Opportunity → Brains For Enterprises
Framework → 3 Steps To Align And Execute
Tool → Yuma
Trend → Top Cities By Unicorn Market Cap
Quote → You Are The Pitch
🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Growth
ICYMI
Opportunity: Brains For Enterprises
You don’t need product engineering, you need context engineering.
We called this prompt engineering at first, but eventually these LLM-based systems will need minimal prompting from you. Instead, they’ll need better and faster ways to locate and share context between each other.
This is already “solved” for engineering since the codebase all lives in one place. But for much of the rest of what companies do, aka “knowledge work,” it’s spread between your meeting recorder, your Slack messages, etc.
There’s an opportunity for a filesystem for knowledge work that is specifically built for agents but also easy to navigate for humans.
Currently a lot of folks building with Claude Code or OpenClaw are using Obsidian for this, but it wasn’t really purpose-built for it. If you were around 5-6 years ago, Obsidian was first released among the wave of Zettelkasten “second-brain” tools like Roam Research.
These never really took off despite the value they provide in having linked records, simply because of the amount of time it takes to maintain them. For most people, the value was outweighed by the commitment.
Agents don’t have this issue, so Obsidian in particular is seeing a bit of a rebirth.
But just because they lucked into a new market doesn’t mean they will be the best tool to serve it in the longrun.
🧠 Framework: 3 Steps To Align And Execute
This week’s framework comes from a reader!
Ryan Batchelor, a navy officer, emailed me after one of our recent issues to share this alignment and execution framework he created as part of his work with Crux Leaders.
It’s a three step framework that turns a vague vision into focused, team-wide action:
Gain Clarity → This is where you develop a strategic plan by breaking each initiative into specific milestones, measurable outcomes, and action steps. Use the pillars of your business (team, business, empire, and lifestyle)
Ensure Alignment → Explain the reasons for the strategic plan you set. It’s not enough to have clarity; your team must understand why the plan exists (throughout all levels of the company). The benefit here is that questions can get answered quickly and genuine buy-in can be achieved.
Execute the Plan → Start implementing by rolling out the action steps within your team, followed by the other pillars as you hit milestones.
🛠 Tool: Yuma
Sometimes I feel like I neglect the ecom founders among us in these tool recommendations, so this week is all for them.
Yuma builds AI agents that handle customer service specifically for the unique challenges ecom businesses face. They’re purpose-built for Shopify stores.
📈 Trend: Top Cities By Unicorn Market Cap
Was there ever any doubt about where the most unicorns come from? Or, more specifically, where the most really large unicorns come from?
Elad Gil notes that generative AI is creating a super-cluster in the SF area. The US has 83% of the total market cap of companies that became unicorns in 2023 or later (compared to 60% before), but even more strikingly the SF area is at 63% of that (vs 33% before 2023).
During COVID there were feelings that SF was losing at least some of its importance as the undisputed center of the startup world. VCs were moving to Miami, founders were moving to NYC (myself included), and with the rise of remote work people were questioning the importance of being in SF.
While it’s likely that the gravity of the SF capital and talent ecosystems would have kept founders coming there as the top option regardless, the rise of LLMs has conclusively ended the debate for now.
If you’re building in AI, or in general, it would be objectively better for you to be in SF. You don’t have to be anymore, but it would be better.
💬 Quote: You Are The Pitch
As a founder, your job is to make people believe in you.
Your deck is just a sales document.
Its goal is to get you a meeting.
It is not the pitch.
If you’re early stage, investors are betting on you.
Every time I’ve had a big win as an investor, it’s been because of the founder.
Even if they were going after the wrong market. Even if their product wasn’t there yet. Even if they barely had traction so far.
So if you’re having trouble closing investors, look inward first. Are you making it impossible for them to not believe in you? Do they see you as a force of nature?
Because the biggest risk in the deal is you. Minimize it.