5 Rules for Pitching

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• Tips on making investor updates a valuable asset (Link)

• 5 things to know when building successful paywalls (Link)

• A Nikita Bier one-pager on how to build viral products (Link)

• Patrick Collison on the importance of waiting a long time to hire people (Link)

💡 Opportunity: AI Agent for Access

There are two types of startups:

Ones that have all their docs publicly available by default, and those that spend a lot of times granting permission to things to each other.

The best solution is probably one that lets each type of company gain the benefits of the other, without sacrificing their own benefits:

🧠 Framework: 5 Rules for Pitching

Jason Calacanis is a polarizing investor, moreso due to his public persona than anything else, but he’s built a proven track record and sees more deals than just about anyone thanks to his high-profile role moderating the All In Podcast.

Here are his rules for pitching and deck structure recommendation:

📈 Trend: Funding for VCs

We’ve been talking about this for a while now, but the VC recession continued, albeit at a slightly slower pace, in 2024’s year-end data.

Remember, VCs have to go out and raise the money in their funds from other people or vehicles. The VC’s job is really just as an allocator for their LPs — they don’t work for you.

And those LPs have choices. VC is one of the riskier asset classes they can choose to entrust their capital to. After interest rates started rising, they went back to choosing safer asset classes. Additionally, many first-time fund managers are seeing their funds underperform relative to experienced managers, which is causing LPs to prefer to give their capital to established VCs.

We’re still above 10 years ago but levels have sunk to where they were in, roughly, 2018. Where things go next is anybody’s guess, but I’m optimistic.

💬 Quote: A False Maxim

You know what really costs a lot of money?

Time.

It’s easy to think that setting a shorter deadline means a project needs to become more expensive (to hit it).

But that often doesn’t play out in practice.

In fact, having people work on it for a longer period of time will typically be more expensive. With a shorter time period, you have no choice but to cut the unnecessary parts (reducing costs).

Stripe’s co-founder, Patrick Collison, agrees and relates this idea to a classic maxim:

How We Can Help

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