Hey y’all — even before we landed Andrew Chen at a16z to lead our Series A, my cofounders and I knew he’d be a good fit.
We’d spent hours making spreadsheets with data on…
Which companies various GPs at various firms had backed
What they’d publicly said about their reasons for investing in those companies
How the companies had gone on to do
Whether we had folks in our network who could warm intro us
The simple truth is that founders who leverage data to shape how they spend their time during a raise will almost certainly close their round faster, and know what to say to the right investors when they have the chance to.
That’s why I’m co-hosting a session on April 23rd on how to use data to fundraise faster with Usman Gul (the founder of Metal.so). He’s seen thousands of founders use Metal to close their rounds faster and knows what’s moving the needle for folks right now.
It’s totally free, and you can also get 20% off of Metal’s fundraising intelligence platform. It would’ve saved me a lot of hours back when we were raising.
Anyway, here’s today at a glance:
Opportunity → API Access Control for Agents
Framework → Startup Narrative Design Framework
Tool → PopHatch
Trend → Data Center Building Boom
Quote → Spend Time On Things That Compound
PS — Become a member to get access to my founder membership including an engaged community, fundraising support, fireside chats and more.
Every founder knows the pain of skyrocketing cloud infrastructure costs. But how to reduce AWS expenses without compromising your product's potential?
Spendbase, in partnership with AWS, offers up to $100k in free AWS credits for the Founding Journey community.
All you need is a startup under 10 years old with a corporate website. Works for both new & existing customers (even if you got credits before).
Want to stop seeing ads? Upgrade now. Want to get in front of 70,000+ founders? Go here.
🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Growth
ICYMI
Get access to Notion Fundraising Agent workflows (Link)*
Elizabeth Yin shares one of her biggest pet peeves as an investor (Link)
Jason Yeh on how most founders treat their network like an ATM (Link)
Ayman Al-Abdullah on how CEOs who try to fix everything fix nothing (Link)
Dave Kline shares 4 tests to know if your 1:1s are actually working (Link)
Charles Cormier on what the winning founders do (Link)
Upcoming Events
RSVP here to my session on how to fundraise with data, co-hosted with Metal. You can also get 20% of Metal.so here to get signals like who the “most likely” investors to be interested in your round are (and who in your extended network can potentially intro you to them).
💡 Opportunity: API Access Control for Agents
As the number of agents each business uses increases, new issues emerge.
One obvious one is around API access auditing. Ideabrowser outlines it well.
I would bet that most startups using agents are having each one use the same API keys.
But without an audit trail, diagnosing issues when they arise will be more challenging.
A tool that agents can reference to ensure they’re getting a unique API key for each service they’re interacting with, and keeping tabs on access on a simple dashboard, would solve this — and this is a market that seems clear to explode over the next few years.
🧠 Framework: Startup Narrative Design Framework
Startups need a coherent story.
Setting your mission, vision, values, culture, elevator pitch, and full pitch deck in vacuums is going to lead to misalignments.
Obviously, you’ll likely want to do these at different times but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aproach them all from within a singular framework.
Sean O’Brien’s Startup Narrative Design Framework intends to be just that.
It acts as a living, narrative document rather than a one-time exercise.
It uses a 6×3 grid to answer questions across three audiences: your team, the market, and other stakeholders (investors, partners, etc).
When you’re filling it out, identify and remove contradictions. And you’ll be left with a rock-solid narrative that makes everything from fundraising to selling or leading your team just a bit more coherent.
🛠 Tool: PopHatch
You launched, but growth is chaos. You’re shipping features and chasing threads, but the real signals are buried in the noise. Finding your first 100 users is a brutal grind—doing it alone is how founders burn out.
PopHatch is your 24/7 partner that thinks through the mess with you. It documents every test, connects the dots between your experiments, and gives you the logic to iterate until it finally works.
📈 Trend: Data Center Building Boom
Even though as many as 25 new data center projects were canceled in 2025 due to local community pushback (re: expected electricity cost increases), demand isn’t slowing down anytime soon.
The bigger story here may be how this is seemingly directly impacting the new construction of offices for human workers.
It’s the digital workers who are being prioritized now.
Many people thought COVID would kill offices.
But it’s clear AI is having a bigger impact on them already.
💬 Quote: Spend Time On Things That Compound
Some businesses can scale with ads.
The recent rise (and alleged fraud) of Medvi is proof that you can scale to hundreds of millions, and potentially billions, in revenue just primarily through ads.
But that’s in a niche with an incredibly quick payback period and low costs to begin with, with a product that has extremely wide appeal.
Most startups cannot replicate that.
It’s not that ads are bad, it’s just that channels that compound are typically better.
The same is true for basically everything you do as a founder or a person more broadly.
Play longterm games.
You’re trying to build something, not just go from one thing to the next.
How We Can Help
Become a member to get full access to our case study library, private founder community, and more.
We can also help your startup in a few other ways:
Content Creation
Let my team and I ghostwrite for your newsletter, X, or LinkedIn.
Audience Building
Grow your audience + generate leads with my growth service.
Fundraising
Share your round with hundreds of investors in my personal network.
Advising
I’ll help solve a specific challenge you’re facing with your startup.
Advertise in this newsletter to get in front of 70,000+ founders.
“*” indicates sponsored content.
