping track of everything that they say and do. And sending it to a militarized government.

Contrarian take: there's never been a better time for early career professionals to command the attention of leaders in their company. How? Become the AI Guru in your company. Every co has a few of them & they instantly earn visibility with the c-suite... If you're an SDR, map out the inbound SDR process end-to-end in your org and build an AI agent on Vercel that automates several/all steps. If you're an engineer, evangelize Claude Code & lead enablement workshops, helping other technical folks understand everything from hooks to worktrees to claude[.]md. If you're a growth marketer, build a paid media workflow that mines creative ideas from reddit, spins up 100s of ads using Nano Banana, sets up the campaign on Meta, and drives traffic to custom landing pages, so you can test ad spend far more efficiently at scale. You could be the most junior person in your company, but if you're truly viewed as the AI Guru, you are wildly valuable & have way more leverage than you think.

Lead Edge might be the only VC firm that has deliberately opted out of chasing the power law while maintaining incredibly consistent returns: "It's all about hitting doubles and triples. We're like Cal Ripken. We're not Sammy Sosa or Mark McGwire. We're trying to make a 2 to 5x in 3 to 7 years. We do not run funds with like 100-150 companies in them, we run funds with 20 investments in them. So if we've made something a 12, 15% position, and that goes 8, 10, 12x. That's how you can 3x net a fund. Our downsides have been very low. I think we've only lost all of our money in one deal ever...if you can avoid zeros and turn those zeros into like 0.8x or 0.1x, it massively helps returns. Probably a third of our exits have been secondaries. We will buy secondaries. We will also sell. We constantly underwrite. We've been referred to as traders or hedge fund guys, and we're like no, no – we're just trying to actually make money."

Many people think that when AI can do a task better than us, it will outcompete humans. But token costs are not trivial, and, for many types of tasks, even skilled labor tasks, humans are much cheaper than AI. Increasing efficiency & compute supply will alter those calculations

BREAKING: Thoma Bravo just released their LP meeting slides. The world's largest software PE firm thinks the market has it completely wrong on software right now. Public markets are panic-selling software based on AI fear. Here's what they're seeing:

Meanwhile 28 year olds in finance in this generation are basically just cannon fodder. No chance anyone makes it up the chain this quickly at any legitimate shop

every generational founder in history was already doing exceptional work by 16, 19, 22. not thinking about it. doing it. if you're 25 and there's nothing to point to - the odds shift dramatically. not impossible. but the distribution gets thin. - dubugras was running a payments company processing $1.5B at 16. - wang was winning national olympiads and interning at quora before he could drive. - collison invented his own programming language and won ireland's young scientist of the year at 16. - buterin wrote the ethereum whitepaper at 19. bet on the youth!