Mikhail Seregine

This Abram Brown piece captures something I'm seeing everywhere: Tools like Claude Code are giving founders way more agency. For many, it's a reminder of the old days when they were ICs or running tiny companies. To be clear, this is not every founder. But those that were already hands on, in the weeds, in the codebase have just been handed Thor's Hammer.

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GTM goals for early stage technical companies: 1. Be referenced often in internal meetings of your prospects (exploratory phase of adoption) 2. Be referenced often in externally facing architecture diagrams of the top companies in your market (first path to production + PMF) 3. Be endorsed often in communities as experts/influencers see 1 + 2 appear without your promotion (your real ARR + NRR story happens here) 4. Be endorsed as the gold standard by communities (moat, hang on for dear life and keep shipping and making money) #2 is v hard as things shift often, but Founder time should be with customers to make this occur as often as possible. #3 + #4 become your roadshow focus over time so you can scale your company.

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Great example of a founder that didn’t fall in love with the product, but rather they fell in love with solving a real problem for their customers. Bravo!

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Most lead gen tools charge you whether they work or not. That's backwards. Here's what actually lowers your risk: ❌ Don't pay for software seats  ✅ Pay for qualified meetings that show up ❌ Don't rely on automation alone  ✅ Get human QA on every message ❌ Don't risk LinkedIn account bans  ✅ Get compliance safeguards built in Tools like Dripify, CopilotAI, and Salesloft give you software. Amplify AI gives you a system: → Executive content that builds credibility  → LinkedIn cultivation that gets replies  → AI meeting generation with human oversight  → Show-up playbooks (confirmations, reminders, rebooks) All tied to performance-based fees. For founder-led B2B teams tired of paying for "activity" instead of results. Would you’ll like to learn more?

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Founders with capital that refuse to hire or add resources to alleviate constraints aren't preserving runway -- they're sabotaging growth velocity. I'm seeing this pattern more frequently: 20+ moths of runway, strong customer demand, a product that's delivering ROI but a founding team clearly spread too thin resulting in self-inflicting issues and paper cuts. I think founders feel that by doing everything you're evoking resiliency and capital discipline. Sometimes that's lauded. However, I think it's founders optimizing for control and comfort rather than scale and delegation. From the investor seat, here's how I'm trying to understand this behavior: (1) Avoiding 'role evolution.' - It's hard to graduate from scrappy founder that has to do everything to scrappy founder with the ability to delegate and deploy resources. Hiring means transitioning from building - - > manager - - > leader (2) Control-minded orientation - We naturally feel more accomplished when we can measure our own output (Ex: sales calls made, lines of code written, support tickets resolved, etc...). When you take time hiring and then ultimately unload these tasks, you have to reinterpret your own productivity and be okay with anchoring towards somebody else's. In reality, runway is not the lens to view your business. If capital is sitting idle on your balance sheet with clear use cases for deployment, all you're doing is suppressing momentum and growth. I care less if you were ultimately wrong where you deployed capital rather than running your business to optimize for more runway. Investors implicitly trust your judgment so just have a more growth-oriented mindset 🫡 🚀 .

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I'm helping a few friends find technical co-founders, early-stage CTOs, and heads of engineering. These are exited founders and people with real traction and backing from top VCs.  If you are a ridiculously talented engineer, you owe it to yourself to take a big swing in this generational paradigm shift. I can't guarantee success, but I can promise long hours, high stress, meaningful work, ownership, agency and insane growth. Which is to say, it'll be a hell of a ride. US only for now. If this is interesting, hit me up. Note: I'm not a recruiter, I'm truly just helping some people I think are talented.

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Venture funding isn't success of course, but it's nearly impossible to win big markets without it. Unlike the AI hype, Ando is very, very real. And unlike others, Ando is here to make lives genuinely better for everyone. (*) #proudinvestor #micdrop #oversubscribed Big thx to Bradford Oberwager and James Kairos, Ben Metcalfe, Andy Mutz, Joseph Chittenden-Veal, Scott Sanders, Massy Ghausi, John Lyman, Thomas Wesley, John Holder… and of course Phoenix Toews and Paul Wellons (to name a few) — (*) Yeah yeah, some pencil-pusher will use AI to over-optimize profits over people, but as American Airlines is learning the hard way (WSJ: https://lnkd.in/ePz_QNzt ), net of competition, "people businesses" don't work that way. You HAVE to care for people or you lose. Ando plays a beautiful collaborative role in that dialogue, helping profit-focused management more clearly see the effects of a motivated labor force. That's why I'm truly #proudinvestor --- Posts co-authored with my LinkedIn secret weapon Dennis Buckley

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For solo founders and small teams, the leverage asymmetry is now absurd. One person in flow can out-ship a committee. The bottleneck moved from "can we build it?" to "do we have the clarity and uninterrupted time to build it?" Protect your focus like it's your most valuable asset. Because it is. #ClaudeCode #Convex #Greptile

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