Muhammad Lila

@ivanburazin @X I really enjoy your transparency, especially on your previous raise. Now just waiting for a reply to my DM :)

Of late, I've been getting more and more heartwarming messages like this. I have also had people walk up to me at multiple events and conferences and say they have read about my journey and find my content refreshing in a sea of slop. Since @X is our #1 channel for creating awareness, I naturally post a lot here. What I have realized over time is that people don't buy from or invest in company advocates. It is the entire personality that sells. I often talk more about my share of ups and downs and what I've learned over the years than I do about our product and other @daytonaio related stuff. And it has been working well so far!

@sridharfyi Really enjoy your content here on X. Are you actively deploying?

if you’re building something obsessive and can’t stop thinking about it, i’d love to hear from you. early-stage investing is less about perfect metrics and more about exceptional people.

Everyone is posting this insane footage, but nobody is sharing what happened next: They all made it out safely. All of them. They crashed a hi-rail truck into the train to shut down the engines, then ran three miles on foot after the truck caught fire. They even rescued a foreman. They should be celebrated as heroes.

Storytelling is an often neglected superpower.

@thogge @captain_vc_ 👋🏼

I now have 30,000 followers. A decent-sized stadium. LFG. I’m a big fan of each of you and want all of us to win. A quick re-intro: -I started @captain_vc_ to invest in the best captains I meet. -I’ve been investing full time for 3 years and have had a blast working with some amazing captains like @sterlingmsnow @Dougbarnett @parkerence @joshpacini @delk @renesaulf and many others. -I love family, faith, capitalism, chess, poker, and the mountains. -I am among the most blessed individuals who have ever lived. Say hi anytime - it’s a pleasure to be addicted to this app with you 🤝

@brian_armstrong On that note, wanna help us save the world?

@brian_armstrong I've been on both sides of this. Risked my life as a warzone correspondent, and then have been interviewed as a founder. There has never been a better time for founders to tell their own stories. Every company should be a media company, by default.

Sad state of affairs when most mainstream media journalists can’t be trusted to tell the truth at this point. As a founder, you have to hunt to find the good ones and spend more of your time going direct or with new media, bypassing them entirely. Many traditional media companies got disrupted by tech, and therefore came to hate tech. So they have a conflict of interest in all tech reporting, even if they don’t disclose it. Others are mainly political propaganda organizations at this point (Marxist etc) and try to label it journalism to prey on ignorant people. Actual journalism is important and even heroic at times (war zones etc), it just isn’t practiced very often by traditional media companies any more, which is a shame and why we need new media companies.

Random things before I became a founder: 🎯 Interviewed the Dalai Lama 🎯 Flew onto a US Aircraft Carrier 🎯 Rescued girls from human traffickers 🎯 Embedded with US Special Forces 🎯 Discovered wreckage of Air Asia Flight 8501 Outlier, meet founder.

@Goodable Thank you

Everybody thinks the world is getting worse but here are six incredible things that just happened: → A new giant dinosaur species was just discovered → Electric vehicle sales have grown 10x in just the last 6 years → Researchers developed a new super strength alloy that could transform manufacturing forever → A Chicago teen who had just learned CPR used it to save his father's life → The West African Leopard population is on the rise, after being endangered for years → Michigan passed a bill that allows children to run lemonade stands without needing a permit. Look for the good. It's everywhere.

Wait, what? We've done: → $1M ARR in ~10 mos → 17% MoM growth → 30x gross margins → 241% NDR → 7 enterprise deals We haven't even opened our seed round yet 🤷🏻‍♂️

This platform is full of investors who boast about their success but are almost never transparent about their misses. They'll tweet about the one win, but not the 99 they passed on. Thank you @BrendanFoody for saying the quiet part out loud.

This is how being a founder radically changes your perspective. Everyone knows the adage "no risk no reward" but few have ever lived it. Founders live their entire lives inside it. The reward is that they will change the world.

@ivanburazin Mark Pincus refers to this as living in The Abyss. You sit there, growth stalled, almost out of money, employees quitting, watching everyone else be successful, and wondering if you have what it takes. That's The Abyss. It's where all great founders lived.

As a founder, your number one job is to eat shit. You're on the call with the upset customer. You need to fire people by telling them directly. You're listening to the engineer who wants to quit due to burnout. You have to read the 40-page vendor contract, which is a nightmare to go through. Every hard, uncomfortable thing lands on your desk. That's the whole job. You're here to absorb the bad stuff so everyone else can keep moving.

@mignano I remember listening to @markpinc describe this. He called it "living in the Abyss." It's the place where founders live, with no money, no savings, almost out of cash, with no PMF, just watching everyone else be successful. The best startups come from the Abyss.

I really believe in the power of constraints. At Anchor, it took nearly running out of money and bankrupting the company for us to make the hard decisions that led to finding product market fit. Without that fear of failure, I'm not sure we would have figured it out.

Toronto's Kyle Lowry grew up in North Philly. True story: If you Google that address today, there's someone on the porch wearing a Raptors jersey. It's Kyle's.

@mignano @HarryStebbings At around 32:00, the part about automating workflows vs. obliterating them was so well articulated. The best founders in my network all invented completely new ways of doing things, not just automated the way existing things were done. Your passion really shone through.

@MuhammadLila @HarryStebbings very cool to hear that. what did you like about it? thanks for listening.

I missed out on $100M+ by passing on the seed rounds of Suno and Granola. Mike @mignano did both. He is the single best example in the last 5 years of an operator successfully turning into a GP at a large fund. It is so hard to do. He crushed it. He has been a friend for 10 years and we shoot the shit today on the biggest questions of the day. I summarized my notes from the chat below. 1. Do You Have to Produce Content to Do Seed Well? To excel at seed, you need to put your ideas into the market so founders know exactly what you are looking for. Publishing your theses acts as a bat signal for early-stage founders before they even launch a product. Success comes down to building a great network, sharing your point of view, and betting on people. 2. Single Biggest Lesson About Venture The biggest lesson in venture is to avoid projecting your own operator ideas onto a founder. It is their company, not yours. Making investment decisions based on your personal roadmap for them leads to bad bets. Venture success requires trusting the team’s independent judgment and execution plan. 3. What Percent of Enterprise Workflows Actually Require Frontier Models Versus Open Source? Roughly 80% of non-coding enterprise tasks can run well on non-frontier models. Standard workflows like summarization and document generation are well suited to open source, which is improving quickly. This lets enterprises optimize token budgets without sacrificing meaningful performance. 4. Why We Believe Suno Has Unlimited Upside Suno has unlimited upside because it unlocks a new consumer behavior: creative entertainment. Users generate music simply for the joy of creation, with no need for distribution or monetization. Like YouTube or TikTok, platforms that democratize a creative medium can create immense, generational value. 5. Obliterate, Don’t Automate Avoid backing software that merely automates existing workflows to make old businesses slightly faster. The true generational opportunities come from completely reinventing industries, like putting an AI doctor in everyone’s pocket, rather than selling incremental efficiency to a corporate middleman. 6. The Shift From Infrastructure to Applications As the capital-intensive AI infrastructure buildout matures, massive value creation is shifting to the application layer. Similar to the internet after the broadband boom, we are entering an explosion of specialized software. Winning requires an opinionated thesis, early conviction, and exceptional speed. 7. Why Startups Must Maximize Token Spend While incumbents restrict budgets, startup CEOs should maximize token spend. Frontier models give lean teams a critical advantage over slower giants. Handing low-level tasks to agents preserves small, hyper-efficient engineering teams and keeps them moving at winning speed. (links below)

@Goodable Thank you for your service 🎂

Need to restore your faith in humanity? George Durrant, a WW2 vet, thought nobody would care about his 102nd birthday. When people found out, complete strangers began inundating him with birthday cards. He's now received 145 cards and counting. 🫡 thedailygoods.com/neighbors/this…

@Goodable Oh Canada! 🇨🇦

This is Alphonso Davies: - Born in a refugee camp - Family fled civil war - Migrated to Canada at age 5 - Learned to play soccer in -14°c - Couldn't afford soccer fees - Became youngest ever player on CNMT He's now leading Canada into the round of 16 at the World Cup.