Join Me In Costa Rica

Hey y’all — I’m renting a house with Tyler Denk (co-founder of Beehiiv) in Tamarindo, Costa Rica in February with room for 7 other founders.

We’ll be working, vibing, and going deep together with structured mastermind sessions. Other details:

• Everyone will have their own private room and bathroom

• Private chef and food are all included

• All activities are optional but included (surfing, yoga, private boat, in-house massages, etc).

• Dates: Wednesday February 25th to Sunday March 1st

• Cost: $10,000 (business write-off eligible).

Expect killer founders, mindset-shifting conversations, and good times.

And now here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Euclid Ventures on the quiet death of VC-Founder alignment (Link)

• Robert Harary shares something that’s easy to forget when raising (Link)

• Tony Beebe on the startup funding funnel (Link)

Growth

• Olivia O’Sullivan on the LinkedIn GTM opportunity for founders (Link)

• Christian Oland on how 90% of failed startups could’ve been saved (Link)

ICYMI

• Jonathan Nwosu on why being a founder is not the flex people think it is (Link)

• Klaas on how to validate almost any startup idea (Link)

• Elizabeth Yin shares a great metric to track at a startup (Link)

• Jason Levin on what to build if you’re not sure where to start (Link)

• Blaine Vess on the only reliable sources of leverage (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Email Lead Recovery Tool

Email spam is rising (always, but faster these days due to LLMs).

Ironically, there’s probably also some actually useful emails that get incorrectly categorized as spam.

I check my spam folder every month or two for this reason.

But if the email’s time sensitive (especially warm leads), I’m out of luck.

You can’t fix this problem for Gmail, or Outlook, etc. But you could build an LLM-based tool that analyzes what else is in your inbox and then uses that, along with industry-level patterns, to automatically pull those out of spam and put them back in your main inbox.

🧠 Framework: Go-To-Market Sequencing Playbook

Sometimes it feels good to flail around a bit.

If you’re not sure how to approach growth, it’s easy to fall into this idea of just launching a bunch of different channels.

You hope at least one works.

You might not be able to explain why though, if it does.

And if it doesn’t you’ll probably move onto a new one rather than refining it.

There are hidden costs to this.

As you expand to more and more surfaces, resources get strained. You aren’t able to keep up with any one of them to really learn and improve it.

Eventually you wonder why none of them are working. Even if they do work, you’re not set up to scale.

The GTM sequencing framework can help with this from the beginning. It prescribes:

1. Narrowing your focus initially

2. Identify your beachhead and develop a process to consistently win their love

3. Expand, now that you’ve earned the right to, by either extending to neighboring customer types, expanding within existing accounts to other use cases, or enter similar verticals to your early winners

If you do it right, it makes entering new markets feel inevitable, not frantic.

📈 Trend: Voice Cloning

Pretty soon every audio message, phone call, etc will have you wondering

Voice AI is something I flagged as one of the trends to watch in 2025 (way back in Dec 2024), and from what I could dig up it looks like startups building in the space raised over $500M this year as the space shifted from just infra to also having practical apps gain traction.

Vocal cloning is a big part of that — I expect we’ll see this trend continue to spike in 2025 as some of these existing startups mature enough to take on truly massive rounds, and more voice-first applications gain preference among consumers.

💬 Quote: It’s That Easy

Startups are hard, but we overcomplicate them at the same time.

We get distracted by shiny things, or overoptimizing our workflows.

I see founders building impressive AI workflows that don’t actually help them learn about their customers, they just automate internal processes.

But then they have to maintain those systems as the business changes.

It ends up sometimes going beyond useful work and trending into busywork territory.

Instead, change “idea” to “hypothesis” in the tweet below and you have a simple formula to work with:

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