Ulas Bilgenoglu

@mazeincoding Documentation (I think one word is enough) :)

scare a developer with two words

@PLBompard @stonkiai SEC Registered Investment Advisor AI stonki.ai/xu

Pitch your startup - Max 5 words - Share link if ready 👀 Seen by 185k people last month 📈 YES, this is marketing - GO!

@InvestwithDoc @kinginvestings For $META I think the reversal is not there yet. Ask @stonkiai

@kinginvestings I already loaded the boat on $AMZN at $216 ... adding more $Meta at these levels (esp under $600 this morning)

My highest conviction stock picks for the next 10 years - $META - $AMZN - $GOOGL What would you add?

@kinginvestings I think $MSFT is a better choice than $META, @stonkiai thinks the same!!!

@RobinhoodApp Definitely an AI investment advisor like @stonkiai

What other products do you want to see on Robinhood?

@ThaDeGen @RobinhoodApp Yes that’ll be great

@elonmusk Yep not receiving

Please reply to this post if you’re not receiving 𝕏 notifications or if the notifications are delayed more than a few minutes

@The_RockTrading $META being Meta I guess.

$META what the heck happened

@ayushagarwal @stonkiai is a full stack RIA!!!

this RFS is crazy, don't build AI Tools - build AI companies to replace Dinosaurs

@SixSigmaCapital Honestly? 6/10 cooked right now. So you're still medium well. Below 600$ with volume you're in the well done territory. Above $625 reclaim = maybe you'll become medium-rare ;) Ask stonki.ai/xu to track it for you.

Been buying $META sub 620...How cooked am I out of 10? (Actually feel like this time decent chance I am cooked and we see mid 500's..)

@MMatters22596 It’s $DLO — the only one showing a real capitulation → reversal setup. Go and ask stonki.ai/xu about it

What stock is the best risk-reward opportunity? $NVO at $48 $SOFI at $31 $EOSE at $17 $NBIS at $93 $IREN at $55 $PYPL at $67 $ROOT at $86 $CRWV at $87 $DUOL at $189 $META at $610 $HIMS at $39 $JD at $31 $XPEV at $27 $OSCR at $15 $DLO at $15 $IONQ at $51 $ASTS at $65

@nylonmusq @ajhodls I think it’s pretty clear, AJ is not talking about 6 figure MRRs or thousands of customer, PMF etc. I guess this is as much as it gets to pre-seed :)

@ajhodls How is any of this “pre-seed”?

i've been getting *a lot* of inbound requests to check out founder pitches lately. we have 100+ portfolio companies, many of whom I meet with on a monthly basis. so my bandwidth for cold inbound is unfortunately pretty limited. of ~300 cold emails a month, i only take ~1-2 meetings from cold outreach. i know that sucks for founders, so i want to be transparent with some of my evaluation framework to help you calibrate outreach and help set expectations on how I think about opportunities at the pre-seed. first, understand it's likely that venture funding isn't appropriate for your idea. venture is a very specific tool seeking outliers in markets that largely do not exist yet. most early-stage funds are looking for 100x (or greater!) returns, so your valuation and market focus needs to account for that. if you're hoping to raise at a $10M valuation, that means a $1B exit (or $2B+ exit factoring in multiple rounds of dilution). these types of outcomes statistically just don't happen often. there are maybe only a handful of liquidity events at that level per year. so you probably should bootstrap until you have a clearer picture that there’s a real venture opportunity in front of you and be able to convince someone of the market potential. but if you still want to try to pitch VCs, here's how you should focus your email outreach to capture attention: 1. you are "consensus" if you have to ask yourself if you're consensus, you aren't. consensus founders typically have one these attributes: - sold a previous company for $100M+ - raised $100M for a previous company - raised $20M+ in previous company from a top VC - early research team at top 5 AI lab (e.g. maybe one of like 100 people in the world) if these aren’t you, you aren't consensus. These founders aren’t reaching out to me. they’re going straight to the biggest funds for the biggest checks. $20-100M++ in their first round of funding. There are only a handful of funds who write these checks and they all already know the founders. 2. you are "qualified" qualifications are just linkedIn experiences. they typically are pretty poor signal for founder quality, but a lot of VCs seem to put a lot of weight on them. there are more popular qualifications like: - worked at top 10 tech firm as engineer or PM - graduated in CS/Math from top 10 university - IMO medalist is now en vogue - PhD in machine learning or equivalent is en vogue there’s a lot of brand association weight here, so after the first 10-20 top companies or institutions, the allure starts to wear off. if this is you, congratulations, you get an easy pass to at least a handful of VC pitches. if this isn’t you, you need to consider if it’s worth trying to work at one of these big companies for a few years to build the pedigree. I don’t think it’s worth it, but some folks do it and it’s a fairly predictable ROI. if you worked at a lesser known company that's worth something, but the most important thing you can do is get a strong referral from another 1. consensus or 2. qualified founder (ideally someone where you worked on the same team) 3. you can build ok so you didn’t work at the big labs, didn’t get a PhD from MIT, and are not a L5 eng at google. but anyone can build these days. and you can cook. live products are king here. your pitch email should lead with a link to a live demo or a loom video showing your product. it doesn’t need to have thousands of users (or any users), but it does need to demonstrate your technical and/or product competencies. in the loom, talk about some of the features and why you think it’s special, talk about the inspiration and highlight the core 1-2 features you’re excited about and how you built them. building software has never been more approachable then it is now with AI models and codegen. so if you aren’t able to ship a product demo that’s reasonably compelling, you probably aren’t ready for funding. 4. you have traction ok you’re a decent builder, but maybe your product and tech aren’t anything to write home about. while it’s an important foundation, that’s not necessarily a dealbreaker. if there are users of your product and they are using the product a lot, that’s pretty damn good signal. it doesn’t need to be thousands of users, even a handful of users is enough. but they should love the product. product outages or missing features should drive them crazy and have them messaging you at odd hours. 5 users in a discord that write you every few hours about feature requests is a great signal. if this isn’t the case, you probably aren’t onto something yet or you don’t sufficiently understand your audience. many of the most popular companies started this way. If you aren’t embarrassed by the state of your product, you are not shipping fast enough. this is a signal that you aren’t getting out the door and engaging your customers enough. and if you don’t understand your audience and how to engage them, you probably aren’t ready for funding yet. 5. you can tell a story ok so you don’t have any traction and you don’t have any product to speak of. you aren’t in a great spot to raise venture capital. but there are the rare founders who can construct narratives that compel huge shifts in demand. this is a very special and rare talent, so if you’re questioning if you’re in this bucket you probably aren’t. but your lived experience and empathy for a problem space is important, and you can build this muscle over time. practice your pitch and build an audience on x / substack / youtube. post on a regular cadence for months / years and demonstrate you can convince people of big shifts. this is building latent demand; and it can be a valuable skill when paired with the builder profiles who can’t find a great market. if you have the following, you can usually convince great technical co-founders to join you on your mission. but if you don’t have 10k+ followers all specifically engaged on a specific topic, you probably aren’t ready to discuss funding yet. so to reiterate: 1. you’re consensus, congratulations. VCs come to you, you don’t even need to pitch. 2. you’re qualified. put together a pitch deck and hopefully some friends from your team at Facebook will make some good intros. this probably isn’t you, but if it is, congrats you’re also lucky. 3. you’re an outsider, no VC connections but you can hack. send demos! loom videos with voiceovers are even better. talk about what makes your technical insights or implementations special. 4. you’re an OK builder, but you understand your problem space incredibly well and you’re engaging customers on the regular. you have a product (it’s not perfect) but users are banging away on it and don’t churn even though it sucks. send anecdotes from users and early activation and retention statistics with ideally a few months of longitudinal data. revenue retention and revenue growth are the most important (if you have it) 5. you can’t build, you don’t have customers yet, but you’re architecting movements through narrative and mission. you’re still a few steps away from building a good foundation for a venture-backed startup but you have an important foundation -- attention. your narrative skills will be important for the next steps, but convincing a great builder will be important too. those are most of what I think about when reviewing cold outreach. i only have time to spend maybe 30 seconds max on every email, so keep it short, and highlight one of the things above in a few sentences while linking to live demos, loom videos, linkedIn, github repos, etc... follow-up emails are fine, but they should include meaningful progress on one of the items above (e.g. more customers, more product links, new builder co-founders, more followers). if you don’t have meaningful progress on those, it’s not worth following up until you do. in conclusion, remember that founders are everything in this business. don’t be discouraged if VCs don’t respond. founders are the fuel of real meaningful change and innovation. i sincerely hope to see more venture capital in the world to catalyze more outliers who become the consensus founders of tomorrow. thank you for all that you do and having the courage to put yourselves out there! the world needs more founders.

@ajhodls I loved your “recovering founder” description @ajhodls I think that’s why you can give this advice wholeheartedly.

talking to portfolio founder today about a $30M acquisition offer for his company, roughly 15x ARR. growth has been steady but not outstanding. he asked “won’t you be upset that we didn’t go for $1B?” my reply was that $15M (he owns about 50%) is a considerable sum for anyone, especially at this stage of life. i told him he’s giving himself almost infinite attempts at taking a big swing down the road, either self funded or with my partnership. in venture you play the long game but you never want to be in a position where you’re operating with your back against the wall there are entrepreneurs who have executed flawlessly in desperate situations but they are few and far between sometimes you need to take care of yourself first, build a foundation of wealth that provides agency and optionality - then go for the big swing.

@ankurnagpal So easy to fix :), which will be the fun part I guess.

Request for startup: Prediction markets for friend groups Bet like complete degenerates on all the people you mutually know Will Alex get divorced in 2025? Will Sarah have more than 4 drinks at the holiday party? Over/under 6.5 likes on John's next Instagram post

@elonmusk Non degrading intelligence with higher context might be next the frontier to conquer.

What are the most important improvements to make to Grok 4 Fast? Critical feedback is much appreciated.

@yishan I mostly agree @yishan expect the regulated markets. Do you think foundational model providers will get certified for health, finance, law etc?

My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers. App functionality will be added to the foundational models' offerings, because the big players aren't slow incumbents (it is wrong to apply the analogy of "fast startup, slow incumbent" here), they are just big. Far more so than with any other prior new technology, there is a massive and fast-moving wave that obsoletes every new app almost as fast as it can be invented. There is almost no time to build a company and scale it. There are two ways AI application startup founders can make money: - Make a flash-in-the-pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash (my estimate is that you have about 12-18 months cashflow generation) - Make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity The situation is highly unstable - we don't know if it's going to crash or go to the moon but both scenarios make it very unlikely that any AI application startup will independently become a generational supercompany (baseline odds are low to begin with). The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones relating to real atoms (hardware or world-related) data and not software/finance.

@bzises Totally agree, lets you zoom out a bit and evaluate, start to look from the investors perspective, which is very useful. So it serves both ways.

After investing $25m+ into 150 companies over the past 10 years, I’ve come to believe that sending consistent written updates is the single biggest leading indicator of future success

@aryanlabde Is this a choice???

You have 3 options as a solo founder: – Code all day – Market like crazy – Burn out doing both Which poison are you picking?

I'll prefer to go back to building, everyday. But the reality is after raising $500k, you'll need another $1.5m pretty soon in order to compete with the crazy checks getting poured to SF startups :( On the other, hand if you use that $500k wisely, you'll have much better change to raise later on.

@ZoellaBolkiah I'm listening - help me understand your point. Do you think it's better for the founder to waste time talking to 100 VCs trying to raise a $2M round (and have high chance of not raising at all), rather than raise a $500k round after talking to 15 VCs and go back to building?

If you tell a VC you are raising $2M, be ready to justify $10M valuation or hear lots and lots of rejections. $500k is a perfectly fine pre-seed if your true valuation is $5M. You'll close the round much sooner.

@samuel_spitz Nice to meet you @samuel_spitz :)

I’ve recently joined a tier 1 venture firm as a scout. If you’re working on something interesting, especially if we’ve already met, DM me.