Cem Sertoglu

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Cem Sertoglu

Cem Sertoglu

@csertoglu

Managing Partner @bek_vc. Investing in tech in Emerging Europe since 2006

United States Katılım Ekim 2008
3.5K Takip Edilen15.5K Takipçiler
Cem Sertoglu
Cem Sertoglu@csertoglu·
@ttunguz All three business segments are extremely difficult to forecast, with changing GM structures. Too capital-hungry to stay private and too unpredictable to go public. The Cult of Elon will make it happen.
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Tomasz Tunguz
Tomasz Tunguz@ttunguz·
SpaceX filed its S-1 yesterday after 24 years private. The filing reveals an AI-era conglomerate : Space, Starlink & AI. Three businesses with vastly different economics. 🧵
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Harry Stebbings
Harry Stebbings@HarryStebbings·
My Biggest Lesson on Reserves Four Funds In: "My first three funds. I did do reserves and I did some great reserve investments. I put 15% of my third fund into @owner @adamguild their series A. So that was a good investment, but I realised the opportunity cost of that investment given where I come in, it could be 20 to 30 pre-seed investments and the value creation at the pre-seed is so high that I decided for my fourth fund, no reserves, just everything up front." @Joshuabrowder What do you know now about reserves that you wish you had known when you started @chadbyers @NWischoff @honam @infoarbitrage @jasonlk?
Harry Stebbings@HarryStebbings

I am going to piss off so many friends by saying this but if I could invest in one emerging manager sub $50M fund, it would be @Joshuabrowder. A few things you need to know about Josh: - He makes the founders he invests in live in his spare room at the Four Seasons until they raise their seed - He turned his $100K Thiel Fellowship grant into a $10M angel portfolio - He was one of the first cheques into Micro1, Yuzu and many more - When he found out his father had been taken by the Russians, he was playing poker… (legend!) I have never had founder references like the ones I got on Josh. I spoke to 12 founders. He averaged 9.2/10 across all 12. This is one of the best episodes we have done in a long time and my notes below: 1. Why I Believe Young Founders Make the Best Founders Young founders have no safety net and no option but to win. Corporate engineers often default to hiring big teams, while young founders stay focused on building the product. Their grit is much higher. Without that level of dedication, most people quit at the first real obstacle. 2. How I Test Founder Commitment Before Investing To filter out tourist founders, schedule a pitch meeting at 11:00 PM. Elite founders accept immediately. Mediocre ones push it out by weeks. During the interview, ask rapid-fire questions. If they claim a specific revenue number, have them pull up their live Stripe account on the spot. Look for tactical customer acquisition goals, not vague partnership promises. 3. Why I Make Founders Live With Me After Investing The best early investments come from deep day-one relationships. Living together creates a focused, one-person accelerator where founders get a three-week crash course and avoid years of mistakes. The rule is simple: co-founders share one room near the Four Seasons and cannot check out until they raise an institutional seed round. 4. Why Pre-Seed Companies Fail Startups usually fail for three reasons: they run out of money, they run out of hope, or the co-founders break up. Money problems usually come from weak pitching, which is why founders should drop the deck and show the product live. To maintain hope, ignore Silicon Valley vanity signals and focus on customer progress. To avoid team blowups, handle mechanics like vesting early. 5. What Founders Need to Know About Signing With a VC VCs will say almost anything to get you to sign on the spot. They reverse-engineer your desires and claim they know every customer you want to meet. Impressionable founders fall for it, but the promised intros often never happen. Never sign in the room. Take the night to think clearly. 6. My Biggest Lesson on Reserve Investing Holding back reserves for later rounds has a huge opportunity cost. The biggest value creation happens at pre-seed, so saving capital for a Series A follow-on can limit your upside. Deploying upfront into 20 to 30 pre-seed companies can produce far better long-term returns. Go all-in early. (links below)

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Fryd Wiatrowski
Fryd Wiatrowski@frydwia·
Today, we’re announcing Viktor’s $75M Series A, led by @Accel . @viktor__com was supposed to be a small experiment. It became the AI coworker 10x'ing real businesses. $15M in annualized revenue run rate. In 10 weeks. – Small companies saving millions of dollars – Sourcing hundreds of thousands in new revenue in their first 30 days – Whole teams getting half their week back – Companies running 40% leaner without cutting output Viktor is not another AI tool. It’s the first true AI employee. The vision that has been with us since 2023 when we started the company has finally been shipped. Back then, it was just the two of us, with a very small but dedicated team, iterating for years. Failing multiple times. Showing products that users didn't even want to test! But we never gave up. Our decisions were often wrong. Certainly more often than not! We kept trying. Now we’ve shipped something people love. Worth every sleepless night. Every sacrifice. The best employees don’t need to be told what to do. Neither does Viktor. Grateful to @Accel, our team, our earliest users, and everyone who believed this category could be bigger than chat.
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Yann LeCun
Yann LeCun@ylecun·
@eladgil BS. Attention was born in Montréal PyTorch in NYC. AlphaGo in London AlphaFold in London ESMFold in NYC Llama 1 in Paris. Llama 2 in Paris+NYC+SV DeepSeek in Hangzhou Plus: DINO in Paris JEPA in Montréal+Paris+NYC SV is 3 mos ahead on topics SV is singularly obsessed with.
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Charles Michel
Charles Michel@CharlesMichel·
.@vonderleyen: Türkiye is: - a core #NATO ally, - a key migration partner, - an energy corridor, - a major defence actor on Europe’s flank, - and a serious regional power. Europe doesn’t get stronger by applying double standards or simplifying reality.
Bloomberg@business

The European Union sought to ease tensions with Turkey after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen named the country alongside Russia and China, creating the impression that the NATO partner was seen as a potential threat. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

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Neil Parikh
Neil Parikh@neilparikh·
1/ Your ex is probably not a narcissist. I know. I'm sorry. But our head of research @CaitlinStamatis analyzed 2,000+ Ash conversations and what she found is way more interesting than another "5 signs" listicle. 🧵
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Damien
Damien@DamienWayne·
I’ve had 17 VC’s reach out this week for pre-seed calls. What the fuck is going on
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Cem Sertoglu
Cem Sertoglu@csertoglu·
I was chatting about this with a friend yesterday. Tech and VC have become rife with transactional behavior. My take is that it's the result of the change in the personalities attracted to tech. It used to be the hackers; now it's the greedy hustlers. Ironically, it makes for an easy filter.
Bilal Zuberi@bznotes

It’s unfortunate to hear some investors - and even founders - argue that early-stage investing is becoming purely transactional…just an “access” game. That view is not only wrong, it’s dangerous. Great companies aren’t built through transactions. They’re built over time—through uncertainty, setbacks, breakthroughs, and the emotional volatility that comes with all of it. What sustains them is trust, conviction, and relationships that hold under pressure. Yes, hard decisions are part of the journey. But how those decisions are made is what defines character—and reflects a true commitment to fiduciary responsibility. This isn’t a rant. It’s a reminder. There are great people building with integrity. Back them. Build with them. Let’s go. 🦾🚀

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Nate Silver
Nate Silver@NateSilver538·
These are the Twitter/X accounts with the most engagement so far in 2026. I suppose I had some intuition for how bad it was, but jeez, this is what you get when the ecosystem is broken.
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Cem Sertoglu
Cem Sertoglu@csertoglu·
@auren Unlike founder-friendly terms, the benchmarks for GP-LP balance are somewhat obscure. I’d welcome more transparency in fund terms.
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Auren Hoffman
Auren Hoffman@auren·
there are tons of quiet decision points where GPs can favor themselves vs. LPs. just like VCs have term sheets that are founder-friendly, they should have systems that are LP friendly. No need to squeeze every dollar from LPs – better to treat LPs as long-term customers.
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Eric Jorgenson 📚 ☀️
Eric Jorgenson 📚 ☀️@EricJorgenson·
🚨📕 THE BOOK OF ELON IS NOW LIVE!!! 🎉🚀 This is the book we WISHED @elonmusk would write… “All of Elon's most useful ideas, in his own words.” Learn directly from the world’s greatest entrepreneur, like you’re sitting across from him at dinner. It took FIVE YEARS to make this for you. Because it's built from hundreds and hundreds of Elon's public appearances. I went through 3,000,000+ words to collect the most useful and timeless ideas. The final book is ~50,000 words. Every word is USEFUL. (This is what I do. My first book, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, is one of the top 100 most highlighted books of all time on Kindle.) Then, I spent $50,000+ on editing and design so it looks and feels beautiful. Then… > Foreword by @naval. > Visuals by @jackbutcher. > Blurb from @mrbeast. > Published by @scribemediaco. > And yes, approval on this idea from Elon himself, thanks to @samteller. I went Maximum Effort to make this an all-timer. We got 10/10 on reviews from early readers, then worked on it for ANOTHER YEAR. Why so much effort? My mission is to create One Million Musks. For a generation to lift our gaze and build, so our grandchildren live in a world beyond our wildest dreams. I’m an independent author. I don’t get an advance. I risk my own time and money to make these books. Then we give away millions of them. Digital versions are free. I believe this book can benefit every human, and if you can’t pay five bucks for it, I want to personally gift it to you. Because I know it is useful. Useful how? You may be seeking purpose, a mission worthy of your life’s effort. You may have a clear purpose and seek the tools for success. You will find both in this book. Get the benefits of Elon’s entire life of hard-won lessons in a five-hour, easy read. (I checked, it’s a 5th-grade reading level.) You’ll feel personally mentored by the greatest entrepreneur in history. Click below to buy it now on Amazon, Audible, or directly from me. Amazon: amzn.to/47avSuh Audible: lnkd.in/gi_7HrFP Me: lnkd.in/gS2xWUWH If you’re not sure it’s worth $4.99 yet, just start reading the free version. PLEASE take 6 seconds to Like, Bookmark, and Repost. Even better: send this to your friends, team, or Group Chats! I guarantee this book will improve their lives. Spread the word! Every little thing helps. Your support spreads good ideas around the world, helping people and making the future better for everyone. Thank you! Forward. Together.
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Patrick OShaughnessy
Patrick OShaughnessy@patrick_oshag·
A crazy image
Patrick OShaughnessy tweet media
Colossus@colossusmag

Despite the proliferation of startup pundits over the last 25 years, no one knows how to make startups more successful. The New Pundits have sold millions of books, and their entrepreneurship “science” is taught in universities and accelerators all over the world. But none of it has made a difference. Startups are no more likely to survive today than they were in 1995. By some measures, they are even less likely to work. In his latest essay, legendary venture investor @ganeumann presents the data, diagnoses the problem, and proposes something that might actually work. It involves Robert Boyle, Peter Thiel, Paul Feyerabend, and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. colossus.com/article/we-hav…

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Dan Gray
Dan Gray@credistick·
For a minute, forget that venture capital exists. Forget Benchmark, Sequoia, and Y Combinator. Forget Kalanick, Faulkner and Chesky. Gone. No legacy. You're trying to assemble a private market product that appeals to large institutional LP allocators, built on the promise of technology companies. Their preferences are: 1) Strong interim performance, so they can hit internal benchmarks, get bonus compensation and advance their career. 2) Protection against the visible impact of systemic drawdowns, protecting relative performance metrics even in a market correction. 3) Bragging rights, from involvement in strong brands with large media platforms and passthrough exposure to lots of hot logos. 4) A high level of service, with a fully staffed IR team to handle everything and organise spectacular AGMs with all kinds of perks. Essentially, you need to offer a scalable basket of assets that will reliably rise in value, attached to a marketing machine, with a valuation policy that aligns your marks with other managers in your network. The ideal asset for this strategy is the most obvious; the 25 year old Stanford graduate who did 2 years on Meta's product team and is now launching some B2B AI widget — and they've just gone viral with their launch video. The cost of capital for a founder that ticks so many boxes is rock bottom; coordination frictions at a minimum. They're likely to keep raising larger rounds and generating markups on sheer momentum, regardless of any idiosyncratic quality. It's also such an easy profile to identify that you can employ an army of associates and scouts to track them down, assuming they don't respond directly to your heavily advertised "call for startups". Essentially, what you have created is a synthetic "venture" asset, built on the elasticity of software companies, that prints growth metrics for allocators. It can scale as much as required, absorbing as much capital as may be shoveled into it, growing at a rate correlated with how close to the consensus you are. Of course, all of these things are correlated with worse ultimate cash returns, as they reflect attributes that are predictive of worse returns in a market with zero alpha. Surprisingly, that's ok. It's not the point. All you have to do is push exits out to 12+ years, giving you space to raise 3-4 subsequent funds and your allocator friends time to move on to a better role. Along the way you'll be able to extract just enough liquidity to keep things moving. Secondaries in a hot company, a continuation fund or intra-portfolio acquisition, and the occasional opportunistic exit to talk about on podcasts. You wont be breaking DPI records or driving much real technological progress, but the fee income will be lovely and your allocator friends will be totally satisfied with the product you have created.
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@jason
@jason@Jason·
What a horrible season… so many lost lives from one storm. When skiing alone this past week, excited to challenge myself in deep powder, I made my first mistakes: alone is no bueno I lost a ski in the deep powder and went down Was right in the area where I took these photos and videos the day before I wasn’t off the trail, but the trail wasn’t groomed — second mistake I quickly popped back up instinctually (3rd mistake) seconds later the snow gave way beneath me and I flipped over I was now in my back with only my head and one arm above the snow I was in a mini-panic as I had now shifted five feet closer to the tree line Tree wells are no joke and I was feet from them I slowly dug myself out Positioned my skis correctly and walked slowly to someone else’s tread marks Was exhausted, but fine Next year I won’t go out alone I will wear a beacon I will carry a shovel I will get avalanche certified I will stop being an idiot my life is fantastic, I’m loved, I have purpose and I want to ski until I’m 80 I will stop being an idiot
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SLCScanner@SLCScanner

#Breaking #BigCottonwoodCanyon #Avalanche Multiple resources on scene of an avalanche in the area of #ButlerBasin and #GobblersKnob. Reported at approx 1035 AM. At least 2 people were directly affected. Medical Helicopter and the #DPSHelicopter responded. Life saving measures in progress on at least 1 individual. The SL County Sheriff is handling this incident. Stby for updates.

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Keşfet

@ttunguz @asliaydintasbas @geekwire @HarryStebbings @owner @adamguild @Joshuabrowder @chadbyers