New York VC Network

This Allbirds story is so insane: → $BIRD IPO'd in 2021 at a $4 billion valuation → Silicon Valley's favorite shoe → Lost 99.5% of its value in 4 years → Closed every US store → Sold the entire brand for $39 million → Renamed itself "NewBird AI" → Using $50M to buy GPUs and compete with AWS → Stock up 450% today on 875x normal volume This is the most unhinged corporate pivot of the decade and the newest meme stock entrant

@paulg This is the real problem with using AI as a research tool. It sounds right often enough that you stop checking. We catch this constantly with legal agents. The ones that sound most confident are the ones you have to verify the hardest.

The VC industry makes a lot of sense once you realize it is filled with alums of this particular program and another just like it

This week I talked to 3 different VCs who are thinking about taking a pause from investing. The AI market is super frothy and the vibes feel off so why not focus on other projects for now? One is looking to found a company, one move to Europe and one start a coaching biz 🤔

Once a founder chooses the venture-backed route, the most financially conservative thing they can do is grow as fast as possible, build hype, keep raising, and take secondaries off the table each round. Almost the opposite of what used to be the conservative move: get to cash flow positive ASAP. Conservative now means playing offense.

A founder is moving west and asked me to recommend the West Village of SF. Doesn’t really exist really. Maybe Dolores Park is the best comp?

This wasn’t really ever the model. You don’t actually grant all the options in the pool, and the pool only gets to 20% when there are hundreds and hundreds of employees. On the AI side…wish more founders were doing what Kevin suggests!

This is the answer to people who scratch their heads at VCs doing seeds at $100M valuations. That said, the company needs to have the potential to be bigger than we can imagine. Too often I see investors paying up for vertical-focused bets. If you’re going to swing for $T, the potential needs to be horizontal. It needs to touch a big chunk of the world economy.

The VC market has evolved dramatically over last 15+ years as cos stay private longer. Yesterday's small/mid cap public investor is now called "venture capital." True VC has roughly doubled since 2015, while the "smidcap alt" class has grown by ≈$250B annually. (chart via SVB)

Vertical AI? Of course that’s your contention. Of course it is. You just finished watching a Sequoia deck breakdown on “AI for Law” and now you think you’re going to disrupt Deloitte with a few fine-tuned prompts and a clever GPT wrapper. You’ll believe that right up until next month when you crack open Sutton & Barto and start throwing around “policy gradients” like you just invented reinforcement learning, quoting enterprise API limits like they’re state secrets. Then you’ll finally talk to a real GC or a hospital CIO and realize your “vertical AI” isn’t an LLM with a moat — it’s a brittle workflow taped together by LangChain and Zapier. You’ll start quoting HIPAA clauses, SOC2 reports, and latency budgets like gospel while your RAG pipeline silently dies because the data you need lives in some 2004 SharePoint server. After that, you’ll get real ambitious, quoting Bessemer’s State of the Cloud and pretending you actually understand CAC:LTV ratios when your model inference costs are eating your gross margin alive. You’ll cite “fine-tuning efficiency” and “domain specificity” while your token burn rate climbs faster than your MRR. “Well, as a matter of fact, I won’t, because Vertical AI is the next SaaS wave. Every industry gets its own copilot. The TAM is enormous—” Right. The TAM. The slide every founder prints before they have a single paying customer. I’ve seen that movie. We called it “SaaS 2010.” It ended with 50 identical dashboards selling into the same ten budget owners. That’s not a moat; that’s a mosh pit. Is that your thing now? You read a16z’s “Who Owns the Vertical?” post and suddenly you’re a prophet of industry transformation? You start throwing around words like “semantic layer,” “closed-loop feedback,” and “multi-agent orchestration” to impress LPs who haven’t logged into Notion since 2019? One, don’t do that. Two, you dropped a $500K pre-seed check into a wrapper app that could’ve been invalidated by a weekend of customer discovery. “Well, at least I’m betting on founders who ship.” Yeah, maybe. But I’m betting on founders who understand — who’ve lived the problem, who know the regulations, the sales cycles, the data formats, and the people who actually write the checks. The ones who know that “vertical” doesn’t mean “small TAM,” it means defensible domain expertise. First principles isn’t about duct-taping a chatbot onto a workflow. It’s about asking whether this industry’s data, process, and trust layers can even support automation yet — and if so, what new infrastructure has to exist to make it real. But hey, if you’ve got an issue with that, we can always take it up with E.

Solo founders have shot upwards since ChatGPT launched. VCs remain more hesitant to fund them, yes. But that's less and less every year. Data only looks at companies on Carta, which implies the startup would like to give equity to its employees even if it doesn't raise VC.

One of the most underappreciated things about tools like Claude Code: We went from: domain expert → product manager → developer To: domain expert = developer The person closest to the problem can now build the solution. No game of telephone. No lost context This is quietly a gigantic unlock

Half the VCs I know are changing their focus areas / investment thesis right now. Feels like a moment of deep reflection - or panic.

Every time you post rankings of startup cities, someone pops into the comments with "lol no Miami, what losers" which is silly. Miami's tech ecosystem is young. Meaning not old enough to raise late-stage, massive rounds. But they are doin pretty good at the early stages!

What’s in your wallet? HUGE AF congrats to Pedro & team Brex!!!

how my codebase written entirely with claude code runs

If the company was going well, a lot of founders I know who sold their companies later regretted it. Because success compounds, they lost out on the revenue compounding over the next several years. AND, when you start a new company, starting at 0 is just really hard to get it going again. That’s why I never want to sell again - because every year gets better.

I keep hearing predictions that VC will “massively consolidate” and a handful of mega funds will eat the industry. That view ignores both history and venture logic. In private equity, a far more mature market, the top five firms manage only ~20–30% of total PE AUM. Hedge funds and real estate show similar long-tail structures even with iconic giants. More importantly, this consolidation narrative contradicts the core venture belief: we invest in startups precisely because small, focused teams can outmaneuver larger, better-resourced incumbents. If you don’t believe in that, you shouldn’t be in venture.

Trying to find a high net worth person to write a $500K check into your VC fund was TOUGH in 2025. Will this be easier or harder in '26?

Do you live in SF but like some of these things? • meeting people from other industries • access to culture • food after 9pm • dating We may have a job for you We’re hiring an investor to be based in NYC with strong SF networks. Technical background strongly preferred. Link to apply confidentially in my bio