Do you think you can handle our hotness? Come join our “special party” on the beach tonight 😉
Anis by @Tiny_Asa and Helm by @ZinieQ , characters from @NIKKE_en
Four ways to run it on Taco Streak:
🎯 First Blood — safe start
🔥 Trending Now — the hot one
🚀 Moonshot — go big,
🫂Custom - choose your own game
Which one are you? Drop it below 👇
I’ve heard 100s of startup pitches this year. Here’s the good, the bad and the meh recurring trends from my experience:
The good:
- High raise amounts and valuations. More inflated for strong teams pre-revenue in hot areas (robotics, bio, personal agents)
- Insane topline growth numbers, many growing >10x this year. By the time a round closes, a high valuation seems justified.
- Tons of M&A
It is what it is:
- Revenue run rate = last month revenue x 12
- Small teams
- Seat based < Platform fee < Usage based billing seems to be the trend for most products
- Tranched rounds
- Best teams have extremely fast product iteration speed
- SaaS products positioning themselves as AI tools to seem appealing to investors
The bad:
- Low or negative gross margin if reselling tokens. Non-standard accounting
- High “Contracted ARR” that’s not live yet
- High revenue concentration
- Expensive compute, limited availability, delays. Excess compute reselling
- Many wrappers with very thin tech differentiation: “self improving harness”, “multi model / router”, “agent swarms”, “computer use”
- Overworked employees. AI generated
- All spaces seem very competitive
- Areas can seem hot one moment before being not
I’m an appreciator of beautiful women. To paraphrase Nicolas Cage, I have respect for the dime
But hotness is fleeting; only creations endure. Even the aesthetic elite want to be judged for their accomplishments
Creating beautiful things is better than being a beautiful thing
(But they are not mutually exclusive!)