Sahil Lavingia

🚨 Founders: If you're not exploring cross-industry alliances, you're playing the wrong game. Some of the biggest breakout companies didn’t scale by outspending the competition they scaled by out-partnering them. 🚀 Think Figma embedding into dev workflows. 🚀 Calendly riding the rails of Zoom and Salesforce. 🚀 Zapier integrating with Trello and Slack before raising big money. 💡 The playbook? Fuse your solution with another industry's infrastructure and unlock distribution, data, or demand without burning capital. Cross-industry alliances do 3 things: 1. Collapse time by borrowing someone else’s audience. 2. Unlock non-obvious use cases that give you strategic moats. 3. Increase your valuation before the first funding conversation. If you're a startup founder and you’re stuck thinking, “We need capital to grow,” you’re asking the wrong question. Ask instead: 👉 “Who’s already serving my customer in a different way and how do we win together?” That’s how exponential growth actually happens. 💬 Founders: Which alliance would double your reach in 90 days? #Startups #GrowthStrategy #VC #EarlyStage #FounderTips #Platform #AI

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Reminder for the Black operators (in startups, large companies, and small firms): AI Hackathon for Black​ Operators. £1k prize 👩🏿‍💻📣👨🏾‍💻 If you're building with AI (which you should be) - this is for you. ​https://lnkd.in/e7NGeCJb

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📣 Female Tech Founders in NYC — New Accelerator Alert! Scale Ready Studio is a new 12-week, revenue-focused growth program for women building tech startups in NYC, created by Women.NYC in partnership with Get Sh!t Done. This program is designed to help founders scale sustainably through: - Revenue and profit growth - Strong systems and operations - Weekly strategy labs - Hybrid coaching (1:1 + group) - Technical assistance - In-person Founder Days The program culminates in a Deal Day, where participants pitch to a curated group of investors. 🗓 Applications close January 12

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The co-founder of Replit just dropped the most contrarian take on product strategy I've heard all year. She deliberately built their coding platform for people who can't code. At our Enrich event last week, Haya Odeh said something that completely flipped how 40 CTOs and VPs think about building products: “Figma is for engineers. Figma is never for designers. I say Replit is for designers, not developers.” A coding platform that's not for coders? Here's what she meant: The people actually using Replit aren't engineers with strong opinions about their dev tools. They're PMs and designers who want to build something but don't have the technical background to set up environments on their own. These users have nowhere else to go. They'd be completely stuck without a tool like Replit. Meanwhile, engineers already have solutions they love. They're opinionated about their tools and know exactly what they want. Fighting for their attention means competing with deeply entrenched preferences. This is the strategic insight most founders miss: Sometimes your best users aren't who you'd expect. They're the people who have no other option. Haya wasn't being provocative - she was demonstrating radical clarity about product strategy. Being willing to say "our coding platform isn't for coders" lets Replit move 10x faster than competitors trying to please everyone. This clarity changes what features you prioritize, how you talk about your product, who you hire, how you structure your team. Every decision becomes obvious when you know exactly who you're serving. Replit's success proves something important: Sometimes the best strategy isn't expanding your market. It's having the discipline to ignore the obvious users and obsess over the underserved. These are the kinds of insights we explore at Enrich - a selective network where VPs, Directors, and CXOs connect with peers, gain strategic insights, and accelerate their leadership growth through intimate dinners and candid conversations. Thanks to Haya for taking the time. If you want an invite to the next talk, DM me!

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NYC's Election Results: A Signal for Tech's Next Regulatory Frontier Zohran Mamdani's confirmed victory is more than a political headline; it's a indicator of the evolving regulatory landscape for tech in New York City. As a prominent progressive voice, his policy priorities directly intersect with core tech operations: · Housing & PropTech: Expect intensified focus on tenant protections and data privacy laws that could impact how real estate tech platforms operate. · Gig Economy & Labor: The push for wage standards and benefits for gig workers is likely to gain further momentum, affecting delivery, ride-share, and other on-demand platforms. · Public Services & Civic Tech: This win signals strong support for modernizing public services, creating opportunities for civic tech companies that partner with the city on equitable solutions. #NYC #TechPolicy #NYCTech #PropTech #GigEconomy #CivicTech #Innovation #PublicPolicy

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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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The idea for Mellow came out of left field. YC was running an MCP hackathon and I nudged Benjamin to join. He came back convinced we should drop everything and build a mobile interface for agents 😳 I was a little annoyed at first...we’d been grinding on a (web-based) creator tool for building apps on top of open-source models, so this was a significant shift. But truthfully, finding PMF had been an uphill battle. Something told me I should spend some more time with this new idea. I took a walk and ended up typing up the first "manifesto" for Mellow in my Notes app: how the world was shifting, the blockers to mainstream AI adoption, and the bets I thought we should make. It all came pouring out of me, stream of consciousness. I was locked in. That note became our inception moment. It got Ben and me aligned on starting with the personal productivity use case for prosumers (vs. a second-screen tool for power users), and committed to the pivot. I pulled it up today, and it's cool to see that our core problem statements still hold true. Here’s what we saw then (and still believe now): 1️⃣ Agents aren’t useful without thoughtful human-in-the-loop design. Right now the experience sucks, and it generally requires you to be chained to a laptop (booooo 👎). 2️⃣ Most people can’t think of real agent use cases that would actually make their lives better. 3️⃣ Most people don’t have time to build custom workflows. They're already underwater; they just want something that works. Our bets: AI needs to go beyond being a thought partner to actually taking action. And it has to live where life happens — on your phone, in the natural flow of your day. That’s what joyful human/AI collaboration looks like. And it's what we're building. If you want to give Mellow a spin, drop a comment below and I'll add you to our beta group.

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