Switching Venture Firms Is Not a Job Search
Transitioning between venture capital firms differs fundamentally from a typical job search. Because the senior VC talent pool is small, moves depend on existing relationships and how peers rank you, not on open listings. The article outlines a mental ranking system, emphasizing that reputation, independent deal flow, and network visibility drive opportunities, while recruiters play a minor role at senior levels. It also advises discreet exploration to maintain leverage during a transition.
Upcoming HIPAA Compliance Deadline: HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices Updates Required by February 16
Group health plan sponsors must revise their HIPAA Notices of Privacy Practices by February 16, 2026 to incorporate new Part 2 privacy protections for substance‑abuse treatment records. The update requires clear language on prohibited uses, legal‑process limitations, and an opt‑out option...
Are Plaintiff Attorneys' Fee Awards in the Delaware Chancery Court Excessive? Part IV
In this episode, the host revisits the ongoing debate about plaintiff attorney fee awards in the Delaware Court of Chancery, focusing on the new empirical study "Is Delaware Different? Stockholder Lawyering in the Court of Chancery" by Stephen J. Choi,...
Survey Finds Optimism on Growth in 2026 Despite Cyber and Tech Risks
A new Protiviti and NC State ERM survey of over 1,500 global executives reveals strong optimism about revenue growth through 2026, with nearly 70% seeing significant opportunities despite ongoing economic, geopolitical, and technological turbulence. Leaders are shifting from risk avoidance...
Should We Audit Organizational Culture or Behavior?
The IIA’s new Topical Requirement outlines what an organizational‑behavior audit could include, but it does not make such audits mandatory. Norman Marks argues that a standalone audit of culture or behavior is rarely appropriate, recommending instead a risk‑based approach that...
Sleeping Giants
The administration is signaling a willingness to enlist government‑sponsored enterprises (GSEs) such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in its effort to push mortgage rates lower. After the 2008 crisis, the GSEs’ mortgage holdings shrank dramatically, but policymakers see an...
Open APIs Are Over
After two decades of thriving on open APIs, major software platforms are erecting barriers. Salesforce limited Slack’s API calls, Datadog disabled a rival observability startup, and Epic faces a lawsuit over restricting patient‑record access. The acceleration of AI‑driven development enables...
Gross Profit per Token
Meta announced a $2 billion acquisition of Singapore‑based AI agent firm Manus, which reported $100 million annual recurring revenue and 147 trillion tokens processed since its March 2025 launch. The deal underscores the relevance of gross profit per token as a valuation lens,...
Y-Combinator’s Framework for Building a Successful MVP.
The episode breaks down Y‑Combinator’s MVP framework, emphasizing that a Minimum Viable Product must be both minimal and viable—enough to let real users test the core solution. It contrasts founder mindsets, shows how Airbnb, Twitch, and Stripe launched ultra‑simple versions...
12 Predictions for 2026
Tom Tunguz outlines twelve 2026 forecasts, from AI agents commanding higher fees than human workers to a record‑breaking liquidity wave driven by IPOs from SpaceX, OpenAI and others. He predicts vector databases becoming essential AI infrastructure and agents autonomously handling...
How Big Is AI Spending, Really? | Using ChatGPT for Competitive Analysis. | Measuring Real Efficiency in Venture Exits.
The episode breaks down three major trends: AI infrastructure spending is already 1.6% of U.S. GDP and could near 3% by 2030, dwarfing past tech booms but still far from wartime mobilisations; female‑founder funding in Europe is rising in absolute...
Elad Gil’s Framework for Spotting Billion-Dollar Markets Before They Look Big.
Elad Gil explains how to uncover billion‑dollar markets that appear small or unappealing by prioritizing market size over ideas, using first‑principles analysis, solving personal pain points, and validating demand through paying customers. He outlines four spotting principles and three market...
The Bifurcation in the AI Market
The AI market is splitting into two distinct camps: open‑source models, which remain roughly 22‑25% of usage despite being 10‑100× cheaper, and proprietary providers that retain pricing power for high‑value workloads. Open‑source share held steady, briefly spiking to 35% during...
The Average Founder Ages 6 Months Each Year
The median age of founders raising venture capital is climbing about six months each year, a shift driven by three forces: the surge in AI‑focused funding, the growing dominance of B2B models, and a media narrative that over‑highlights youthful, consumer‑centric...
The Toll of Stress on Startup Teams and Its Link to Founder Well-Being
Startup Snapshot’s second report reveals that 80% of startup employees say their mental health has suffered, with half experiencing burnout and 52% reporting anxiety. Founder stress is visible to 57% of staff, yet only 10% of founders discuss it openly....
The Two Context Databases Powering Enterprise AI
Enterprises are adopting two distinct context databases—operational and analytical—to serve as the new system of record for AI agents. Operational databases capture procedural knowledge and trade secrets, while analytical databases encode metric definitions and reasoning logic. The article emphasizes that...
The AI Value Gap : Where Does the $7,000 Per Seat Go?
A new OpenAI study finds AI saves white‑collar workers 54 minutes daily, translating to roughly $7,282 of recovered productivity per seat each year. Current SaaS pricing—ChatGPT Plus, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Google Workspace AI, and Gamma—captures only 3‑5% of that value,...
Streaming Comes Into the Fold
IBM announced an $11.1 billion acquisition of Confluent, valuing the streaming‑platform provider at 10 × its last‑twelve‑month revenue. Confluent, the commercial arm behind Apache Kafka, serves more than 40 % of Fortune 500 firms and posted Q3 revenue of $298.5 million, up 19.3 % YoY, with...
Coming Soon: Harry Stebbings on the State of Venture
In this episode, Harry Stebbings examines the rapid transformation of venture capital, focusing on shifting valuation dynamics, the impact of AI hype on startup success, and the emergence of a new capital stack that founders and investors must navigate. He...
How to Build an Investor CRM (With Template) | The Four Product Discovery Models: Where Your Company Really Operates.
In this episode, Sahil S explains that successful fundraising is 80% organization and introduces a simple investor CRM built in Google Sheets, complete with a downloadable template. He walks listeners through essential columns—contact info, investor type, referrer, and stage—showing how...
Top 10 Posts of 2025
The 2025 "Top 10 Posts" roundup highlights a paradox in AI: OpenAI pledged $1.15 trillion in compute contracts through 2035 while DeepSeek demonstrated a 90%+ drop in training costs with its V3 and R1 models. Nvidia’s $110 billion vendor‑financing scheme dwarfs the...
The Metric that Predicts AI Product Success. | Why AI Coding Assistants May Slow You Down. | How to Actually...
The episode examines three core themes: the productivity paradox of AI coding assistants, which often slow developers despite a perceived speed boost and introduce security risks; the concentrated nature of AI venture funding, where massive capital flows into a few...
20VC Newsletter - 30th November 2025
In this 20VC newsletter episode, Harry Stebbings interviews Base44 founder Maor Shlomo, who argues that traditional SaaS will fade as "vibe coding" enables companies to own their tools and data, and highlights Google as the real competitive threat while emphasizing...
How to Do User Research without Users: The Synthetic User Guide. | The Truth About ChatGPT Enterprise Adoption.
Unicorns are back: what founders must understand right now & VC Jobs
Private Equity : The New Distribution Channel for AI Startups
The post argues that private equity (PE) firms have become the primary distribution channel for AI startups, thanks to the rapid growth of PE‑owned companies—now outnumbering public firms 4:1 in the US. Because PE portfolios consist mainly of mid‑market firms...
The Scaling Wall Was A Mirage
The post argues that the supposed "scaling wall" in AI pre‑training has been disproven by recent developments: Gemini 3 achieved dramatic performance gains without increasing parameters, showing that algorithmic and compute improvements still drive scaling laws, and Nvidia's record earnings and...
20VC Newsletter - 16th November 2025
The episode features three separate interviews: Everett Randle of Benchmark explains why mega‑funds prioritize capital velocity, proposes new AI‑company valuation metrics, and shares lessons from Mary Meeker; Rory O’Driscoll and Jason Lemkin discuss a looming Palantir valuation correction, the accelerating...
Y-Combinator Pitch Deck Framework: Access 50+ Decks That Raised Over $450M.
In this episode, Sahil S breaks down Y Combinator’s proven pitch‑deck framework for seed‑stage startups, outlining a clear slide structure—from title and problem to traction, market size, and the ask—while emphasizing narrative simplicity and investor memorability. He highlights why a...
How Big Is AI Spend, Really? | What 180M Job Postings Reveal About AI’s Impact. | VC's Turning Into a...
The episode breaks down the massive scale of AI infrastructure spending, now at 1.6% of U.S. GDP and projected to approach $1 trillion annually by 2030, dwarfing historic economic mobilisations. It also highlights Europe’s narrowing valuation gap with the U.S. at...
The Growth Strategy Most Startups Overlook: Engineering-as-Marketing. | The Smartest Startup Pivot in Recent AI History.
The episode introduces Engineering-as-Marketing, a growth tactic where startups build free, useful tools that double as product experiences and marketing assets, allowing them to acquire users organically without heavy ad spend. It explains why the approach works—low competition, upfront value,...
It’s Not Just You. Everyone Is Paying a Lot More for AI Engineers. Especially Equity.
In this SaaStr AI episode, Jason Lemkin highlights Carta’s data showing AI engineers’ equity grants soaring up to 40% while salary growth remains modest, driven by an "AI or Die" mindset, big‑tech poaching, and perceived massive upside. He warns founders...
The only AI Prompt Guide You Need for Idea Validation & Competitor Research. | Why VCs Pull Back From China...
The episode breaks down three major trends: AI deal activity is slowing in volume but concentrating in massive mega‑rounds, while VC and PE bonuses stay flat and secondaries see double‑digit bonus growth; venture capital is sharply retreating from China’s AI...
If You Ever Think "Should I Fire This Person?" Even Once ... Well, Then It's Time
In this episode, Jason Lemkin argues that the moment a leader questions whether to fire an employee, the answer should be an immediate, compassionate termination. He explains how gut instincts synthesize performance data, and why retaining "pretty good" or mediocre...
Are We Being Railroaded by AI?
The post compares AI infrastructure spending to historic U.S. investment projects, showing AI at 1.6% of GDP in 2024—far below World War II, the New Deal, and the railroad boom. It highlights current corporate outlays (Microsoft, Google, Meta) and projects OpenAI’s...
The Three Sales Frameworks Every Early-Stage Founder Needs. | Template-Tips: Everything You Need to Raise a Successful Seed Round
The article presents three story‑centric sales frameworks that early‑stage founders should adopt – crafting a compelling founder narrative, leveraging concrete customer success stories, and structuring sales calls around those stories – each backed by simple templates and real examples. Sahil...
The Top 10 Mistakes I See In The VP of Sales Hiring Process
The post lists the ten most common errors founders make when hiring a VP of Sales, emphasizing that a successful hire must deeply understand the product, be willing to sell and close deals themselves, and bring a ready pipeline of...
20VC Newsletter - 2nd November 2025
The newsletter recaps three recent 20VC episodes, highlighting AI’s shift from dollars to gigawatts, the commoditization of compute, and the rapid scaling of AI startups to $100 M revenue, while questioning high AI talent pay and the relevance of gross margins....
Y-Combinator’s New Batch Doubles Down on Production-Ready AI, Unconventional Tactics for Validating Your Startup Ideas & Measuring True Efficiency in...
Paid AI adoption in the United States slipped 0.7% in September, but enterprise contract values surged from $143 K in 2024 to $530 K in 2025, showing a move from experimentation to deep integration. Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch of 165+ startups mirrors this...
It only Took 20 Years, but the Strategic Management Society Now Believes the Lean Startup Is a Strategy
After two decades, the Strategic Management Society has formally recognized the Lean Startup approach as a legitimate strategy, marking a symbolic shift in how iterative, customer-driven methods are viewed by mainstream strategy scholars. The movement originated from the author’s post-retirement...
From Zero to Eight Figures in 18 Months: Decagon CEO’s Playbook for AI-Native SaaS Growth. And Why They Partnered With...
Decagon, founded in late 2023, scaled to eight‑figure ARR in roughly 18 months by selling AI customer‑service agents to major enterprises including Hertz and Chime, claiming roughly $800K in annual savings for every $250K spent. Backed by Accel at Series...
40+ Investor Databases for Easier VC Outreach (Free Access) | How to Execute Your Own Offline Outbound.
A curated collection of 40+ free investor databases has been published to simplify startup fundraising and offline outbound outreach, pooling lists vetted by The Venture Curator team. The compilation includes large, searchable rolls such as 2,000 US VCs, 900 climate...
20VC Newsletter - 26th October 2025
20VC’s latest newsletter synthesizes three interviews with practical takeaways for founders and investors: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz laid out a repeatable M&A playbook that rebuilds frontends in months and full backends to hit product scale in about nine months (vs....
Product-Market Fit Is No Longer Static
Venture investor Tomasz Tunguz argues product-market fit (PMF) is no longer a one-time milestone but a continuous condition because rapid advances in AI are constantly reshaping customer needs and technical possibilities. He points to firms that lost PMF between 2021–2024,...
The Bear Roars: Dan and Brad
On The Bear Roars podcast, Dan Caruso and guest explored how advances in AI, quantum computing and robotics are reshaping not just technology but learning, leadership and collaboration, with a central claim that equitable access — broadband, curiosity and freedom...
The Forecast Model Every Startup Needs (with Free Template). | VC & Startup Jobs.
A simple, reusable financial forecast model — with a free Google Sheets template — is presented as essential for startups to project cash flow, prioritize spending, and guide fundraising and hiring decisions. The model focuses on five core sections: customer...
20VC Newsletter - 19th October 2025
The 20VC newsletter (Oct. 19, 2025) distills three podcast episodes featuring Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon‑Brookes, investors Rory O’Driscoll, Jason Lemkin and Roger Ehrenberg, and Warp CEO Zach Lloyd, highlighting how AI will expand software development, reshape pricing models, and leave...
How Founders Should Think About Runway: A Guide From Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital published guidance urging founders to treat runway as a dynamic strategic metric, not just cash divided by burn, recommending use of net cash (cash minus drawn debt) and monthly cash burn (cash in minus cash out) to get...
The Data Pendulum Swings to Consolidation
Fivetran and dbt Labs have announced a merger in an all-stock deal, creating a combined entity with an anticipated annual recurring revenue (ARR) nearing $600 million, signaling a strategic shift towards consolidation in the data infrastructure market. This merger reflects...
20VC Newsletter - 12th October 2025
Here are the transcripts and top takeaways from 20VC episodes released this last week.
Is Token Consumption Growth Slowing Down?
Philip Schmid dropped an astounding figure1 yesterday about Google’s AI scale : 1,300 trillion tokens per month (1.3 quadrillion - first time I’ve ever used that unit!). Now that we have three data points on Google’s token processing, we can chart...