Albert Morro

this is the stuff every 20 year old needs to hear. not bullshit career advice from people who never took risk to build something real. game from a guy who got pushed out of his own company, cashed out billions, and started building again like nothing happened. different breed.

Until you have PMF, there are only 4 things you should be doing: > talking to customers > improving the product > creating content > finding more customers to talk to That's it.

A huge, huge part of a founder's job is to simply inject (1) energy / optimism (2) clarity (3) urgency into EVERYTHING they are involved in. Every email, every meeting, every walk & talk, every slack thread, every whatsapp chatter.

Founders should know the sobering reality for enterprise SaaS venture funding today. Here’s the math. Say you’re a $1M ARR company raising a Series A with a classic 33222 growth expectation. That gets you to $72M in 5yrs and say $250M in 8yrs. By then you’re usually growing <<50% and the public markets might give you a 7x or $1.75B, if you can even go public. If you get $10M at $100M post-money for the A, that’s a 17.5x and maybe 10x after dilution. That would be ~33% IRR and $10M invested becomes $100M. In the venture model, you have to outperform the SP500 which is 15% and a Google which is 25%. Here, with perfect execution, a lot of work, time and risk, you get 33% in a near optimal (95 percentile) case. And usually, you expect 7/10 things to not work out: execution risk, market size, competition. Plus, this math is for a Series A. You need investors to underwrite even more growth at the B / C / D. It’s really hard to see this sort of deal driving fund returns. Now, of course, there’s tons of caveats. You could pay less than $100M post, try to grow faster, do pro rata to avoid dilution, stay private longer etc, but the point remains. There might be exceptional growth stories like Databricks, Snowflake and Applied Intuition, but most deals look like what I described. In a previous time, SaaS multiples were higher in public (20x), entry valuations were lower ($30M) and the money you needed to hire talent was lower ($150k). You could get 100% IRR before. Now, it’s harder than ever to justify investing here, unless they are true outliers.

It has never been easier to fool VCs > generate beautiful landing page with micro animations using ai > product semi-fake ai agent/wrapper to record an insane mocked demo > pay influencers $20k to become the top news on X for a day > get 100 VCs in your DMs > raise the round, go viral for this > put a paywall so that the crowd is too curious to not pay > you got 30 days until they cancel, wait til day 29, multiple the current mrr by 12 and claim you reached gazillion in arr in just 30 days > get more VCs in your DMs and raise your next large round > get acquired by one of the other portfolio companies or your VCs > you’re fking legend, all doors are open to your for life Be honest can you name a few startups that done this script ?

The AI era will not be friendly to startups who chased revenue traction at the expense of accumulating advantages (or 7 Powers).

Lyra went from $20K to $700K ARR in 6 weeks inside YC. Every other founder in our batch automated their outbound. I did the exact opposite. This is every lever we pulled and the things I did that most founders would never consider:

@johnrushx The West monetized clicks. China built the physical layer of civilization.

@jspujji sales

I hired an ex McKinsey consultant to compile all my companies' sales materials. I wanted to see how each company reaches over $20M in annual revenue. He collected: - Recordings of sales calls - Sales scripts - SOPs - Led gen systems - etc 100s of top companies paid me for access to it. Today I'll give it away for free. Comment "sales" to get a copy.

@elonmusk Easy fix with one executive order: - Interest-free loans to married couples - 25% off per child they have (fully discharged after four).

I’ve been warning about this since the turn of the century

Hot Take: Forget the typical marketing channels for your early stage startup. They don't work. You will find early traction in: - Tiny, focused events - Hyper-niche online groups - Personal outreach (yes, DM your friends!) That's where the real early magic happens.

Still Day 1 for AI. The most valuable systems won’t just generate. They’ll reason, decide, and act.

As an early-stage VC, this deep integration of vertical knowledge (SOR) + AI is incredibly exciting. If you're a founder building at this intersection, defining your path to owning the core system for your industry, I want to hear from you. Let's build. DMs open.

Ultimately, it's not AI vs. Software in vertical markets. It's AI + Software. Like streaming needed great content + great tech, the enduring vertical winners will likely master both the AI capabilities AND the core industry data/workflows (the SOR).

Building Vertical AI is tough. You're heads-down creating incredible tech, likely battling worries about big AI players. But as a VC seeing patterns across the landscape, the biggest long-term opportunity is hiding in plain sight, within the existing industry software...