NFX

Before your next board meeting, try this: -Write down what you told your board you'd do last quarter. -Next to it, write what actually happened. Good board meetings create a record of progress. Exercises to help you run a great meeting, from @omri_drory ↓

Before anyone shares anything, they run an unconscious cost-benefit calculation: Benefit to me or my audience - effort to share Win that equation, and you grow. No matter what platform. Most founders obsess over features and funnels. But the real leverage is in understanding what makes people want to share in the first place. A classic from @JamesCurrier on the 8 psychological principles that tip the scale:

We've tracked hundreds of AI-first companies. Some are impressive — moving faster with smaller teams. But many fall into the same traps. Here are 5 we commonly see:

The promise: AI speeds up every team. The reality: AI amplifies what's already there. Great structure and mindset — you ship a better product, faster. Lack of clarity and weak standards –– you slow down or ship slop. Here are the structures that work, and the traps that kill momentum, via @GigiLevy

How to move faster: Adopt a mindset of rapid experimentation. Your seed round is a bank of experiments. The goal is finding product-market fit. Years ago, a typical startup might run 5-10 experiments during its seed stage. Today, we see some running 50-100. More experiments mean a wider scope of ideas tested. You discover what actually works, not what should work. Perfect it from there according to real data, taste, and vision. The market rewards learning from doing.

Tesla built more than just EVs. It built batteries, charging networks, and software. Each layer creates a moat -- you move faster, you gain specialist skills, you're more defensible over time. That playbook -- aggressive vertical integration -- is now a powerful defense against commoditization in the AI era. Early-stage companies are starting to think this way.

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Vertical integration just became one of the sharpest defenses in AI. The same strategy that made Tesla defensible -- owning the full stack -- is now appearing at seed stage as the wrapper generation dies and models commoditize. @Peteflint on the 3 emerging patterns:

Full breakdown (with the 6 tactics working today): nfx.com/post/upgraded-…

We mapped the last 25 years of go-to-market into 3 phases: → Phase 1 (2000-2010): Pull — win on search and PR → Phase 2 (2010-2020): On-platform push — win on product virality → Phase 3 (2020-present): Off-platform push — build where your users already are.

Slowing aging enough to add ONE year of life expectancy is worth ~$38 trillion. Ten years: $367 trillion. Longevity is one of the biggest economic levers we have. From @omri_drory:

Growth only takes off when three things align: Power. Intelligence. Coordination. That pattern is the most important thing to understand about how AI can create real progress, and what's stopping it.

The puzzle of growth: For most of history, living standards barely budged. Sustained economic growth didn’t take off until the late 1700s And yet, key technologies existed centuries earlier: the printing press, wind, and water mills. There are many explanations for this, but one that's clarifying for today: