Greg Raiz (Pre-Seed VC)

When I started Raiz Capital, I chose the name because I appreciate a good pun. But over the last six months, it became clear that a better name was waiting in the wings. linkedin.com/feed/update/ur… @Founders_Edge

Everyone's worried about AI slop. But let's be honest: most software has been slop for decades. We just called it "shipping." The typical software product for decades has been mediocre. Details get skipped. UX is an afterthought. Known best practices get ignored. Why? Because doing it right was too expensive, too slow, too hard to justify in a sprint. The dirty secret is that it has never been a knowledge problem. We knew autocomplete would be better. We knew inline validation helps. We knew smart defaults and thoughtful integrations made products stickier. We just couldn't afford the engineering time to build them. AI changes the cost curve of craftsmanship. The niceties that got cut from every roadmap, the "wouldn't it be nice if" features, are now buildable. AI doesn't get lazy. It doesn't cut corners because the sprint is ending. We're not replacing human quality with AI slop. We're replacing human shortcuts with AI thoroughness. This is exactly what we focus on FoundersEdge. We invest in experienced founders building at the intersection of AI and user experience, because the biggest opportunity isn't replacing humans. It's replacing the compromises humans were forced to make. So before you call something AI slop, hold up a mirror. Look at what we've been shipping for years. Look at the corners we cut and the experiences we settled for. AI isn't lowering the bar. We had the bar on the floor. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.

@ZeMariaMacedo Doing a final close soon. Can’t dm you, but happy to chat my alias @ FoundersEdge.com

Update: we've now deployed ~$15m into 6 awesome emerging managers. We're still looking to deploy $15m more, so if you know anyone talented who is either raising or looking to raise a fund, pls hit us up

I don't see too many people being critical of OpenClaw. It's cool in terms of what it can do... mostly emergent behavior of an LLM with full permissions and few security checks. The actual UX, web-interface, CLI interface, integration w/ WhatsApp or iMessage is all pretty poor. I've been using my own CLI "Personal Chief of Staff" built on the Claude code foundation. OpenClaw was first but more are coming.

I've never written a line of rust code but perhaps teams should be prompting for Rust rather than defaulting to python? Switching languages is just a prompt away, maybe I can get better perf and be rid of pip python3 venv hell.

@MartinGTobias @mahaniok As an LP and GP, I approve this message.

@mahaniok Totally

Founder reminder: Founders will generally make 20-30X what VCs make when they succeed. Recent case from my portfolio: $500K seed check valued at $58M in recent round. Yea! Founder shares are worth over $1B.

According to Claude, I'm absolutly right.

The data says exactly the opposite. According to Entrepreneurs in High Technology study from MIT, there's a positive relationship between # of co-founders and positive trajectory. Not even including the 18 co-founders of Alibaba.

@ericbahn Last three months of actuals are more helpful. I’ll usually take strong growth over larger numbers with slow growth. ARR is often a wild guess because churn and renewals aren’t proven.

Some founders are getting REALLY dodgy with their ARR metrics. Almost like: "We booked $1000 in the past hour, and therefore are now on a $9M ARR". I'm spending a lot more time now trying to understand how founders are 'annualizing' their revenue...

@NWischoff In the comments in case LPs are looking for the new generation of GPs. 👀

Have had a lot of LP meetings recently and a consistent theme across large institutional LPs is that very few have continued with their blue-chip relationships (outside of Index). "Those funds are no longer hard to access". Looking to concentrate in the next generation. The new challenge is writing smaller checks to new funds while they are small and where they need to deploy 50M+. Times are changing. Huge opportunity for new funds looking to build something durable.

@drewwilson Internet rando here, I've been finding TikTok to have a lot of the founder/commity I was missing from X. I have been unable to get good engagment/connection from Bsky.

I think I've got it. X is no longer a social network first. X is all about hearing from randos and what's in the zeitgeist. A virtual town square. Twitter was about hearing from your friends and people you wanted to hear from. A social network. So, where's the next Twitter?

This.

If I organized the Vibe Coding Olympics Games. What would the categories be? How would you judge the winner?

@rrhoover It's likely whisper transcription locally and a few LLM API calls per meeting. I suspect they are getting enough org subscriptions that they don't feel the need to squeeze individuals. Same GTM as gmail or dropbox.

Confused why Granola hasn't charged me yet. Not mad about it tho.

Apple products this year, two innovations. A thinner iPhone, and air Pods can do real-time translation. Ok but it's a trillion-dollar company. Most of the stuff they announced is incremental and derivative. - AI and Siri still meh. - Vision Pro still meh. - Apple TV stuck in the past. - iPhone has looked the same for 5 years Apple needs founder-mode again and Tim can't do it.

Claude Code 503 upstream error and global engineering productivity crawls to a halt.

@DSox Would come up from boston for a good bagel.

Coming this fall.. If Family VC hosted a few coffee/bagel meetups in NYC for: 1. Family offices (active in VC) 2. Founders 3. VC managers Would you be interested in attending? * Reply or react to this post to lmk. *only if you are one of the three personas mentioned.

@DSox Super busy, let’s go!

The slowdown for many VC investors in July & August is real but this year I 👀 a lot of deal activity. At our FO, it has been the most active summer since ‘21. VC community: who is actively investing in VC deals (pre-seed to pre-IPO) this late summer? React or reply to lmk!🙏

What's the difference between GPT-4 and GPT-4o-mini? The latter is 120x cheaper. Changing that string in your code may have a huge impact on your bill.

@drewwilson I thought about making an open BookFace. Maybe I should vibe code this. 🤔 difficulty is validating that posts aren’t VCs patting themselves on the back.

Convo with a buddy about the VC landscape:

💰 Congrats to Figma, ~$300B in unicorn value ready to go: Stripe, Databricks, Canva, Discord, Anduril, Anthropic, OpenAI, Ramp, Cerebras, Klarna, Netskope, Deel, Holtec. All could IPO in the next year or two. #IPO #Unicorns