Cosmin Nicolaescu

"Claude can rip a PR/FAQ in 30 seconds. What you don't get is the friction." AI makes production cheap. The hard part was never writing the document. It's the thinking the document forces you to do. The uncomfortable moment where you realize your customer isn't who you assumed, or your pricing won't work, or your moat is thinner than you thought. We built this program at Climate Drift because too many climate founders burn millions learning things they could have learned on paper. Free info session linked below.

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NYC is losing young technical founders to SF — and it’s not about vibes. It’s about cost of entry. SF has far more entry infrastructure than NYC: i.e. the housing, community, and early support (financial and otherwise) that lets founders start building before they raise capital. This is widening the gap between the two cities' tech sectors. We are specifically calling for ideas (and hopefully action) to address NYC’s dearth of hacker houses: physical spaces that combine housing, workspace, community, and early peer support. I’m convinced that seeding hacker houses, if done right, is a low-cost, high-impact way to attract more young technical founders to NYC — and critically, something this community can actually do. And we should. The data is stark. Venture investment in NYC is ~19% of SF’s total — the lowest since 2017 — and the biggest, most innovative companies (especially in AI) are overwhelmingly being built in San Francisco. People who want to be entrepreneurs tend to work where those companies are. Unsurprisingly, many students and young builders assume they must go west. But do they actually want to — or is it just easier to get started there? I spent significant time in the Bay last year, and one difference stood out immediately: SF is dense with hacker houses and founder residences that help people get from 0→1. These resources are especially critical for recent grads and first-time founders who might lack capital or built-in networks. NYC may have long-term pull, but at the earliest stage, higher upfront costs and friction (recent Economist data suggests ~50% higher rents than SF) push many founders away. Hacker houses may sound anachronistic, but they’re real centers of gravity. We estimate SF has at least ~10x more active hacker houses than NYC, and that these houses have helped foster hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. I’m an NYC tech evangelist. I’ve worked on tech ecosystem development at New York City Economic Development Corporation, helped design national innovation programs for the Obama White House, and now invest in early-stage companies as a GP at Max Ventures. From a dollars-to-impact perspective, seeding hacker houses in NYC is one of the most efficient levers the city can pull. We wrote an overview doc (linked below) that explores this concept — and we'd welcome feedback from the NYC tech community. We are also hosting a small series of conversations — starting with a dinner in February co-hosted with Tech:NYC, Keel (Brent J. Smith), Company Ventures and Inspired Capital — to bring together leaders across tech, real estate, and policy. 👉 If you’re a founder, operator, VC, student, or have built / lived in a hacker house: • Does this resonate? • What would make this work in NYC? • Who’s already doing something adjacent we should talk to? Would love to connect if you’re interested in contributing or joining the conversation.

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Genspark hit 2M users in 45 days by focusing on something most teams don't prioritize: How well can we "one-shot" from prompt to job done. In this clip from CLIMB, my guest and Genspark co-founder Wen S. explains that their “growth hack” was really just about ruthless product focus. Here's the game plan: If you reach $5M ARR, some people love your product. Your job is to serve them better. Make them feel like their getting an exceptional deal for $25/mo Double down on output quality, make the work “ready to go,” not something users need to re-prompt and tweak and fix. Build and test and re-test tight in house eval benchmarks so every run feels like a boardroom ready result. Design a flat organization that incentivizes everyone to contribute code, features, product insights, etc. so you're spending less time in meetings and more times shipping. CEO Eric Jing is currently the only PM in the org. Ship new stuff every week so more people try your product and feel that “whoa, this saves me time and gives me freedom” moment. The growth hack? “The more you ship, the more you get new people to try the product.” Easy enough right? 😅 Learn more great product insights from Wen in the full episode linked below 👇

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I used to think you had to know your co-founder for years before starting a company together. That the best partnerships were forged over late nights in college, or years of working side by side at the same company. Then YC's co-founder matching program paired me with Eric Owusu Sekyere. A DoorDash data scientist I had never spoken to. Never met. Never heard of. Within weeks, we co-founded a company together in May 2024. A few months later, we pivoted into Pamba, the AI creator platform we run today. Now I see that shared history is overrated. What matters is complementary obsession. I was obsessed with engineering and AI infrastructure. Eric was obsessed with distribution and growth. Our focuses interlocked. If you're waiting to start something because you haven't found the "perfect" co-founder in your existing network, stop waiting. The right person might be a stranger who fills the exact gap you can't. Would you trust a co-founder match from an algorithm?

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This week I accidentally walked through a Paul Allen retrospective. A call with a friend at the Allen Institute, where they're mapping brain cells to understand where Alzheimer's actually begins. A stop at AI2 Incubator to connect with Yifan Zhang, who's leading the team catalyzing Seattle's AI ecosystem. Got caught in the Seahawks Super Bowl parade (a million 12s celebrating a team stewarded by Jody Allen) on my way to Ai2 to jam with my friend and "AI to solve the hard stuff" thought partner Chris Emura. Four stops. One name. At the same time, there’s an active conversation about the identity of Seattle tech. As a transplant, it's easy to see this as a company town. Yesler’s mills. Boeing. Weyerhaeuser. Microsoft. Amazon. Starbucks. Each wave built fortunes. Each wave reshaped the city. And each left people asking what we gained and what we lost. What feels different about Allen’s imprint is this: He didn’t just build companies, he built infrastructure: Research institutions that publish openly; Gathering spaces for builders who aren’t yet famous; Connective tissue across sectors that don’t naturally talk to each other. Paul Allen built a scaffold for what comes next. So when people ask where Seattle fits in the AI moment, I think the more interesting question is: Who better to confront the second-order effects of AI than a city that has lived through industrial reinvention multiple times? We know innovation creates wealth. We also know it creates displacement, fragility, and unintended consequences. Seattle's opportunity isn’t to replicate our neighbor in California. It’s to double down on being the home base for founders and institutions making this wave durable and widely beneficial. The future belongs to the cities (and founders) willing to build for the long arc.

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I still vividly remember the day Cheng Z. called me. I had spent five intense years at Zuora during its pre-IPO phase - an experience that pushed my limits, and taught me more than I could have imagined. How to scale systems. How to ship fast. How to support enterprise-grade revenue infrastructure. But I also saw the cracks. As pricing models evolved and go-to-market teams shifted toward product-led-growth, usage-based billing, and omnichannel sales motions, we continued to try to retrofit a system built for a different era. It was a layer of duct tape on top of another layer of duct tape. When we left Zuora, we didn’t want to fix the past. We wanted to invent what should come next. So I wrote a manifesto. A vision for a new kind of platform, one that didn’t just quote or bill, but handled the entire revenue lifecycle:   🟣 Purpose-built for PLG + direct sales in a single system, with direct sales native on Salesforce   🟣 One pricing engine from quote to usage to invoice   🟣 Real-time lifecycle changes - co-terms, upgrades, renewals, price adjustments 🟣 And finally, revenue intelligence that’s not just accurate, but trusted and loved by CFOs. That manifesto became the blueprint for Nue. Today, companies don’t need to duct-tape CPQ to billing and hope for the best. They need a unified, omnichannel system that flexes with how they sell, price, and scale. That’s what we’re building at Nue. And we’re just getting started. Read the story → https://lnkd.in/gU9y5tFB #nue #cpq #salesforce #zuora #originstory

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Today, we’re coming out of stealth and announcing $9M in Seed funding led by Venrock, with participation from Sierra Ventures. https://lnkd.in/g7PC_Dgs https://lnkd.in/geH7Uw4a We started Gitar with a simple belief: in the AI era, writing code is no longer the main bottleneck. The harder problem is everything that comes after—review, validation, failure diagnosis, and building enough confidence to ship safely. As teams generate more code with AI, validation is becoming the constraint. Too much engineering time is still spent triaging CI failures, investigating pull requests, and managing risk instead of building. That is why we built Gitar. We believe code validation is becoming a foundational layer of modern software delivery, helping teams move faster without giving up trust, control, or production readiness. Try Gitar for free and make code validation part of your engineering advantage: https://lnkd.in/g-Rtn3H4

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Thrilled to share the news: Obvio has launched in 5 cities and we’ve raised a $22M Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures, with continued support from Khosla Ventures and Pathlight Ventures, who’ve backed us since the early days. When Ali Rehan and I set out to explore the traffic safety problem, we didn’t expect to see the magnitude of the problem: every parent, crossing guard, and dogwalker said the same thing: “I’m really nervous about drivers these days.” Every pedestrian we talk to has a story of the near miss that happened just days ago. We decided to push harder and the journey took our team to unexpected places: we’ve passed laws at state houses, built an end-to-end traffic safety solution that combines modern hardware, advanced computer vision, and a full-ticketing operation, and have traveled coast to coast more times than should be allowed. The result has been Obvio: we’re on a mission to curb reckless driving and reduce the 40,000 annual deaths that happen on our roadways. Our first 5 cities went live earlier this year, and we’ve been excited to see the results: 50% reduction in unsafe driving events in just the first couple months of the program. Read about our approach here: https://lnkd.in/g3j3WWx9 We’re just getting started—and we’d love your help. If you’re excited to work on hard problems and solve a critical problem, we’re hiring across product, engineering, government partnerships, marketing, and more: https://lnkd.in/grq6NQPN A huge thank you to our entire support system: our first police chief partners (Dan, Anthony), our incredible team who took the leap, our early mentors & backers (Jairam, Vinod, Mahdi, Charley, Ajay, Qasar, Tom), and the families and friends who’ve supported us every step of the way. 💙 Let's make the roadways safer!

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AGI is the ability to figure things out. That's it - from blog post of Sequoia Capital by Pat Grady and Sonya Huang https://lnkd.in/gi7MXfHm

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The TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 event, happening this October in San Francisco, will gather over 10,000 tech leaders, investors, and innovators under one roof. What really stands out is the scale of opportunity for startups to gain direct access to decision-makers who can propel their growth. Exhibitors get not only a physical presence but priority branding, press exposure, and multiple full-access passes for their teams to network and build meaningful connections. This isn’t just another conference — it’s a three-day sprint where being visible means attracting your next key partners, customers, or investors before your competitors do. When the floor is packed with the brightest minds from Netflix, Sequoia Capital, and other heavy hitters, the brands that act fast will be the ones capitalizing on the momentum. The takeaway? In today’s hyper-competitive market, strategic presence in such ecosystems isn’t a luxury but a necessity. How are you planning to maximize face time and genuine engagement at large industry gatherings like this? What tactics have helped you turn fleeting networking into lasting business impact? #TechCrunchDisrupt #StartupGrowth #TechInnovation #NetworkingStrategy

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Decision modeling is key. Intent + decision traces created by agents need to be modeled to create self learning or ever improving decision quality ( measured via outcomes), while the criteria is non stop shifting. Process modeling - aka crud on system of records will also get eroded and merged with decisions models being stored. This is where Agebt plane and human plane converge.

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Today I want to share how to choose your co-founders. My first startup taught me almost everything I know about building a company. Most of those lessons came from what I got wrong. We raised from Sequoia, GSR Ventures, Shunwei, Redpoint, and Y Combinator China. We served over a million users. We built real technology. And still — the thing that challenged me most wasn't product or fundraising. It was how I thought about team. First time around, I treated the 'co-founder' team like an equation. You need this skill, this skill, and this skill. Find three people who have them. Solve the problem. Ship the product. I was optimizing for success. After years of going through real challenges together — the kind that break things — I understand it differently now. Co-founder teams are not assembled for success. They're built for growth. You need people you'd trust when they fail. People you'd help when they're struggling. People who'd do the same for you. Because you will fail. You will struggle. And the ability to build trust through that,not despite it — is what actually holds a startup together. The essence of a founding team isn't the problem you're solving. It's the trust you build while solving it. I'm on my third company now. The way I choose who to build with has completely changed. I no longer ask "what can this person do?" I ask "would I trust this person when things go wrong?" That's the only question that matters.  #cofounder #startup #voicecursor

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Talking to users and thoughtfully integrating their needs and wants was woven through everything we did at IDEO—threaded through every prototype and product decision. Reading my colleagues Joanne and Leo's latest work brought that to mind. They describe a future where research runs continuously, with AI agents recruiting participants and instantly surfacing insights. Synthetic personas, carefully trained on consumer signals, mirror human behavior closely enough to extend live studies and compress timelines from weeks to hours. Today user research mostly runs in fits and starts, prohibitively expensive and locked away in dedicated project cycles when it could be a constant companion, seamlessly integrated into the product development process. Joanne and Leo lay out the full vision here: https://lnkd.in/gEUBSG_J

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Many founders and tech professionals are starting to explore the O-1 visa, often assuming that building a strong O-1 profile can be done quickly. However, based on my conversations with Jason Cheung about EB-1A and O-1 profile-building, this is not the case. Even O-1 profile-building can take months or even several years. If you want to start building an O-1 profile, begin by: - Getting involved in activities relevant to the criteria you want to target. - Speaking to reporters if you are already connected to them through your network or company. - Attending conferences to speak, which can help demonstrate your expertise in your field. To be notified first-hand about all our future opportunities like these, subscribe to our calendar of events: https://lu.ma/ventureminer Additionally, if you're interested in learning more about EB-1A and O-1 profile-building, check out Jason's profile-building opportunities database, private group, and other resources through his newsletter (only $12 per month): https://lnkd.in/deqhfpRs #eb1a #o1visa #greencard #swe #tech

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We are announcing Potpie AI's $2.2M pre-seed fundraise to advance Spec-Driven Development for large enterprise codebases. The round is led by Emergent Ventures, with participation from All In Capital, DeVC, and PointOne Capital, along with the support of some amazing angel investors from companies including Atlassian, OpenAI, Meta, Razorpay and Flobiz. As AI accelerates code generation, the constraint inside large enterprises has shifted from coding to maintenance and assurance. The limiting factor is no longer writing code, but understanding complex systems, aligning teams around intent, and safely evolving large, interdependent codebases. In most organizations, specifications exist as static documents, while production systems evolve independently. Context is fragmented across repositories, tickets, logs, reviews, and floating documents making reliable AI adoption difficult. We are building the foundational layer that makes Spec-Driven Development executable at scale. By unifying engineering context and operationalizing the spec as a structured source of truth, we enable AI systems to reason with architectural awareness rather than surface-level code completion. We are already working with large enterprise customers, including Fortune 500 organizations. This milestone allows us to deepen those partnerships and support more teams transitioning from experimental AI usage to structured, production-grade AI-first engineering workflows. If you are leading engineering at scale and evaluating how AI should integrate into mission-critical systems, we would love to chat with you!

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Clean-tech innovation needs not just great founders, but engaged investors willing to support them early. Angel investing can seem opaque from the outside, but communities like E8 Angels make it far more accessible to learn, collaborate, and participate. If you’ve been curious about getting involved in climate investing, this is a great place to start exploring.

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AI startup AGI infinite revenue involves tech bros lying about it like Chungin Lee and Cluely - foreshadowing scope of incompetent ARR @ in this case Andreessen Horowitz and Shaheer Sandhu w Susa Ventures et al - story below, thx to Julie Bort w good journalism

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Love it or hate it, being in the SF Bay Area is still one of the biggest hacks for First Builders to discover huge opportunities before anyone else. But what can you do if you’re not here? Cecilia for example moved here in 2001 and instantly joined Yahoo after feeling the palpable energy around early internet. And it’s been nonstop ever since as she later joined Amazon, Cruise, Replit, and her own breakout company GC AI. She credits a lot to the emerging tech density and optimism in the Bay Area. But she also mentions additional ways people can identify these opportunities early on: - Follow intuition around big waves - Follow your envy - Never lose curiosity - Watch the teen hackers - Talk to peers early and often (builds long term networks/insights)

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