4x founder turned early-stage investor.
🇨🇦 YVR ↔ 🇺🇸 SFO
Joined February 2009
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It was only when I switched from being a founder to a VC that I understood how wrong this perspective is.
1. VCs usually don't understand how to describe your company accurately (even your board members).
2. Accurate blurbs are very important. Most VCs won't take meetings "because warm intro". Nobody has the time. Investors want to know what the company actually does first to make sure it's in-thesis, they don't have a conflict, etc.
3. Your VC isn't your EA.
There are plenty of reasons why founders should always have an up-to-date blurb ready to go. That's your job, not your VCs (nor anyone else's).
I really dislike it when my investors ask me to "send a blurb".
1- You invested in my company. You should already know what I'm building.
2- You and I both know that generic blurbs never work. What works is a hand-crafted message from a warm contact (i.e. you, the investor).
3- On top of that, asking for a blurb is lazy. It throws the work back on me (the founder) at precisely the moment when I'm asking for support.
If you REALLY wanted to be helpful, you would write the intro yourself + ask for my edits/approval.
Just sayin'
Just posted the videos from this year's Founders Day!
Plenty of spicy takes from some of Canada's leading founders, including @jack_newton, @DanEbs, @dennispilarinos, Edward Chiang and Ath Caramanolis:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL…
The single biggest move Canada could make for its long-term economy would be to build a high-speed train between Waterloo and Toronto.
UW students graduate with more connectivity to SF than TO, so guess where they move to?
The next generation of enterprise data adoption looks a lot like the last...
...well, all of them. It's pretty much always the same.
Just spoke to one of the big data labeling businesses.
Few interesting insights:
- They predict the majority of their revenue will come from Fortune 1000 enterprises, not labs in a few years
- They believe every company will want to own their intelligence, but owning intelligence does not necessarily mean using open source models
- A company’s evals will become their main proprietary IP given the improvement in agent performance after properly setting up & running internal eval environments
- Most enterprises haven’t graduated from coding agents and it’s largely due to not having the proper eval infrastructure to make non-Eng agents performant
Chris Neumann retweeted
Founders get too much advice.
Every investor, advisor, employee, customer and random person on Twitter has an opinion about what you should do.
The dangerous part is that a lot of the advice is actually good.
It’s just not necessarily good for your company.
If you listen to everyone, you end up building a company by committee.
Take every meeting. Listen to everyone. Ask a million questions.
Then ignore most of it.
The founder’s job isn’t to follow the best advice.
It’s to figure out which advice actually applies.
I’ve used many of these agents and have come to two conclusions:
1. None of them can do everything I want out-of-the-box (at least, not yet)
2. The hardest challenge as they scale isn’t technical, it’s *technical support*
Here's what I mean: chrisneumann.com/archives/th…
Too many AI personal assistants, too little time to assess all of them. Nice work here: assistantbenchmark.com
Currently booking December flights between SF and Vancouver.
British Columbia has year-round "daylight savings time" starting this year.
In other words, as of November 1st, Vancouver and San Francisco will no longer be in the same time zone.
My brain hurts. 🤯
Put my boys to bed and went to get some work done.
After 5 min, one came down and asked to sleep on the couch beside me while I worked.
A few min later, the other came down and asked to sleep on the other couch.
I just carried them both to bed.
These are, in fact, the days.
Chris Neumann retweeted
If you’re working on a pitch deck this weekend, here’s one of my favorite ways to test it.
Give the deck to someone who doesn’t know much about the company.
Let them read the whole thing.
Then ask them to pitch the company back to you.
Listen closely to what they remember and how they explain it.
That’s a pretty good test of what your deck is actually communicating.
I’ve reviewed a lot of pitch decks over the years. I still find this more useful than starting with individual slides.
Technical founders often get stuck on this point.
Too many think, "I just need to talk to a VC who gets it", not realizing that to get to that person they often have to go through someone non-technical.
...and the non-technical person usually doesn't want to seem stupid.
A lot of startup fundraising comes down to whether the investor can explain your company to someone else.
You might have a brilliant product, a nuanced market and a complicated technical advantage, but if the VC leaves the meeting and can’t explain in 30 seconds why the company matters, that’s a problem.
Because the pitch usually doesn’t stop with the person you met.
They have to explain it to a partner. That partner may have to explain it to the rest of the fund. Then somebody has to remember it a week later when they’re comparing you against five other companies.
The strongest companies usually have a very simple sentence hiding underneath all the complexity.
What do you do? Why now? Why are you different? Why can this get huge?
Founders sometimes think simplifying the story makes the business sound less sophisticated.
Usually it does the opposite.
If your investor can’t retell your story clearly, they’re probably not going to fight very hard to get the deal done.
The folks at @LocalityBrewing just harvested the special edition Founders Day honey lager! 🍻
If you haven't got your ticket yet for this Thursday's Founders Day festival in Vancouver, use the discount code FIELD_TO_GLASS for 20% off your ticket 👇
Get your ticket for Founders Day 2026 (this Thursday, Aug. 20!) at luma.com/rt28t6b8
