Most early pipelines are more hopeful than accurate. Deals sit in late stages because the quarter needs them there, a champion stands in for a buyer nobody has spoken to, and prospects who went quiet weeks ago are still marked live. A deal is worth counting when three things are true: the buyer has a reason to act now, the person who can approve it is involved, and there is a next step they have agreed to. Most of what fills an early pipeline meets none of these. Swipe through for 7 signs a deal is not as real as it looks.

AI models have exploded in size while GPU memory has barely moved. To fit one model, companies now spread it across dozens of GPUs wired together, which is slow, power-hungry, and expensive. The real bottleneck is not computing, it is moving data between chips.

The first sales conversation now happens without you. Buyers have moved discovery upstream. We all research with AI now, whether the purchase is personal or B2B, and we do it because it works. It saves time. It surfaces things we would never have found. It often explains a product better than the product's own website does. That behaviour is not going back. The problem is what happens next. Roughly 7% of AI sessions end in an outbound click. The other 93% form a view and close the window. The traffic that does reach you converts at multiples above organic search, because by the time someone arrives, the selling has already been done. That is a flattering number and a difficult one at the same time. Our General Partner, Tom Chen, in one of our MAGICal Insights pieces, explores the funnel you cannot see. Read the full article in the link in our bio.

Most cargo in the world is invisible between scans. David Stanton co-founded Reelables in 2018 to change that, and the company has now produced the first printable active smart label for tracking cargo and inventory. At Drayson Technologies he met his co-founder Brian Krejcarek, who was putting IoT chips onto thin printed batteries. Together they built a label that goes through a standard barcode printer, comes out live, and broadcasts its location without anyone scanning anything.

Your next customer may learn everything about you before they ever visit your site. The source doing the teaching is an AI. That shift rewrites the buying funnel. Only about 7% of AI sessions end in an outbound click, which means most of the selling now happens in conversations you never see. By the time a buyer reaches you, the decision is often already shaped. Our GP, Tom Chen's latest piece argues that positioning is king in this new invisible funnel, and that brand is becoming infrastructure. Not a campaign or a rebrand, but the underlying system that determines how your company is understood when no one from your team is in the room. Link in comments.

Endometriosis affects 176 million women worldwide. On average, it takes over 9 years from a first doctor's visit to get a diagnosis. Because the condition requires a surgical diagnosis, these numbers are considered conservative. Millions of cases remain undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for years.

Venture debt is one of the more underused tools in a founder’s capital stack.