The Rise of Secondaries

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Nikunj Kothari on the common founder fundraising problem (Link)

• Mariya Valeva on how to build a strong data room (Link)

Growth

• The Boring Marketer on how to dominate your niche with vibe marketing (Link)

ICYMI

• Access proven frameworks for success in both work and life with The Pocket newsletter (Link)

• Greg Isenberg on the optimal startup team in 2025 (Link)

• Z Fellows on Sam Altman’s hiring advice (Link)

• MaximeB on top subreddits for builders (Link)

• The Founders’ Tribune on Scale AI Founder’s hiring advice (Link)

• Arjun Khemani shares Marc Andreessen’s guide to personal productivity (Link)

 Opportunity: Work Clone Licenser

Some people are better workers than others.

They make better decisions, move faster, synthesize context more effectively, etc.

In fact, these people are probably better than the average AI model at making those decisions too.

Startups like Delphi, whose founder came on our podcast a few months ago, are already helping people make digital clones of themselves.

These clones are useful if you want to engage with the person (for example, you can message with Lenny Rachitsky’s bot here) but what if you wanted to hire Lenny as to make product decisions for you?

He’s too busy himself, but an AI agent clone of him won’t be.

Monetization here is simple, have users pay based on time or usage, and have human Lenny keep a cut of the revenue.

🧠 Framework: 10 Ways To Own Your Time

What’s better than one productivity framework?

Maybe ten productivity frameworks?

In all honesty, you probably should pick the most impactful one for you and focus on sticking to it first… but here are a bunch of options to choose from (many of which can be paired up together):

📈 Trend: The Rise of Secondaries

How do venture-backed founders actually make money?

We’ve been taught that it’s through IPOs or acquisitions, but that actually isn’t the case anymore.

Increasingly, founders are making money through secondary sales where they directly sell a portion of their shares to investors along the way to an eventual full exit. In fact, secondaries now make up the majority of exit money earned by venture-backed founders from their startups.

It’s very hard to get trustworthy data on this, but Tomasz Tunguz has done the best job I’ve seen of it.

IPO markets have been slow since the end of the ZIRP era in 2022. Barring economic crisis, we should start to see that change in 2026/2027 as more AI companies from the current era reach full maturity, but in the meantime there’s a lull.

However we shouldn’t expect this to be a temporary change even as IPO markets open back up, it will be hard for investors to claw back the option for founders to take secondaries along the way more commonly now that the Pandora’s Box is opened.

💬 Quote: An Entrepreneur’s Job Security

We’ve all heard it for years. Basically forever.

Our concerned, non-founder friends and family tell us how risky starting a company is and ask why we wouldn’t just get a secure job somewhere.

The tide may finally be shifting. AI is already automating jobs away.

I’d bet that more, new jobs will spin up for humans to do (rather than expecting society to go post-work anytime soon), but there’s undoubtedly going to be significant disruption and re-training required for the job market.

While this doesn’t necessarily make entrepreneurship more stable than a traditional job, since both will need to respond to these rapid changes, it does give founders more job security than employees because a founder’s skillset inherently involves managing change and adapting to shifts.