We're excited to introduce @sistilli and @StephTreacy, the founders of Fallom Labs building @nightmarketai. The API marketplace where AI agents discover and pay for services on-chain. No API keys, no subscriptions. The team includes: • Serial founder and software engineer who sold his last startup in esports; previously worked at Stripe • YouTuber with 400,000+ developer followers across platforms, providing direct access to a large technical audience • Former Amazon Robotics engineer who built the first autonomous robotic workcell • Deep expertise in AI safety, critical automation, and large-scale production systems • Proven track record in both building and selling companies From esports to robotics to the agent economy, this team combines technical depth with massive distribution to build the infrastructure layer for agentic commerce. Meet the founders of 👇 nightmarket.ai @focal_vc | @thelabmiami

We're excited to introduce you to @itsEthanKeiser, the founder behind ORDERSHIELD AI - tackling fraud prevention and order protection in a >$50B market with AI-native solutions. @itsEthanKeiser's background includes: • Ex-TikTok engineer and serial entrepreneur who built Parallel Live to 5M+ users before a successful exit • The most-followed computer scientist on TikTok with 1.3M followers • Proven track record of building and scaling consumer products to millions of users • Deep technical expertise combined with massive audience reach @itsEthanKeiser is bringing engineering excellence and distribution power to revolutionize fraud prevention. Meet the founder of 👇 🌐 ordershield.ai @focal_vc | @thelabmiami

We're excited to introduce the founders behind COOL LABS - a team pushing the frontier of AI research into real-world applications with a focus on agentic AI for participant engagement in clinical, consumer, and life sciences research. The team includes: • A PhD from UT Austin in AI and life sciences. Recipient of 2023 Meta PhD fellow • Best Paper Award winner at leading academic venues (ACM UbiComp and IEEE ICASSP) • Graduate researchers specializing in NLP, explainable AI, and language-vision systems • Builders who've shipped ML-driven citizen science games and scalable AI production systems • Dual degree holders in CS + Cognitive Science from top programs This powerhouse trio combines cutting-edge research credentials with proven execution skills to advance AI where it matters most. Meet the founders 👇 Dawei Liang, Tongxin Gao, and Yuan Lu! 🌐 coollabs.ai

We just kicked off the @focal_vc x @thelabmiami W26 founder residency with an incredible density of technical talent coming in from NYC, Boston, Austin, Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, and London. The founders include: - Serial entrepreneurs - The "most followed Computer Scientist on TikTok" with 1.3M followers - AI PhD's and published academics - MIT engineers - Georgia Tech drop outs - Ex-Stripe / TikTok / Amazon / etc engineers - Ex quants, and - A 17 year old prodigy There are 8 companies / 15 founders in the batch with every single one of them being technical. Meet them here 👇 .

10 spots. 3 months. 1 goal: Build a venture-scale company. We’re bringing together the best technical AI builders for an exclusive residency in Miami this winter. Think the firepower of a top accelerator - WITHOUT the heavy dilution. What you're signing up for: - Hyper selective (10 startups only) - Highly intense (6+ days / week in office) - Fully in person (Miami relocation required, costs of move offset) Plus get mentored by unicorn founders incl. DigitalOcean ($4B NYSE), Mural ($2B), Papa ($1B), vLex (acquired for $1B), Quicknode ($1B), Spotnana ($1B), and more. Importantly: There’s no “too early” - apply with nothing more than your drive, your idea, and the ability to ship exceptional products at breakneck speed. A few spots remain - apply asap at focal.vc/residency By @focal_vc x @thelabmiami

𝐋𝐚𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐡 𝐀𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐭: Winter 2026 Residency for Technical Founders at Inception! This winter, we’re bringing together 10 hardcore AI builders for an exclusive residency in Miami with all the firepower of a top accelerator without the heavy dilution! This is the most talent-dense, high-velocity, carefully curated launchpad for technical AI founders outside SF to start a venture scale company - AND you get to escape the harsh winter while you ship! The 3+ month residency - hosted in partnership with The LAB Miami - is hyper selective (10 startups only), highly intense (6+ days / week in office) and fully in person (Miami relocation required / costs offset). Plus you get mentored by unicorn founders including Digital Ocean ($4B NYSE), Mural ($2B), Papa ($1B), vLex (acquired for $1B), Quicknode ($1B), Spotnana ($1B), and many more. The best part: There’s no “too early” - apply with nothing more than your drive to build a venture scale company, your idea, and the ability to ship exceptional products at breakneck speed. Applications just opened - apply at focal.vc/residency to start in Jan 2026! 𝐏𝐒: 𝐓𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐫 𝐚 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐫, 𝐭𝐚𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐞’𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. @focal_vc

Pump.co (@pumpdotco) is one of the fastest growing YC companies. It’s no surprise - both their product and sales team are incredible. Now - for the 1st time - @wolfofmarketst, (employee #1 / sales leader) opens up about how they built a sales team that helped them grow from $0 to significant eight-figure ARR in just 2 years. Here are cornerstones of their sales hiring process: 1) Hire hunters Don’t hire “process people”. Hire super hungry, full‑cycle sellers who both prospect and close hard. Hire for brains, drive, and a bias to action - not logos on a résumé. Prioritize ultra‑competitive individuals. @pumpdotco has had a lot of success with D1 / elite individual‑sport athletes (rowing, swimming, tennis, etc) who went to top schools. These individuals are comfortable with early starts, long days, being measured directly, and learning fast. Other profiles that succeed at @pumpdotco in sales are founder‑aspirants with analytical majors from top schools. 2) Source candidates you’re selling Treat recruiting like pipeline gen. Go outbound. Fish where startup‑minded people already are like YC’s Bookface (filter top‑20 schools + “athlete”), and LinkedIn using founder / accelerator signals in company names (eg YC, SPC, AI Startup School). Then pull their numbers (Apollo / Clay) and call them like a customer - open with a crisp hook, follow with traction, mission, and why this call matters: “We grew from 0 to $xxM [significant eight‑figure] ARR in ~2 years, are 50+ people, and save companies money on AWS / GCP / Azure for free. We’re hiring founding sellers and give them real equity. Got 60 seconds?” Don’t ever ask them if they’re “free to chat”. Every sentence must be earned. 3) Apply the right filters 3 major filters are: 1/ 15 min initial screen: Screen for (1) intellectual curiosity, (2) desire for autonomy, (3) willingness to work very hard for a great financial outcome, (4) a tilt toward extroversion for sales - great but more introverted candidates are routed to ops / other paths. 2/ Practical panel: Put candidates through mock cold calls with escalating objections followed by feedback. Then, the candidates immediately have to rerun the mock calls. This tests for willingness to sell and coach-ability. 3/ Discipline + clarity: Two important traits to thrive, tested as following: • Discipline: Daily habits that survive long days (sleep, gym, reading, reflection). • Clarity: Explain a financial concept to a second‑grader in max 4 sentences. @pumpdotco's product is technical but the pitch can’t be - sellers need to be able to translate complexity into simple language customers can act on. The bottom line: Hire competitive learners who want the ball. Source them outbound, test them in live fire, and filter for clarity and discipline. Technique is teachable, drive isn’t. For more on @pumpdotco's sales hiring and organization, check out the podcast episode - LINK IN COMMENTS

"The real runway of a company is the number of pivots you have left in you." @handotdev, Co-Founder and CEO of @mintlify, knows this better than pretty much anyone. @mintlify pivoted 8 times during their first 14 months before finding Product-Market-Fit and eventually raising > $20M from a16z, Bain Capital Ventures, and YC. While those 14 months felt like “chewing on glass”, @handotdev learned a lot of valuable lessons he shared with me during our conversation, including: 1. Bet on a space you care about, not a specific idea 2. If, when, and how to pivot 3. Speed is your only advantage For the full playbook on surviving multiple pivots, maximizing learning velocity, and recognizing real product-market fit, check out our conversation on the focal podcast and subscribe to my Substack (LINK IN COMMENTS).

"People will not allocate legitimate money to your idea unless they actually need it" Every week, I talk to founders who mistake politeness for product-market fit. They collect positive feedback, encouraging words, and even LOIs. This is all great but by far the strongest signal as to whether you’re onto something is actual revenue. I recently spoke with @santiycr about this, the Co-Founder and CEO of @dealmomentum, who spent 15 years as a successful engineering leader before deliberately building for sales teams - a market he knew nothing about. He went from "never sold anything" to building a thriving AI sales company in a short time period and has many lessons to share that especially fellow technical founders need to hear. Including: 1. Everyone Loves to Give Advice, No One Wants To Buy - Why revealing your product in the first 5 minutes guarantees false signals, and how to navigate the brutal transition from beloved advisor-seeker to rejected vendor 2. Outbound Can't Wait For Product Market Fit - Start cold outreach before you have a product (yes, really), plus the "Fellow Portfolio Company" email that unlocks 100+ warm leads per customer 3. Revenue is the Only Truth - Why $1,000 on a corporate card is politeness not validation, and how to push for amounts that prove real pain exists For the full playbook, listen to our conversation on the focal podcast (LINK IN COMMENTS) and if you want to receive the most powerful insights from this and many other conversation in your inbox, subscribe to my newsletter (LINK IN COMMENTS).

"Finally a startup podcast where you actually learn something that matters!" That's what I set out to do when I started having discussions with founders and operators around potentially doing a podcast. Why? Because most startup podcasts are basically a highlight reel that barely scratch the surface across the 20+ topics they cover. They're entertaining - but you don't actually learn anything useful. Thus, meet the focal podcast where I go deep with some of today's best founders / operators on ONE crucial lesson they learned the hard way early on. No fluff, just the real, actionable insights you'd get if these founders were mentoring you 1-on-1. Our debut episode - launched today - tackles a critical mistake most founders make early on: “Most startups don’t focus on growth nearly early enough.” This comes from @austinh___ who knows startup growth better than almost anyone else. As a former early growth lead at @tryramp and now the co-founder and CEO of @unifygtm (>$30M raised from @ThriveCapital , @emergencecap, @OpenAI), Austin has both built a growth organization from scratch as well as helped scale one faster than almost anyone else. A few weeks ago, I had a fascinating conversation with him that changed how I think about growth at startups, including: 1. Experimentation speed is everything 2. Why you have to start with outbound from day 1 3. To win, move from cold to warm outbound 4. Why to build your growth team as early as possible 5. The ultimate startup moat: Building in public Starting tomorrow, I'll also share insights from these conversations in writing. For more, check out our conversation on the newly launched focal podcast and subscribe to my Substack for the write ups (LINK IN COMMENTS).