George Kalligeros (YC P26)
60 posts
@kalligeros
Building @AseonLabs - second-time founder (backed by @YCombinator) - designer/engineer @Tesla - classic car/bike tinkerer
30 partners already passed on the same deck and the founder is still asking for warm intros. intro 31 isn't going to read it any differently than intro 30 did. "we just need more intros" gets thrown around like a fundraising strategy. it isn't. it's what you say when you don't want to look at why the first 30 didn't bite. the work nobody wants to do at month 4 of a stalled raise is rewriting the pitch. asking for another intro feels productive and costs nothing. rewriting the pitch is the work that actually moves the round, and it's the work most founders avoid until month 6.
I'm beyond excited to announce that I’m joining @Lightspeed as a Partner on the early-stage investing team and helping to build everything they're doing in new media. I've spent the last six years investing in early-stage companies, and the last year building a media platform in parallel. What started as a side quest has reached 350,000+ followers and millions of viewers a month. For me, investing and storytelling have always been two halves of the same job. This work has put me in rooms with incredible founders, researchers, and operators - many of whom have become close friends, collaborators, and early stage bets. There's so much happening at the frontier right now, and the media platform has given me a way to be in those conversations early (and to bring the people I admire most into a wider audience). When Lightspeed reached out, we saw the same opportunity. Venture and media are converging, and the next generation of great firms will need to show up differently: reaching founders and builders before they've even started a company, and being the place where people first get excited about what's happening in tech. With more than $50 billion in AUM, Lightspeed has been building alongside founders at the frontier of technology for decades. It's a firm I've admired for years since I started investing - for its intellectual rigor, its long-term conviction, and the way it approaches company building. I’m excited to join a team that brings real depth and substance to its work, and I hope to bring that same ethos to everything I put out. Thank you to @ravi_lsvp, @bsomaia , and @Machiz for believing in this vision and trusting me to help build it. I’m so excited to see what we do together. If you're an early-stage founder, building or thinking about starting something, or just curious about this ecosystem - please reach out. My DMs are open and I’d love to chat!
Did GC count on Marc getting so mad at this ad that the whole firm would engage with it until it hit 1M views?
