Julius 🪸

@paulg How about Chief Deletion Officer?

A rule of thumb that has served me well: Beware of anything with "innovation" in the name.

@ColinGardiner Reverse-secondary: new meta

Founder in my portfolio just invested in his own growth round. Didn't need to. Call me old fashioned but I find it bullish.

Feels insane, that despite your legendary execution/success on the consumer side and AI as cornerstone of scaling efficiency, consumer (marketplace) startups are still off-meta when it comes to funding. Have your words a few months ago yielded some mindset shift within YC? Feels the industry air-gapped from SaaS B2B directly to deep-tech. „consumer is too hard, so now we‘re doing deep-tech“. Mental gymnastics needed to make that work logically or I‘m just too much in love with consumer networks solutions.

After YC, Airbnb raised $615k at a $3M post-money valuation. We were the highest valuation in our batch.

💯 Ads are underrated as monetization layer. For marketplaces like eBay ads are now a key profit driver with ~18% of high margin revenue flowing through ads. Vintage classifieds monetization comeback. Opportunity: C2C marketplace that is solely relying on ads and offering zero-take: a) transactional cost benefits to users b) reduced friction for buyers and sellers, as they or their personal agents can route with 1-tap through any payments/logistics option that suits their needs across categories/borders (no UX lock-ins). c) surface-light regulatory burden compared to merchant-of-record business models as additional tailwind for rapid global roll-out. Many are doing the opposite (building out secondary infra) instead of utilizing the full breadth of accelerating next-gen payments/(autonomous) logistics options. One of their main (questionable) assumptions is that trust requires proprietary infra, when verified identity paired with reputation and AI are the asset light alternative that is increasingly underpinning trust on social networks like LinkedIn. The irony in all of this is that ads also make the value add for subscriptions stronger (e.g. YouTube subscriptions use case is mainly to avoid ads)

A big story that most people are missing in the AI race for the consumer (ChatGPT vs Claude) is ads. Right now, most consumer AI revenue is coming from power users who are willing to pay high cost subscriptions. This currently skews positive for products like Claude - but this will not be the end state. Google makes ~$460/ user/year in the U.S., mostly on ads. Meta makes around ~$250. I would argue ChatGPT’s ad-based ARPUs will be even higher as they will ultimately have deeper / more frequent user engagement. Even at the $460 level - monetizing everyone in the U.S. via ads is $152 billion in annual revenue. By contrast, if you’re able to monetize even 5% of the population on a $200/month subscription (which is a stretch!), that’s only $40 billion 🤔 I suspect this will be even more drastic outside the U.S. where users are even less willing or able to pay directly for subscriptions. And, the earliest data from a very small rollout shows ChatGPT ads are already outperforming Meta in effectiveness - this just gets better over time. TL;DR - I would not count ChatGPT out on consumer AI revenue. Once ads start working, that can quickly become a massive machine.

@Trace_Cohen Permissionless future accelerating 💚

Only $40M in revenue! I assume just a treasury hedge too wow

@elonmusk Dev self-rejecting and resubmitting helped me a few times to get immediate approval. Hunch is that sometimes the queue gets glitchy. Aka „have you tried turning it on and off again“

iOS App Review delays are getting ridiculous

@ColinGardiner Congrats! Closing in on 9 years, but didn’t make it past 2 kids 😶‍🌫️

Thirteen years married today, amazing wife, four kids. It's a good life.

@Jashanx_gill Rooting for you! ✊

My app just crossed 10 downloads. I know the number is small, but it still made me happy.

@brettcalhounn Overhyped: ARR Underrated: Global consumer networks

What’s currently overhyped in the startup world? Underrated?

@Trace_Cohen Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

My last fortune 50 company had a “hackathon” idea submission. So I proposed adding an average cost per employees attending a meeting based on their job title to show how much money was being wasted in big meetings. Everyone but the execs liked it.

This hits! Escaping pattern matching is an excruciating challenge. When someone runs a non-consensus highly experimental playbook the first instinct is to pattern match against failed category precedents and assume similar outcomes as if the outcome is a function of the category and not the applied playbook. Even worse is the recommendation to change the playbook to the learned patterns, which increases the likelihood of repeating past failures. One of the many examples in my case: „you should start in one vertical and then expand horizontally“ even though no one (!) has managed to dethrone horizontal eBay, facebook marketplaces or craigslist by going vertical first and VCs lost billions trying, while all three tech-dinosaurs are still humming along collecting their outdated monopoly premium.

@antoniogm There is no second best. 🇨🇭

A real sign of creeping middle age is the growing desire to just move to Switzerland and not deal with the pointless aggravating bullshit rampant in the rest of the world.

@lizwessel Literally swimming with our hammerhead mascot Shack :) You‘ve got 📮

Canva and Chime. Two of many companies that got over 100 VC rejections before getting funded. Now both multi-billion dollar businesses. Founders: Just. Keep. Swimming.

@srcasm @flybridge Not sure if C2C is considered niche (I‘d argue innovation niche, given the lack of progress with Craigslist/ebay/facebook marketplace still at the top) DM in your 📮

We’re about six months into deploying @flybridge 2025 (our 7th fund). The "AI" honeymoon period is officially over. In 2024, everyone wanted to talk about models. In 2025, everyone wanted to talk about agents. Nowadays, I’m looking for the Invisible Infrastructure. If you’re building the plumbing that makes autonomous systems actually safe, auditable, and reliable for a Fortune 500, we should be talking. Specifically, I’m looking for: > Tools that verify human intent in a world full of high-fidelity deepfakes. > AI that doesn't "forget" who I am or what we talked about yesterday across different apps. > Founders who spent ten years in a "niche" industry (like maritime logistics or waste management) and are now rebuilding it from the studs up. I know the best founders are often too busy building to be scrolling LinkedIn. If you have a friend who is currently building something that fits this description, tell them to hit me up. I don't need a deck yet. I just want to hear about the problem they can't stop thinking about. We’re cutting $1M to $3M checks. My DMs are always open.

Lost a million betting on the passive bubble to pop 2022 buying put leaps on SPY/QQQ end of 2021. Expired worthless. (I should’ve just shorted Tesla and Bitcoin as both were down like 65% end of 2022⚰️) Went down the rabbit hole of passive indexing stupidity 2020-2021 through Mike‘s great work. Too hard to know, when it‘ll finally break :( So switched strategies and decided to build a business that I know well and should do well, if the bubble keeps inflating and would likely thrive, when it finally breaks. Vinted was founded 2008 and received heavy tailwinds through the financial crisis as consumers needed liquidity through selling clothes and preserve liquidity by buying second hand clothes. @shackxyz is ironically a venture/hedge hybrid. If a global downturn hits a pure horizontal next gen C2C platform, where users can sell atoms, bits & time should be in demand, especially given how outdated current solutions are.

@levelsio Only thing I disagree with you on. Though my advice is similar: ride the indexing bubble and be the first person to sell when people start to realize indexing makes no sense (incredibly good video below by prev manager of Peter Thiel's macro fund) x.com/scottastevenso…

Me 5 minutes after meeting somebody new: it's of utmost importance for you to open a broker account and buy Vanguard S&P 500 UCITS ETF (USD) Accumulating (VUAA)

@travisk Abundance.

Atoms. atoms.co/vision

I usually like to test iOS apps/products that get larger funding rounds to see what I can learn. The last few had ~80% fabricated usage or were a „coming soon“ button festival Wondering a) how many investors test the product before investing. b) how much artificial usage is being generated to juice growth/retention 🫣

I had been following a YC startup for 6 months. Every week the founder was posting insane numbers: 30% weekly growth, a fresh fundraise, everything looking like it was taking off. Same niche as me, so I paid close attention. I booked a demo. I bought the product. I tested it. And... I couldn’t understand it. It didn’t seem to work much better than what we were doing. Then two weeks ago: full rebrand. Back to zero. The founder finally said the idea wasn’t working and they were starting over with a new one. Lesson: without real data, never trust everything people say on the internet.

@cryptopunk7213 Mapping is underrated 💚

damn google just launched the biggest AI product in history - 2 billion users, an intelligence layer on top of google maps. this kills yelp and tripadvisor: - "Ask Maps" is a conversational AI built on 300M places and reviews from 500M people, ask it: "is there a public tennis court with lights on that I can play at tonight?" and you get an actual answer yelp is cooked (why open a separate app for reviews)??? but heres the coolest part - maps becomes a local intelligence layer eg: "what's parking like near the venue?" or "is this neighborhood safe to walk at night?" - this shit changes the way you travel and DO activites. google ads are gonna go craaaazyyy - the moment Ask Maps gets monetized you won't know if it's recommending the best coffee shop or the one that paid 2B fucking users, thats more than chatgpt and gemini ai COMBINED. gg

@AlexKolicich ALDI playbook 🇩🇪 Also applies to generalist recommerce marketplaces, where professional middlemen extract rent along the marketplace itself through take rate and bloated cost structures. Future is direct and free of take rate💚

We wrote the first check into Quince and never shared our thesis publicly At the time, D2C was radioactive and 'affordable luxury' sounded like an oxymoron. Today they raised at $10B. We couldn't be more excited. Here's why we believed — and why we think it's still early! 8vc.com/resources/quin…