Excerpt: Before Mr. Trump took office for his second term last year, Mr. Andreessen spent “half” his time at Mar-a-Lago helping with the transition, he has said. The venture capitalist also informally advised Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. And two former Andreessen Horowitz partners took on senior government jobs, including one working on A.I. regulation.
“…Nona Yehia readily admits that her company, Vertical Harvest, which she helped start in 2010, made plenty of mistakes, like how to manage airflow and humidity. But the reason Vertical Harvest is still around is the scale of those mistakes.
“My colleagues and competitors made big mistakes with big money and big farms,” she said. “We made small mistakes with small money and small farms.”
She said the first wave of vertical farms had approached business as if they were huge, established food companies, and not start-ups. Their business plan was “large-scale, commodity lettuce sold into retail at thin margins,” she wrote in an email, a difficult proposition against established competition…”
"The uncomfortable conclusion most angels do not say out loud: a large percentage of seed-funded PMF is not PMF but FMF (founder-market fit) combined with enough early customer goodwill to produce metrics that clear the bar. The product may be fine, the founder is exceptional but the pull is not there.
This could still be fundable at seed. The bet is that the product catches up to the founder before the founder burns out carrying it."
"Angels confuse founder quality with product quality and often fund the wrong thing.
A strong founder who is personally closing customers, personally managing relationships, and personally rescuing churn is demonstrating something real. Their ability to sell, their commitment to the company and their capacity to hold things together in early chaos. These are not small things as they matter for survival.
But survival is not the same as scalability. And angel returns do not come from survival."