> if a VC investor is doing their job well, they will make sure to keep investing in your company until they have a good amount of ownership. This means it is against their incentives to introduce you to other investors or do anything else that interferes with their ability to buy more shares in your company for a good price.
this is only true for larger multi-stage funds who compete with each other, not for Seed or Series A-only funds
Yes, it's completely backwards really. In most successful companies, a VC's holdings are likely to decrease over time, not increase, as the company raises more money and existing investors are diluted. And investors are (in general) motivated to introduce you to new later stage investors because it increases the value of their holdings, even when diluted.
That's because most of us can't actively remember back to the dot com bust and have only been around for the boom times since. Success is great! Say you're an early investor, with 2 million shares out of 10 million issued, or 20% of the company at a $10 million valuation, or $2 million dollars. Pretty good! $2 million is $2 million.
The AI boom is in full swing. You've got product market fit, lots of paying users, everything is gucci. So when they issue 40 million more shares to new investors, there's 50 million shares out there, you have 2/50 million, but, hey, lookit! The new valuation is $100 million. You now have $4 million of a $100 million company. Not bad! It turns out that when things are good, things are quite good!
Unfortunate, it's discovered that your product is actually the torment nexus. Users flee, the bubble pops, the entire sector goes bust, your remaining users sue you, you run out of money. Your board fires you and the new CEO takes on a new round of investors. They issue 950 million shares, at a $one million valuation.
Fuck.
For all your hard work, your blood sweat and tears. Failed personal relationships. Your 2 million shares are now 2/1000 of $1 million, or $2,000. That's right, two thousand dollars only. Do not past go, Do not collect money to FIRE, hope you can get a job running Door Dash, except that got automated away so you can't do that.
Edit: Before commenters reply, That's not possible! I have preferential rights written into my contract. They won't and can't do that! And maybe you're right. Maybe you've got a totally iron clad contract written up by a lawyer who experienced the com bust and there are provisions against the exact scenario written above isn't possible. Except you were collecting a founder's salary of $50,000 /year and don't have $200k in savings to afford a high-powered corporate lawyer to sue and get back what's left of your company. Say you do regain control, it's got a $1 million valuation for a reason. Maybe it'll be like Pebble and you win, and you can run it as a life-style business because there are enough loyal customers who like your brand of torment nexus, and you eke out $10,000 of revenue (gross, not net) per month. Not bad per se, but still not the NYSE bell ringing IPO you were hoping for. Plus you're in debt to your lawyers and it's going to take forever to pay them off.
No successful company is issuing 40 million shares to new investors from a base of 10 million. Why would investors or founders sign off on that level of dilution?
And ultimately, if your product is the torment nexus, nobody is going to make money regardless of valuation.
Yeah. In my experience investors in the early rounds are eager to do introductions because they’re still seeking to validate the investment internally.
If they led a pre-seed, they’d be happy to see someone else lead the seed round because then it’s easier to make the case within the fund that they should maintain or increase their stake.
External validation means a lot when the company is young.
Very cool - is it possible to simulate this on a live production site (i.e. instead of Halluminate Flights, just test the agent live on Expedia)? Even though you don't have access to the backend json, presumably you could verify the right values were entered in the frontend/UI?
yup, though without access to the code it's much harder to pull the state of the components - becomes more like a web scraping problem, it's a brittle and much hackier than just intentionally exposing component state like we can do in the sim.
more importantly though are use cases that depend on the data. the data on real google flights/expedia is constantly changing, so it's impossible to build datasets based ground truth, e.g. the answer for a task like "Find the cheapest round-trip flight option from Bologna (BLQ) to Dushanbe (DYU) if I leave on 2026-05-05 and come back on 2026-05-15. Return the total price and the flight numbers for all flights." isn't stable. on our site, we control the data, so that answer is stable (deterministically random). so controlling the whole clone rather than running on the prod site unlocks richer and more repeatable tasks/testing.
lastly, our site runs the exact same locally as deployed, it has zero internet dependencies. so it can be run offline directly on the cluster with no issue for network latency/failures
For sure. It can be challenging to inculcate a culture of treating docs as a product, but since great docs can drive revenue growth and bad docs can increase churn, it's a very important mindset.
In terms of creating guides/examples for third-party tools, do you have a particular use-case in mind? e.g. if you're something like Zapier with hundreds of connections?
Re: 3rd party integrations, think glue code for enterprise platforms (I previously worked on the developer platform at Shopify).
For example, a guide to integrate Shopify's Storefront API with Sanity CMS. These are usually a marketing/product thing more than developer docs... and almost always become obsolete after the next release and forgotten about.
Would've loved to generate a bunch of these guides and then automatically keep them up-to-date with code examples, and help serve both purposes for growth and developer docs.
Yes, absolutely! Someone mentioned a similar situation where they had 100+ integration-specific landing pages in webflow (mostly for SEO) that became stale within months.
Definitely would love to pick your brain more about this if interested. prithvi@gopromptless.ai
Yeah, great question! The earliest quantitative measurements people make are around how much time is being saved, but people are also measuring deflection rates in AI support chatbots (better docs => better support), which is strongly correlated with CSAT scores. Measuring reduction in churn or increased inbound takes several months to prove out, and we just haven't been around that long :)
We'll definitely be posting some case studies in the coming weeks, though!
you might consider that it's precisely your depth and breadth of experience, which isn't common across most teams, might actually highlight why a solution like Fortress is valuable
A couple use cases were already listed in other comments:
1) Document search
2) Translating plain english <> Legalease
But seems like the highest leverage here is building a copilot for authoring new contract templates that Common Paper doesn't offer yet (maybe the legal advisory panel could assist with RLHF training).
Thanks for the reply. The scenario is a customer logs in. They come back 4 days later, and we want them to remain logged in and not have to re-login.
According to this mutation, you must renew the access token before it expires (presumably for just another 24 hours). So I don't think this solves the issue -- we want users to stay logged in for more than 24 hours -- aka logged in for like a month by checking a "keep me logged in" box.
I don't personally click through on web search results from Spotlight (usually I just use Spotlight to search for an app or shortcut on my phone), but I think Siri is the biggest unlock here.
I actually didn't, but I'm pretty sure it is similar in terms of capabilities. I liked FabricJs because of its thorough documentation, having lots of examples, and because I saw a strong community on GitHub and other places.
FabricJs was a bit counter intuitive in some aspects though, for example the way it handles the rendering in the canvas made it pretty hard for me to be able to get a video / GIF out of it leading me to have to use a pretty complex setup. Image scaling is also a bit odd in terms of how it deals with cropping/stretching, so that was a bit messy for getting source footage and putting it within a region in a device.
this is only true for larger multi-stage funds who compete with each other, not for Seed or Series A-only funds
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