Mark Twain famously said “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” As someone who works in the tech industry and spends way too much time online, every once in a while I need to take a step back for some perspective. It’s so easy to get caught up in building the future without any reflection or appreciation for the past.

Reflecting on the past year, I looked back at some moments that caught me by surprise.

Why did Frankenstein, a story that’s over two hundred years old, hit me harder than any film I’ve seen in years? Why have friends stopped listening to the full Brat album, but still have “party 4 u” in the rotation? Why is everyone so emotionally invested in Bryan Johnson’s love life, maybe even more than his longevity protocol?

In many ways the first half of the 2020s rhymed with the Enlightenment period of the 1700s, which paved the way for the Industrial Revolution. It was a shift towards mass industrialization: factories replaced craftsmanship, technology separated humans from nature, and art and writing felt overly formal, professional, and detached.

Sound familiar?

But as people got tired with the cold, restrictive, and in many cases dehumanizing values of the Enlightenment Period, there came a movement where romantic thinkers reclaimed emotion, creativity, and emphasized a way of life that embraced technology, but wasn’t obsessed with it.

As we look to 2026, there are many signs we’re heading into a similar romantic period with implications for every industry.

In the music industry, we’ve seen a mass industrialization where one song has so many writers, any hit song was likely written with another artist in mind, and the era of one hit wonders on TikTok doesn’t guarantee any sort of lasting career in the industry. In music, it’s become a numbers game where you need to write as many songs as possible and shop them around to see what gets picked up. In the mass industrialization of music, everyone is left craving the authenticity that used to exist in the industry. We’re seeing artists call out copycats and algorithm hackers ie: EsDeeKid recently called out the Chainsmokers for unauthorized use of his work and even Taylor Swift has been called out by critics and fans alike for her latest album. Authenticity and vulnerability has become increasingly rare in any industry where you’d expect a plethora of romantics.

If the end of 2025 is any sign of what’s to come, we will see artists like Rosalía who not only mix genres, but assembles a full orchestra and sings in 13 different languages, taking musical inspiration across the world, from Mexico to China.

When interviewed Rosalía said, “AI is nonexistent on this record. At one point I thought, let’s take advantage of the fact that it exists, let’s ask it to write a verse and see how it does. The result was disappointing. AI is very interesting, but for now, this album was made by humans.”

After a decade of mass industrialization in the film industry, Marvel continues to be the golden handcuffs and running joke in Hollywood. Every franchise is ultimately overplayed and eventually sees a well-funded, well-promoted, flop ie: Joker: Folie à Deux.

Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, and many main characters in the Marvel cinematic universe have carefully chosen the right role to transition back to major films after a fear that maybe that forgot their craft entirely ie: Oppenheimer for Downey Jr & Marty Supreme for Paltrow.

In the early 2020s, plots are dumbed down to be more “scrolling-friendly,” it’s no coincidence the most highly regarded film of 2025 (Frankenstein) and the most highly anticipated film of 2026 (Wuthering Heights) are both 300 page novels from the Romantic Period covering deep topics like unchecked ambition (playing God), isolation and the need for connection, and what it truly means to be human or a monster. All themes that are just as relevant today as they were over two hundred years ago.

In the era of AI-generated everything, the most memorable performances involve a more comprehensive approach to the process. The ten to eleven hour physical transformation, 42 pieces of prosthetics, unlearning how we move as humans and reconstructing a new physicality through butoh, the Japanese art form to develop a uniquely grotesque, yet beautiful movements. We are truly discovering what it means to be alive.

As an investor in early stage software companies, I’m not in the business of telling people what to build but I’m very much watching to see who deeply understands the world around them and builds technology with a fresh perspective and unique insight.

In 2025, it felt like the majority of companies missed the market from a design perspective. We live in a world of endlessly scrolling only a few feeds and the stark contrast between major world events and the bubbly, almost too cartoonish design choices from companies felt especially jarring.

While Adobe is predicting another year of maximalist, chaotic design choices, I’m optimistic the same romanticism we’re seeing across music, film, and other creative industries will extend into how we design technology products and digital universes.

We’ll evolve from big, bold, overly high energy, which feels AI-generated, to more calming, nostalgic, and emotionally triggering choices… in a good way :)

• Design choices that feel like a vacation, the antithesis of brain rot

• Subtle reminders that everything is art ie: why can’t sriracha be a font?

• Documenting your creative process is just as important as the finished work itself

“When a generation is overwhelmed with polish, and now slop, they crave things that were never meant to deceive. that never had an agenda.” cole

Here’s to a more romantic 2026! If you’re building something new this year, I’d love to chat. Please follow me on X @briannekimmel.

One of my favorite series at Worklife is our Made on the Internet series. We covered Vacation, the viral, $80M annual revenue sunscreen brand when they were in the earliest stages of building one of their initial concepts: a retro AOL chatroom style community for creatives.

It was something like a Soho House for cool, creative people on the internet. Today, they’ve grown into an iconic lifestyle brand in every Target and just about every boutique hotel or well-designed restaurant, cafe, or rooftop bar.

I was reminded of Marty, the trailblazing founder who hails from Scotland and a friend of mine I made on the Internet close to 10 years ago, this past week when Hayley Williams dropped 17 new songs on her personal website and unsurprisingly broke the internet. She reignited the same energy and excitement we saw during Brat summer with a retro “y2k moment” for gen Z and an almost too nostalgic moment for millennial Paramore super fans.

The best part? The songs were only up for a little over 24 hours. In today’s always connected world, artists are constantly vying for your affection. There’s something incredibly cool and nonchalant about a first look that’s more of an ephemeral experience than an elaborate press campaign.

This got me thinking about why y2k and nostalgic design is not just a fad or short-lived fashion trend with Gen Z, but it’s now informing design choices for mainstream brands, UX/UI for tech companies, and it’s brought back a resurgence of 20+ year old electronics and equally as dated films and pop culture references that could have been easily left in the past.

Y2K provides a safe form of escapism, a cyberpunk-style universe to play in visually and digitally, without all of the fear, uncertainty, and annoyances of technology today.

It’s refreshing to see accessories like the Casio wrist camera that holds up to 100 photos, a refreshing feature in today’s world where finding a photo in your camera roll can send you down a long, complicated rabbit hole. The problem with most annoyances we face today is the solution is typically yet another app and another subscription fee ie: Swipewipe helps you delete dozens of photos in a single session with the same familiar functionality of Tinder.

It feels like we’re entering an era where less is more because we’re all drowning in digital clutter and our brains simply weren’t built for this. More apps, more fees, more, more, more…

Although the Casio wrist camera is over 25 years old, yes y2k was that long ago, it currently sells for around $500 on reseller sites like eBay. It’s funny how much we’re willing to pay for something simple and nostalgic.

From interior design choices, shoes, hair accessories, makeup trends, even vapes today are y2K coded, which seems fun and maybe not that deep but in talking to friends and zooming out there’s a lot happening at the intersection of personal identity and distrust for institutions. Tech, even early stage startups, have a trust problem.

In the past couple of weeks, there’s been a great deal of debate on social media about social surveillance, distrust for the U.S. government and its increasing access to our data, and even the most trusted personal outlets can’t fully be trusted ie: ChatGPT sharing your private conversations in Google search results.

Something as playful as leaked Spotify listening habits of influential people has the potential to ruin someone’s reputation in an instant. Do we really need to know that Vice President JD Vance is listening to the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” or US attorney general Pam Bondi frequently listens to Nelly’s “Hot in Herre”?

Even Gen Z favorites like Partiful are not free from distrust and backlash as users have uncovered Partiful’s founding team worked at Palantir and many “social” features are not designed from a Gen Z state of mind.

One of the most interesting, timely observations I’ve read this summer The Astronomer CEO’s Coldplay concert fiasco is emblematic of our social media surveillance dystopia describes this well — “Facial recognition and crowdsourced social media investigations are constantly being used not just on cringe CEOs, but on random people who are simply existing in public.”

While millennials are more comfortable posting personal photos that potentially compromise personal information like their boarding pass, home address, tagging their location in real-time, and having a much more expansive digital footprint, Gen Z have a complicated relationship with technology and have a more constant awareness of privacy, safety, and keeping a safe, secure, controlled image online.

When it comes to behaviors and values on the internet, much like genetic traits, everything seems to skip a generation… or even two. Gen Z are more religious, more private on the internet, and share more similarities to older Boomers than they do Millennials.

From a brand and product design perspective, James Cameron said it perfectly “it’s harder to write sci-fi because we’re living in a sci-fi world.”

We’ve entered a new era of online culture where you see real humanoid robots walking down the street, AI generated characters replacing Millennial human influencers, and the next generation intentionally fighting “the age of algorithmic-driven cultural flattening.” The DIY-inspired looks like wired headphones and even intentional typos signify “non-AI writing” aka imperfect, unpolished thoughts from a real person to another real person.

A huge part of the Y2K appeal comes from the fact that technology during this time was far from science fiction. For example: Gen Z fans today are shocked that Vanessa Carlton’s 2002 hit song A Thousand Miles was not shot on a green screen. She was strapped to a flat bed truck and driven around LA. Something so wildly unfathomable in the age of green screens and increasingly AI-generated content.

“This pivot from polished to unfiltered, driven by stars like Addison Rae and Olivia Rodrigo, is gaining traction across TikTok and beyond, where wired headphones, oversized bags, and deliberately scruffy yet still effortlessly chic hair are being celebrated as part of a wider pushback against curated perfection.”

As creatives, company builders, and generally speaking humans on the internet, the question becomes how can we create safe spaces for people to connect online, build technology that doesn’t force users to compromise their personal values and comfortability with sharing personal information, and keep our online experiences upbeat, enlightening, and maybe even nostalgic.

I recently read Y2K “it girl” Rebecca Minkoff's book Fearless, which is not only filled with inspiring advice for anyone ready to start something—it's also a delightful time capsule of early 2000s culture.

While Y2K fashion may have made a massive comeback today, our relationship to technology and how we shop has changed dramatically.

It's difficult to imagine a world where “it girls” aren't on TikTok, the internet is used more like an encyclopedia than a source of entertainment, and the quality of our shopping experience is completely dependent on where you live or how far you're willing to travel to shop.

Internet shopping was in its earliest days—no Depop, no Shein, and most popular online stores we love today.

As I was reading the book, I was reminded of the scene in Serendipity when Molly Shannon tries to buy a horrific knock-off wallet for $20 on the busy streets of NYC. The wallet says "Prado" instead of Prada, but she creatively says, "For one dollar, I can buy a magic marker and fix that."

Fast forward to today—knock-offs have become dupes, duplicates that have indistinguishable quality from the more expensive, higher margin original. In some cases, a dupe is the exact same item from the same factory with the logo tag removed.

Dupes today are far from taboo; they've become a status symbol for the modern consumer who has infinite access to information. What makes someone cool today is the ability to think smarter, spend less, and not compromise on quality. If you’re covered in logos and paying full-price, the joke is on you.

While today’s educated consumer makes smarter decisions and tries their best to avoid fast fashion, it’s understandable why many young people have praised France's new law that cracks down on ultra-fast fashion carbon emissions with ad bans, eco-taxes, and transparency rules targeting SHEIN and Temu.

Fast fashion and consumer shopping trends in China have created an insatiable appetite for low-stakes, one-click buys—cheap dupes, logo-less luxury goods, items you only wear once —and it's created a lot of unnecessary waste.

But as someone who is optimistic about new technologies and trends, one thing I've loved about TikTok over the past few years is how dupe culture has enabled a new form of financial literacy and consumer savviness.

TikTok has democratized access to quality goods and ultimately unleashed a new generation of highly educated consumers who aren’t fooled by marketing campaigns and are ready to expose inauthentic and unethical companies.

For example Dupe, the visual search engine that instantly generates a list of lookalikes of the product you want for up to 90% less, is a great example of how dupe culture scales beyond fake Prada wallets to entire home renovations, office buildouts, and all types of large-scale projects.

Leveraging high-quality dupes as an interior designer could save your client tens of thousands of dollars and help you increase the margins for your business.

For small businesses with razor thin margins like restaurants, the ability to buy chef-grade knives and supplies for back of house and wine glasses, dishes, and bar supplies for front of house at a fraction of the cost can dramatically change the outcome and positioning of your business.

Element Brooklyn, an affordable alternative to your favorite soaps, candles, and home goods, very cleverly speaks to the "starter pack generation.”

The modern Yuppies who want to impress every Hinge date without spending too much money. After you've bought the real deal from Aesop, you can refill the bottle with a cheaper alternative that smells the same… because it’s better for the planet, of course ;)

For the most established, quiet luxury person who cares more about the quality of the materials over the brand name itself, Italic offers significantly discounted items coming from the same factory as the designer goods.

Italic, a company that was early to this trend and one that I invested in a little over four years ago, is a great example of outsmarting legacy retailers, empowering mom and pop manufacturing companies, and ultimately saving savvy consumers a lot of money.

Bed sheets, cashmere sweaters, diamond tennis bracelets, Japanese chef's knives—just about anything you want for your house, closet, or even your pet can be purchased directly from the same factories as Prada, YSL, and luxury brands.

For the ultra-savvy consumer, Phia is a company that displays the best possible price for an item before you buy it. It also shares the resale value to gauge how much money you can make once you’re done using it.

Phia founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, former Stanford roommates, started building a community around Phia two years before launch as a powerful lever to bring transparency to fashion by hosting feedback sessions in their office.

They even parlayed their community mindset into a trending podcast called The Burnouts, part of Alex Cooper’s Unwell Network.

The podcast touches on the ups and downs the duo are facing as they build Phia, and it also features other female entrepreneurs and their star-studded cap table of investors including Kris Jenner and Spanx founder Sara Blakely.

From Phia’s early preview in 2023

The Business Opportunity

So what are the implications for founders of new companies and the next generation of leaders responsible for turning around legacy companies.

On a positive note, there's an opportunity to be radically transparent and build a company that's fairly priced, mindful of its impact on the planet, and checks all of the boxes for today's educated consumer.

On the other hand, this level of transparency has dramatically changed what it means to be a founder in a world where inauthenticity is almost immediately exposed.

The Opportunity: Radical Transparency Wins

Companies that embrace transparency and fair pricing are thriving. Success requires:

• Honest pricing: Eliminate unnecessary markups and explain your value proposition clearly

• Supply chain transparency: Show customers exactly where products come from and why they cost what they do

• Quality over branding: Focus on materials and craftsmanship rather than logo recognition

• Sustainability alignment: Match your environmental claims with actual practices

The Risk: Authenticity Is Non-Negotiable

Today's consumers can instantly expose inconsistencies between your company values and actual practices. Consider the backlash against Meghan Markle's company As Ever—selling white-labeled Republic of Tea products at 3x the price contradicted her authenticity-focused brand that was positioned as a small-batch, family-run business based in Montecito, California.

Three Action Steps for Your Business

1. Audit your value proposition: Can you clearly explain why your product costs what it does? If not, you're vulnerable to dupe competition.

2. Embrace transparency: Share your manufacturing process, material sources, and pricing breakdown. Consumers reward honesty with loyalty.

3. Focus on genuine differentiation: If your only advantage is brand recognition, you're at risk. Develop real value through superior materials, customer service, or user experience.

The Bottom Line

The dupe economy isn't killing premium brands—it's forcing them to justify their premiums. Companies that adapt by offering genuine value at fair prices will thrive. Those that rely solely on brand mystique and inflated pricing will struggle.

The consumers driving this trend aren't looking for cheap alternatives; they're demanding smart alternatives. The question for your business is: Are you giving them a reason to choose you beyond the logo?

What I’m reading

The Death of the Middle Class Musician

More and More Students are using AI to Cheat - but Does it Really Matter?

Getting Sticky With Erica Chidi: Motherhood is mess and ambivalence. It’s time to talk to each other about it.

There's a scene in the film Booksmart where Molly, the school-obsessed overachiever who dresses and acts like she's forty, discovers through an awkward bathroom encounter that her classmates—the ones she wrote off as slackers—are heading to Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown after graduation. Even the kid who failed seventh grade twice landed a six-figure engineering job at Google straight out of high school.

"This isn't possible," Molly protests. "You guys don't even care about school."

Her Yale-bound classmate's response cuts to the heart of everything: "No, we just don't only care about school."

This moment perfectly captures what I call the Creative Hacker mindset. As we enter the AI era, the old playbook of working harder isn't just outdated—it's counterproductive. Success now belongs to those who work smarter, think differently, and refuse to be constrained by traditional ways of building.

The Great Credential Collapse

For the first time in 45 years, people with bachelor's degrees or higher have unemployment rates above the national average. The time-honored formula— study hard, get good grades, graduate with honors—is failing to deliver its promised outcomes.

This shift explains why Cluely's provocative "cheat on everything" motto has struck such a nerve, particularly in Silicon Valley. The phrase makes traditionalists uncomfortable because it challenges their fundamental assumptions about merit and success. 

Whether we like it or not, an entire generation is already "cheating" on essays and exams using ChatGPT and similar tools. We're witnessing venture-scale businesses built by teams without classically trained engineers—just builders with sharp product intuition and access to democratized tools that let anyone create based on instinct rather than credentials. The “you can just do things” mantra of Silicon Valley is producing a whole new way of learning and building that needs no college degree or blessing from a top tier VC.

If we look specifically at the world’s top technical talent, there are plenty of Creative Hackers who take “cheating” one step further by copying popular startups and immediately open-sourcing their version for free to prove a point. 

Breaking the Sacred Rules

Every sacred rule of education and startups are not only being questioned publicly, but disproven through outliers embracing this new “you can just do things” mentality. 

Take Y Combinator's long-standing bias against solo founders. For years, they actively discouraged single-person teams, and even their rare solo founder exceptions typically found co-founders soon after acceptance.

When Dropbox's Drew Houston applied to YC in Winter 2007, he had just two weeks to find a co-founder.

Here’s his initial application: 

Today, we're seeing solo-founded, six-month-old companies sell for $80 million in cash. Critics might argue these founders are selling too early or could achieve more with co-founders, but that misses the point entirely. Creative Hackers don't optimize for external validation—they build on their own terms and can achieve generational wealth in the process.

The Replit Revolution

Replit exemplifies Creative Hacking at scale. For years, many traditional VCs didn’t really understand the product, the value of its community, and how they would monetize without a traditional sales team. The team remained committed to shipping exceptional products rather than compromising product in favor of an old-school way of building a company: hire a large sales team, add new features based on large enterprise customers, and ultimately slow shipping velocity as tensions between engineering and sales are inevitable.  

Just six months ago and after eight years of building, Replit hit $10 million ARR. A great milestone for any company, especially one that has emphasized keeping the product accessible and affordable for all types of builders globally.

But here's where the story gets interesting: with an already addicted base of engineers using the product daily and an explosive ecosystem of vibe coders discovering Replit for the first time, Replit grew from $10M to $100M ARR in just six months. A growth rate that defies the old-school “triple, triple, double, double, double” 

By staying committed to the product experience and its global community, Replit has been able to achieve both “vibe coding” revenue and land large enterprise customers like Anthropic, Coinbase, Hubspot, Zillow, and other big names.

Creative Hacking applies to distribution, not just building products 

When I first explored Creative Hackers in 2019, I focused primarily on no-code builders and individuals who build in public while collaborating with like-minded peers. They looked more like builders on Product Hunt, indie hackers, even Stay at Home Valley, the social network I built in Figma could be considered a way of creatively hacking a new way for designers to collaborate in a laidback, engaging way.

These types of Creative Hackers often faced criticism for being "stunt-driven" and hype-driven and disagreeable when given traditional advice. When you reference check them, you’ll get mixed reviews. They don’t study traditional playbooks. They don’t want to network with traditional VCs. They’re truly unconventional, sometimes even to a fault. 

Creative Hackers don't set out to build marginally better versions of existing products. They create things that are difficult to understand because they're living in the future. This approach often offends classically trained tech professionals who value credentials, logos on their resume, and tend to value a more linear career path.

Today, I think more holistically about Creative Hacking because building a product is only half the equation—distribution matters equally, if not more. A consistent Substack writer who masterfully leverages social media and native community features is just as much a Creative Hacker as an open-source contributor.

In the current social media recession, creatively hacking your way to better distribution is as crucial as creatively building your product itself. TikTok engagement dropped from 5.69% to 2.63% this year and Facebook interactions are down 47% YOY. 

This is why Tomato Girl Summer is taking over Instagram and outperforming AI slop and a digital camera is the most popular accessory this summer. Except for maybe the Labubu if you’re lucky enough to find one.

Cluely recently proved distribution is not limited to cool consumer brands, software companies can leverage the same marketing psychology to break through the noise and convert curiosity into meaningful revenue.

The Open Source Paradox

Here's the beautiful irony of the Creative Hacker era: good ideas will be copied and talented engineers who embrace open-source will build copycats and offer them to the broader community for free. This doesn’t mean the products are enterprise-grade products with the correct security features and reporting to make them a viable solution for more established companies. But for the hobbyist builder, anyone can creatively hack their way to a decent product using free open-source projects.

Another thing you’ll find with more contrarian technical creative hackers is they are not guarded or precious with their work. You won’t find their personal site or portfolio password protected, sharing freely online is a sign of confidence. The true Creative Hackers welcome criticism and aren’t afraid to get in fights on the internet over their technical philosophies and ways of doing things.

To become a Creative Hacker you need to get comfortable with freely sharing your work and developing a thick skin when it comes to online haters.

The Future Belongs to the Unconventional

The Creative Hacker movement represents more than a trend—it's a fundamental shift in how value gets created and recognized. As AI continues to democratize technical capabilities, success will increasingly belong to those who can think creatively, move quickly, and ignore conventional wisdom.

The question isn't whether you'll adapt to this new reality, but whether you'll embrace it before your competition does. The future belongs to those who, like Molly's classmates, understand that caring about more than just the traditional path is far more interesting than playing by the rules.

I would love to hear from Creative Hackers in Silicon Valley and find even more examples for future posts, please reach out and say hi! Also, follow me on X @briannekimmel

What I’m reading:

Proof of Concept

A primer on vibe coding

Vibe coding is a phenomenon that became popular with the continued advancement of code generation this year. I highly recommend Carley Ayers's piece on vibe coding, which she wrote while at Figma. For me, the term is perfectly fitting. I grab my cold brew, put on a multi-hour synthwave playlist, and start making software in inconsequential ways. No unit…

Read more

7 months ago · 26 likes · 2 comments · David Hoang

Sex Happens

Welcome to Sex Happens

If you follow me on instagram (sorry), you know I love nothing more than sharing a screenshot (with permission). People messaging me saying they just took a Julie, how thankful they are for the morning after pill, or asking me to send them one. (Which, happy to…

Read more

7 months ago · 22 likes · 9 comments · Sex Happens

The Career Archetypes by Joel Uili

Restoring work to its sacred function

When Christopher Hitchens the acclaimed writer, journalist and renowned combatant of organised religion told a packed out auditorium that to be a writer it cannot be something you want to do, “...it must be the thing that you have to do. It must be that without which you could not live," the irony was present…

Read more

7 months ago · 45 likes · 5 comments · Joel Uili

Outlaws & Highways

Digital Intimacies: My Notes On Social Media

There’s a part of me that wants to disappear…

Read more

7 months ago · 174 likes · 11 comments · Katie Beth Payne

I recently published The Six Builders who will Thrive in the Era of AI.

Of all of the personas that informed the creation of Worklife and people I believed would thrive in the new era of work, The Industry Academics have been the group to explode the most over the last few years. 

In 2019, as I was researching important skills and the non-obvious jobs of the future I saw OpenAI hiring a new profile of operator that was atypical for a startup and didn’t fit the usual profile of a scrappy full-stack engineer (builders) or an early customer-facing go-to-market (sellers). There was a highly educated, deeply focused, and more research-driven hire (thinkers and writers).

Today, the most interesting operators at the fastest growing software companies are not writing code or selling to customers. They’re heads-down conducting research, publishing industry-leading white papers, and using their own methodologies and AI tools to conduct the equivalent of a decade or more of research in a matter of weeks.

The level of insights and intelligence we’re seeing at early stage companies is unprecedented. This shift has attracted both highly credentialed academics with decades of experience and recent graduates who typically explore roles at Google, Microsoft, or large institutions with more traditional post-grad programs. 

Historically, the term “researcher” or even “academic” could easily be dismissed or frowned upon by Silicon Valley folks. We are after all an ecosystem obsessed with building, doing, and shipping at a rate that would be unfathomable in other industries.  

In a place where young people are drawn to the industry-wide emphasis on experimentation and our unique ability to “move fast and break things,” how does a researcher who carefully and thoroughly studies a topic fit in with the rest of the fast-moving culture in the Valley? 

For many repeat founders and even the most highly regarded venture capitalists, you’ll notice a shift where going deep and taking a more research-intensive approach is leading to more robust product building and thinking. There’s a reason why some of the most highly respected voices in the Valley have hit pause on any short-term ideas or opportunities to thoroughly understand what’s being built today and how AI will change every aspect of our lives in the future. 

@Suhail and Sarah Tavel being two recent examples.

My personal obsession with researchers and academics in tech stemmed from my time at Zendesk building Zendesk for Startups which included a close relationship with Station F, the Family, and top technical schools in France. 

I love Paris for its rare combination of style and intelect. Many of the best data scientists, AI researchers, and industry academics have graduated from top technical programs there. The ecosystem there feels noticeably more academic, which has pros and cons, but spending time in the region gave me a deep appreciation for the thoughtful approach to building. Hugging Face is one of my favorite examples of a French team that has contributed so much knowledge to the broader tech ecosystem. Many operators today credit their interest in AI/ML to the early days of Hugging Face. I also find myself bookmarking so many papers from their Daily Papers, which feels like the equivalent of Product Hunt for researchers.

Today, Cursor, Anthropic, and many AI companies start as research companies and as they scale research continues to a core value for the company. This has created entirely new types of builders who will ultimately leave and start companies in areas they’ve spent years thoroughly researching both what’s possible from a technological perspective and increasingly the societal impact of the technology we’re building. 

OpenAI’s Head of Model Behavior and Policy Joanne Jang shared an important and thought provoking update on how OpenAI is closely studying the emotional well-being of users. Chat is now a trusted therapist and increasingly a viable romantic partner for its 400M weekly active users in such a short amount of time does raise long-term questions on tech’s role in shaping human-ai relationships.

As I reflect on the pitches from Summer 2025 Demo Day it’s clear that the Industry Academics are gaining power and influence in Silicon Valley.

In Summer 2019, 15% of YC founders had a postgraduate degree. 85% of founders had a bachelor’s degree or no college education, the latter has been a beloved archetype for many years in the Valley as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Oracle were founded by college dropouts.

In Summer 2023, 36% of YC founders had a postgraduate degree. An increasing number of founders had additional education, but in spaces like biotech where some form of advanced degree in medicine is required to build in the space.  

In Summer 2024, 55% of YC founders had a postgraduate degree and 72% of founders had a background in Computer Science as this batch was AI focused with 67% of founders based in San Francisco Bay Area, which has become the epicenter of AI globally.

The most recent batch that presented yesterday had the largest number of postgraduate founders close to 60% because of the batch’s emphasis on AI, which signals not only are the Industry Academics joining well-funded, research-focused AI companies, they’re also taking the leap and starting their own startups immediately after graduation or a couple of years operating at a Silicon Valley startup.

If you’re thinking about next steps, we’re a first check firm that backs operators leaving top companies. We’ll invest up to $2M and help you every step of the way to product-market fit.