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 next week (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 → Google Cloud For Context
Framework → Startup Rocket Framework
Tool → Warmy
Trend → The GTM Engineer
Quote → Do Reps
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🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Growth
ICYMI
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: Google Cloud For Context
Photos and videos are valuable assets.
In the age of LLMs, the context within them is more valuable.
Google Drive, Apple Photos, etc all let you store your videos but don’t let you dynamically search based on the context within them.
As Brycent notes, there are creator-centric applications here but the bigger opportunity is likely in B2B.
Imagine trying to find that one meeting where that guy you met once said that thing that is now relevant to another conversation you’re having.
Mission impossible.
But if you could vaguely describe it to an LLM, it could find it (I just found a tweet I’ll be using as inspo for a future deep dive that I saw once two months ago, by asking Grok to find it).
A few folks in the comments shared Eden which looks like it’s focused on creative work, so there’s likely still room here for a B2B-first option to win the market.
🧠 Framework: Startup Rocket Framework
Most frameworks talk about how to manage. This one talks about the full lifecycle, starting from ideation.
The Startup Rocket Framework is used as an operational guide, starting in the early days.
It walks you through ideation, validation, creation (of value), growth, and funding for a startup through the lens of how to acquire and retain happy, paying customers (instead of just writing a business plan or strategy doc).
🛠 Tool: Warmy
Sending emails but getting zero replies? It might not be your copy.
Many startups unknowingly have broken email deliverability, causing messages to land straight in spam folders.
That means lost leads and wasted outreach. Warmy automatically warms up your email accounts, protects your sender reputation, and keeps your emails landing in real inboxes. If email is part of your growth strategy, this matters.
📈 Trend: The GTM Engineer
Remember “growth hackers”?
In 2026, the term feels like when you look back at your hairstyle from high school or college and think “why did I ever think that looked good?”
No? Just me? Ok moving on…
Anyway, back in the early/mid 2010’s growth hackers were these loosely defined hybrid roles whose job focused on simply producing rapid, scalable growth as their true north.
They were a sort of mix of marketer, ops person, analyst, and occasionally engineer too who ran low-cost experiments to find things that could scale.
Ultimately the term became an overhyped buzzword and the role lost any real meaning and basically got absorbed into other growth roles. You went from wanting to be a growth hacker to wanting to never be known as a growth hacker.
However this general idea is rising again, this time as the more professional (sounding, but also in approach) GTM engineers.
Pave, the compensation benchmarking platform, shows the rapid growth of the role
GTM engineers use new, LLM-powered tools and workflows to rapidly test and iterate on new ways for their startup to grow faster.
The main difference is that GTM engineers have the power of software engineering (thanks to Claude, etc) by default, so they can do even more with less.
It remains to be seen if GTM engineers will be here to stay or if their responsibilities will ultimately get absorbed into other roles.
💬 Quote: Do Reps
It’s not 10,000 hours, it’s 10,000 iterations.
Just putting time into something doesn’t do much.
It’s about focusing that time on testing, experimenting, and just plain trying.
Everything you do should be to prepare yourself for success.
Work to understand the environment you’re operating in, your goals, and how to reach them.
Doing that 10,000 times really will make it “unreasonable” to assume you’ll fail.
The key, as a founder, is being able to do that enough without losing time.
We all know speed is the most important thing.
So, think to yourself today: how can you speed up your cycle time? How can you go through the iterations you need to, faster?
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