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Rocket Man
731 posts
Rocket Man
@Rocketplace
Helping Entrepreneurs, Early stage investor
Space Katılım Aralık 2021
420 Takip Edilen338 Takipçiler
One of the major reasons why I am anti-SF for building a company: Everyone is trying to do exactly the same damn thing.
You can hear and see it everywhere.
Even when products are different, product demos start to mimic the same language.
On top of that, as a start-up (or early employee) you're competing for everything - housing, employees, VC attention - against very similar looking companies.
Meanwhile, everything is more expensive and takes more money because of that.
That companies open an office in SF at Seed is madness to me.
And if you live in the Bay Area, literally everywhere but SF is the better location. If you look hard enough, there are office deals all throughout the Bay Area.
And yet, none of 👆 matters to most founders because they deem living in proximity to SF investors will maximize their chances.
Spoiler: SF maximizes chances for only one type of company - the one that already attracted tons of capital, and is not capital constrained. One that will shell out $500K per employee to get whoever it needs to accomplish any milestone. Such companies are rare even among successful start-ups. And such strategy starts to make sense only after 20M raised
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Cyber Security, AdTech, Artificial Intelligence funds for founders raising capital
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@Nick_Davidov Sure, it is a bad thing. But are not you like a VC funded by Russian oligarchy?
Should not you be taxed somewhere for taking advantage of America with your Russian oil capital?
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I love California, but If the CA wealth tax passes I’m likely to leave. I’m not anywhere close to a billionaire but none of the taxes our companies or family pays would go to support this lunacy. I think I won’t be alone. Bankruptcy and austerity might actually be better for California in long term even though it will hurt a lot of people not deserving this in the short term. People who turn on their cars praying not to see a check engine light. While bureaucrats throw billions of public money around on waste, fraud, and destroying the markets.
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Founders don't appreciate enough the importance of a good company name for when their own kids tell others what it is that their parent does.
Turns out, @Rocketplace has a very convenient name, for when a 7y.o. tries to explain what the company does to his friends.
@AviSchiffmann's friend ai is pretty good here to.
@elonmusk's Boring Company and SpaceX are amazing
I wonder how this would work for @ycombinator, @OpenAI, or @cluely 😂
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What's funny is Instagram was actually perfect on day one:
Feed
Comments
Follows
Filters
Cross post to Facebook and Twitter
Every single core feature was present on day one.
Big Brain Business@BigBrainBizness
Michael Seibel, Managing Director at Y Combinator, on why shipping a crappy product in under a month beats building a perfect one for a year: Michael starts with a simple challenge: "Do you remember the day Snapchat launched? Do you remember the day Instagram launched? Do you remember the day that WhatsApp launched? Remember the day that Uber or Lyft launched? Most likely you don't." His point cuts against how most founders think about launch day: "It turns out that launching is nowhere near as significant event to your users as it is to you. So, you should move up the launch as soon as possible." The reason comes down to validation. "Until you can get your product in front of customers, you can't validate whether it solves their problem. And so, it's much better to build a crappier product, release it sooner, and get it out there in front of customers, see if they want to use it." @mwseibel acknowledges the approach isn't universal: "There's some exceptions. In some extremely regulated markets like banking, for example, or lending, it's just really hard to launch. You actually have to get one s*** done before you're even allowed to get customers." But for most founders, the bar is far lower than they think: "In most consumer and B2B startups that we encounter, it's actually possible to get some form of MVP built and launched in less than a month. And so, that's what you should be thinking about."
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1st time founders realizing that the only thing that matters for pre-seed round is founder signal, who knows you, and who you know.
Not Decks
Not Product
Not TAM
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@frantzfries One of the companies on this list is not like the others
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If accurate, I’m surprised by how small some of these companies are compared to the footprint they have on the world
Techsaleshackz@techsaleshackz
The 15 most talent-dense Tech Companies from @paraformtalent Some good names on this list
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@nichochar lol. That would have been epic.
But the counter side, Sam was likely an angel investor, so he cached out on the deal, and probably views it as a net positive regardless.
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haven’t seen tbpn once in my feed since the sellout.
given the beef between Sam and Elon, I am 99% sure Elon told the X algo team to “bury them”
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@stevesi @levie @martin_casado @MTSlive sure, but the guy should have let @levie speak rather than stretch his 5 second argument to 2 minutes
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@levie @martin_casado — trying to bring some grounded thoughts to AI. Check out the new MTS “Monitoring the Situation” where we have full length and lots of clips. Follow @mtslive for more and join the conversation.
MTS@MTSlive
.@stevesi: " This idea that AI just gets rid of jobs... it's ancient." "One of the things people thought was that computers would get rid of accountants. That was like IBM's pitch in like 1965. But what it actually did was like, oh my God, we could do so much more with accounting." " When you look at the notion of like creating information, synthesizing and all that, AI is an accelerant for that for a person who knows what they're doing. And companies are suddenly gonna want more of those people creating more of that information."
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@dalibali2 let's face it, he successfully copied Facebook - it was based off on another Harvard social network
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Contrarian take: Going Viral Is the Worst Training Ground for Building a Product Company
@nasdaily just raised $27M from Khosla Ventures for NAS. The guy built a 70-million-follower media empire essentially solo. Disciplined, creative, never stops. Genuinely one of the most impressive operator-creators I've seen. I'm rooting hard for him.
And yet. This round is the perfect trigger to talk about a pattern I've watched quietly destroy a lot of VC-backed startups.
The influencer founder trap. Attention now flows through people: creators, personalities, trusted voices who've built real audiences. That's just the world we're in. More people with massive platforms are getting funded to build products. Distribution is the hardest part of a startup, so this sounds like a gift.
Except nobody says this out loud: the skills that make someone a great influencer are basically the opposite of what makes a product founder succeed.
Trap #1: Confusing engagement for validation
I've built and launched half a dozen products. The biggest insight from every single one has been the same: the real work starts AFTER launch. It's the months I spent understanding users. Sitting in the gap between what the solution does and how it's actually perceived is what determined whether the thing survived. That's what PMF is. And it's never-ending. The market definition shifts, matures, expands, and the product has to move with it.
Influencer founders almost always start with the broadest possible market. Everyone is a potential customer. So their instinct is NOT to obsess over product experience: it's to build funnels that qualify customers. That's a media company move, not a product company move. And those are very different businesses.
When I ran video interviews, we had posts hitting 200,000 to 500,000 impressions. I was ecstatic. Then I learned the hard truth: there is a near-perfect INVERSE relationship between the highest-watched content on LinkedIn and buyer intent. Nobody watching a 500k-impression video is about to pull out their credit card. The audience showed up because the content was interesting. That's not the same as having a problem they'll pay you to solve.
A viral launch is not a PMF signal. It's a dopamine hit.
Influencers have spent years being rewarded for that hit. Every metric in their life has confirmed that audience attention equals value. Unlearning that is genuinely hard. It's a reflex a decade in the making. Not just a knowledge gap.
Trap #2: The product IS the founder
An influencer's brand is built on a specific voice, face, and energy. That's the asset. But a product company needs to run without you. A support queue that doesn't collapse when you skip posting. A roadmap driven by what users need, not what just flopped on camera.
Most influencer founders struggle enormously to step back, because stepping back breaks the thing. The content slows down, the community goes quiet, the momentum dies. They end up trapped between two jobs: feeding the audience machine that funds everything, and building the product that's supposed to replace it.
And this is where influencer founders CAN win, when the product is a media business, a creator economy tool, or a community-first platform. Those are cases where loyal followers are actually the mechanism, not just the distribution. Nas.com might be one of those cases. It's built for solopreneurs and creators, and Nuseir understands that customer better than almost anyone alive. If the roadmap is shaped by deep user insight rather than what performs on camera, it has a real shot.
Most of them never find out, because the audience never stops watching long enough to force the question.
If you're writing a check to one of these founders, the first question is: does this person know the difference between a follower and a customer? Not theoretically. Have they actually watched users churn and had to figure out why?
If yes, back them hard.
If no, the check just bought them an expensive education in the difference between an audience and a business. Nuseir might be the exception. He's built more under pressure than most. But the $27M will answer the question that the 70 million followers can't.
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@scottastevenson It is even worse than that. We've being saying this for months: x.com/i/status/20313…
Rocket Man@Rocketplace
Nobody doubts that Roy is good at marketing. Nobody thinks there is no lying by other founders, traditional legacy executives, and well-known media personalities at large. The point is that this is the latest most visible example of the behaviour perpetrated by many Founders: - claim publicly fake ARR - skip due diligence (b/c you are YC) - raise $$$ And increasingly this is becoming a problem, which Roy is making worse. Unlike for traditional "legacy" industries, our ecosystem's executives rarely can face any jail time. The only reason this is the case is because of mutually-agreed on importance of reputation. But if Roy's approach indeed becomes every founder's playbook, then we're going to see a lot more investors pushing for Theranos-type judgement, and that will be the end of tech start-up "Mecca" as we know it.
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It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR
The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric
The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage.
The setup: Company signs 3-year enterprise deals. Year 1 is discounted (say $1M), Year 2 steps up ($2M), Year 3 is full price ($3M).
They report $3M as “ARR” — even though they’re only collecting $1M right now.
The worst part: The customer has an opt-out option at 12 months! It’s not actually a 3 year contract.
In the chart below, by Q5 the company is trumpeting ~$100M “ARR” to press, while actual cash-generating, in-effect ARR is ~$35M. That’s ~3x inflation.
On top of this, enterprise AI companies are bundling full-time “forward deployed engineers” into deals massively reducing margins, sometimes producing Year 1 negative margins.
At some point customers are going to start triggering their opt-out clauses or aggressively negotiating down Year 3 pricing.
And a wave of enterprise AI companies may collapse.
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Here is what no one will tell you about SF
It is loved by:
- Europeans, because they have no jobs back at home
- Indians, because back home is traffic, bad weather, pollution, and equal levels of crime
- Ukranians, because back home is war, and here it is peace
- Midwest farm girls, because here they can earn 150K/year doing linkedin stalking on nerds, while back home they would be serving burgers at a local diner
...
So yeah, SF is loved by many, but unless your baseline is Bangladesh, be very careful to extrapolate the true reasons
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