Be Ambitious

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Jason Freedman on common Series A planning conversations right now (Link)

• Jimmy Acton shares Vinod Khosla’s brutally honest quote about investors (Link)

• Jack Mcclelland shares the flow of how a founder told their story (Link)

Growth

• TJ on how CRM reporting is an underrated sales method (Link)

ICYMI

• Hire rockstar devs your investors wish you hired first (Link)*

• Rohit Mittal on why many vc-backed companies end up in the same place (Link)

• Matthias Schmidt on why his company doesn’t use AI to code (Link)

• Steven Cravotta on the 3 rules that every good app idea follows (Link)

• Chris Tottman shares 15 startup mistakes to avoid (according to YC) (Link)

• Greg Isenberg shares 30 ways to find your next $10k+ MRR idea for 2026 (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Human-Only Social Media

Social media is getting worse.

Some people will joke and say “I didn’t think that was possible” but the truth is that billions of people use social media platforms every day in ways that have become essential for their lives.

Negative impacts or not, you’d be hard pressed to make the case that there haven’t also been huge positive ones.

Perhaps the most important way is through connecting with one another. It’s why I spend a couple hours writing this newsletter each week, myself, even if I get delayed to midnight the night before — to connect with all of you.

But now an increasing share of content is being created by AI.

Discerning humans can often tell when this is the case, but not everyone can. And, regardless, even the discerning among us likely don’t love having to scroll past or interact with AI “slop.”

As that slop becomes more common, where will the humans go?

It’s rare that there are true preference shifts among such a large share of social media users, but preferring a place where only human-generated content exists may be one.

The hard part here is verification. You won’t likely be able to keep up with all the ways bots will believably pretend to be human.

Instead, you need to verify that humans are human. Worldcoin is actually ahead of the game here.

🧠 Framework: The Pitch Iceberg

You’ve probably heard of iceberg theory. Made famous by Ernest Hemingway, it says the best stories leave much under the surface.

It emphasizes subtlety rather than bombarding the reader with all the information. It’s not about hiding things from the reader, but rather elegant concision.

The same idea should apply to your pitch. What an investor is presented with is the output of many, many things that went into the pitch but don’t need to explicitly be included in it.

I don’t agree with everything on the image below, but the principle holds true — your pitch is a sales meeting, and your desk is a sales document.

As with anything else in sales, you want to be truthful first and foremost. You just don’t need to spill your guts to get your point across (and doing so would likely muddy it).

📈 Trend: Vibecoded Video Games

Vibecoding SaaS is out.

Vibecoding video games is in.

We’re about to see an explosion of hobbyist video game designer and builders who create their first games. Some will go viral. Millionaires will be created.

And it’ll happen sooner than you think.

Where this gets really interesting, though, is when you consider the new features games created by LLMs can have.

Vibecoding them is just phase 1.

The real innovation will come in the form of endlessly refreshing game experiences.

Think of a puzzle game with no end to the new levels you can play. Or an open-world GTA-esque game that has an endless map and where each location truly does have different things happen every day.

Those are just the obvious ones.

Any big game studio that is working on new titles without considering innovating with LLMs will be left behind in 5 years.

This was already happening before LLMs — it’s been 12 years since the last GTA game, there’s no sign of Destiny 3 in sight, and studios are consistently looking to milk as much additional lifespan and revenue out of existing titles as possible.

LLMs are just going to supercharge it.

💬 Quote: Be Ambitious

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been mentoring a startup here in Charleston, SC (where I’ve been living since July — side note, it’s great here).

I got matched with them to help them with a local pitch competition, which they went on to win and get $800k in funding from.

They have a great business, with a shot of owning a niche with their vertical SaaS product.

And while they were being encouraged by others to aim to raise VC, there were few folks who were pushing them to aim as big as possible.

Silicon Valley is a unique place — for most investors a $50-100M exit would be a great outcome for a startup they invest in but, for folks in Silicon Valley it’s basically a writeoff.

This isn’t delusional, or just trying to go big for the sake of going big. Not every company has the potential to become large enough to generate Silicon Valley sized returns.

Rather it’s a practical response to having the opportunity to invest in companies that actually can become decacorns and beyond. The SF ecosystem is dense with opportunity.

In most other ecosystems this type of thinking doesn’t really exist, and changing that is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem:

Aggressively-minded capital inspires founders to think bigger, and founders who think bigger attract investors who are aggressively-minded.

The solution is for founders, as always, to lead.

Pursue problems in markets that can become large enough to support true venture-scale returns. Forge a path to capture that market. And think big along the way.

If you’re based outside of Silicon Valley, this will be harder. Investors may even fight you or say it’s too risky for them, or that you’re delusional.

But if you present a compelling vision and prove it step-by-step along the way, eventually they’ll know not to miss the next one.