Every seed fund now uses AI for sourcing, diligence, market research, ops, portfolio monitoring, even construction.⁣ ⁣ Alex Edelson's take on what that actually buys you:⁣ ⁣ "I'm not sure how much of a competitive advantage it is because it's generally available to everyone."⁣ ⁣ Same tools, same data, same models. The edge was never going to come from the tech.⁣ ⁣ "VC is an artisanal game. It's about relationships with founders and VCs and building a brand and a flywheel in those communities."⁣ ⁣ AI raises the floor for everyone at once. It doesn't move the ceiling.

The median venture fund returns worse than private equity.⁣ ⁣ Alex Edelson's point: that's fine, because the math was never supposed to run on the median.⁣ ⁣ "Every shot on goal has to have some chance of that asymmetry, or else you should be investing in private equity."⁣ ⁣ Ten to thirty x outcomes are what pull the mean above everything else. If a fund's portfolio can't plausibly produce one, there's no case for the illiquidity or the risk.⁣ ⁣ Which means the diligence question isn't "is this a good company." It's whether the fund has the ownership and construction to actually capture the outlier when it shows up.

Michael Green on why small IPOs are getting starved out:⁣ ⁣ Going public means finding buyers willing to hold something the index doesn't. Historically that was active managers. But passive flows have gutted that pool of capital.⁣ ⁣ Fewer active dollars means a higher bar for which new companies get bought at all. And the active managers who are left have every incentive to hug the benchmark and stay invisible rather than take the risk.⁣ ⁣ "Why would you want to take a significant risk as an active manager who's largely incapable of selling your services to the public?"⁣ ⁣ Passive growth didn't just change how stocks trade. It changed who gets to go public in the first place.

Alex Edelson, on how Slipstream actually builds trust with LPs:⁣ ⁣ Real feedback on their portfolio. Help thinking through a strategy shift. Being a thought partner on decisions long before there's ever a fund conversation.⁣ ⁣ And sometimes telling them Slipstream isn't the right fit at all.⁣ ⁣ "It's not just pushing Slipstream, and I think that does build credibility. The strategy is not for everyone. We are not for everyone."⁣ ⁣ No quarterly email cadence. No repeatable playbook. Just case by case relationship building until trust shows up as capital.

Alex Edelson on raising from top LPs: there's no silver bullet, just a long, personal, trust-based process.⁣ ⁣ His approach is to lay out the reasons to invest and the reasons not to, in the same conversation.⁣ ⁣ "It's I'm balanced. Let me tell you the reasons why you invest. Let me tell you the reasons why you should not invest with us."⁣ ⁣ Some of those relationships stop feeling like fundraising entirely. Texting constantly, working closely, genuinely close.⁣ ⁣ "It's almost like becomes a friendship more than a business relationship, even though it started in a business setting."⁣ ⁣ Started as diligence. Turned into something he didn't see coming.

Grant Cardone asked Ryan Serhant how long you should follow up with a prospect.⁣ ⁣ Serhant's answer: until you die, or until they die.⁣ ⁣ Cardone's team sends 420,000,000 emails a year to a 7.8 million person list. 8,000 outbound calls a day. From one department.⁣ ⁣ 18% unsubscribe annually from the emails. 65% of those unsubscribers are the best customers, the ones who spend the most.⁣ ⁣ They don't need the email anymore because they're about to see you on Instagram, then YouTube, then TikTok, then Fox Business, then a podcast, then the front row of your own event.⁣ ⁣ Be in one place and people forget you exist. Be in every place at once and they start assigning you power.

As General Catalyst scaled, bigger check sizes and bigger AUM pulled the firm's gravity toward growth.⁣ ⁣ Yuri Sagalov on the fix: acquire three seed firms and let the founders who built them rebuild GC's seed practice from scratch, from inside the company.⁣ ⁣ You don't nudge a firm back to early stage with a memo. You bring in people who've already built one.

If someone pitches you a cloud fund today, you'd think they were crazy. That's Yuri Sagalov of General Catalyst on why sector-specific seed funds don't age well.⁣ ⁣ His logic: seed returns come from the next generation of startups. A thesis built around today's hot category is stale by the time the fund finishes raising.⁣ ⁣ "All the returns in seed come from the next generation of startups. So by definition, if you're out there marketing a fund for twenty four months, your thesis is already stale."⁣ ⁣ Crypto funds, AI funds, cloud funds, internet funds. Each one looked smart for a year or two, then looked dated.⁣ ⁣ The differentiation sector focus gives an emerging manager is real. It's just not durable.⁣ ⁣ For LPs, Sagalov's advice is simple: stop underwriting the theme and start underwriting the person's ability to find exceptional founders, over and over, regardless of what's popular.

Companies hitting $100B+ valuations while still private used to be impossible. There simply wasn't enough capital outside public markets to get them there.⁣ ⁣ Yuri Sagalov on why that's changed:⁣ ⁣ "I think there are a number of companies now in the hundreds of billions dollar valuation range that historically would have been public by now, because there would have been no capital available to them privately. And now there is capital available to them."⁣ ⁣ Series H rounds. Companies raising letters deep into the alphabet because staying private no longer means staying small.⁣ ⁣ Some founders want the bell-ringing moment. Others see quarterly earnings calls as a distraction they can now avoid indefinitely.⁣ ⁣ Going public used to be a capital requirement. It's becoming a choice.

Nelson Mills on grading venture investors:⁣ ⁣ "There's three options. One, they invest and you never hear from them again. Two, they invest and they're really a pain in the ass. Or three, they actually add value once in a while."⁣ ⁣ His breakdown: most land in bucket one. That's a B+/A-, not an insult. An F is an investor who interferes and wastes your time. An A+ is rare, maybe 10% of a cap table, introducing customers and helping close the next round.⁣ ⁣ The part people miss: disappearing is still a good outcome. Capital is value. Someone who writes the check and goes quiet already gave you what you needed to build.⁣ ⁣ Everything after that is icing.

Most VC firms use seed as a feeder for Series A. Fund a bunch of seeds, cherry pick the winners, double down. Everyone else gets left wondering what's wrong with their company.⁣ ⁣ Yuri Sagalov on why General Catalyst refuses to play that game:⁣ ⁣ "We blanket said that we will not cherry pick any of our best companies at Series A. We will buy ownership upfront at seed... but we actually will skip leading any of our seed companies' rounds at Series A because we just wanna get rid of signaling risk."⁣ ⁣ His reasoning on why this matters most in the messy middle:⁣ ⁣ "If things are going exceptionally well, no one's gonna care. If things are going exceptionally poorly, no one's gonna care. But there's a big 80% in the middle... and in those cases, I think people do care."⁣ ⁣ Nobody has more information on a company than its existing investor. GC decided to make that information useless as a signal.

Yuri Sagalov, General Catalyst, on why the best founders avoid IPOs as long as possible:⁣ ⁣ "The very best founders, whether Elon, the Collison brothers, they try to avoid the public markets as long as humanly possible in order to align the organization around long term thinking versus quarterly thinking."⁣ ⁣ Going public buys you acquisition currency. SpaceX just showed you can dangle that promise without ever ringing the bell.⁣ ⁣ But Sagalov thinks the rest of the gap is closing fast. Employee liquidity through private redemptions, regulatory scrutiny catching up to what private M&A would look like anyway.⁣ ⁣ Staying private used to mean giving something up. That trade is getting cheaper every year.

Q1 2026: 75% of all global venture capital went into five companies.⁣ ⁣ Yuri Sagalov's point: SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI aren't going public by choice. They're going public because private markets can't fund them anymore. Only $350B gets deployed privately per year, and it's concentrated in a handful of names.⁣ ⁣ Double the size of the private market and the math changes completely. Each of these companies gets another round. They stay private longer. And the returns that used to accrue to public shareholders start accruing to venture instead.⁣ ⁣ Forget TAM, forget GDP. The capital shortage alone is worth two to three extra turns of return.

John Borthwick on why AI feels so hard to reason about:⁣ ⁣ We built our entire intuition for technology on determinism. Light switch goes on, lights turn on. X plus Y equals Z. Glass on the table stays on the table.⁣ ⁣ Language models don't work that way. They're probabilistic, closer to the world we actually live in than the clean deterministic one we got comfortable believing in.⁣ ⁣ The discomfort isn't a bug in how people understand AI. It's a sign they understood the old world a little too well.

John Borthwick (@Borthwick) on the real unlock behind this AI cycle:⁣ ⁣ "The step function change that took place really last October, November, coming into January with the launch of these harnesses. All of a sudden we could use these AI models as systems to actually get stuff done."

What separates founders from everyone else with an idea:⁣ ⁣ "The best founders, they're not even necessarily excited about a company. They can't stop obsessing over it. It's almost like an ex girlfriend they can't get over."

SC Moatti built a system that listens to 600,000 product conversations so humans don't have to.⁣ ⁣ Their AI, PSIS, filters the noise and only surfaces a signal when it's strong enough to deserve a human's attention. Once a day, ten times a day, doesn't matter.⁣ ⁣ "Going from one to 10 is something humans can do. Going from one to a 100, it requires layers and complexity and generally creates a lot of waste."⁣ ⁣ Most firms bolt AI onto an old org chart. Moatti's point is sharper: start from what only humans can do, judgment and relationships, and build everything else AI native.⁣ ⁣ The firms that win this shift won't be the ones automating the most. They'll be the ones that figured out what never should have been human work in the first place.

SC Moatti spent years telling herself she needed to know one more thing before starting her fund.⁣ ⁣ "The more I know, the less I know. And everything I don't know, I'll figure it out."⁣ ⁣ She points to John Chambers, former Cisco chairman, who watched the reinvention cycle shrink from seven to ten years down to three to five around COVID. Her guess today: about two years.⁣ ⁣ Readiness was never the blocker. It was the excuse.

.@stevenjr76 on what working under Steve Jobs actually gave him:⁣ ⁣ Not a playbook. Confidence. The kind that lets you sit across from any founder or billionaire executive and know you belong in the room.⁣ ⁣ He also learned what parts of Apple's culture to keep and what to leave behind when he went to run Foursquare.⁣ ⁣ Two years of flying New York to Cupertino taught him something else: his best work wasn't going to happen inside someone else's company.⁣ ⁣ That realization is the real reason he started a venture firm.

SC Moatti on why she'd tell a 22 year old to do sales first:⁣ ⁣ Sales gives you a fast, brutal feedback loop. You win the deal or you lose it. Nothing subjective about it.⁣ ⁣ That's what builds the credibility to eventually tackle the ambiguous stuff, like product or venture investing, where you don't find out if you were right for ten years.⁣ ⁣ "Anything that's not a win or lose outcome is really difficult to build the credibility and the confidence to execute."⁣ ⁣ Career growth is a sequencing problem before it's a talent problem.