TLDR Founders 2025-06-20

Recent venture funds are struggling to return cash with just 37% of 2019 funds and 30% of 2020 funds generating any distributions for LPs by Q1 2025. The market has shifted toward smaller funds, with 42% of 2024 vintage funds under $10 million versus 25% in 2020. The median IRR for 2017 funds sits at 11.5%, with massive variation from 5% at the 25th percentile to 28.3% at the 90th.

Meta wants to partially buy out VC fund NFDG and hire its partners Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to lead AI efforts. The move - part of Zuckerberg's "founder mode" push that includes nine-figure signing bonuses to poach OpenAI talent - would give Meta minority stakes in AI startups like Perplexity and Safe Superintelligence without getting insider information.

Microsoft is prepping another round of layoffs targeting "thousands" of sales roles after cutting 6,000 jobs in May despite 13% revenue growth and spending $107 million daily on shareholders. The company feels secure enough to play hardball with OpenAI. It is reportedly willing to walk away from restructuring talks and let the partnership expire in 2030 rather than bend to demands.

This YC company treats Claude like any new engineer, with a formal onboarding doc (CLAUDE.md) checked into source control that gets updated whenever Claude does something dumb. The result is Claude now handles chunks of the company's engineering work, creating GitHub issues and PRs while following strict workflows to avoid its favorite failure modes like committing to main, claiming it tested code it can't run, and ignoring documentation completely.

Vanta hit $10M ARR before its Series A by staying under the radar, then scaled to $100M+ by moving upmarket with design partnerships and enterprise sellers. Its CPO spends daily time using the actual product and its CRO runs weekly forecast reviews debugging every part of the GTM funnel. Vanta structures product teams around three time horizons, from immediate growth to moonshot exploration.

AI demos go viral then churn hard. One growth leader saw 70-80% opt-out rates on experimental AI revenue. Annual plans boost net revenue retention by 10-20 percentage points versus monthly, but forcing them backfires with 10-14% refund rates. The winning tactics include making annual the default pricing display, offering exclusive AI credits upfront, and targeting upgrades in month two when customers are 3-4x more likely to convert.

Lovable 2.0 is a smart multiplayer AI workspace with chat agents, team collaboration, and built-in security scanning.

Build apps from flows and sketches.

Smodin is an all-in-one AI writing assistant for generating, rewriting, translating, and detecting AI or plagiarized content in seconds.

One solopreneur just sold his AI product Base44 to Wix for $80M after six months, proving the next unicorn could be built over a weekend. VCs now face explosive noise at the top of funnel plus compressed time to product-market fit, forcing a shift from Pre-Seed → Seed → Series A to just two stages: Pre-PMF (bootstrapped) and Post-PMF (massive rounds in hyper-competitive markets).

Peter Thiel's Founders Fund thrived despite Thiel not being a traditional manager due to the contributions of key figures Napoleon Ta and Lauren Gross. Ta led successful growth investments while remaining low-profile, and Gross expanded the firm's AUM into billions. Thiel's network also birthed Valar Ventures and Mithril Capital, each playing unique roles in Thiel's broader investment strategy.

Harvey parlayed early GPT-4 access into a $100M+ valuation through genius branding over product quality. It won deals with 50-100 seat pilots that generated press releases, but multiple firms reported that Legora beat it in head-to-head product comparisons. Harvey's raise-and-burn strategy worked until challengers like Legora kept shipping better features faster than Harvey could catch up.

Scale raised its Series A while still in Y Combinator after pivoting during the batch, breaking every fundraising "rule" about milestones and metrics.

TerraPower, Bill Gates' nuclear startup, raised $650 million from Nvidia's VC arm and others to support its innovative reactor technologies.