Eagle of Byblos

we track every vc newsletter in internet capital markets so founders don't have to. daily digests, weekly roundups, conviction maps, and vc directory - just what's actually moving and why it matters the investor interned, curated. byblos.digital

sf in 2026: "where do you live" "soma" "what do you build" "agents" "what's your eval suite" entire identity compressed into three answers and a context window.

~80% of pre-seed founders pitch using a 2019 vc frame to a 2026 partner. the gap shows up most on "moat" and "pricing model." read what your target vcs are writing this month before pitching. byblos.digital

the 4 questions every 2026 fundraising deck has to answer: what do you charge for that an AI agent can't replace which 2 enterprise logos do you have in production, and what makes you un-rip-out-able what does month 22 look like if series A doesn't happen what implementation depth do competitors structurally can't match none of these were standard 18 months ago. all 4 are table stakes now.

@arabisol_ the people who stick around are the ones who got here for the tech for sure

crypto influencers need to move away from promoting the monetary aspect of the industry. talking about your profits and flexing the “crypto lifestyle” only invites the wrong crowd, people who see the industry as a quick cash grab with zero intention of building and improving it. this is one of the reasons why people come and go, their entire relationship with crypto is based on the unrealistic financial expectations they had when joining. people with a platform need to showcase the use cases of this technology instead of just flashing their bags. i know that there are already creators out there pushing for utility over hype, but we are in need for more of them if this space is ever going to reach its true potential.

@gigi_ggrimes @pai_company @everhettgrimes @betaworks exactly! brands could just talk to an ai model of their customers. so cool

I’m so excited to officially introduce @pai_company to the world - the simulation engine for consumer brands. @everhettgrimes and I have spent the past 10 weeks building from the @betaworks campus in NYC - we’ve rebuilt our product from the ground up, landed F500 customers, and saved brands hundreds of thousands of dollars on research costs. We’ve also brought an unbelievable group of industry advisors and experts onto our team - I’m excited to share more about that soon. Pai helps brands build an AI model of their customer base that they can talk to and test product ideas, packaging, messaging, and ads with. We transform first-party customer data and research into a custom simulation engine that helps brands predict their customer reactions with over 85% accuracy on some of the toughest research questions - messaging hierarchy, concept tests, and packaging design.

@DoveyWan founders bailing on their own companies to join labs is wild. but the market structure stuff dovey's talking about - crypto rails, stablecoin gaps, new venues for flow - that's actually where young founders still have an unfair advantage.

@stacy_muur we track which vcs are writing about retention vs tvl. most of them aren't but it's coming though

@kerryxwang love this! ex-founder turned vc remembering what it felt like to be on the pitch side is a cool experience

@arian_ghashghai yes so true. lp capital gets allocated to certain sectors. that creates different fundraising environments depending on what you're building

Something first-time VC-backed founders need to understand is that the venture markets being funded are a proxy of VC funds (and their strategies) being closed, which itself is a proxy for broader financial interest in certain verticals in the private market (i.e. VCs are not neo-family offices). This means if 90% of LP capital gets earmarked for AI, you are competing with a lot of founders for a tiny piece of the pie if you're not building an AI startup. This generally also means that unique ideas that are ahead of the market are difficult to fund (due to a general lack of understanding of the opportunity), and also why angels (who are not tethered to broadly-represented financial interests) are often early investors in consequential companies before VCs The good news: If you are in the business of building an enduring, valuable business, not drinking from a fundraising firehose from your company's inception (which is an acute risk of building in consensus area paired with bloated AUMs) is more likely to yield long-term positive outcomes (ht @credistick for the graph)

@CarlKVogel amazing! tokenized finance is at the point where it needs to actually work better than tradfi or institutions won't move. the security renaissance thing is real

@Rico_Mueller huge one, congrats! $2M uncapped for 12 weeks is a serious bet on it. this might be an amazing thing for us to write about for founders

We are launching the Monastery for AI-native founders. $2M uncapped for a 12 weeks program to do the impossible.

@faionur @AbstractVC @generalcatalyst @usv amazing! most ai apps blow up then die when inference costs hit. status actually made it work at scale and profitable

Status has raised $17M in seed and Series A funding led by @AbstractVC, @generalcatalyst and @usv to let anyone step inside their favorite stories, become famous, and live a million different lives. We quietly launched Status last year and grew to over 1 million users in 19 days - making us the fastest growing AI app since ChatGPT. But we hit a (predictable) snag - the app was incredibly expensive to run. How do you serve millions of users without degrading the product with a cheap LLM? So the team locked in: we rebuilt the whole experience, and our technical bets paid off. Our users now spend 35 minutes on average to (90 minutes each day for power users!), and millions of characters and worlds have been created. All by our users. The next frontier of entertainment is mobile-first and deeply personal. Traditional mobile games take years to build and rarely stick. TV shows are fleeting in the age of streaming. Status is different. It is not a game you finish, it is a world you can live in. Status is a new category entirely: Immersive Social Entertainment, and we believe strongly that it is the next great entertainment paradigm. We’ve 10x’d to millions in annual revenue in Q1 2026, we're just getting started. On Status, you can be anyone.

@HaunVentures @diogomonica @brxckinridge @ahnchrisj ai trained on reddit telling people to break up is hilarious and also terrifying. we're outsourcing relationship advice to a data source that's basically just people at their worst

In the Charts, Episode 18: Centrist AI, Predatory Fintech, and the Future of Crypto Infrastructure In this episode @diogomonica, @brxckinridge, and @ahnchrisj dig into The AI Breakup Bias: As AI models are trained on millions of Reddit comments, relationship advice is shifting. They look at why "end the relationship" is becoming the default answer and the massive societal impact of losing the art of communication. Timestamps: 0:00 – Intro: Doxing Breck’s full name 0:30 – Chart 1: 15 years of Reddit relationship advice 2:56 – Is your AI bot telling you to break up? 4:30 – Chart 2: AI models vs. Political Polarization 6:00 – Diogo’s "9/11 Conspiracy" anecdote: How AI changes minds 14:00 – Chart 3: The massive wealth transfer in Credit Cards 17:00 – Is the credit market fundamentally broken? 23:00 – Can Stablecoins and AI settlement fix consumer debt? 26:30 – Chart 4: The state of Crypto VC deals in 2026

@1confirmation onchain collectibles have better liquidity than the "official" ones. that's the whole game right there

Who’s bringing culture onchain with us?

pure-SaaS gospel is being rewritten forward-deployed engineering is now a moat.

📡 what 600+ VC newsletters converged on this week rising: • outcome-based pricing as new SaaS standard • defense AI as a real category • forward-deployed engineering as a moat • orbital + physical-world AI infra cooling: • per-seat saas pricing • horizontal AI tooling • pilot-to-pilot "validation" decks • pure tokenomics-led pitches the convergence inside the divergence: VCs disagree on the cause, agree on the cure. founders pitching the wrong cure are losing 2026.

Q1 2026 was record-breaking VC funding. Q1 2026 was record-slow VC funding. if you're openai or anthropic, the venture market has never been more generous. if you're literally anyone else, it's never been more selective.

things that got $20M+ this week: → orbital data centers (literally in space) → robotic arms → agentic security → AI-native quote-to-cash things that didn't: → "AI for everything" plays our founder lessons from the week is in our article. byblosdigital.substack.com/p/founder-less…

stages of pitching a VC in 2026: - confident - realizes they've read all your competitors - tries to differentiate on team - opens substack to figure out what they care about this quarter - should've done that first we built byblos for step 5.

"the moat isn't the product. it's the implementation depth." — vc memo this week on enterprise AI founders who hide their forward-deployed engineering are losing to founders who own it.