Being a Founder is a Privilege

Hey y’all — trying something new today: bounties.

Readers have asked me to set up a job board forever. But most of y’all are founders and not looking for jobs, so I’ve always resisted.

But founders do know other folks looking for jobs, and the best hires come from referrals.

Plus, more startups are paying out thousands in bounties to hire their most critical roles.

Like Focal, an AI suite for financial advisors.

They’re well funded and are offering $10,000 for a referral to someone they hire for any of the following roles ($30k total):

• Lead Fullstack Engineer

• Lead AI Fullstack Engineer

• Growth & AI Marketing Lead

This is just an experiment, but if it ends up being helpful I’ll open it up to everyone and add a section of the newsletter for bounties each week.

For now, just reply if you have someone to refer and I’ll connect you with Focal’s founder directly via email.

Anyway, here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Sahil S shares the VC scorecard that early-stage investors use (Link)

• Andrew Chen on the anti-pitch (Link)

• Sephi Shapira on why not to pitch with slides (Link)

Growth

• Sam Shank on starting with distribution instead of product (Link)

• Tibo Louis-Lucas 3 rules for growth (Link)

• AJ Chan’s CX playbook to grow to $1M ARR in first 6 months (Link)

ICYMI

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

• Peter Walker on returned vested employee options (Link)

• Leon Abboud on meeting best practices that helped during scale (Link)

• Imran Khan on the biggest problem he sees with early-stage startups (Link)

💡 Opportunity: AI-Powered Collectible Verification Platform

The rise of casual stock and crypto trading has also drawn a lot of eyeballs onto alternative asset classes that can broadly be categorized as “collectibles” (i.e. trading cards, sports memorabilia, sneakers, etc).

As a result of the interest, collectibles have generally performed well relative to public stocks over the last 5+ years.

But just Google “collectibles investment fraud” and you’ll see the problem.

End-users aren’t trained on how to do this verification, and verification costs scale linearly with transaction volume for marketplace businesses.

Both can be addressed by different tools.

An app or site could be built for individual consumer-level verification with basic computer vision tech to give some level of trust.

And then the same tech can likely be sold to marketplaces as a “first verification” where a certain confidence level means a human review is skipped.

🧠 Framework: 8+1 Framework

Balancing everything a founder has to do (both within and outside of their business) is chaotic to say the least.

Henrik Wedelin (co-founder of Bark aka BarkBox) developed the 8+1 framework to solve, or at least manage, this when he was running two startups, a podcast, teaching a college entrepreneurship course, and had a young family.

He credits it with helping him create a life that’s purposeful and highly self-aware.

The 8+1 system breaks everything down into eight categories that Henrik wants to pay attention to:

• Transact → Generating immediate income to support personal or family needs

• Invest → Compounding bets (like startups, or building your reputation) without immediate benefit

• Assist → Helping others

• Learn → Henrik focused this on professional learning (i.e. learning AI tools to stay competitive). Up to you if you’d want to include recreational learning as well

• Health → Physical and mental too

• Family → Henrik plans family and husband/wife activities on Trello. Your mileage may vary :)

• Relationships → Focuses on deliberately building connections with interesting people. Again, up to you how formalized you want to make this

• Ego / Self-Kindness → Find and note the micro-moments of joy that we often move on from too quickly

You’re probably wondering what the "+1” is — it’s a dedicated weekly review to assess how you’re doing on each category and identify ways to improve. You can plan experiments, adjust priorities, etc.

Henrik uses Trello along with a simple physical notebook as he goes about his week. He shared more detail on his thinking about how to balance the categories for founders here as well.

📈 Trend: Electricity Peak Demand Records

It’s easy to take electricity for granted.

Most people in the US have dealt with “power failures” during times of bad weather when a tree falls on power lines or something of that sort.

But, in some other parts of the world, scheduled rolling blackouts are a thing. They’ve even happened in California.

AI is driving this — AI-related needs are expected to raise the total amount of electricity needed in the US by 8% over the next 5 years. At the scale of the entire energy grid, that’s a massive change to attribute to a single industry in a short period.

We’re already seeing the impact with aggregate US electricity peaking to a new all-time record twice in July:

It’s no surprise that moonshot energy projects like Helion are in vogue, but demand will likely rise faster than supply.

I’d be on the lookout for opportunities to improve efficiencies within the grid as well, as AI is a strategic priority for the US and there will likely be considerable federal investment in ensuring energy doesn’t become a bottleneck.

💬 Quote: What A Privilege

Take a minute and remember what it was like…

…when you woke up every day to work a job instead of build a future.

…when you watched the clock and daydreamed about 5pm.

…when you wondered if you’d ever make the leap.

As founders, we all happily traded 40 hour weeks for 60+ hour weeks because we believe in the potential of what we can build.

Remember to start and end your days (even the hard ones) by remembering this is a privilege that is open to anyone but requires courage that only people like you have.

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