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Alexander Shartsis shared thisJust because an investor is famous and successful doesn't mean he won't be a dick to founders, even in his own portfolio. Vinod Khosla just called the CEO of a company he has invested in "a struggling second tier competitor." I've met Vinod. He is unquestionably a genius, and his worldview has clearly served him well. That doesn't make him someone I'd want on my cap table. There was a time in my career when I was in a bad place and had to sell my company in a hurry. I reached out to about 20 founders and CEOs in my space. Every one had been through a moment like mine. Khosla was the only firm any of them named as the cause. If this post blackballs me from ever raising from them, fine. I never would. You probably shouldn't either, even if their terms are better. And once an investor is on your cap table, you can't get rid of them.
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Alexander Shartsis posted thisall of this talk about which model is best, or how great the new one is misses a key point they're all good enough now. we are at the iphone 7 moment It does all the things it needs to do it's waterproof anything extra is nice but the extra 10 megapixels on the camera? not necessary. That's where AI is right now You can code Write terrible sales emails Write great sales emails The difference is in how you use it. The harness, the skills. The more people I work with the more the massive variation I see in AI ability Remember the Ti-85 calculator? Some people could use it to do addition Others could plan the construction of a suspension bridge. Most people don't need more AI. In fact most people would benefit from downgrading to Sonnet on most tasks. What we do need is to get better at using it.
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Alexander Shartsis reposted thisAlexander Shartsis reposted thisLet’s be honest, people tend to buy high-protein products for the nutrition, not the taste! But taste is exactly why they buy your brand again! Next Wednesday, September 30 at 10 a.m PT, we're going live with Helen Joyner, Associate Principal Scientist in Sensory at Premier Nutrition, to find out how sensory testing helps build winning products. Join us for a Customer Spotlight where she explains how sensory is woven into the product development process — from first prototype to shelf-ready formulas. You'll hear how you can: — Use sensory insights to make more informed product decisions — Balance speed with quality under real deadlines — Bring consumer-centric thinking into a fast-moving R&D process If you work in food or beverage innovation, this is a candid look at how sensory science helps shape decisions from an expert inside the company behind Premier Protein and Dymatize. Join us next Wednesday: https://lnkd.in/e4y_GpuM
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Alexander Shartsis shared thisYou want to get your startup acquired? Here's how. 1. Be named Max. Like maximus greenwald or Max Mitcham 2. Build something in the GTM space 3. Call up HubSpot, tell them about 1 and 2. BOOM! On a more serious note, though, this is cool. It's awesome to see Hubspot making moves in this space -- GTM is evolving rapidly, it's hard for a large org like Hubspot to keep up, and buying best-in-breed software is probably the fastest way to do so. Congrats again to everyone named Max who now work at Hubspot!
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Alexander Shartsis shared thisIf you ever wonder what a key difference is between successful people/companies, and unsuccessful... Just try. Courtesy of Brendon Cassidy
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Alexander Shartsis posted thisTo all the founders who want to quit or shut down to go do AI: STFU. You are probably too smart for your own good, and <25 yo I have nothing against youth. But with age comes some wisdom, whether you sought it out or want it–its pretty much forced on you. Let me drop some. Call it "unc" if you want. I started my career in tech the doldrums of the dot-com boom. The Internet was going to be the Next Big Thing until we figured out $1bn valuations for companies doing $30mm in unprofitable revenue is not sustainable. (Remember when $1bn seemed like a lot of money?) By 2005, working in tech was not something you advertised. Much better to work at Clorox or P&G. Or in banking. Innovation felt dead. People had left San Francisco–literally, rents were down, smart people (and not-as-smart people) packed their bags went home. But then mobile and social media happened. Among many, many other things–too many to name. Like Google and Amazon quietly growing in the background (not to mention, MSFT). And online video. I started a job in "online video" two weeks before YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion (an impossibly large amount of money, at the time, especially for a company doing 0 revenue). Instagram was acquired. Then Whatsapp. For (increasing) billions. In the 20-teens, it felt like mobile was largely played out (it wasn't). IoT happened, which is kinda mobile. Samsara. Verkata. Etc. Then crypto happened. Whether it's lived up to they hype or not, more trillions in value were created. Now it's AI. (Yes I skipped some stuff–billions in "generational wealth") What about now gives you any confidence that this is your last chance? It always feels like the last one. And then there's another one. So should you quit or shut down? Maybe, yes. You do you. Too many founders persist for too long working on bad ideas. This is a hits business. If you raised at ZIRP prices–you are unlikely to ever see much from an exit, even if you outperform. Unapologetically quit if you have lost confidence in the problem/your approach/your team/etc. Vinod Khosla quit the first time. He seems to have done just fine. But there is no End of Days coming, where you can no longer innovate. Where there is no longer money to be made. So if you've got kind of a good thing going, there's nothing wrong with investing more time in trying to figure it out. The next wave will be there afterwards. Let go the fear and embrace the present. Be grateful for the opportunity you have. But stay impatient.
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Alexander Shartsis posted thisAre you pro-Miro or pro-Fin? Take a nice (but disappointing) payout, or bet the company and go all in on AI? I know where Brendon Cassidy stands on this. What about everyone else? My $0.02 is–it depends. For Fin it was obvious. Customer support was one of the first great use cases for LLMs Intercom already automated a lot with machine learning and other models, intercepting questions with support articles: "How do I reset my password" led to the shocking recommendation of the article titled: "How to reset your password" (Requires some insane engineering talent to figure that out) But fin could just answer the question, and perhaps walk them through the process. Big win. People had, generally speaking, one use case for Intercom: answer customers' questions. Before that was with humans. It could be done as well or better with AI. I'd bet the company on that. For Miro, or Airtable, the other recent Bending Spoons acquisition, I'm not so sure. Yes they are good businesses (if they were run like businesses, not cash incinerators that also produced some cash to incinerate) But both did not have obvious AI pivots for 2 reasons: 1. They both were ways of humans understanding problems - whiteboarding, building interconnected tables, etc. 2. They both had diverse use cases–unlike Intercom. In Miro you could build slides, or flow charts, or diagrams, or just draw, or run brainstorming sessions. In Airtable you could run the backend of a small business, or a fantasy league, or just track what to buy at the grocery store. And so much more. So this armchair quarterback is in team Miro AND team fin. Pivoting is the right move where PMF is obvious. But I have no issue with selling out, at a down valuation. Because pivoting would have been too big a gamble.
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Alexander Shartsis posted thisCongrats to Tom Willerer and other friends at Miro on the Bending Spoons acquisition. Whatever anyone says about valuation, building a company worth $1bn is no mean feat. There used to be the attitude that, when you sell, you sell at a premium of what you'd raise at–because in theory you were giving up all that future upside. This applied to early stage startups, as much as it applied to public company acquisitions. Investors expected a premium to the current market price. Thing is that the valuations in the ZIRP era got so out of control, for companies like Miro and Airtable there is literally no price at which they could raise at–because their past valuations were so high. CJ Gustafson does a good job of explaining why in this week's newsletter, which I highly recommend. It boils down to - growth rates under 30% are just not worth the premium. With so many billions allocated to venture investing, it's not going anywhere. People will still raise. But I think we're seeing a return to the old school days. Where you needed a truly huge idea, with truly huge up front costs, and almost limitless potential, for venture math to work still. SaaS and other business innovations simply don't work with the model now that building software has become so much more affordable (yes, thanks to AI) Many in the current AI crop of $50mm seed rounds will suffer the same fate as Miro–if they're lucky or skilled enough to build a company worth $1bn, which many won't be. Airtable and Miro weren't the first. They won't be the last. There are hundreds of other much smaller scale companies who could also benefit from a cap table reset via acquisition–I'd be curious if you know of any? This seems like an interesting space to watch.
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Alexander Shartsis reposted thisAlexander Shartsis reposted thisShocking absolutely no one, it looks like the end of Cursor is upon us. It will always have access to Grok, but without access to the other models it's hard to believe that it will maintain it's market share. The features it offers just aren't unique enough anymore to stay at the front if it can't run Codex or Claude. https://lnkd.in/gsVpZtfqOur decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceXOur decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
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3h
100% this
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Alexander Shartsis liked thisAlexander Shartsis liked thisBuilding a good product requires understanding the world it’s being dropped into. Those worlds are changing quickly. We can feel it happening and we generally understand why. Our instinct is to start planning for change. But every good plan benefits from a counterplan. A counterplan is an alternative way of achieving the same result. In business, counterplanning means reconsidering the operating principles we’ve inherited and asking how we would design the work differently if we started from first principles today. The process reveals what should remain, what should change, and what entirely new approaches are now possible with frontier technologies. We’ve built and launched products like Sidekick and Radar by applying this thinking to problems we knew deeply. Now we’re building Counterplan around that approach. Counterplan embeds forward-deployed agents and engineers inside companies to rethink how work gets done and build the AI-native products and systems that make those new ways of working possible. We start with the outcome a company wants to achieve, then identify where AI changes the underlying assumptions, design a better path, and build it. Our belief is that a company’s future should not be constrained by its current structure. Counterplan gives us a broader horizon for the mission we started with Sidekick and Radar: using AI to create entirely new possibilities for how companies grow and operate. If your company could benefit from a counterplan, let’s make one.
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Alexander Shartsis liked thisAlexander Shartsis liked thisThe true internal test at seed is not whether a VC will fund you. It is whether it’s worth the next 10-15 years of your life.
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Alexander Shartsis liked thisAlexander Shartsis liked thisFascinating live example of a Silicon Valley norm that has been effectively retired: what if your investor is invested in your competitor? Now in this case Khosla (the fund itself) is invested in both FactoryAI and Cognition. There's a serious dustup between the two at the moment as a former advisor to Factory has joined Cognition as their CRO. Accusations flying, who knows what's actually true. But one of the meta-debates is: what does Khosla do? Seems like some of the leadership has come out swinging in favor of one side. What do you do, founder, if faced with the choice of taking money from investors who are at least somewhat conflicted in the same category? Or are all of these software/AI businesses so overlapping that this old firewall is out-of-date in today's venture market? Odd times!
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Alexander Shartsis liked thisAlexander Shartsis liked thisIn a bind: ask for help. We all have people around us who can and will help us. Most of us are too proud to help. Including me for most of my career. And if nobody wants to help you, it’s good motivation to start building relationships where you give as much if not more than you receive Help someone. Small. Big. Whatever Many today are so self serving they’ve lost the concept that relationships are reciprocal
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Alexander Shartsis liked thisAlexander Shartsis liked thisI used to respond to every cold email but now AI slop is killing my inbox https://lnkd.in/gDMVVFKNI used to respond to every cold email but now AI slop is killing my inboxI used to respond to every cold email but now AI slop is killing my inbox
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Alexander Shartsis liked thisJust because an investor is famous and successful doesn't mean he won't be a dick to founders, even in his own portfolio. Vinod Khosla just called the CEO of a company he has invested in "a struggling second tier competitor." I've met Vinod. He is unquestionably a genius, and his worldview has clearly served him well. That doesn't make him someone I'd want on my cap table. There was a time in my career when I was in a bad place and had to sell my company in a hurry. I reached out to about 20 founders and CEOs in my space. Every one had been through a moment like mine. Khosla was the only firm any of them named as the cause. If this post blackballs me from ever raising from them, fine. I never would. You probably shouldn't either, even if their terms are better. And once an investor is on your cap table, you can't get rid of them.
Publications
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The Ultimate Guide to Pricing Strategy: A Playbook for Behavior-Based Pricing and Promotions
Amazon
See publicationIf you're like most companies, your conversion rate ranges from 0.5% to 5%. That means you probably ignore more than 99% of your behavior data when making price and promotional decisions and only focus on what's selling. In today's world, price and promotional strategy hinges on understanding customers and creating the behaviors you want. Learn how to put the latest in pricing science to work for you, converting more visitors and making your entire organization more behavior aware.
Patents
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Computer-Implemented Method of Capturing Transaction Data Associated with an Online Purchase
Filed US 15/053,241
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Prediction and Trend Analyzer
Filed US 14834422
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The US defense industrial base has a structural problem that creates opportunity. The issue: • A few number of primes dominate procurement • Cost-plus contracts incentivize rising costs • Thousands of lobbyists maintain the system Promising defense-tech startups die before scaling, crushed by procurement friction they can't navigate. This "valley of death" is where specialist capital can outperform - funds that understand DoD go-to-market and have patience to back companies through the scaling gap.
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Daniel Dart
🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg
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