Yuva Krish

@bryan_johnson Oh

Just gave Kate oral sex. Goodnight everyone.

@adelwu_ That’s great but let us have it

founders be like: i’ll be in sf from 5pm to 6pm! who should i meet? whose lap should i sit in? whose hand should i hold? who wants to smooch at blue bottle??

@adriannalakatos Sounds like my team and I, building a neurotech wearable that noninvasively tracks and augments cognition- flowstatebci.com

request for builders: • the 19-year-old who grew up flipping pokémon cards and is shipping apps at 2am • the single mom who built to $4k mrr during nap time instead of selling arbonne • the nurse coding patient tools on night shifts • the beauty creator showing off an app she built instead of another product haul • the gamer with 500k followers and more github commits than brand deals • the dropout with more paying users than classmates • the kid whose parents think they’re doing homework sound like you? drop the link below. ugly mvp, janky demo, messy screen recording. whatever you’ve got. i write $100-$250k checks for the underdogs p.s. if it’s cool, i’ll invite you to our campus

@ArtinBogdanov @speedrun @sunapp_ai Building flowstatebci.com - neurotech wearable sitting behind ear designed to track and augment cognition

The next a16z Speedrun cohort opened up last week. If you're applying - comment below. What are you building and what do you actually need right now? I did @speedrun with SUN this year. Moves fast, worth it. I'll go first: @sunapp_ai turns any topic into an audio course or podcast in seconds. For people who want to learn but have no time to read. What are you working on? Drop it in the chat! Let's get you visible.

@ryancarson General rule I follow is if i scroll through and don’t see anything I would find useful in professional/interests, usually don’t accept

I've started to say no to LinkedIn requests. What is everyone else's strategy here? I used to just accept everybody, but I realize now the signal-to-noise ratio on my connections is not good. I really wish somebody would boot up an Agent First network that was actually good, so that my agent could go out and find other people's agents and request permission to meet them. I still can't believe LinkedIn isn't doing this. It just seems like it's there for them to grab and own.

@TTrimoreau Need to spam more

Progress matters. But visibility multiplies it. Are you visible enough?

about to drop our first product teaser. If you’re interested in bcis and frontier tech, stay tuned… In the meantime, check out flowstatebci.com

@rxhit05 This is great thanks

Reddit is the easiest place to get your first users. If you’re building a startup, post in: Founders / Startups: r/entrepreneur r/startups r/SaaS r/sideProject r/indiehackers r/entrepreneurRideAlong r/buildinpublic r/solopreneur r/microSaaS Ideas & Validation: r/startup_resources r/appIdeas r/business_Ideas r/startup_Ideas Growth: r/growthHacking r/scaleinpublic r/growmybusiness r/indiebiz Builders: r/webdev r/webdesign Marketing: r/marketing r/ecommerce r/freelance r/SEO r/socialMediaMarketing r/advertising r/PPC r/content_marketing r/askMarketing Feedback + Users: r/roastMyStartup r/alphaandBetaUsers r/startups_promotion r/plugyourproduct r/madethis r/imadethis

@Cookiesarefunnn Looks useful

how to get 100 users a day → go to geodo.ai → paste your url → Automate your LinkedIn, email, reddit, agent mail, sub stack, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook → Makes everything sound exactly like you.

@Peter_Soida Looks great. If interested, check out waitlist signup if you want to stay in email list / put down $10 for EA

@YKischapped Thanks! Check our site! newpoint.press

I’m a student building a startup - 2400 people following the journey - connecting with 6-figure creators - building a “YouTube for articles” still early a lot to figure out launch will help If you’re into startups, tech, writing, or media - say hi 👋

@Peter_Soida Cool stuff

@YKischapped Launching soon!

@Peter_Soida MVP done, pilot study data looks good for cognitive enhancement, got some early traction but def ways to go. Wbu?

@YKischapped interesting And how is it going?

@ajhodls Loved this breakdown

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.

@Peter_Soida Flowstatebci.com - non invasive neurotech wearable that tracks and augments cognition with the help of audio frequency

@YKischapped thanks man! Hope it will! Btw, are you building smth?

@heyblake Flowstatebci.com

Fork it Drop your landing page URL I'll give 1 piece of advice to as many of you as I can

@DStrachman I think it’s great that more firms are starting to focus sci-fi and physical ai. Super nice change of pace to have something tangible in hand, rather than the usual enterprise SaaS approach

Love working with the team at Boost! Like us, they are eager to be the first check and love spaces that are sci-fi!

@MicroLaunchHQ Building flowstatebci.com - a noninvasive neurotech wearable sitting behind the ear that tracks + augments cognition. B2B2C applications with our neural data layer

What are you building or marketing this week? Let’s drive you traffic.

@dunkhippo33 Needs to be a fundamental shift from enterprise SaaS to startups that are solving real problems for the everyday

In AI, the fundraising market is extremely bifurcated now. There are founders who are raising tons of money for new AI ideas. And other people can't raise a dime because they're working on things that a lot of other ppl are doing.

Whenever I have the temptation to break my focus score, I go on X and cathartically post.