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JC
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4/ Some VCs are great
Some VCs are exceptions to the rule. Folks who know their sh*t.
I wish I had a full list but I don’t.
But YC is a good example.
Partners are founders.
Their advice comes from experience.
They prioritize founders over the firm.
Even if it’s not optimal for YC itself.
Those types are worth listening to.
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3/ VC tips are usually garbage
Yes, they talk to a lot of founders.
Yes, they see a lot of business.
Yes, they think about market trends.
But just because you eat at restaurants does not qualify you to run one - nor should you give advice to the chef.
they are not founders.
they are not customers.
So advice is worth nil.
More often than not it’s shallow, half-cooked advice coming from their 10k ft view perspective.
It throws more founders off than it helps.
So don’t change your strategy because a VC says so - easy way to destroy your business.
Listen to customers over everything.
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I raised over $3m in 2 weeks.
Here’s why you should never take advice from VCs.
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1/ VCs need you “on the hook”
Harry Stebbings@HarryStebbings
Founders, when the VC starts advising you on the fundraise and giving you tips on how to raise, that is when they are signalling this is not for them.
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Unpopular opinion: It’s the best time to start a company and the worst time to own one.
It’s never been easier to take down the incumbent.
Todd Saunders@toddsaunders
I heard an incredible analogy from a VC friend that I can’t stop thinking about. “The moat in software was the cost of building software. And Claude Code just mass produced a bridge.” It’s wild when you think about the impact of this. The SaaS boom produced a few dozen billionaires and a bunch of zero sum winners. But the AI SaaS era will mass produce millionaires. There will be fewer ServiceTitans hitting $5B valuations, and instead there will be 50,000 companies doing $500K-$5M each, run by 1-3 people with deep expertise and huge margins. To be clear, I believe that the total value of software goes up, and the number of companies created goes up exponentially. But the number of people who capture the value also goes up 100x. I don’t believe in the “SaaS is dying” headline, I think it’s missing the point. It’s simply that the power of SaaS is changing hands.
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@StrictParental distribution is still challenging - the main defense against copies.
most copies don't realize how much of the 'special sauce' lives outside of the product.
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@shiftj speed-to-ship but also need to know how to market what you're selling
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Copy culture hitting an all time high right now.
Article goes viral? Copied.
Feature gets love? Copied.
Company launches? Copied.
13 competitors by the next day.
No moats.
(Not complaining, just observing)
JC@shiftj
Unpopular opinion: It’s the best time to start a company and the worst time to own one. It’s never been easier to take down the incumbent.
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True.
And even beyond existing industries and sectors, Entrepreneurship is the new “job” anyone can have and create new verticals.
AI makes building something your own 100x faster. There are different challenges now but execution is much easier than ever before.
JC@shiftj
Unpopular opinion: It’s the best time to start a company and the worst time to own one. It’s never been easier to take down the incumbent.
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@shiftj Yeah the productivity thing is weird. Like you get better at stuff but then just pile on more work
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@shiftj Agreed.
The ease of data capture is inverse to the value of the data.
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@EncodedInsight Even still, never been easier to compete. Also, that advantage may be also be at risk in the coming years as data becomes easier and easier to capture and migrate (this is already a growing trend)
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@shiftj As an incumbent it depends on a few factors including how good your data is and how much overhead bloat you have.
Basically, do you have a data advantage over a new market entrant and can you move fast enough to use the data.
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@shiftj AI didn't save you time, it removed the friction that used to make you quit for the night. The "ugh this is annoying" wall was your off switch and now it's gone.
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I’m somehow more productive than ever yet working more hours than ever.
Who else is hooked on building rn?
andrew chen@andrewchen
AI is supposed to save me time, but now I find myself building stuff all evening and weekend and it's actually increasing my time in front of the computer WTF
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I just saw my lawyer friend *literally* read 1,000 pages of documents trying to pull out the facts for his case.
It took him 3 days, what a waste of time..
Friends don't let friends manually read 1k pages of documents. Going to spend the weekend automating that for him.
If you've got any lawyer friends, send em my way.
Happy to share the love.
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@shiftj Basically just LLM powered doc review - prompt based search of relevant sections that were linked and summarized for the user
e.g. Give me any document section that refers to or could be related to the {incident}
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@shiftj Incredible. Would love to play around with it when you have an MVP ready — I could really use something like that too since I do video editing and I hate reading my mail.
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I just finished a v1 of a tool to convert PDFs to mark down files to solve this exact problem:
JC@shiftj
I just saw my lawyer friend *literally* read 1,000 pages of documents trying to pull out the facts for his case. It took him 3 days, what a waste of time.. Friends don't let friends manually read 1k pages of documents. Going to spend the weekend automating that for him. If you've got any lawyer friends, send em my way. Happy to share the love.
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