The Founder OS Circle

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Chloé Lozac’h on convertible notes versus SAFEs (Link)

• Peter Walker on % of your company you should expect to sell per round (Link)

Growth

• Olivia Moore from a16z shares AI startup revenue growth benchmarks (Link)

• David Park on how to get your first customer (and millions more) (Link)

• Scot Chisholm on how to 10x your chances of success in your 1st 2 years (Link)

ICYMI

• This FREE 2-Day AI Mastermind will teach you how to master 20+ AI tools & prompt engineering, build workflows, set automations to scale your business —all without any coding skills (Link)*

• Ben Lang on YC’s latest request for startups (Link)

• Jen Abel’s advice for startups moving up-market into enterprise (Link)

• Stephany Kirkpatrick’s checklist if she were starting her company today (Link)

• Justine Moore’s takeaways from studying the future of consumer AI (Link)

• Jason Lemkin on what a truly great co-founder does (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Tegus for products

If you’ve worked in big tech like I did, you’ve probably been contacted by Tegus — they spent years building a massive database of 70,000+ call transcripts with experts in the workforce who can, for a fee, provide insight to hedge funds and other investors about their industry.

It’s a sort of murky area where participating usually isn’t outside the bounds of a typical employment contract, but in theory what you share could have negative implications for your company.

They exited a few years ago for $930 million.

With AI, you could build something similar at the product level that could be useful not only for VC firms looking to measure product velocity, but also competitors and big companies:

Considering how much easier it’s gotten to clone products, and how much harder it is to keep track of what’s happening in markets, this type of research and analysis agent would be hugely valuable for companies looking to effectively defend their market position.

Even simply tracking landing page changes over a 6-12 month period would tell you a lot about product development, brand positioning, and changing customer preferences.

🧠 Framework: The Founder OS Circle

It’s one thing to have hustle, passion, and motivation.

But that’s tablestakes.

If you really want to scale, you need to build a machine that builds itself.

Blaine Vess sold his bootstrapped company for $60M and then got his next company into YC and ended up with a successful exit from that one as well.

He identified the 8 key systems that startups should make sure they have operating with relative, if not total, autonomy from the founder:

📈 Trend: AI Storytelling

I talk a lot about how storytelling is a skill founders should actually train to get better at.

It’s not enough to know your numbers and your market — you have to walk people (investors, candidates, partners, co-founders, etc) through why it’s going to become huge before they’ll jump onboard.

Well, even if you’re turned off by Apple’s report that LLMs are actually just pattern-matching (rather than truly reasoning through problems), you won’t be surprised to hear that folks are turning to AI for storytelling help.

I’d bet this is actually more big company execs and middle managers who are trying to get ahead on their presentations than founders, but it likely applies to both markets.

In either case, storytelling is real business — my friend Robbie Crabtree built and exited a founder-centric storytelling agency in just over a year.

Consider exploring ways to pull in contextual information or datapoints that someone may not consider themselves.

💬 Quote: Solve a painful problem

I’m a big fan of Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory (and would recommend reading his book on it).

It gives you a good lens to look at how a startup can grow into something huge.

But, at the same time, don’t over-intellectualize picking the right startup idea.

The truth is that you’re likely not going to know all the ways something can disrupt existing industries when you start out.

In fact, Peter Thiel says to ignore existing markets at the beginning of your journey entirely and, instead, focus on a small and underserved market.

Mapping out your disruptive journey might look good on a whiteboard or sound good in strategy meetings, but it’s likely not going to play out that way.

Everything is always changing, forever. The current conditions will be different by the time you’re big enough to exploit them.

Instead, focus on a painful problem in a market that’s likely to naturally expand, and keep an eye out for opportunities to capture more value.

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