996 Is Here

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Michael Schneider on the #1 fundraising hack (Link)

• Sephi Shapira on the answer that gets you funded (Link)

• Aneri Shah on what she tells every founder to get investor-ready (Link)

• Nikunj Kothari on what he wishes accelerator demo day pitches had (Link)

Growth

• Josh Lowman on Anthropic’s marketing funnel (Link)

• Matt Hammel’s tech stack that helped grow $2M → $8M ARR in 6 months (Link)

ICYMI

• Tasker takes you from Prompt → Product → Pipeline (Link)*

• Alexis Ohanian on what the best CEOs do to win (Link)

• Andrew Gazdecki on the importance of talking to customers early on (Link)

• Tom Bilyeu on one thing he learned from building Quest to $1B (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Senior Tech Support Companion

In a perfect world, you’d either be around and able to help your more senior relatives with all of their tech support needs or they’d figure them out on their own.

Sadly, you can’t always be there though.

But if seniors have trouble with iPhones and Alexas, what are they going to make of OpenAI’s future hardware device?

The truth is, there’s probably a good business to be built helping them navigate these with a human-centric form factor.

The $50M ARR number on this is likely very optimistic, but a human-led service business could do well here.

🧠 Framework: The Credibility Ladder

Credibility is what closes the deal.

Whether it’s with investors, new hires, customers, or anything else — you have to be able to back up what you’re selling.

And it helps with everything one you get the flywheel going:

But, as Ashish Kulkarni says, it isn’t a switch you flip — it’s a ladder you climb.

Here’s how to establish credibility at 5 stages of your startup’s journey:

1. Ideation → Signal you can think clearly. Do you have a coherent thesis behind what you’re doing?

2. Prototyping → Signal you can execute. Just do the thing and do it well. Tick the boxes. Listen to users. Build something people want.

3. Early traction → Signal the market cares. Or, better yet, even exists in the first place. Will your early users become advocates?

4. Validation → Signal you can scale. What you’re doing is repeatable. Unit economics are starting to matter and everything checks out.

5. Growth → Signal you make the right bets. People want to see you’re not just surviving, but are able to be strategic. Showcase year-over-year growth and retention without a crazy burn multiple.

📈 Trend: 996

It finally happened.

After years of hearing about how the 996 approach to work was helping Chinese tech companies move faster than American ones, SF may finally be adopting it.

ICYMI, 996 refers to working…

• From 9am

• To 9pm

• 6 days a week

It’s the opposite of the 4 day workweek.

It turns Saturday into a bonafide work day.

And 2025 seems to be the year the switch flipped in SF.

This, of course, is ironic… isn’t AI supposed to do things for us and give us our time back?

The truth is likely that AI is enabling teams to get more done, and they feel pressure to move faster since they know product is now less of a moat than ever.

As someone who frequently works long hours, I see the appeal to motivating your team to do the same.

But don’t go retroactively imposing it on folks who didn’t sign up for it.

💬 Quote: Obsession Can Beat Experience

Passion gets a bad rap.

When you’re a kid it probably feels like the opposite. You often get told to follow your dreams.

Then you hit your 20s and you might think doing what you love was overhyped.

Your friend with a band is still sharing a cramped apartment with three other folks while your friend in finance is living it up in NYC.

The truth is passion matters quite a bit.

But you have to find what you’re obsessed with that also is valuable to the world (or some subsection of it).

Do that, and your drive and determination set you up to better deal with the ups and downs required to reach success than a mercenary, no matter how experienced they are.

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