Opportunity → IRL Events
Framework → Racecar Growth
Tool → Origami Agents
Trend → Stealth Startups
Quote → Don’t Reveal Your Numbers
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Opportunity: IRL Events
In 2020 I was sick of being cooped up in my basement apartment in San Francisco, so I booked a big Airbnb in Tulum and convinced 18 other founders to come live with me.
Back then, going IRL was highly contrarian and attracted a lot of attention (both good and bad) as a result.
In 2024 the pandemic is starting to feel like it happened a while ago, and post-election I’m seeing a lot of people craving more connection and experiences with others again.
The problem is that most people are pretty bad at running events.
Events are hard and not very scalable, so it takes a special kind of person who loves events to put in the time to run them well repeatedly.
While this has traditionally been a tar pit idea, Steph Smith from a16z is wondering if there are new solutions in the space:
🧠 Framework: Racecar Growth
Startups are racecars.
They go fast, are impractical for most people, and there’s a high likelihood of crashing.
But the racecar analogy holds when you think of how to grow a startup, too.
Here’s how Reforge breaks it down, with some help from Lenny Rachitsky (along with how to avoid common pitfalls and how to put it into practice):
🛠 Tool: Origami Agents
Agents are here.
Specifically, “origami” agents.
This is an interesting YC startup that lets users create crawlers with agentic functionality.
If that sounds a bit vague to you, don’t worry, it does to me too.
But basically you can monitor whenever things happen on the internet, and set up alerts or trigger actions.
Think about it like a tool that does social listening, competitor research, Google alerts, and more. Worth a look!
📈 Trend: Stealth Startups
In the ZIRP era, it was weird if you weren’t building in public.
Sharing your thinking behind strategic decisions, sharing your numbers, and more was all extremely normalized in Silicon Valley.
It never got to the point of actual social pressure but it was definitely… odd if you weren’t open about it all.
In retrospect this is absolutely insane.
You are investing years of your life into a single business, and your investors are investing millions of dollars.
The opportunity cost alone makes being private about what’s going on make sense.
But people did it because it gave them something to talk about that would excite people, and could lead to more customers, employees, or investors.
But we’re very clearly in the next era now, and it’s quite different.
In this era, product is not a moat, someone can replicate a simple version of your product in 24 hours. Distribution is only a moat for as long as you stay ahead of others. Private data, partnerships, and brand are the only true moats.
And with that backdrop, why would you openly share what’s working?
Here’s Will Manidis over-exaggerating the (actually very real) trend:
You might point to bootstrappers, who have mostly continued to embrace building in public, mostly as a way to get customers and bond with other bootstrappers.
This will likely continue. The bootstrapper community is strong, and without investor pressure there’s less at stake.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if some bootstrappers pull back too.
💬 Quote: Don’t Reveal Your Numbers
Right on cue, given this week’s trend, here’s Jack Altman explaining another case where being protective of how it’s going can work in your favor:
(And yes, this is good advice, it serves you no purpose to share your numbers with investors if you aren’t fundraising. Better to be upfront about that. Most investors will easily understand and not force the issue. If they do… well, you made the right call.)