The 80/20 Principle

Hey y’all — I’m looking to invest $200-400k in a few startups in November. Here’s what I’m looking for:

• Pre-seed or seed stage

• Primarily software-driven

• Either B2B or B2C

• (Mostly) sector-agnostic

Fill out this form or reply directly to this email and I’ll get back to you if it could be a fit!

Anyway, here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• This investor is looking to invest $150K in 1-2 startups before 2024 ends (Link)

• Why this AI startup raised money when they didn’t need to (Link)

Growth

• An SEO strategy that is crushing for this founder (Link)

ICYMI

• Tactics to make an amazing product launch video (Link)

• Personal anecdotes from Marc Andreessen on why Elon is so effective (Link)

• The advice Paul Graham gave Sam Altman that not enough people take (Link)

• A hiring hack for startups (Link)

• More thoughts on why founder mode is so effective (Link)

• 6 things startup founders should avoid doing (Link)

• Keith Rabois thoughts on how to hire (Link)

💡 Opportunity: AI Voice

Text-based LLMs were (still are, actually) a disruptive platform upon which many unicorns will be built.

Voice-based LLMs are the next one.

In 20 years it will seem archaic that we used to physically type into computers. The idea of a computer will be entirely different than today, likely with a different form factor.

Voice-as-an-input is the path to get there.

Opportunities to built on top of AI voice currently, right now, exist in just about every industry.

Go make a few million bucks or more 🙂 

🧠 Framework: The 80/20 Principle

As Sam Altman says, it’s extremely important to spend time thinking about what to work on. Most founders don’t consider this enough.

But the most common mistake first-time founders make is planning too much after that.

In fact, you’re almost always better off getting 70-80% of the way to a perfect solution and just moving forward to the next obstacle.

As Greg Isenberg shows, this principle applies to basically everything a founder deals with:

📈 Trend: The Rise of Distraction

At my first engineering job after college we used Atlassian’s HipChat to send each other DMs throughout the day.

And if you started your post-college professional life sometime after 2013 like I did, you’ve never known a world without Slack (or a similar tool like HipChat).

The reason Slack became a decacorn, and why work-chat tools are so prevalent now, is that it has a simple sales pitch: solve problems faster by getting in touch with the right person right away.

Fewer meetings too (in theory, at least).

But the tradeoff is an increase in distractions and switching costs.

Is that a positive tradeoff, in terms of productivity?

Even if it is, how should we respond to this new distraction-heavy state?

I see two ways:

1. Tools that help consolidate, ignore, and prioritize the distractions

2. Tools that create an entirely smoother experience, without even making you aware of the distractions

This isn’t a new idea, but so far no one has cracked it yet and the trend continues to rise.

LLMs are a natural tool to fight back against this.

💬 Quote: A Phase Shift

Some people would argue there are three modes a company should have:

1. Learning → Early stage, and occasionally after that

2. Scaling → Growth stage

3. Defending → IPO and beyond

I would argue only the first two are real. Defending is a loser’s game.

The only way to win is to grow.

With that said, founders often don’t go all-in on the second phase fast enough once they’re ready to move beyond the first:

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