This week we at slow ventures hosted our first ever etiquette finishing school for YC founders in the Four Seasons in SF — The rare business formal event in SF — We had fifty people in attendance and a long long wait list we couldn’t fulfill (next time bigger room). There was some good fun — how to dress with several models showing off different looks, wine tasting, caviar tasting and advice on how to properly ‘bump’ it (champagne, always acceptable. Rosé, never)… But obviously there were deeper points to get across.
- (1) When tech was a backwater side show it was ‘cute’ to show up in other people’s cultures as the ‘tech kid’ smelling bad in ripped clothes and eating like a heathen… but tech is now big business & with AI quite scary to many people. Showing up with humility, showing respect and understanding for the cultures you are invited into, etc. is actually quite important to building trusting partnerships, business relationships, etc. How you show up and the respect you show for different cultures matters now in a way it didn’t used to.
- (2) Show up as a person first…especially as a young founder — it is important to enter rooms with low heart rate, calm, and an abundance mindset instead of a scarcity one where you have to force yourself to the center of attention / the room, etc. Project confidence, be willing to ask questions, etc.
- (3) Trust is everything… people are investing in you — not your technology. People are partnering with you… employees you are recruiting will mirror the behavior you project and the etiquette you set… you need to be conscious of the signals you send and how you show up. If anything that YC pitch and all your research on product market fit? When you are at zero that is proof of work towards building trust when you are just starting out, but really the big bit is trust — all that jazz is just signaling towards the end of someone trusting you, your passion to win, and that you know how to do smart work (which inevitably will change in substance 50 times before you actually know what you are doing)
Yes you need good tech, yes you need to be solving real problems… but building successful organizations and companies in 2025 is not at all a matter of ‘just focusing on product market fit’ — that is old incubator thinking… excited to explore this more with more founders and congrats to all the graduates of our first cohort :) — and fun to see folks talking about the experience on Linkedin and updating their bios with their certification… the certificates really are pretty great.
Hot Takes
- Elon’s Inflation Dreams - If ever there was a person with an incentive to devalue the USD in the next decade.. it is now Elon Musk! If you believe people are their incentives, look for Elon to now really want the money printing machine to go brrr (and maybe buy some bitcoin, seems to be on sale!!?)
- No Kings and Queens… of Corbets - every year in Jackson Hole there is a crazy extreme competition called hilariously ‘kings and queens of corbets’ — don’t get me wrong, it is cool… but the problem is that it shuts down an iconic run for like half the season and keeps average joes / the people from skiing it! So I say ‘no kings or queens’ !! Starting a movement this ski seasons — I have about 30 requests from crazy extreme skiers this weekend to fulfill for t-shirts… but clearly more to do here — I am thinking 1980s style ski-party ‘no kings and queens’ at the Moose… big flags, stickers for the kids, etc. This is gonna be a party!
- Pre-Bailout Bailout for OpenAI — this was quite a faux pas from OpenAI — spoke about it on CNBC but I guess no clips yet. For a long time I have been saying this whole thing is clear — US needs to inflate dollar + a ton of GDP growth from somewhere… AI / driving Chinese hosing boom for computers based on religious belief is the way to go! Everyone can play, everyone can ship dollars into this and tie hands and all agree to do it together! But then OpenAI went and said the ‘B’ word by accident… don’t do that! Are you kidding… the last thing we need is everyone to realize that the real game is taking all the dollars in, returning $0.20c of infra… with $0.80c of belief and a cap table that shifts all the value out of the wallets of the people into the 0.0001% (especially this week with Elon!) AND then make them bail us all out! You are going to get us all guillotined…
- Holy Baseball — I grew up loving baseball / playing a ton of it… it is the most American sport by far / models how America actually works — a ‘team sport’ that is actually a series of individual actions & a game where most of it is how to focus through long stretches of boredom just so you are primed and ready to act in the rare critical moment of action. That said, I can’t imagine a better World Series— it almost makes me like baseball again as an adult. almost.
- Over-Supply of Belief — This is really what is going on — there is a big belief vacuum because people gave up communities and religions and friends to believe in — so they stake it all on the future and tech… meaning that where once you needed people to believe in themselves, in the future, etc… now we have an over-supply of that type of belief and a vacuum of belief in anything else — what do you owe people in this over-pivoted to tech-belief world? Honesty.
- Good Luck Mamdani — I really do get pleasure with this story not being an SF / CA story for once… let someone else do the whole ‘lab of democracy’ thing… and let’s see what we learn from it as a country. It is really relaxing to let someone else do the crazy experiment for once.
- $400M Jelly my Jelly — This is just wild…. I started this with half a Solana … have never sold any… but also haven’t bought that much — I AM quite excited for what Iqram is building & see really cool integrations for a social app focused on authenticity with JMJ payment rails built in (tipping, paying for videos, etc.) — but watching JMJ rip to a $400M+ market cap this week on heavy trading almost a year after I launched it is somewhat surreal.
- Lettermeme LOL— I really do keep amusing myself with lettermen… close to some really cool new ones as well that I think will be really helpful to understand the world (with a dash of whimsy of course)
I hope everyone enjoys lint rollers in the gift baskets,
Sam
P.S. if you open a good bottle of wine… offer the sommelier a taste… and this made me laugh the most on the week.
P.P.S. Save the date for December 1st - we are hosting a pilgrimage through the streets of SF to OpenAI’s HQ to celebrate the birth of our god chatGPT… followed by drinks — inspiration from Mexico last week… and inspiration for the after party also from last week.