Mercedes Bent

building a startup is a game of catch-22. you need funding to hire great people to build the product, but you need results to raise money. you need proof points to show prospective customers, but you need pilots to create proof points. you need to improve retention by investing in product, but the team is stretched thin just keeping the site up, so you need funds but to get funds you need retention and so many more catch 22s. Winning is figuring out how to break the paradox BREAK the Catch 22

@BuxtonMatthew oo these are good!!

@mercebent + Beige slacks pair well with a dark blue body warmers. + We named our company to sound aggressively contrarian to make up for the fact we never lead. + Giving money to anyone who worked at Anduril is better than DD

The Lies VCs tell themselves: + "I didn't really try that hard" or "We dodged a bullet".....(but you missed the fastest growing unicorn). + "I know they acted strangely, but this founder is still the right one"......(and then exec team quits). + "This company just needs $1.5M more of an extension and they'll unlock growth".....(but they've stagnated) + "This company will return $500M to the fund".....(but hasn't been marked up in years). what else?

@SNDP__design hahah classic VC

@mercebent I’m never wrong. The market or the founder just behaved incorrectly

@SNDP__design 💯

@mercebent And also emotional control and discipline

investing is mastering the emotion

@MG_web3 ooof thats just bad

@mercebent the worst one is "we're being disciplined" when they're actually just slow. seen it from the founder side constantly. VC says they're being thoughtful, founder waits 6 weeks, turns out they were never going to write the check but didn't want to say no.

@howcanbobhelp 1000%

@mercebent The classic: "We're passing for now, but keep us updated." Translation: we're never looking at this again but want optionality if you 10x.

i'm sorry to announce but the misdirection preposition aka the corrective clause, is officially dead. "it's not X, but Y....." thanks AI ruining another thing we all liked

Surreal 2026 YTD You're not just a PM anymore AI in the Enterprise Next Frontier of Models Building with Replit

@Kyriakos_Pelek true

@mercebent distribution of funding always looks like this honestly

Wow. only ecosystem with worse concentration of capital is VC firms 🙃

@capreal26 😂 you're def right, Power Law is VC's version of Buffet/Munger's compounding

@mercebent VC tweets power law - 80% of tweets from VCs are about power law.

p.s. if you're looking for something fun to do in SF this weekend the DiRosa gallery in Dogpatch has a really cool exhibit: Ancient Wisdom for A Future Technology by artists Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg

thank you for having me on the podcast @MarkStockley this was a lot of fun! We discussed: + Hassabis proposes the Einstein test for AGI. + An AI agent went rogue on a safety researcher's inbox. + Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of distillation attacks on Claude podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/5-w…

@TeachDad4 respect 🫡

@mercebent Haha. I own my revenue. No cap table required.

To be fair, the younger generation having difficulty finding jobs due to AI doesn't out of band compared to the past decade From the Anthropic report

"everyone is their own boss" is becoming true again... we are only 10-15k per month new biz applications away from breaking the Covid record of new businesses formed!

Anthropic labor report shows workers aged 22-25 have ~14% drop in findings jobs in "exposed occupations." This includes: computer programmers customer service representatives, and financial analysts

i feel like i'm using a lot more desktop applications today thanks to AI....

interpreting this Anthropic report.....so would this imply that the growth rate for software engineering roles has decreased by 4.47% (absolute?) Meaning software growth rate over the next decade drops from ~15% to 10%? From the Anthropic Labor market impacts of AI report: "For every 10 percentage point increase in coverage, the BLS’s growth projection drops by 0.6 percentage points."