Shane Chin

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 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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founders that have only ever worked within a large company tend to be empty vessels. the most valuable skill at a big company is identifying who has (or could soon have) power and then aligning with and advocating for their ideas as if they were your own. take a spin through the recent YC class and you see a pattern of big company mids all founding the same AI for xyz... its not really their idea, it just sounds good. the board meetings will be especially painful. founders acting like they work for the investors, seeking approval, lost in the woods. there are exceptions. but they tend to be founded before zirp. when founding a company was hard and low prestige and there wasn't capital at every turn. an empty vessel doesn't jump into the abyss without first raising a $5m round from the 9 figure 'seed firms'. 

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Fundraising isn't dating. It's a sales funnel. And most founders don't track it, so 3 months go by while they're still "in conversations." Here's the brutal math (seed round, current selectivity): 100-200 investor outreaches → 15-20% reply rate → 15-30 first meetings → 5-10 partner meetings → 1-3 term sheets → 1 close If you're not tracking conversion at each stage, you're not fundraising. You're hoping. Founders who close faster don't have better luck. They have better systems: 1. They track the funnel weekly Where are leads dying? Outreach, first meeting, partner meeting? Each bottleneck has a different fix. 2. They iterate the narrative Every week: one sharper answer to the question that killed the last meeting. 3. They batch meetings 10 meetings in 2 weeks beats 10 meetings over 2 months. Compression creates urgency. Urgency creates leverage. 4. They treat "no" as data A fast no is worth more than a slow maybe. It frees you to find the real yes. If your fundraise feels stuck, stop asking "Who else can I talk to?" Start asking "Where is my funnel breaking?" I stress-test fundraising packages for founders. Deck, model, cap table, assumptions. You get a written findings memo and a 90-minute call showing you what breaks before investors do. Link in comments. #fundraising #seedstage #venturecapital #startups

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Your early-stage startup ARR isn't a scorecard. It's a learning tool. Founders: bring the story behind the numbers to your board. Not just the numbers. What matters more: - Customer interview takeaways - Why people renew (or don't) - How fast you iterate on feedback - Progress toward product-market fit The real question isn't "did you hit $50K ARR?" It's "what did you learn while getting there?" The best investors/boards care more about the latter.

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Lately I’m hearing more founders being told to delay revenue to make early growth metrics look better for fundraising. I get the logic, but it just feels wrong. Early revenue is an important learning loop. Don’t stunt your business just to package it for VCs

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Over the past few years, fundraising has become significantly tougher, especially for smaller funds. This, unfortunately, is the case even for VCs delivering solid returns. In my recent Crunchbase piece, I talk about how emerging managers can survive (and even thrive!) in a challenging fundraising environment. I discuss why the process today is more about familiarity than performance, and highlight places where managers should look for capital that others ignore. Check out the full column via link in comments. Curious to hear from other managers who have recently raised successfully. Which part of this rings true?

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This is very true. The valuation trap is real. But I don’t think this is a YC story. It’s a market story. We’re seeing the exact same thing here in Israel. Seed rounds at 30–40M for companies with no product, no real validation, sometimes barely a prototype. Not second-time founders. First-timers. I’ve personally seen more than 20 rounds like this just last year. This isn’t about YC “pushing” companies. The system as a whole hasn’t adapted. The cost of building collapsed. The speed of iteration exploded. But pricing logic stayed anchored in 2021. When capital doesn’t recalibrate to reality, it doesn’t just create paper risk. It creates structural fragility. Good companies get boxed into impossible expectations. They are forced to grow into valuations instead of growing into product-market fit. That’s how promising businesses die early. The tragedy isn’t overvaluation. The tragedy is killing companies that could have become durable, profitable, meaningful businesses. This isn’t a YC issue. It’s a venture industry inertia issue. And the longer it takes to adjust, the more collateral damage we’ll keep seeing.

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The hardest thing in VC isn't finding the next big thing. It's saying no to a founder. I was a founder once. I know what it's like to pour your whole life into a company until it becomes the very extension of who you are. Sadly, the no is inevitable in our line of work. But over the years I've learned how to be less bad at it: 1. "No" is not the cruelest word in venture. "Maybe" is. The slow fade. The "let's touch base in 6 months." These aren't kindness. They're just a way of keeping optionality at the founder's expense. Yes, sometimes an opportunity is genuinely too early. But you know the difference. If you know it's a no, say it. 2. Don't hide behind abstractions. A famous investor once counseled founders: "Believe the no and not the why." Investors usually don't want to open a Pandora's box of heated back-and-forth with founders, so they take refuge in vague cover: "it's too early," "we don't have enough experience in this space," "the market's not big enough," or the classic "it's just not a good fit for us." I've used every one of those. Now when I pass, I try to be direct about why I don't have conviction. But I'm also aware that in saying no, I may be describing the limits of my own imagination. So I explicitly say: this is my read...it's based on incomplete information and a highly subjective point of view. I may well be wrong in my assessment. 3. You're not saying no to a pitch deck. You're saying no to someone who probably hasn't slept in months. I'll be honest, there were times I'd glance at my phone during a pitch or quickly check email during a pitch. Not because I'd lost interest, but because something felt urgent and I was already juggling 100 things. It took me too long to understand that when an investor checks their phone, the only message a founder hears is: "this is not that interesting." I accepted the meeting. They've been at this for months or years. The least I can do is be fully there for an hour. 4. Founders remember how you made them feel. Forever. The company you pass on today may be run by someone who pivots and builds something extraordinary tomorrow. Or who becomes a founder you want to back in five years. Or who tells every other founder in their network exactly what kind of person you are. As in every other facet of life, reputation takes a lifetime to build and a minute to destroy. 5. If you're passing, try to be useful. Introduce them to an investor whose thesis actually fits or a corporate partner they've been trying to connect with. It costs you ten minutes. It saves them months. In summary, there is no way to make rejection painless, whether in one's personal or professional realms (startups are both and that makes it doubly bad). But there is a way to make it honest and dignified. To every founder I've said no to: I tried to do it right but I know I didn't always succeed. I also know some of you will prove me wrong and I genuinely look forward to that.

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🚨 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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