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Founder walked into my office.
I was doing a cold plunge with 2 LPs.
He said he had 400% net revenue retention.
I asked how much ketchup he ate as a kid.
He said his family used mayonnaise.
I got out of the water and asked security to escort him out.
Keith @rabois explains his Ketchup theory:
"I still believe that ketchup is really good for you when you're a kid. People who are successful were eating a lot of ketchup when they were young."
"Malcolm @Gladwell also has a chapter on how ketchup is the perfect food."
" I've just noticed observationally that when I talk with some of my friends, I'm like, 'How much ketchup did you have when you were a kid?'"
met a founder who hired a "Head of Corporate Jargon" at $350k
his only job is to translate normal sentences into jargons like "circle back" and "move the needle"
once the team asked for a day off
he said "we'll socialize that offline and align on bandwidth"
no days granted
berlin is actually insane
met a founder who dropped his AI provider because it runs on French nuclear power
he switched to a model powered by wind only
it answers when it's windy
last Tuesday it took 3 days to reply to a customer
he raised €6M
I’m doing due diligence on a pre-seed founder in Europe
Potentially investing €1k for 50% of the company, requiring daily updates of course.
Looking at the expense report he faxed to my office.
He spent €6.50 on a flat white with the company card and didn’t mark it as personal expense.
What should I do?
This should be reported to the European Data Protection Officer
how to make 10m in a month brokering data for ai labs:
step 1. get opus 5.5 to copy a preexisting brokers website (hell, copy mine: grepped.ai) that allows people to get a ballpark valuation of their data in order for them to get excited and book meetings.
step 2. cold outreach specific sectors (e.g UK packaging centers), advertise in niche business newsletters, do IRL marketing that doesn’t scale (envelopes) to get them to your website and book
step 3. on the meeting, ask them questions, make them feel like they have to qualify themselves in order to work with you. make them sign an NDA
step 4. get them to export their salesforce, xero and industry-specific data.
step 5. hit up the labs (connect with anthropic/openai MTS on linkedin) to sell data. if you haven’t got lab connections yet, hit me up [email protected] and I will sort you out
rinse and repeat before this gold mine has ran out.
Great move EU, well done.
AI Act compliance is very important
OpenAI will watermark ChatGPT and Codex text in the EU to comply with the AI Act. Editing can make the invisible marks harder to detect, it says.
spr.ly/6011BGLxfN
You have to really suck to come up with something worse than Microsoft teams
The European Commission has rolled out an alternative to Microsoft Teams.
But officials using it aren't impressed, with one describing the tool as “absolute shit.”
vist.ly/5kje9
berlin is actually insane
met a founder who said dating outside the company is "a retention risk"
so he built an internal matching algorithm
it optimizes for overlapping sprint schedules
team was 100% guys, the algorithm matched 11 couples
HR asked if this was a problem.
he said "no, it's a 4.2x improvement in commute efficiency"
sf is weird man
met a founder who hired a "Head of Vibes" at $310k
his only job is to walk into the room and say "we're so back"
he's done it 61 times
2 male engineers started dating after one of those mornings. the founder said "the vibes are working"
company has no revenue. valuation is $40M
My European mind cannot comprehend
Vinod is an investor in both companies
US market is definitely more entertaining
You are a struggling second tier competitor that is more unethical and lying just because you have no decency or sense of proper behavior and shows your desperation. Straight out lying about if Chris being fired I thought would be below even you.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Khosla is an investor in both Cognition and Factory. khoslaventures.com/category/enter…
Building data centers to let AI agents book tables at restaurants
LFG!
Instinct CEO Noah Shinn says agents will let restaurants give tables to birthdays and anniversaries over whoever clicks first
"And traditionally, because of the way that the internet has worked, at least for reservations, it's been first come first serve. So anyone that comes in, no matter how important or how not important it might be, whoever gets in first gets the reservation."
"But what if you had the ability for the agent to be able to communicate on both sides, communicate, hey, this is important. This is actually the person's spouse's birthday, the 30th birthday, a very special event is coming up."
"And the restaurant too can say, let's actually prioritize birthdays or major decade birthdays or major anniversaries or these certain people, I don't know, whatever it might be, right?"
"So now with the ability, with all of the logistical burden of having to describe exactly what your case is and what's happening and why it's important. Now we have the ability to perfectly match what does the restaurant want? What does the user want?"
"And that will result in more special events for the users being able to actually have a spot in the restaurant."
Great stuff happening today.
Sebastian met with @vonderleyen at the EU Commission HQ. We discussed how Europe is clearly leading in AI and how our fund is heavily deploying capital to make it happen (€50k cheques at a time).
Our LATAM investor Mateo played padel with @JMilei instead. They discussed a new framework to standardise investments in LATAM startups leveraging USDT, crypto and food stamps and capping pre-seed valuations at $20k post money (very generous already).
Looking forward to giving you more updates
met a american founder
backed by a European VC
first time at the notary
fell asleep during the deed recitation
notary started over from page one
he was a boy when he walked in, got out a man
Berlin is insane
was at a dinner with 15 drop out founders
guy says he did groceries. bikes, ten minute delivery
told him the margin on bananas is negative, this isn't a business, go home to sleep
he said it's about the ten minutes and it was called like a monkey
wrote out a list of the founder i'm looking for.
X, work your magic.
non negotiable
- 35 to 42 pages in the deck, not a page more
- healthy masculine cap table
- smart, funny, lighthearted about dilution
- cares about GDPR, DPIA, SOC2
- provider/protector mentality toward my €50k
- post revenue (still pre product)
- must be kind, generous with equity, thoughtful with my time
- on the healing path (history of serious commitment: failed startups, therapy, one retreat in tuscany)
- can meet anywhere but will not sign unless the notary is in the same city
- fit and sober burn rate because you care about your runway
strongly preferred
- no prev rounds or engagements with other funds
wrote out a list of who I’m looking for.
X, work your magic.
non negotiable
- 35 to 42 y/o
- healthy masculine
- smart, funny, lighthearted
- provider/protector mentality
- post economic (still hardworking)
- must be kind, generous, thoughtful
- no kids yet, decidedly wants kids
- on the healing path (history of serious commitment ex therapists, books, retreats)
- can meet anywhere but will not date unless live in the same city
- fit and sober because you care about your health
strongly preferred
- no prev marriages or engagements
- works in tech (comfortable with risk and career is blended into personal life)












