Prateek Sharma // Ahead VC
8.6K posts
Prateek Sharma // Ahead VC
@prateeks
Managing Partner at @Aheadvc. Writing pre-seed checks in applied AI -agents, voice, robots, infra. Always up for coffee. IITB alum.
Palo Alto Katılım Temmuz 2008
2.4K Takip Edilen4.4K Takipçiler
@nakul As texted, let's do an IRL event for this! If any angel or micro fund wants to attend that's reading this, DM either of us :)
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When we lead a seed investment, we often work with the founder to bring in some micro funds + angels who can truly help. We have our roster we go to repeatedly but wanted to ask startup twitter: who are the most helpful micro funds & angels on customer intros + recruiting?
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If you're a naturally anxious person, I recommend pursuing a high stress career path where at least you'll be compensated for anxiety you're going to have anyways.
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didn't get Cerebras allocation?
@_ram_ says dont sweat it: 1) Every stock gets back to its IPO price. 2) buy Google.
"Every stock gets back to its IPO price. I used to also be very anxious back in the day when we didn't get big allocations. It doesn't really matter. There'll always be a chance to buy it again if you're patient"
"Number two... if you don't have the capacity to get into these IPOs, well, just buy Google. They have the cheapest cost of tokens, they have the longest capacity structures, they keep getting better and better models every single time, the best talent density."
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@Nik_Quinn One of my portfolio founders @vaibsite showed this to me a few months back. Great tool!
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No need for any more cold emails!!
I am not an investor (so no biases) but am a huge fan of
metal.so.
It shows founders who's actively investing in your space, at your stage and who is the best to speak to. They have ~170k investors in their database and also map the warm intro path (maybe most important!).
This is how fundraising should work.
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British person told me today they didn't know Jeeves & Wooster. I can't.
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Been thinking about this idea of minimalism in code and life.
Built a quick fun deck about it with a little help from Claude code and @naggarwal1's fluid web.
Tell me what you think!
share.fluiddocs.ai/p/code-is-debt…
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Prateek Sharma // Ahead VC retweetledi
I think we are past the point where “only people in San Francisco get AI” is true.
AI users are in every industry & they have access to the same models. SF is far from the epicenter of many of the craziest use cases I have seen in science, law, finance, marketing, education…
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Fundraising sucks for founders, especially if you are a first-time founder. I've raised for my own companies, invested in over 100 startups and helped 1000+ founders raising money. We had a bit of time so we decided to do a 40-minutes fundraising crash course.
It’s a mix of strategic stuff, mental models, understanding investor game dynamics and tactical advice. Hopefully useful to anyone raising money right now.
A few takeaways – but I explain it all in the video better:
1. You can evaluate every deal on three vectors: “credentials, innovation, execution”. You want to be strong on two of them. And being able to understand where you stand here allows you to be pro-active in driving your raise.
2. "We're not fundraising yet, but..." is the most underrated hack. Use it to test the waters. If an investor is genuinely bullish, they'll make you an offer anyway.
3. If it's not a hell yes, it's a no. VCs that want in will do anything to get in. The rest keep you in weird limbo with fake homework.
4. "Come back with more traction" is a lie. It means: we don't believe in you yet, but if the market proves us wrong, sure. But there is an easy way around this. Get the right people involved.
5. Don't pitch. Send the deck before. Have a real conversation. Your only goal: can this investor repeat what you do in a way that's exciting at drinks afterwards?
6. Don't raise for long. Three months on the market and everyone knows? You're discounted sushi.
7. Velocity beats optimisation. Almost always. The best fundraising strategy is getting investor commitments so fast that other investors have to chase you.
8. The real elevator pitch isn’t between founder and investor but between two investors. Eg. an associate trying to show off to a partner or angels trying to get new opinions on the deal.
=> and tons more
Full video in
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Actually I would put Bangalore engg closer to NY engg, not 12 months behind them.
The rate of learning and adoption is insanely fast there. Bangalore learns from and fast follows SV.
The physical distance is a big disadvantage, but I am seeing a BIG wave of Bangalore founders in the bay, from day 1.
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People at major AI labs (using internal models) 3-4 months ahead of startup silicon valley engineers
SV founders/eng 3-6 months ahead of NY
NY founders/eng 6-12 months ahead of rest of world
Most people have no idea how fast AI shifting as 1-2 years behind SOTA
"The future is here, just not equally distributed" - Robert Heinlein
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@nrmehta So hard to read and also makes me wonder whether the human (trained by the feed algo) wrote it or AI (trained the feed algo) wrote it.
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I now present to you the MOST LINKEDIN COMMENT EVER...
Me: Posts Substack about loss and death on LinkedIn
Sales Bro: "Speaking of suicide, what about sales strategies?"
mehtaphysical.substack.com/p/humpty-dumpt…
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Such a cool feature!
I do this manually, by getting claude to to generate my daily review and then pasting the text into the @ElevenLabs app before I got into the car.
Fun fact, elevenlabs reads out my daily review to me in Michael Caine's voice.
Gustav Söderström@GustavS
Hey. This one is for all you early adopters out there! Like I’m sure many of you do, every morning an agent preps me for my day - calendar, news, last 24hrs of Slack - in a morning briefing. But mine lands in my Spotify library, so I can listen to it on my commute. Same app, same experience, same everywhere. Many of us at Spotify have been living with this for a while and find it really useful. So today we're opening it up to see if you do too? Now, your agent of choice can create a Personal Podcast and save it directly to your Spotify library. It's private. It's yours. And it plays everywhere Spotify plays. The use cases feel obvious once you have it: for example a morning briefing built from your calendar and inbox. A deep dive on your class notes before an exam. A travel itinerary narrated for your flight. We've always believed Spotify should be the home for all your audio. Music, podcasts, audiobooks – so why not also the things you make for yourself? Try it out with OpenClaw, Claude Code, or Codex. Install the Save to Spotify CLI from GitHub on desktop and follow the directions. Describe the Personal Podcast you want to hear and ask your agent to save it to Spotify. It will show up in Your Library. Early, rough around some edges, and genuinely exciting. Try it out and let us know what you think? Link in comments 👇
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@mignano This is fantastic! I did this manually, by getting claude to to generate my daily review and then pasting the text into the elevenlabs app before I got into the car. Fun thing though, elevenlabs reads out my daily review to me in Michael Caine's voice.
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Spotify learned a long time ago that people love having all of their different types of audio (music, podcasts, etc) all in one place.
This is a big reason why Spotify ended up wrestling the podcast opportunity away from Apple years ago: while the latter was committed to having separate apps for music and podcasts, Spotify saw an opportunity to bundle them together and cross-pollinate the user behaviors with a single tap, not a heavy switch to a different app.
The next realization they had was that they could follow a similar playbook with audiobooks and win that market, too. And they've stated many times that more formats are on the way.
The feature Gustav is announcing below is clearly a fun way for people building agents to push new types of custom podcasts into their Spotify libraries. But I suspect it's also an extension of the formats strategy articulated above.
We're seeing lots of new products in the app layer that leverage AI and new TTS models to create awesome new audio experiences. Products like Huxe, Particle, Pingo, and Oboe come to mind. But there are many others.
But with the Save to Spotify CLI, Spotify is not only empowering individuals building agents, they're also making it really easy for developers to push new audio experiences directly into Spotify.
This is actually a huge win for all parties: developers don't have to reinvent the wheel and build a robust audio player/experience, Spotify gets more audio content, and users get to listen to new audio where they listen to everything else.
Gustav Söderström@GustavS
Hey. This one is for all you early adopters out there! Like I’m sure many of you do, every morning an agent preps me for my day - calendar, news, last 24hrs of Slack - in a morning briefing. But mine lands in my Spotify library, so I can listen to it on my commute. Same app, same experience, same everywhere. Many of us at Spotify have been living with this for a while and find it really useful. So today we're opening it up to see if you do too? Now, your agent of choice can create a Personal Podcast and save it directly to your Spotify library. It's private. It's yours. And it plays everywhere Spotify plays. The use cases feel obvious once you have it: for example a morning briefing built from your calendar and inbox. A deep dive on your class notes before an exam. A travel itinerary narrated for your flight. We've always believed Spotify should be the home for all your audio. Music, podcasts, audiobooks – so why not also the things you make for yourself? Try it out with OpenClaw, Claude Code, or Codex. Install the Save to Spotify CLI from GitHub on desktop and follow the directions. Describe the Personal Podcast you want to hear and ask your agent to save it to Spotify. It will show up in Your Library. Early, rough around some edges, and genuinely exciting. Try it out and let us know what you think? Link in comments 👇
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@akothari The reward function is attention and attention goes to the most extreme takes. Weird but this is the world we live in now.
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One interesting trend over the past year is how quickly vibes complete the full circle. In just the last few months, we’ve done multiple round trips:
- PMs went from “the role is dead” to “we still need PMs” to “PMs might be the most important function.”
- Software engineering went from “AI will wipe out coding jobs” to “new grads can’t get hired” to “software hiring is booming again.”
- SaaS itself went from “software is dying” to SaaSpocalypse to “actually, AI is software too. We are so back!”
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@Mark_Goldberg_ @sama Fantastic idea! New computers need user training!
It has been 20 years since the iPhone launched and Apple stores still run "how to take better photos" workshops.
It takes a long, long time for technology to percolate down to users beyond the early adopter crowd.
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@sama should build OpenAI Genius Bars throughout major cities to do coaching for plus/pro users
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OH: “whatever therapy the CEO hasn’t done becomes the psychosis of the organization.”
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That time of the year where the FOMO direction reverses in the India US corridor :)
The Wall Street Journal@WSJ
Americans are going to extraordinary lengths to get their hands on Indian mangoes. “I literally stop whatever I'm doing.” on.wsj.com/3Rjydhd
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@ChatGPTapp is fun again - thanks @sama
Inspired by a visual resume, asked chatgpt to look at my linkedin, then create a retro bollywood poster meets tech magazine cover image :)
This is the one shot output!
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RIP LinkedIn profiles
I will now only accept professional bios in the form of ChatGPT-generated 1980s software ads
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Love this take!
Though I think there is a tension here. Keeping systems illegible also holds you back from improving those systems using AI. So as long as you are ok not improving / changing them or just want to use illegible ways to improve, you are all good. But you do give up the option of improving your secret systems.
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