E207: Can AI Replace Your VC Analyst?

What happens when AI lets five people build what used to take fifty? Can you scale to eight figures in revenue without ever touching a “Series A treadmill”? In this episode, I talk with Henry Shi, co-founder of Super.com and creator of the Lean AI Leaderboard, about seedstrapping (raising once, then reaching escape velocity), outcome-based pricing, and a new, non-dilutive way to finance lean, profitable startups. We also get into how Henry “vibe-coded” an AI VC tool over a weekend, why survival rates should improve in the lean-AI era, and what founder traits show up again and again among these ultra-efficient companies.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Weisburd?

  You recently vibe coded an AI VC tool.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  We use AI, my girlfriend and I, to build this tool that allows you to upload a PDF. The DI will do deep analysis, competitive research, web crawling, and generate an investment memo. And you can also upload a forecast and Excel model, and it can do all the situational analysis, planning, forecasting, and generate a term sheet automatically. It's incredible how someone with no engineering experience, never taken a CS class, doesn't know what a terminal is, doesn't know what a HTML is, is able to build this tool entirely end to end, front end, back end, chat interface, web search analysis, API calls, GitHub, GitHub Actions, Bressel deployed, end to end deployed, all within a weekend.

• 0:44David Weisburd?

  And what's the use case that you're building around? Is it to completely replace VC analysts?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  You get way more detailed analysis of the market, competitive trends, analysis. You get forecasts built in, so it just reduces the process and human biases to make it a much more transparent, fair, and efficient process. Because going back again to the first principles, now with AI, if you can be a lean team, grow, hit your forecast, and be profitable or not die, then I want to fund you and I want to support you.

• 1:13David Weisburd?

  You founded Super.com and you just had a milestone. Tell me about where Super.com is today.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Started that company in 2016, grew from zero to 200, 250 employees, over 200 million annual revenue, and profitable, and over 50 million users.

• 1:29David Weisburd?

  You also run a cool leaderboard. It's called Lean AI Leaderboard. Tell me more about this Lean AI movement.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  After running the company for eight, nine years, after we were at a point where we were hundreds of millions of revenue, profitable, growing, I decided to step back to the board and give other leaders a chance to shine and take the company forward. So since transitioning to the board at the end of last year, I've been spending a lot of time helping founders do an angel investing, sharing content, dabbling in AI. And it's been a great journey. And in that process, I, beginning of this year, 2025, I saw a lot of people tweet on Twitter, LinkedIn, about how these companies with so few people are getting to 10, 20, 50 million dollars in ARR and beyond. And I thought, there must be more. Than just these handful of companies like Cursor, Mid Journey, etc. So I decided to create this leaderboard to track all the super lean, hyper growth companies that have post AI

• 2:19Speaker 01

  that are growing extremely quickly with very small teams in an official place called Lean AI Leaderboard. So I built this leaderboard, launched it, and it just took off, had millions of impressions across social and the website, and now it's this sort of way to track these lean AI companies growing extremely quickly with very few people and a high revenue and oftentimes profitably. So it's incredible to see this new trend.

• 2:44David Weisburd?

  Double click on why AI is allowing these crazy, high-growth companies that are grown on a very lean basis. Is there also a revenue and a cost side to the equation, or is it just simply less engineers?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  That's a great question. I think there's a couple of reasons why you're seeing this new trend and it's a confluence of factors. One is it's easier than ever to start a company with these AI tools, coding, Copalace, customer service, marketing, etc. You're seeing teams, instead of hiring people, they can just automate and augment themselves. So a small, lean, crack team can stay nimble, move quickly, and get a lot more done. So you're seeing that on the cost side, whereas before you had to raise a lot of money to build your product to go to market. Now these teams can ship quickly and get to market extremely quickly. On the demand side, you're seeing there's also a higher willingness to pay. Everyone is sort of interested in AI, interested in trying AI, adopting AI, they're getting pressure from the board,

• 3:42Speaker 01

  getting pressure from the markets, so there's a much higher willingness to pay from the customer side. And oftentimes you're seeing higher pricing because, and higher AOVs, because people are pricing based on outcome, not on necessarily software receipts. And for example, it's much harder to get to 10 million AR if you're selling a SaaS seat for five, $10 a month. But if you're selling an outcome, you can sell the same thing for hundreds or thousands of dollars. So higher O V, higher demand, willingness to pay, and lower cost basis. And you're seeing this effect of lean AI companies scaling so quickly and oftentimes profitably.

• 4:14David Weisburd?

  Give me an example of one or two outcomes that AI companies are pricing based on versus kind of this traditional SaaS model.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  So a good example is, I think, a company called Growth X. So that's a sort of AI service company, but it's incredible because they have seventy percent margins and it's AI-powered growth. They were able to scale from zero to, I believe, seven point two million AR within a year and a half and thirteen people. And that's the example where if you're just selling a SaaS tool for, you know, tracking your growth, analytics or something, right, you couldn't charge that much and grow so quickly. But because they're charging based on outcome, they're charging, I believe, five, ten thousand or more a month per client, but they're delivering end-to-end outcomes and they're able to do it efficiently and leanly with AI automation

• 5:04Speaker 01

  across entire back office and keep seventy percent plus margins.

• 5:08David Weisburd?

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• 5:51David Weisburd?

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• 6:18Speaker 01

  When you look at the history of venture capital, venture capital is actually the wrong product for most businesses, even those that do raise VC. And it's gotten worse as the funds got bigger and bigger. So I believe the stat is mega funds that are over five hundred million accounted for seventy seven percent of capital raised in the first half of twenty twenty two. And these billion dollar funds needs to own fifteen percent of twenty one billion dollar companies to just return three X. Uh but there were only twenty two public companies with a ten billion plus market cap. Um so the question becomes, how do you return these mega funds? Well, these investors have to chase more and more extreme outlier outcomes, but being a unicorn isn't enough. You have to be a decker coin and beyond.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Uh but realistically, most companies are not decker coins, so venture capital chasing these extreme outliers. And makes it such that everyone is forced to talk these large narratives, hire these massive teams, target these massive tech competitive teams. Um and and that's actually just not the right vehicle for most companies and founders. And and for these lean AI companies, right, if you can be five people doing ten twenty million a year. You're probably doing bet- you're probably better off than most venture backed founders. You have way more control, way more uh. Way less dilution, way more possible outcomes. And by the way, these are not lifestyle companies, right? These are not lifestyle founders who are spending an hour, working an hour a day uh in Dubai or somewhere.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  But there are hardworking founders who are driven, who are vicious, who are motivated, but who recognize that there's a better way to start, build and fund these companies. So I've been piloting a lot of different ways to try to support these founders. Where I think the fundamental premise is, if you can grow and you can hit milestones and you can stay alive, which is very much possible now with AI. Right? You should get funding and maybe it's not traditional equity, maybe it's rev share, royalty or something else, but it's much less, it's it's not equity, it's not dilutive. It's not a recourse, not loan, and it gives a founder optionality while still giving investors a good return, faster DPIs. And you don't have to wait ten years for for an exit, you can get, you can recycle the capital right away. So happy to dive more into it.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  But these are some of the things I've been piloting to explore new ways of funding and seed strapping companies.

• 8:33David Weisburd?

  So you popularized this term called seat strapping. What is seat strapping?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  So seed trapping is a interesting alternative way of building a company where you raise a sizable nice seed round and then you get to escape velocity from there on. So you no longer need to raise consecutive rounds of funding like pre-seed, seed tiers A, B, C, D, etc. And there's lots of benefits on why seed trapping, I think, is the ideal model for many lean AI hypergrowth scaling companies. And we can go into the differences in terms of revenue, founder dilution, ownership control, founder liquidity, etc., etc. But I think there's a lot of benefit now with lean AI that you can seed trap companies and you're seeing a lot of founders do this.

• 9:18David Weisburd?

  Give me a sense for what kind of company should be using seed strapping strategy.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  I think almost all the lean AI companies should consider that because the good part about seed strapping is you don't need to dip into your own pockets. Right? So you can start the company without having to dip into your own savings. But you don't have to constantly dilute yourself and chase investors and be on the VC treadmill. You can own control, grow over time, get more liquidity throughout the process and maybe even buy out some investors over time really not. So it's a benefit for in many ways. In terms of the companies, I think if you're a lean AI native company, it's a great bet. If you're a consumer PLG, I think that's also you're seeing a lot of companies successfully do that. If you're an AI nimble services company like GrowthX, I mean, you can raise money, but it's a great way to go.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  And I would say pretty much most companies, except for maybe certain industries like deep tech or heavy enterprise sales where the AI sales agents aren't quite good enough yet. But as the capabilities of AI agents get better and better, I think we'll see the appeal of seed strapping for more and more companies.

• 10:24David Weisburd?

  You recently vibe coded an AI VC tool. So first of all, what's your definition of vibe coding? And then tell me a little bit about this tool.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Okay, so basically, we use AI, my girlfriend and I, to build this tool that allows you to upload a PDF. The AI will do deep analysis, competitive research, web crawling, and generate an investment memo. And you can also upload a forecast and Excel model, and it can do all the situational analysis, planning, forecasting, and generate a term sheet automatically. So that's sort of what we built, and it's incredibly, it's incredible how someone with no engineering experience, never taken a CS class, doesn't know what a terminal is, doesn't know what a HTML is, is able to build this tool entirely end-to-end, front-end, backend, chat interface, web search analysis, API calls, GitHub, GitHub Actions, Vercel deployed, end-to-end deployed, all within a weekend.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  So truly using just Claude code and Claude, and that's, I think, the best definition of vibe coding. As you can see here, all these interfaces, everything was built just within a weekend and entirely vibe-coded.

• 11:31David Weisburd?

  And what's the use case that you're building around? Is it to completely replace VC analysts?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  As I'm exploring this new way of seed-strapping and supporting founders, I'm getting a lot of inbound and requests and companies. And I've always felt that the traditional venture investing, especially in early stages, was very vibes-based, right? Like, do I think this company is going to check all the boxes and become a tech icon? And frankly, how am I supposed to know? And the irony is, the investors, they get a thousand pitches, they reject 999 of them. They probably don't even look at half of them, and they're all trying to chase the two companies near that matter, right? But the irony is that the sum of the revenue of the 999 they rejected is definitely higher than the one you're trying to pick. So my thought is, how do you analyze and approach and systematically analyze the 999 founders who have been good

• 12:20Speaker 01

  and great companies, but in a way that's scalable, automated, and unbiased, and transparent? And you can do this much more effectively now with AI. You get way more detailed analysis of the market, competitive trends, analysis, you get forecasts built in. So it just reduces the process and human biases to make it a sort of much more transparent, fair, and efficient process. Because going back again to first principles, now with AI, if you can be a lean team, grow, hit your forecast, and be profitable or not die, then I want to fund you and I want to support you.

• 12:52David Weisburd?

  It reminds me a little bit of Dan Gross, who's obviously a prolific AI investor. He had this project called Pioneer, which tried to find these founders all over the world that maybe didn't fit the Stanford, Harvard, MBA, or a computer science background, but had built something special. There's a lot more of these than people think, and the reason more people aren't aware of them is because it becomes reflexive. If they don't get VC funded, they essentially never actualize.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Exactly, right? And so much of it is pattern matching and trying to predict decoy coin outcomes at the earlier stages. And I'm just not sure that's, I mean, maybe it's possible if you're the top 10, 20 firms, but for everyone else, I think it's so hard. There's so much selection and self-selection versus supporting the 999 founders who collectively, that's a ton of revenue. I think on the leaderboard you see here, obviously, a lot of them have raised funding, but a lot of them haven't. And collectively, it's 3.46 billion, right? And some of the best, highest revenue companies have not raised from this venture, like Telegram,

• 14:03Speaker 01

  billion revenue, not funded, Mid Journey, 500 million plus, $0 funding, Serge AI, billion dollars, zero funding. And so I think you're seeing a lot of these founders are realizing that's actually a better way to build incredibly massive, successful businesses.

• 14:17David Weisburd?

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• 15:00David Weisburd?

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• 15:18David Weisburd?

  Highly scalable, non VC backed companies. What are some characteristics that you see behind the founders themselves?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I don't know if you see the meme of the high IQ and low IQ and mid IQ. A lot of times you see these incredibly successful repeat founders who built businesses before the traditional venture funded way. And they realize there's a better way. So for example, I had a founder who reached out to me. His last company was 400 million AR, right? 400 million. And he's starting a new company. He's like, hey, hey, Henry, I came across your seed strapping thing and I'm starting a new company, but I don't want to do a traditional Y C safe or equity funding. What other methods are there? Because these founders, they've got it. They've been through the journey. They've gone through the venture capital grind and they realize that actually there's better ways to build a company, especially if we're a repeat founder.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Or you sometimes find that's another side of the end, which is, you know, fortunately they're maybe international, didn't go to Harvard, Stanford, didn't check the box. Tam's a little small or something, whatever reason, venture isn't the right instrument. Sure, this is a great alternative. And then you have folks in the middle, like the first time Y C founder, right? So who are like, hey, this sounds interesting. This is cool. It's non dilutive. It's, there's no recourse, but I don't know, it's different and I should just do a safe because Gary Tan told me to do a safe. Right? So you're kind of seeing this distribution. But my hope is over time, as you highlight more of these stories, these incredible founders building incredible business outcomes, that more people are going to shift to the right of the tail and realize that there's better ways. And it's not just a single way to play the game.

• 16:49David Weisburd?

  If you had to guess, would you see Y C starting to play in this realm? Or would you see kind of a new AI native incubator that's focused on these seat strapping strategy?

• 17:01Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I don't know if traditional Y C will get into this sort of realm because their whole model is based on marking up and fundraising and sort of having the company, prepping the companies for demo day and getting marked higher valuations and fundraising and traditional venture route. And actually very good at it because if you're an incumbent and you're the best at that type of model, you know, why should you change? It's been very profitable for them and they're great. And in fact, it's been awesome. Whereas here, I think it's a bit of like. Innovator's dilemma or alternative model where at first it looks different. It's maybe good, uh, uh, you know, sort of people don't get it. But over time, as AI and capabilities become better and better, I think you're going to see more and more founders opt into this new model.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  And I'm not sure if it's an incubator accelerator or funding model or something else. My hope is that there will be more people who are doing this. So it's not just me who's thinking about investing in different ways, but there we can inspire other investors to think about funding the, you know, nine hundred ninety nine companies who are not the two a year that become Deco coins. And hopefully that can translate to more founder, more diverse founders, more um transparent fund funding, and more much more fair, efficient process. So that's how I hope is more people can do this and and sort of realize that it's also a great economic uh opportunity as well. Because if you can get DPIs right away, right, your IRs are extremely high. You don't need to wait ten years for an exit or liquidity event. You can get DPIs right away and then you can recycle that capital to invest in more and more companies.

• 18:31David Weisburd?

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• 19:15David Weisburd?

  Double click on the seat strapping model on the investor side. So clearly this is a great model for a founder that's looking to maybe owns ninety seven, ninety eight percent of the founding team. Of a startup. Tell me about the dollars and cents of investing on the investor side.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  I've obviously tested various experimented different mechanisms and models of this. And so the latest thinking and iteration is basically it's a non-dilutive, non-recourse capital. So it's not equity, there's no control, there's no debt. And all founders do is they give me a deck of the company, which I use my AI VC analysis tool to do a deep research on, generate their landscape market mapping memo, and then a 15-month forecast. And what it would offer is based on the forecast, basically the idea is like if you can hit your forecast, which you said, by the way, right, the founder chooses, if you can hit your forecast and generate growth and not die, then I want to give you the opportunity to get funded.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  So for example, so right now it's structured as a bit of a sort of a line of credit, which is it's not debt, but it's it's up to the founder how much they want to draw. So let's just use round numbers. Suppose I do analysis on the forecast and I say, hey, you know, I want to give you a million dollars that you can draw in over four tranches and it's 250K per quarter based on hitting your quarterly forecast. So again, right, the founder sets the forecast and so long as you can hit it, you can unlock more tranches of capital. But it's up to the founder how much they want to draw, if any. So it's up to them if you want to draw all million or maybe only 250K or half of it. It's up to them and that actually encourages founders to to be more disciplined about capital.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  And the the structure is around five to 10% revenue and it's capped over two to five years at two to three X, right? So it's not cheap like a bank loan, but it's way faster and it's way cheaper than equity, especially you know, pre-seed funding, which is you're giving up 20% of a company for oftentimes a million dollars, right? So it's capped for the investor, but it's high DPIs right away and it's an option for the founder depending on if they want to use it. And because sometimes what you see is you see founders say, oh, look, I raised a massive seed round, you know, five million dollars and I didn't even have to touch any of it, right? Even though they're they're flexing about it, but it's actually, that's actually kind of dumb because you just diluted yourself 20 plus percent and you didn't even need the money. So why did you do that? So the the thinking here is help encourage founders to be disciplined with the funding.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Give investors a way to invest in these companies, whether they become unicorn or not, doesn't really matter. If you can hit targets, grow and build a great business, I want to fund you. And it's a it's essentially a free option for the founder. There's no cost. If you don't want to use it, great. Um, you know, if one is, that's awesome too. But my hope is that by giving up founders a fair, transparent way to get capital as they hit their targets. It encourages great financial discipline, encourages people to actually set realistic targets. And um, whether you use my money or not is somewhat irrelevant because I s- I would have still helped you build a better company. If you can hit your forecast and actually build a great business. And this is based on the idea that they're already revenue generating and already you could scale up from some revenue number.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, uh, right now I'm focused more on more mostly on companies with some former revenue. But the goal in the future is to have all types of companies because again, go back to the first principles, right? The reason why fundraising is hard and annoying is because the there's a fundamental disconnect between a founder's projections and investors' belief in their projections. Because if you think about it, if the investors actually believe the founder's projections, right? Then you shouldn't invest in every single company because they're always up into the right. If you actually believe you should invest in every company, but the reality is investors don't. And the other, the thing makes things worse, founders are incentivized to um, sort of juice the numbers. Because they're all taught, oh, you have to talk about a deck of corn unicorn, major outcome, or else investors aren't interested.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Well, that's going back because investors are sort of these mega funds are looking for these mega exits and only twenty plus percent of deck of coins, right? So both sides, people are sort of incentivized to uh, sort of not align on the financials or projections. So the thing here is if you can just get the founder to set their own projection that they that they believe in and align the capital to their own projections, then you should hopefully align them to and end up with great sort of businesses that if you can hit projections are going to be good investments. So in terms of question. Over time, I do hope to support companies pre-revenue as well because so long as you can make a forecast and hit those forecasts, then I want to fund you because that's as simple as it should be. If you can have forecasts

• 23:47Speaker 01

  and build a great business, then you should get funding, whether you need it or not separate, but you should at least get the opportunity for that.

• 23:53David Weisburd?

  To play devil's advocate, historically, I think something like three out of four startups did not give back one X their money at the Series A, not even at the seed, but at the Series A. How do you make that work with a two to three X return at that stage if you're capping yourself?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  That's a good question. And so one is, I think the probability of success will be much higher now with AI and these lean AI methodologies because it's easier and cheaper than ever to start a company. Before, you had to raise a lot of money, hire a bunch of people, spend a lot of time on R and D, get the product to market. And by the time you have this large team, you have hired Series A, for example, twenty, thirty, fifty people. In those cases, yeah, you might actually die. You might actually run off a cliff because you have this high burn and you can't grow revenue fast enough or whatever. You have all these fixed costs of people, labor, et cetera. You might actually die. But now, with the lean AI approach, you can get to that level of scale with a very small team and a bunch of AI tools, right?

• 24:47Speaker 01

  You don't need to hire a lot of engineers. You don't even need to know how to code sometimes. And by keeping being lean, nimble and scrappy, you have optionality and flexibility, right? Like, you're not going to fall off a cliff because you have five people. You can always adapt. You can always pull back here, spend less or more on marketing, but you're not, you don't have this fixed, large fixed cost base where suddenly you run out of money and you fall off a cliff. So one is the cost is a lot lower, you have more control and flexibility, and you're more nimble. So you can adapt quicker and you can adjust. So I think that's, that's why I fundamentally believe surround rates are going to go up. And what I often look for in these founders is, as you know, a lot of times companies die not because of competition, but because of suicide,

• 25:29Speaker 01

  because the founders give up, they get bored, they do something else. So really, it's more about the resilience of the founder and their sort of persistence and, and sort of conviction versus like, oh, we're gonna overspend, hire too many people and run out of money. It's more about them just maybe giving up as, as a failure mode. So that's one on the, on the, on the, on the, excuse me, on the. Cost and probability of success. And then on the return side, oftentimes you'll see, right? These are because oftentimes you see companies that are great companies who are now zombie companies because they're not going fast enough and they don't have an exit opportunity. They've the prep stack is way too high, the early investors get washed out. So I think you also see a lot of reasons why investors don't return in capital.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  It's not because these are not good companies, it's just it didn't fit the venture model. And when you're stuck as a sort of zombie company, zombie unicorn company, right? Everybody's stuck and you're not getting your money. Whereas if you're doing it on a rupture royalty basis,

• 26:26Speaker 01

  it doesn't really matter if you get stuck at twenty, thirty million A R, right? Because I'm getting a revenue split of that, so I can still get my return and my money. And I don't need to pray or depend on an exit. And oftentimes, as you know, these exits, the company has to be growing really quickly. And the market has to be right and the sort of multiples have to line up. So if you're investing at a high multiple and the multiples don't catch up, yeah, you're underwater. But here, you're investing and they're growing, or excuse me, if you're investing and they're making money, even if they get stuck and the multiples are low, it doesn't really matter because I can recycle the capital to rupture royalty and then reinvest in more companies.

• 27:02David Weisburd?

  I like a lot of parts of this concept. I like the seed strapping. I like the term they popularized. I like the higher return of capital. I worry about the misalignment where you're being paid off of revenue and you're also getting capped at the upside. That invariably misaligns you with the founder, not in every way, but in certain ways. And I think if founders went about just raising less money and not chasing the headlines, the five million dollar seed round, like you mentioned, there could be more co-centric circles that work better for the founder and the G P.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Sure, right? And that's why after many iterations, I've structured it more like a line of credit. So it's up to the founder how much they want to take, right? So they don't need to use all of it. Whereas for a traditional equity, if you get a five million seed, that's all of it. Even if you don't need it, that's all of it on your capital, you can't give it back. Whereas here, it's meant to be structured in a way that's founder's option. So. Yeah, they want the headline and some big number because they feel psychologically better. That's cool, but you don't actually need to use all of it. And oftentimes I've actually paired this with traditional equity funding. I suppose they want to raise a two mil round. Um, they raise a million equity and a million in this new format. And so that way they don't need to over dilute themselves. And instead of doing a two on twenty, right?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Maybe now it's a one on twenty and another one on this rep share model. And that's only five percent dilution, right? So that's oftentimes good to pair it as well.

• 28:30David Weisburd?

  Just looked up the numbers roughly fifty to seventy percent of seed stage companies fail to get to series A historically. You believe there will be much lower death rates or much higher survival rates for startups. What percentage of these lean AI startups do you think will make it as defined by being ongoing businesses in the future?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  The question, I think the metric you mentioned is fail to raise a series A, right? But I think that is maybe no longer the definition of success or failure. Whether you raise a series A or not, maybe it doesn't matter because you're seeing companies here on the leaderboard that are just blowing past series A numbers, um, right? So, um, I, I, I don't know that raising consecutive rounds of funding is a true success metric. In fact, that might actually be the wrong metric because now you look at all these companies who are raising all these successful rounds and getting marked up. But the DPI is the last, you know, fund cycle has been terrible, right? So, so is that truly the measure of success? Or is truly measured as capital return and DPI? So I think that's maybe a, a sort of discussion point about, uh, definition of success. And two is in terms of survival rate.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Again, I think, um, if you're a lean company doing like, you're not doing deep tech, you're not doing some crazy like enterprise sales thing, right? If you're doing like standard tech, consumer PLG annual services. And again, the founders commit convicted, they're keeping lean, keeping the costs burn low and they're nimble and they're scrappy and they're hungry and they're motivated. I think this is survive survival rate will be extremely high, much higher than fifty, even seventy percent. Uh, because most companies die because, uh, uh, assuming you don't fall off a cliff because founders give up, right? And so long as they don't give up, they're focused and committed and they're nimble and scrappy and, and can grow revenue ahead targets. Yeah, I think it's going to be much, much, much higher.

• 30:18David Weisburd?

  And to your point, if you double click even further, why founders give up, sometimes they have this capital stack, this pref stack of fifty, seventy million. And there may be a twenty million dollar business today and they just look at it and they say it's going to take seven years and then I'm going to get screwed by the preference stack anyways, I might as well. Close the company. So this misalignment happens kind of from the pref stack as well.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly right. So that's why it's not worth it for them. To continue a company that's like a zombie unicorn. I have many friends who are in that situation.

• 30:50David Weisburd?

  Well, Henry, I wish I had people like you around and these types of funding when I started my first company in two thousand and four, my freshman year in college. So thanks for doing this for the community. How should people keep up to date everything that you're working on, everything that you're writing about?

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can find me, my content on my LinkedIn, my Substack, Twitter as well, for free to reach out. Kind of like you, my company, we raised a hundred fifty million venture funding, grew to two hundred million revenue a year. Overall, we were very lucky, very successful and our investors have been very supportive, but the journey was super painful. We talked to. A hundred investors for our seed round, got ninety eight no's, one maybe, one yes for our series B. We talked to a hundred and forty four investors, got a hundred and forty three no's. As every time is a big distraction, it was. Did a whole song and dance, a whole process and it just never felt like the as, I don't know, just straightforward and enjoyable and transparent.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  As it is building a company, talking to customers, actually creating value and same for the investors side, you know, I'm an LP and some of the top funds. I'm also an angel investor and I venture partner in some funds and you see them on the table. It's hard. It's a, it's a frustrating process for the investors as well. So much noise. Very little signal. Everyone's trying to pattern match the exact same way. So just, there's got to be a better way and hopefully by. Talking about this, by sharing these stories, these success case studies and putting my money where my mouth is, investing my own money in this new model. Hopefully we can help inspire more founders, especially now with AI and lean AI methods to build amazing companies in a new way.

• 32:23David Weisburd?

  I think the second order effects of this could be enormous, maybe five, 10 times more startups. If you take it to its natural progression and people are able to start companies, you don't have to work at large companies. You could start companies with almost no capital down with no, without knowing venture capitalists, without going to Harvard and Stanford. The TAM for potential founders is pretty enormous and probably easy to underestimate.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely, right? And that's kind of the future thesis is can you have these AI enabled one person, you know, AI companies? And Sam Altman talks about the one person billion dollar company, right? Which I think we're starting to see because one, one person just got, you know, acquired for 80 million cash and more of, more even 80 million cash upfront. And another 80 plus million in earn out, that's one person. And I think we're going to see more and more of that. But I think what's even more exciting is not the, not just the one person billion dollar company, but the billions of one person AI companies, right? Entrepreneurs who are building, who are chasing their own dreams, who are more fulfilled, more driven, more motivated. And what is the tooling? What is the stack? What is the sort of capital allocation to support these one person, one person AI native entrepreneurs?

• 33:36David Weisburd?

  David Deutsch, in his, in his book Beginning of Infinity, basically philosophically thought about this question, like how much innovation could there be? And there's literally an infinite amount of innovation that could happen because it become, starts innovating on itself. So people need not be worried that there will be more and more opportunities for everybody.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And one of the most fun, fulfilling things after putting out the Lean AI Angel, which I'll share here. So let me just share that screen here.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Right. So after I vibe coded this site where people can upload their deck and financial, and we do the analysis and generate a term sheet, right? The cool thing is, one of the coolest things is how many people and innovators and entrepreneurs all over the world have these incredible ideas that I never even thought about or even existed. And it's fascinating to see them build incredible business. And again, like it may not be what VC's pattern match, but these people are building real businesses, making real money, growing, excel. Growing, accelerating and succeeding in their fields and domains and just incredible to see. So hopefully we'll see even more of that.

• 34:41David Weisburd?

  Awesome, Henry. Well, I'll be in San Francisco soon, so we need to get together and sit down soon.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, awesome. Yeah, great to catch up and thanks for having me.

• 34:50David Weisburd?

  Thanks, Henry. Thanks for listening to my conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. This helps us grow. Also provides the very best feedback when we review the episode's analytics. Thank you for your support.