Brent Willess

Seven lessons I learned in six years at Uber: 🕸️ Decentralized talent is a superpower 🏦 Everyone needs to be an owner 🎯 Design for what matters 🚀 Moonshots take time 🍦 Build marketing into the product 🚨 Disrupt yourself–or someone else will 📈 Use data when making bets /🧵

@nunzi46 this is so true

In the before times, written depth was a way to confer credibility and substance in the absence of trust Thanks to AI slop and short attention spans, trusted voices writing brief and to the point content win Decks, blogs, etc

@MikeyShulman Let's go @MikeyShulman!!

The future of music is one where everyone enjoys creating. Suno is #1 in the App Store for music

You have no experience. You’ve never started a company. You’ve never had a full time job. Nike is going to kill you. You’re a kid. You don’t have technical skills. You shouldn’t build hardware. Apple is going to kill you. You can’t build hardware. You can’t measure heart rate non-invasively. Athletes don’t care about recovery. Under Armour is going to kill you. It won’t be accurate. You don’t listen. You’re an ineffective leader. You can’t recruit great talent. You’re going to have to pay every athlete. You can’t measure sleep non-invasively. It’s too expensive to research. Athletes are a small market. The product costs too much to make. The product costs too much to sell. Your valuation is too high. Consumers aren’t going to want it. Hardware is too hard. You should measure steps. Fitbit is going to kill you. You can’t build a marketing engine. You can’t raise enough money. You need a real CEO. Google is going to kill you. You can’t be a subscription. You can’t build a brand. You can’t do consumer in Boston. Your valuation is too high. You shouldn’t make accessories. You shouldn’t make apparel. Lululemon is going to kill you. You can’t predict Covid. Stay in your niche. You are going to run out of money. You can’t build a health platform. Amazon is going to kill you. You can’t measure blood pressure. You can’t get medical approvals. The market is too small. You don’t understand AI. The market is too competitive. It won’t work internationally. The supply chain is too complicated. You can’t build an AI. You can’t raise enough money. It’s too competitive. Healthcare isn’t going to want it. … Just keep going ✌️

Compound. Compound. Compound. A founder in his late 70s gave me that advice ~20 years ago. This week, he sold his company, Restaurant Depot, for $29B. You may not know the company, or its founder, 94-year-old Nathan “Natie” Kirsh. He isn’t exactly an avid social media user. An episode of Acquired or a chat with @HarryStebbings is overdue at this point. I remember pitching Natie on becoming an LP in Founder Collective when we first started. He passed saying he didn't do funds. But his advice, “Compound. Compound. Compound,” has stuck with me. Here’s what his advice about compounding looked like in practice: He got his start in his family’s milling business in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Then he crossed into Eswatini and built one from scratch. The lessons were compounded into the capital to buy a distribution company. The distribution company allowed Natie to pioneer a cash-and-carry model, think Costco without the polish, supplying small restaurants and shops at scale. The success compounded, and it became one of the largest food distribution businesses in southern Africa. In the 1970s, he took the same playbook to New York and started Jetro, selling bulk groceries to bodega owners. In the 1990s, he acquired Restaurant Depot and began rolling out stores. Lessons and leverage compounded, and eventually, there were 166 of them across the country. At one point, Warren Buffett tried to buy a stake. They couldn’t agree on terms, though it was a serious nod of respect from one legend of compounding to another. The fascinating thing about Natie’s story is that technology is almost non-existent in the telling. There’s real sophistication behind this business, decades of world-class execution, and a long list of smart decisions. Still, every business Natie built would be recognizable to a merchant 3,000 years ago. Buy low. Move goods. Repeat. His edge was perspective not invention. He bought Restaurant Depot at 63 after four decades of grinding, literally and figuratively. Thirty years later, just after his 94th birthday, he sold it for $29B. Compounding isn’t easy. The discipline to keep going, especially after decades of success, is rare. Failure forces change, but success typically breeds boredom. Most people want to move on. Natie kept grinding, from his start as a 20-year-old miller to a nonagenarian billionaire. I've carried his three words for nearly twenty years. With luck, I'll spend the next forty proving I was listening. I hope you do as well. Compound. Compound. Compound.

My co-founding partner emeritus @epaley met @WHOOP co-founder/CEO @willahmed at Harvard’s i-Lab. In the 14 years since, the company has become the go-to accessory for elite athletes. Today, the company is worth $10B+. @fcollective, we simply couldn’t be prouder investors. Whoop, a Wearable Health Device Maker, Raises $575 Million nytimes.com/2026/03/31/bus…

Congrats to @willahmed, @ed_baker_whoop, @Durkin and the entire team at @whoop on their latest round. They are on their way to building the best/ most accessible consumer health company in the world.

@samswoora Boston has the greatest suburbs in the world that are basically free on nyc value adjusted terms

It seems crazy that I have to say this, but I still believe deeply in human talent. The reason that no one likes AI is that a bunch of CEOs are running around touting how it’s going to “replace jobs” and “improve efficiency.” That may make for a good earnings call but it’s a terribly uninspiring message for the workforce. Tech collectively needs to wake up from its echo chamber.

Last week, @MikeyShulman announced that @suno has surpassed two million paying customers and $300M in annual revenue. I would love to say I had a grand theory about where AI was heading when I was the sole investor in their pre-seed round in 2022. The truth is I’m largely tone deaf to tech trends, but I do have a reasonably good eye for founders. So far, much of the AI story has been about making engineers more efficient. Suno is about making music more experimental and accessible. That shift has a lot to do with Mikey. He studied physics at Columbia, earned his PhD at Harvard, and later taught at MIT. That kind of academic pedigree can produce a prima donna. Mikey is the opposite, combining serious intellectual firepower with the creative instincts of a jazz band leader. (Fun fact: he’s also an accomplished bassist.) As impressive as he is, I was encouraged by the chorus cheering him on. Hugo Van Vuuren and Nancy Zimmerman were emphatic in their praise. His co-founders and former @Kensho colleagues, Martin Camacho, Georg Kucsko, and Keenan Freyberg, were similarly lauded by every reference I checked. When people you respect harmonize like that, it’s wise to listen. In the early days, the team was experimenting with different ways to commercialize the engine that would become @suno. They were commercially ambitious, but also deeply committed to empowering creators, and early enthusiasm from creative customers gave confidence that they were on the right track. Major talent and Minor ego is a rare combination, but in this case has produced one of the most consequential developments in music since MTV.

Klaviyo cofounders Ed Hallen and Andrew Bialecki are donating $6 mil to MIT aimed at keeping more entrepreneurs in the Boston area instead of decamping to California. This is one of several great initiatives designed to make Boston a fertile ground to start & scale.

We don't manually test features anymore. You can now run continuous QA features in Claude using “Feature Review” by Ranger. Feature Review is an always-on AI QA that runs in the background, fixing features while providing you and your team with full visibility. Never ask Claude to fix errors again.

@RangerNetHQ incredible work here - this is huge

@OnlyInBOS felipe’s - harvard sq cc: @josephflaherty

What Massachusetts restaurant does this remind you of? █ █ █ █ █ █ Quality Cost

@Waymo let’s go Boston!

New cities, new horizons. 📍 Boston & Sacramento, we’re here to lay the groundwork for our autonomous ride-hailing service. The future of mobility just got a little bigger. Learn more: waymo.com/updates

@mattyglesias Surprised me as well cause I love the DMV. it’s the hub of New England which is really nice. Mountains for skiing and hiking (VT/ NH) + beaches (Cape, islands, Maine). Quaint, small towns in the suburbs with top public schools and diverse career opps (bio, tech, finance, uni)

@JasonrShuman Completely agree! We talked about this all the time at FC. If you're a seed investor, by the time something is in a market map you're too late to that category. Build and invest in companies that shape next year's theses.

I wonder if VC content erodes alpha. Publishing theses and market maps clearly accelerates competition. More investors show up faster. More founders chase the same ideas, and CACs increase. The supply of startups increases as narratives turn into templates, creating more noise and making true outliers harder to spot for both investors and customers.

@aeyal1 @saullevin @EntreeCap best news ever, @saullevin is one of a kind. Equal parts wonderful person and investor. Couldn't have happened to a better person and firm!

👏 We are promoting @saullevin to Partner at Entrée Capital today (@EntreeCap). From the moment we met it was clear that Saul possessed the unique combination of hunger, integrity, and intellectual curiosity that we look for. His dedication to founders and his ‘can do’ attitude align with our firms’ DNA and succession plans. We are proud to have Saul join the partnership. Congrats!