US Startups Are Pulling Ahead

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Anuhas Athapaththu on 6 uncommon pitch mistakes made by founders (Link)

• Kevin Benoit on the biggest mistake founders make in the 1st meeting (Link)

Growth

• Kody Nordquist on a test to run for more profit from ads (Link)

• Preston Rutherford on the brand lifecycle (Link)

• Rohit Mittal shares a new playbook that wasn’t possible 5 years ago (Link)

ICYMI

• What works in tech recruitment: our data from 11 channels vs. ChatGPT estimates (Link)*

• Peter Kazanjy on the 3 clear narrative parts for each competitor (Link)

• Hubert Thieblot on the founder trap (Link)

• Andrew Faber shares 10 phrases that work when delegating (Link)

• Natia Kurdadze shares solutions to common startup problems (Link)

💡 Opportunity: SMS Assistant For Event Organizers

I’ve probably organized 500+ IRL events in my career.

And, almost always, managing them in the moment is fun but chaotic.

What you want attendees to take away from an event is how special it was. One of the best ways to do that is to be attentive to their needs as a host.

However too many times hosts aren’t able to focus on elevating the experience for guests and, instead, get bogged down solving small problems, answering simple questions, and managing ops.

A lot of those simple tasks could be offloaded to an LLM-based assistant who everyone at the event gets access to via text. That leaves the host free to do the things only they are uniquely able to do to elevate the experience.

You could charge event organizers a SaaS-style subscription fee or, more likely, use usage-based pricing.

🧠 Framework: Business Acquisition Framework

Interesting take from Greg Isenberg last week.

He says that there’s an opportunity right now to build mini holdcos by acquiring niche businesses and increasing A) margins by using AI and B) customers through internet-based distribution.

Then, using the incremental cashflow to rinse and repeat by buying more businesses.

It’s a simple flywheel but, if you have the initial startup capital and understand how to build distribution, one that seems relatively undeniable right now.

It’d be interesting to see someone’s criteria for assessing the right types of businesses for this model.

Something that comes to mind for me is Constellation Software, which built a $10B business on the back of this type of acquisition strategy specifically for vertical SaaS companies.

What types of businesses could you replicate that with over the next ten years?

Ones with proprietary data, rather than verticalized software? Ones with sticky workflow integrations?

Hoping to see a few folks try this model and find out.

📈 Trend: US Startups Are Pulling Ahead

Patrick Collison, cofounder of Stripe, may be from the EU but he’s shared some data that would make anyone bullish on American startups.

Specifically, Stripe’s payment processing data clearly shows that US-based startups are growing so fast that it’s created an increasingly-large gap to the growth rates of startups from other regions.

It’s not just that they are growing more quickly, it’s that as time passes the growth rate gap is getting larger.

The chart below shows the US in comparison to the EU and UK, but Collison noted it’s also true for other regions.

The easy thing to do would be to attribute this to the amount of VC money flowing into AI companies in the US, but even when you entirely remove AI startups from the data the pattern holds true.

What seems to be happening is that because US-based startups have fewer regulations to deal with, they are able to more quickly adopt new technologies like AI and stablecoins, which are then helping them grow faster.

💬 Quote: One Business Away

One of my favorite quotes is from investor Peter Lynch. He says “selling your winners and holding your losers is like cutting the flowers and watering the weeds.”

This isn’t just true about investing. It also applies to founders.

Any good founder knows you only need to be right once.

Most people who have created self-made generational wealth has done it by being correct about one thing, and that thing has been correct to a very large degree.

So if what you’re doing isn’t working, don’t be afraid to cut the weeds instead of holding onto them.

You have a limited amount of time and mental bandwidth.

There are caveats to this, but at a base level if your business isn’t growing, and you’ve legitimately tried everything to the best of your ability, focus on giving yourself the room to find something that will achieve your goals.

How We Can Help

Advertise in this newsletter to get in front of 60,000+ founders.