facts that were true in 2020 > the average founder of a top 0.1% startup was 45 > 50-year-old founders were 2x more likely to succeed than 30-year-olds > founders in their early 20s had the lowest chances of a successful exit > even in tech, the average founder was around 40 > 3+ years of industry experience doubled your odds of building a top startup > founders who successfully exited were 46.7 on average facts that are true in 2026 > average AI unicorn founder age dropped from 40 in 2020 to 29 in 2024 > AI startups reach unicorn status in 4.7 years vs ~7 years historically > outside AI, unicorn founders are still getting older > health and biotech unicorn founders are older than those in other sectors > 40% of unicorn founders are repeat entrepreneurs > 25% of unicorn founders are immigrants

the most active crypto investors who are early on Cosign: cosign.co/lists/paulklayvc/w… lmk who I'm missing!

the exact same principles that apply to poker also apply to venture capital 1. the right decision can still lose going all-in with pocket aces is usually the right move, even if your opponent ends up hitting the card they need. investing in a great company can also be the right decision, even if it eventually gets written off you always need to think long-term. if you're consistently making bets with positive expected value, you should come out ahead over enough repetitions but you can still lose money in the short term, and that doesn't make you a bad investor 2. trust your intuition only when you've seen the same situation a hundred times intuition should work like a trained neural network. with enough training data, it performs well in familiar situations. but when it encounters something completely new, it's much more likely to get things wrong that's why decisions in unfamiliar territory deserve more time and careful thinking 3. discipline starts with your deal funnel we see dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pitches every day, but we've invested in just over 28 companies you need real conviction before making an investment. there's no reason to deploy capital just for the sake of deploying it at the same time, you can't afford to move slowly when a great deal comes along the trick is knowing how to wait patiently and act fast when it matters 4. remember what founders promised you one of the most useful habits I've developed is writing down the promises and milestones founders give you, then comparing them with what actually happens this works for companies you've invested in, companies you might invest in later, or even just to test your own judgment and with AI, tracking all of this has become incredibly easy if the actual numbers are even remotely close to what the founder projected, that's already a great sign even better if they managed to pivot and achieve much better results in my experience, 95% of the time, the results look completely different 5. know when you're going to fold before the hand starts you should have a clear plan for when to walk away before you even play the hand in venture, this becomes especially important when a portfolio company asks for a bridge round I think the best approach is to evaluate the opportunity as if you were seeing the company for the first time would you invest in this company today, knowing everything you know now? if the answer is no, you probably shouldn't put more money in the fact that you've already invested isn't a good enough reason to invest again 6. be honest with yourself you're going to make mistakes in both poker and investing. the important part is learning from them and constantly improving your judgment one of the GPs at Begin Capital always says something I really like: after your first 100 deals, you love everything. after 2,000, you think everything is terrible. only after that does your radar finally become calibrated, and you start making good investment decisions and there are some great examples of people who went from professional poker to successful careers in VC: @hosseeb, @pratyushbuddiga, @seanlippel, @gametheorizing, @JeffGrossPoker, @phil_hellmuth, @zachcoelius

just got my first X payout thinking of giving 100% of every payout to my top 10 supporters each month the more we grow, the bigger the rewards should I do it?

if you get FOMO every time a new model drops or some guy posts how he automated his entire job don’t everything is moving way too fast. there’s a new model, tool, agent, use case every day and 99% of it won’t change your life or make you more money unless you actually need it rn, you probably don’t need to learn it you don’t need another vibe coding course just to “keep up” you don’t need 20 AI tools in your workflow and you definitely don’t need your own 17-agent orchestration system because some guy on X said it runs his entire company use AI when it saves you time on boring shit that’s enough your actual edge is still your expertise, taste, network, and ability to get things done if everything worked like AI companies and headlines make it sound, half the businesses around us would already be dead you’d know instead, most AI products are still looking for PMF and some companies are already rolling back AI implementations that didn’t work saw a great analogy today: in the 90s, people knew every processor, motherboard, sound card, GPU, RAM manufacturer, hard drive a lot of people built their own computers how many people need to know any of that today? probably 0.1% AI will probably go through the same thing, just 10x faster everyone rn is learning how to build agents, connect tools, create workflows and set up their own orchestration systems in a year, a lot of that knowledge might be completely useless building computers went from useful to unnecessary for most people in 10 years building agents could do it in one so yeah you can probably just sit back and wait

stop paying for customer acquisition before you try this give an agent your business and acquisition budget it’ll find people who already have access to your customers, figure out how to partner with them, and build the whole channel for you just open-sourced the skill for free here’s what it did for an AI implementation agency with only $500/month to spend on acquisition: - $3k per implementation - 2 clients so far - room for 2 more a month $500 isn’t much if you’re trying to compete for paid traffic but this business only needs 2 more clients a month so instead of going after customers directly, the skill started with a much better question: who already has access to them? it mapped out 7 groups: business coaches, fractional CFOs, peer advisory groups, agency consultants, trade coaches, law and accounting advisors, and tech partners then sent 7 research agents out in parallel 45 potential partners came back it narrowed those down to the best 30 based on customer overlap, incentives, competition, and how realistic the partnership actually was then the useful part started for every partner, it found a public contact route and explained why they were a fit the best opportunities were ranked, with the top 5 picked to start with then it worked out what to offer them the whole point is to avoid paying upfront, so it looks at what the business already has that could be valuable to a partner revenue share, reciprocal referrals, custom work, access, upside, or something else that makes sense for both sides from there, it wrote personalized outreach for the top 5 and worked out the economics behind each partnership then it turned the whole thing into a 60-day pilot with clear targets and a point where you stop if it isn’t working so you don’t end up with another AI-generated spreadsheet full of names you get: who already has your customers -> who to partner with -> what to offer -> how to reach them -> whether the economics work -> what to test first all built around a $500/month budget the skill is open source and free send this to Claude Code, Codex, or any other agent with terminal access: run npx skills add paulklayvc/skills --skill bootstrap-growth and set it up for this agent

People who actively invest in solo founders: - @julianweisser + @_guglielmo (Solo Founders Program, $100k checks) - @aridutilh + @FedericoNoemie (Solo Grants, $1k grants) - @jmj (Chapter One Ventures) - @patmatthews (Active Capital) - @brettcalhounn (Redbud VC) - @CindyXBi (CapitalX) - @EricJorgenson - @JoshConstine (SignalFire) - @bentossell - @alexfmac (Sequel) - @joshu - @ColinGardiner (Yonder Ventures) - @crapshoot101 (POV Ventures) - @MindaBrusse (First Row Partners) - @hyperdima (Hyperstition VC) - @jan_olsson (Extantia) - @TheRealMcHoy (Mordecai Seed)