AI Agents Are Here

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Perplexity founder on what VCs look for before investing (Link)

• The dangers of “over-raising” (Link)

• An inside look at Nicole Wischoff’s VC fund (Link)

• Looking back at the fundraising journey of startups from 2019 (Link)

Growth

• Startups can grow despite being exceedingly simplistic (Link)

• Are VC firms are getting serious about helping founders with growth? (Link)

• How Cal AI partners with influencers to reach $400k MRR (Link)

ICYMI

• Keith Rabois on how to hire your first 100 employees (Link)

• Where Allbirds went wrong (Link)

• Andrew Chen on the future of consumer startups (Link)

• Why founders should still move to the US to start their companies (Link)

• Jessica Livingston’s lessons from the most successful startup founders (Link)

• 10 ideas for building a great culture for a distributed team (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Nanny Recruiting Service

Generally I’m skeptical when someone starts talking about a business by saying it would crush, but I do like this idea.

Let’s look at the tailwinds:

1. Large rush of low-skilled labor entering the US that will drive costs down even on the high-end of this market.

2. Rise of delegation services (like Athena) for high-earners will lead to them looking to do the same in their non-work lives.

To get started I’d grab verified emails of thousands of high-earning execs from a lead gen service and start cold emailing them to gauge appetite to pay and any trends (certain job titles, regions, etc).

Ideally I’d be able to start in one geographical location.

Once I validated there was a market I’d find someone with deep experience and credibility in the industry to lead the vetting and nanny management side of the business.

Make them a co-founder with meaningful equity and ask them to bring in nannies from their network as our initial group.

You could probably get a pilot running with your first couple clients in under a month.

🧠 Framework: Early-Stage Startup Sales Playbook

When you start out, you don’t know anything.

So there’s a natural phase of trial and error that you’re trying to get out of as quickly as possible.

For sales, this means leading the process yourself.

A few months ago I interviewed Jen Abel about why founders need to lead sales for much longer than you might think.

She’s one of the most thoughtful founders about sales that I know.

But for some founders sales is uncomfortable.

So here’s Jen’s 5-step framework for how to make it through the trial and error phase quickly:

📈 Trend: AI Agents

This will be obvious to some, but we’re moving from AI being something you chat to it being something that actually can perform tasks for you.

We’re seeing signs of this in various ways:

• Research

• Code repos

• Job postings

• Search volume

But the most exciting is obviously actual products you can use.

And the most exciting of those early use cases is likely what Replit it doing.

In short, it goes one step further than Cursor’s code assistant.

You can basically just talk to a chatbot and it will create functioning products or features.

I think it’s likely that people are underestimating the disruptive impact of LLMs for this reason alone.

People just aren’t that good at predicting and planning for exponential change.

But if you can cut the time of production for a software product by 1,000x or 10,000x, everything will change about building a startup:

• The validation process

• The amount of funding required

• What a venture-scale outcome looks like

• Just about everything else too

And if you apply that same principle to AI research then things get weird very, very quickly.

But at a minimum, as I wrote about back in the beginning of 2023, code will stop being a moat.

Data and distribution are the moats of the future.

Plan and build accordingly :)

💬 Quote: Founder Mode

Last week I mentioned Paul Graham’s newest essay: Founder Mode.

If you haven’t read it already, go do it. It’s relatively short.

The TLDR is that founders often get told bad management advice about staying out talented people’s ways as companies grow, and “founder mode” is an alternative that encourages founders to stay hyper-aware of what’s going on.

It’s basically the opposite of what you’d get taught in many business schools.

I’ve seen anecdotal evidence it’s superior throughout my career:

• At Uber, Travis led us and let the whole company be in founder mode. It was truly joyful to work there and teams were fully bought in with a sense of ownership. We shipped.

• At Airbnb (pre-COVID), the company was slow and extremely bureaucratic despite not even having IPO’d yet. It once took me more meetings than I could count to get something added to a set of filters. It’s thankfully clear that Brian saw this and addressed it since then.

• As a founder, I’ve partnered with people who had contrasting styles — more often than not, not being in the details and focusing on higher-level tasks led to issues.

Here’s an excerpt from the essay:

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