Don't Settle for "Kind of Works"

Hey y’all — happy new year!

If you’ve been getting emails from Stripe about a BOI report and aren’t sure what it is or what to do, my friends at Pilot are offering Stripe Atlas customers a 100% free no-strings-attached filing.

I did it myself just to get it out of the way and you can here.

This isn’t an ad, I just was personally confused by these emails (Pilot’s blog shows that the courts have been going back and forth on whether it should be required) so I wanted to share with y’all.

Anyway, here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• This investor is looking to invest in founders whose core KPI is growing 25%+ MoM (Link)

• The advice that helped this startup raise $17M from a16z (Link)

• The brutal truth this founder wishes he knew when fundraising (Link)

• 6 things that surprised this founder about the investing world (Link)

Growth

• A few less obvious early-stage startup sales learnings (Link)

• How to scale brands to 8 figures with paid ads (Link)

ICYMI

• The question Peter Thiel asks every startup founder he invests in (Link)

• How to build a $200k MRR mobile app in 2025 (Link)

• Emerging startup trends to watch for in 2025 (Link)

New Case Studies

• Common Paper ($7M raised) → Insights from a 2x exited founder now building his third company.

• Encast ($2.9M raised) → How a founder raised his round after 1 conversation

Get full access to our library of 80+ case studies here. It’s growing every week.

💡 Opportunity: IMDB for Tech

When I was working in big tech, a friend told me about this interesting hiring site called KeyValues where companies could detail what their engineering culture was actually like, in ways you couldn’t easily do on a JD.

It never became huge but I heard it was doing six figures of revenue at one point (maybe it still is). However, everyone I knew who had heard of the site loved it because it was a source of truth for information they couldn’t get anywhere else.

This week’s opportunity could be similar: highly niche, but valuable.

With resumes there’s a sort of unspoken rule that you can frame things in a way that veers into exaggeration, as long as you don’t outright lie.

Even some big creators do this with their public persona.

Getting a source of truth about who worked on what would be valuable for hiring decisions.

There are real challenges here, though.

That information is locked up in people’s heads and companies codebases. So there are only three ways to get it:

1. Incentivize people to give you accurate data about what their coworkers built

2. Incentivize companies to let you scan their codebases and employee directories to see who built what

It would need to be a labor of love, as both of those are very hard (and maybe impossible) asks to make.

But if it came together, the industry would thank (and pay) you.

🧠 Framework: Barrels and Ammunition

10x employees are real.

And rare.

And when you find them, you quickly realize they have a ton of leverage over you as a founder.

Keith Rabois says they’re like the barrels of a gun, and everyone else you hire are the ammunition that gets fired out of the barrel.

📈 Trend: VC Fund Consolidation

Venture capital is a game of power laws, where one winning company can return the entire fund.

So why shouldn’t the venture industry itself behave this way?

The biggest venture funds are getting bigger faster than new funds are being started.

This makes sense — GPs (who deploy capital from funds) build trust with LPs (whose capital is invested in the funds) over time.

If you were investing a venture fund, one of the riskiest asset classes there is, wouldn’t you feel more comfortable giving your investment to someone who has already successfully found 10 unicorns?

Even among the $48 billion raised by top 30 firms there’s a power law, with the top 5 raising half of that.

What does this mean?

Well, for founders it means ironically that smaller funds may be less willing to take “risks.”

They’d rather co-invest with the big guys, as they can pitch that to LPs when they go out to raise their next fund.

Overall that doesn’t feel like a healthy component of the ecosystem, but it is what we’re seeing right now.

During the ZIRP era this wasn't the case, but with interest rates still high and no clear end in sight, founders should expect this trend to continue in 2025.

💬 Quote: “Kind of Works”

It’s the last day of 2024.

Tomorrow’s a new year.

You might be expecting me to say that it’s time to start something if you’ve been holding off.

But the point I think it more important to make is to existing founders:

If you’re working on something and investing your blood, sweat, and tears into it but it isn’t growing — consider moving on.

This isn’t a bad thing.

Founders are the engines that create prosperity in society.

The more successful your startup is, the more you’re doing to help others.

Ego, or the sunk cost fallacy, can get in the way of knowing when the right time to move on is.

But I would say to you to make sure you’re focused on delivering value in 2025. Make sure you’re building something people want.

How We Can Help

Advertise in this newsletter to get in front of 60,000+ founders.