Arjun Dev Arora

.@thomasknoll is an amazing CoS - he can help give great founders a lot more leverage on their time in a very hands on way! services.selfhealingleaders.com/cos

AI is not just winning venture in the US. It is dominating venture globally. Over 60% of global VC dollars are now going into AI according to data from the OECD.

@amaankahmad Huge! Congratulations guys! :)

We're excited to announce Pathfinder's $4M seed funding led by Gradient and Reach Capital to put education back into the hands of parents  - pathfindercard.com/seed

Special Projects— the “I hired this guy and have no idea how tf to explain how valuable he is to me but is” role

We spend a lot of time during @speedrun workshopping a company's one-line description. It's a surprisingly high leverage exercise benefiting recruiting, BD/GTM, *and* fundraising Fitting a lot of context into a few words is hard, but super important

In this chart from Carta you can see a clear decline quarter over quarter in the number of pre-seed instruments or deals, but the cash portion on the bottom is steady. What this means for founders is fewer startups are getting funded, but the winners are getting bigger checks.

Startups that have done tender offers for employees recently: - Notion - Decagon - Gamma - Stripe - Hightouch - Harvey - Anthropic - Clay - Linear - Canva - Eleven Labs Huge win for employees and the ecosystem. This will result in a massive recycling of capital: 1. Employees being able to save / buy houses 2. Angel investing 3. Supporting family members 4. Becoming founders themselves. Onwards!! 🚀

Pre: Pre makes anybody an operator. by @bubs producthunt.com/products/pre-2…

It's very obvious when someone produces a deck using AI since it ends up being incredibly text heavy and uses a lot of text in boxes (though well designed). AI created decks in the future will incorporate more visually dense information but for now lots of text!

Huge congrats to @gob_earth and @laurynmenard on the pitch on Shark Tank! Mushrooms, hearing protection and more! :) youtube.com/watch?v=Xc2DrB…

Where are all the venture LPs who used to commit to emerging funds? 1) Fewer committing than the past couple years (even though we saw more emerging funds created in 2025 than in 2024) 2) Median number of LPs down across the board Not easy out there

Using AI to build custom personalized websites for everything (marketing, sales, PR, CS, data input) is a lot of fun! A true accelerant.

Mission success! Alpha Flight 7 achieved nominal performance and validated key systems ahead of our Block II configuration upgrade. This test flight also delivered a demonstrator payload for @LockheedMartin . Congratulations to the entire Stairway to Seven team! Read more: fireflyspace.com/news/firefly-a…

We’re excited to announce that @join_ef has raised $200m of fresh capital, including $130m into our management company at a unicorn valuation, to be the natural home of the world’s most ambitious people in the Age of Entrepreneurship 🧵

In 3 years, HockeyStack went from a 3-person startup getting ghosted on $5,000 deals with SMBSs to a $300M+ company closing 6-figure deals with the Fortune 100. Here are the 4 major changes we made to our GTM: 1. We turned every call to a science by watching every single call for 18 months Won deals. Lost deals. Deals that stalled for no reason. Deals that closed in two weeks. All of them. Most founders stop listening to calls once they hire a VP of Sales or start scaling. That's the beginning of the end. Watching every single call allowed us to control every minute of every call and onboard reps faster. After 18 months, I could predict which deals would close within the first 10 minutes. And when your team knows the founder watches every call, preparation quality goes up overnight. Not because they're scared. Because they know someone cares about the craft. 2. We built outbound from scratch Our first year, if inbound dried up, we had nothing. Just a team refreshing their lead queue hoping marketing would save them. Then I brought in Alex Choi, who built $100M+ in pipeline at Carta. He jumped on the phone himself, saw what worked, and hired and onboarded reps personally. One of our largest enterprise deals ever started from a cold call and closed in 4 months. But the numbers aren't the point. The culture shift is. We went from a team that waited for pipeline to a team that created it. 3. We built blueprints of our best deals Every sales org has tribal knowledge. The top 10% of reps know things about winning that exist nowhere except their heads. They can't even articulate it if you ask. So we stopped asking. We mapped every closed-won deal and reverse-engineered what actually happened. Not what the rep said in the deal review. What came out was a blueprint. A decision tree of what winning looks like at our company. We compared it to what our VP of Sales had documented. The gap was massive. Not because anyone was wrong. Because the human brain cannot hold that level of detail across hundreds of deals. Now every rep runs against the blueprint. A living map of how our best deals actually close. 4. We built a culture of collaboration This one wasn't planned. It was a byproduct of everything else. We reviewed calls and deals together. Held group sessions on deal progression to come up with ideas together. We started seeing reps jump on each other's deals uninvited. Not to steal credit. To add context. "I sold into that persona last month, here's what landed." "That objection came up in my deal, here's how I handled it." You can't mandate this culture. You can only create the conditions for it. Shared blueprints, transparent call reviews, and comp structures that don't punish collaboration. None of this is a secret. Watch calls. Build outbound. Study your wins. Help each other. Every sales leader already knows this. The difference is doing all of it at the same time and refusing to stop when it gets uncomfortable.

Excited to officially announce the launch of Pax Fund I, a $50M early stage vehicle dedicated to founders transforming the foundational categories of society. 🇺🇸🚀 Wrote a bit about my journey and the thinking behind Pax below:

Big steps are underway for the Stairway to Seven launch today! Check out our viewing timeline to see when you might catch a glimpse of our test flight on the West Coast. The two-hour window for Alpha Flight 7 opens at 5:50 pm PT. Our livestream with @NASASpaceflight will begin 20 minutes before liftoff. youtube.com/live/nyVbmoRXc…

Very well articulated. I agree and also this capital will flow into emerging and recently emerged fund managers as well (in addition to the newly liquid shareholders building their own funds).

Why 90% of AI Founders Misread Fundraising Reality youtu.be/iznOtSEFwmU?si… - my recent interview with @tommychavez on the @ClosedSeshPod - we chat AI, fundraising, workflows and more!

This is an excellent chart (built with data from Goldman Sachs) which shows new occupations that emerged after 1940 measured against pre-1940 ones. They found that 60% of jobs are new ones that didn’t exist before 1940. Will this trend hold in the age of AI? I think Mark Twain put it best when he said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

Gokul (@gokulr) has worked with generational founders like Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong), Jack Dorsey (@jack), and Tony Xu (@t_xu). Here he explains how great companies use "bet sizing" to keep innovating: "Every company has a core business, but if they don't take any bets alongside the core business then they're destined to fail". The Founding Partner of @MarathonMP break this down into three core principles: 1. Allocate Resources: "A core business should have about 70% of resources. The remaining 30% can be used to make four or five bets, with each bet maybe having 5% of resources". 2. Time-box and Goal-Set: "Give these bets a certain amount of time and a specific goal to hit. The first goal is typically "product market fit," where you have maybe a hundred customers who "love you and use your product on a daily, very regular basis". 3. Double Down: If a bet hits its goal, you "double down" and act like an investor, seeding the bets and figuring out which one deserves "Series A investment". @gokulr mentions that @coinbase has 12 products worth more than $100M and "almost every single one of them outside of the core transaction marketpalce started as a bet". "You never bet the whole company, but you got to take multiple bets".