Will Price

Joshua Steinman 🇺🇸 shared esoteric hard tech fundraising knowledge with the Discipulus Ventures Cohort (apply to the next one to figure out what is under the blurred text). "VCs want 3 sentences of renegade and 50 pages of Normie." — Be interesting enough to get attention, conventional enough to get funded.

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Don't Build a Better Wheat Farm" - Why Defensibility Stakes Are Higher in Deep Tech Just published a new piece on my "Ignore the Confusion" blog, building on thoughtful insights from Eric Ver Ploeg at Tunitas Ventures about startup defensibility. Eric's core thesis: Too many startups pitch like wheat farmers - "huge TAM, slow incumbents, growing market, domain expertise" - but fail to think through long-term defensibility until it's too late. From a deep tech perspective, the stakes are even higher: ** Unlike software, deep tech founders must commit to defensibility strategies from day one - their funding depends on it ** Patent vs. trade secret decisions are often difficult to reverse and shape your entire competitive strategy ** Even "picks and shovels" providers (the tools that make industries more efficient) become commodities without proper moats The key insight that resonates: Defensibility can't be retrofitted. Whether you're building software or deep tech, your moat must be architected into the business model from the start. Thanks to Eric Ver Ploeg for sharing these insights on startup strategy and letting me build on his framework from a deep tech lens. Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/dEj_iF-Q #DeepTech #StartupStrategy #Defensibility #VentureCapital #Innovation

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Halter just launched satellite-connected cows, leveraging SpaceX's Starlink satellites and telcos! More accurately, Halter now offers the world's first virtual fencing for dairy and beef cows via SATELLITE, unlocking ranch management anywhere -- and this news is fresh off their $220 million of new financing from Founders Fund that values them at $2 billion with collars on over a million cows! Check out this video from NZ Herald where Halter CEO Craig Piggott is interviewed about this news: https://lnkd.in/grTBYxD3 Until now, Halter’s solar-powered, GPS-enabled collars relied on Halter’s proprietary long-range radio towers. With direct-to-satellite, the collars can communicate with the cloud, eliminating on-ranch infrastructure entirely. “Connectivity has been the final barrier to bringing virtual fencing across remote and expansive ranches,” said Craig Piggott, CEO and founder of Halter. “Direct-to-satellite allows ranchers to manage hundreds of thousands of acres in the most remote terrain on the planet. Combined with our new suite of product features, these ranchers can be even more productive.”  Ubiquity Ventures #softwarebeyondthescreen

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Loved chatting with Kelli Fontaine about how LPs like Cendana Capital manage risk when investing in solo GPs. It's an interesting time to raise a fund: • Some LPs will not invest in dual GPs after seeing so many breakups in the past two years 💔 • Yet others will not invest in solo GPs as they or their peers have had the unthinkable happen (solo GP becomes incapacitated and firm is in limbo). Kelli's advice for GPs was spot on – there are ways to manage this in both situations. Focus on the LPs that believe in your model; don't waste time on those that will never be comfortable with it. Thank you David Zhou for hosting me on Superclusters!

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Agentic AI has an infrastructure problem. OpenInfer built the solution,... and it's FREE for OpenClaw users. Anthropic's recent restrictions on using OpenClaw as a tool within #Claude exposed a real and growing inefficiency in enterprise #AI infrastructure: agentic workloads are being served on compute stacks that were never designed for them. Agentic inference is fundamentally different from the inference era we have been building for. Majority of agent workloads are background tasks. Latency-tolerant, routine, and always-on. Yet most teams run them on the same premium compute topology designed for real-time sessions. That mismatch is expensive, fragile, and unnecessary. OpenInfer routes each workload based on its SLA and characteristics to the right compute topology automatically. The result: a major compute dependency unlock and genuine cost control at scale - without migration pain, without re-architecting your stack. This is what Weave (https://lnkd.in/evSHBEmB), their inference orchestration engine, was built for: treating execution strategy as a first-class variable, not an afterthought. Today, they are launching OpenInfer Beta. 🔗 More on Product Hunt: https://lnkd.in/g8KmkDiX 👉 Come try it out: https://openinfer.io/beta #openinfer #openclaw #agenticai #infrastrucutre

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The YC W26 batch is settling into rhythm, and week by week, the direction of this cohort is becoming clearer. As always, Y Combinator selection process acts as a powerful market filter: thousands of applications distilled into a small group of founders whose focus often hints at what’s coming next. This week’s launches suggest a batch leaning into complexity, regulation, and the real-world systems that actually keep the economy running. What stood out: 🧬 Healthcare & life sciences are gaining momentum Companies like Ruma Care, Rhizome AI, and Strand AI reflect renewed founder interest in regulated healthcare, biotech, and life-science workflows. From prior authorization and regulatory intelligence to biological datasets and financial crime prevention, these teams are tackling high-stakes problems where accuracy and trust matter deeply. 🏭 Manufacturing, logistics, and the physical world are being supercharged by AI Startups including Kyten Technologies, Servo7, Inviscid AI, and Pollinate are applying AI to atoms — battery manufacturing, adaptive warehouse robotics, building and data-center optimization, and ERP-layered supply chains. This is practical AI, focused on efficiency and resilience. 🏢 Enterprise operations continue their AI-native rebuild General Legal, FullSeam, Oximy, Orthogonal, Librar Labs, and Booko are rethinking legal services, finance ops, AI governance, API infrastructure, inventory management, and dynamic pricing. Less dashboard-watching. More execution. Taken together, this feels like a turning point. Early-January experimentation is giving way to conviction — companies built for regulated environments, physical infrastructure, and enterprise-scale execution. This week’s Fund Manager Picks: 🔹 Rhizome AI — Always know what the FDA thinks Citation-backed, hallucination-free regulatory intelligence for life sciences. Already generating six-figure revenue and becoming indispensable for regulatory affairs teams. 🔹 Inviscid AI — Real-time building simulations Physics-informed AI and digital twins that optimize energy use, HVAC efficiency, and air quality — pushing building management beyond rule-based systems. 🔹 General Legal — The AI-native law firm Flat-fee, high-quality contract drafting and negotiation for growth-stage companies. Contracts in hours, not days. 🔹 Servo7 — Autonomous warehouse robots Flexible, learning-based robotics that adapt as warehouse needs change — increasing value over time rather than becoming obsolete. 🔹 Booko — Dynamic pricing for service businesses Bringing marketplace-style pricing to appointment-based services, unlocking ~20% revenue uplift by monetizing perishable time slots. More to come — but this week’s launches made one thing clear: YC W26 founders are building for the hard, regulated, and deeply operational parts of the economy. And that’s where things get interesting. https://lnkd.in/edAyRgRk

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Since investing in Baseten earlier this year, it's hard to overstate just how blown away we've been. The momentum is undeniable. Inference is becoming the infrastructure layer that separates AI demos from AI businesses and Baseten gives the best teams a reliable, high-performance way to run open-source and custom models at scale, with the unit economics and controls required in production. The team is exceptional. It is a textbook example of A+ players attracting A+ players, and A+ customers attracting A+ customers. Baseten is synonymous with reliability & innovation. For these reasons, we’re excited to double down on Baseten's mission to accelerate a multi-model future where companies own their differentiation by co-leading their $300M Series E with IVP. Proud to partner with Tuhin, Amir, Pankaj, Philip, and the whole team. If you’re building serious AI products in production, you should talk to them! https://lnkd.in/geHn7c37

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Another missive from Chuck Cotter and Daniel Faierman. Thanks guys for continuing to help to ecosystem. If you've not seen their posts, peek at https://lnkd.in/gPiu9Z4z. Topics include: · CPG Co-Manufacturing Contracts · Early Stage VC Terms to Rarely Accept · More Dividends (and Dividend Recaps?) · 5 Raises, 5 Takeaways · A Founder's Guide to Secondaries · Standing Out Pre-Traction · The State of VC · Corporate Governance 101 · Anti-Dilution Provisions · Primer on QSBS · 4 Fund Raising DON'Ts · Liquidation Preferences · Understanding SAFEs · Understanding Convertible Notes · Understanding Prorata Rights · Founders & Athletes · Employee Stock Options Demystified · The Art of Start-Up Valuation · What Is A Term Sheet Anyway? Check it out ...

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When Genspark hit 2 million users in 45 days, the tech -- usually the first breakpoint -- held strong. So what broke first? In this clip, Wen Sang breaks down what hypergrowth looks like from the inside. For starters, they launched for individuals, not enterprises People all over the world started signing up and sharing it with friends and colleagues. They sent requests to their executives to but it for them. 80%+ of their code is written by AI, and the three layer tech stack stayed solid under load Genspark had zero team or enterprise plans, no “contact sales” page, no corporate pricing. Then the support inbox started getting flooded with “I want a corporate plan. Give me a corporate plan. I want an annual plan.” Users re-wrote the roadmap. For the team, the answer was simple, focus on making human beings happy. Build them what they want, as they want it. As Wen S. said to me many times “If you care about human beings enough, if you focus on making human beings happy, you are going to be successful. That is our philosophy. That is our focus. That is our bet.” Full episode with Wen Sang and Genspark in the comments.

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Frasca Executive Dispatch — Macro + Policy I've watched three platform shifts up close. Every one of them had a moment where the regulatory infrastructure flipped from obstacle to accelerant. We are in that moment right now for digital assets, on both sides of the Atlantic. 1. GENIUS Act meets its first deadline. The FDIC approved rulemaking on April 7 to implement the prudential framework for stablecoin issuers. Supervisory agencies must publish final rules by July 18. Stablecoin market cap has crossed $317 billion. The plumbing is being installed. 2. The Fed published its stablecoin stability assessment. The April 8 FEDS Note analyzed financial stability implications of stablecoins at scale. Meanwhile, Mastercard is acquiring stablecoin infrastructure. Coinbase has integrated with Citi and American Express. Traditional rails are not competing with digital assets. They are merging with them. 3. MiCA's July deadline approaches. Every crypto-asset service provider in the EU must achieve full MiCA compliance by July 1. Over 30% of EU institutional investors have already increased digital asset exposure. The DAC8 tax reporting framework went live January 1. Europe is building the institutional on-ramp while the US finalizes the stablecoin guardrails. What this rhymes with: 1996. The Telecommunications Act didn't kill the internet. It created the legal certainty that let capital flood in. July 2026 is shaping up as that inflection for digital assets. Second-order effect: Firms without licenses will lose access to institutional capital. Firms with them will set the terms. For institutions: The question is no longer whether to allocate. It is which regulated infrastructure to allocate through. Regulation is a feature, not a bug. — Rob Frasca | COSIMO Digital | Capital markets, rebuilt on-chain, amplified by AI #DigitalAssets #Tokenization #RWA

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Access changes everything. Lowering the Jetstream Venture Fund minimum to $5,000 creates a new entry point for people who want exposure to high-growth companies. Excited to see where this goes. Full details in the press release below.

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Thrilled to share the launch of Criticality, a $65M fund built to back founders solving hard, high-leverage problems at the intersection of technical complexity and real-world urgency. Criticality builds on the foundation we’ve laid at Antler - applying our conviction-driven approach to companies at Seed & Series A. The fund is sector-flexible but applies a deep tech lens to each opportunity, targeting non-obvious, high-leverage problems from the earliest stages of company formation. Grateful to the New Mexico State Investment Council for their support in anchoring Criticality. More to come soon from Cash Allred & I.

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Fullstack startups are the latest craze: Marc Andreessen talked about this phenomenon on Jack Altman's latest podcast Today Browserbase launched Director.ai for consumers to automate the web This follows Vercel launching @v0 for consumers to build sites and apps Both of these companies are infrastructure (picks and shovels) providers that have now moved "up the stack" to launch consumer applications on top of their infra This is the latest in vogue playbook following: Compound startups (multi-product - i.e. Rippling) Layer cake vertical startups (SaaS+Payments+Lending - i.e. ServiceTitan) Links in comments: Jack altman Marc podcast Director.ai launch video Paul Klein IV, Guillermo Rauch, CRV

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Trying something new this week - a studio industry roundup with my take on what matters. The studio model is no longer an experiment being run in a handful of places. It is infrastructure being built across geographies, sectors, and institutional types. 5️⃣ stories from the past seven days:  1️⃣ OSS Ventures hit a EUR 40M first close on a EUR 75M follow-on fund -- capital raised specifically to back the 30 companies their studio created since 2019. The "build then fund" lifecycle is maturing. B'More Venture Studio with a similar thesis: studio operations first, then dedicated capital to scale what's working.  2️⃣ Delta40 raised $20M from 54 investors across 13 countries to launch Africa's first integrated venture studio and fund. The LP base is almost entirely DFIs and foundations. Impact capital is discovering the studio model as a deployment vehicle, something I seeing across geographies (conversations with Michael Bob Starr and Damias McDonald this week alone) 3️⃣ Start Holdings launched Start.vc out of NYC and Barcelona after a $200M EV infrastructure exit. Another operator-turned-studio-founder. This is the pattern we see quite often in our work at 9point8 -- experienced operators like Jason Goldsmith who've built and exited deciding the studio model is how they want to build next.  4️⃣ UBC HATCH admitted 10 new deep-tech spinouts for Winter 2026 -- mostly climate tech. University venture builders are quietly becoming one of the fastest-growing segments. Follow Evan Allen and Jaimie Testai to keep track of its rapid evolution.  5️⃣ The INVEST Act is advancing through the Senate. If passed, it expands qualifying VC fund size from $10M to $50M and loosens general solicitation rules for accelerator and university events. For studio-funds -- and for folks in the The Venture Studio Forum community tracking policy -- this could be the most significant capital formation legislation since the JOBS Act. If this roundup format is useful, I'll keep it going. What other noteworthy news hit your desk this week, and what stood out to you?

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Very happy to share that we are leading Pursuit's Series A. Mike Vichich and Brandon Max are exceptional leaders. I met Mike in December 2024 and was immediately struck by his focus on building in government, one of the most important and under-innovated sectors. Big vision, strong execution, and optimism. At the time, I was between roles and doing some angel investing. That conversation made it clear I wanted to work more closely with founders like him. A year later, I get to do exactly that. Leading this round is a full-circle moment. If you're building in GovTech please consider taking a look at their fantastic product. And reach out to us at Builders VC as we love the market!

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Proud to be part of Flick’s $6M seed round, giving filmmakers a new creative workflow for the AI era. Worth watching: https://flick.art/showroom Huge congrats to Ray Wang, Zoey Zhang — and great to be in this round alongside GV (Google Ventures), Y Combinator, Lightspeed, Pioneer Fund, True Ventures and many others. Round announcement: https://lnkd.in/gSYpCU3C

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Here's a transition we see go sideways all the time: successful services business. Revenue, team, domain expertise. The next step feels obvious -- start building ventures on that foundation. In theory, elegant. In practice, one of the hardest transitions in the studio world. The core problem is that costs and benefits land in the same place. The services team builds client work (pays bills now) and internal ventures (might pay in three years). When an outside investor looks at this, the question is immediate: how do I know the best people are on my ventures and not client projects? That's not a trust problem. It's an incentive alignment problem. 📉 We've seen the same diagnosis play out repeatedly. Venture builders and service providers share the same entity, the same P&L, the same team allocation. Ventures always lose this configuration because revenue-generating work always wins the resource fight. Cleanest solution: distinct entities, distinct teams, distinct reporting. Services business funds operations. Studio entity houses ventures. Shared thesis, separate P&L. If full separation isn't possible yet, raise per venture through SPVs. Build proof points one at a time. 🎯 Here's the takeaway -- the earn-to-own path is valid. But the operators who succeed plan for structural separation from day one. They don't assume services and studio can coexist in one body indefinitely. The ones who wait to separate usually never do. ⚡

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Tokenisation is disrupting TradFi by making assets more liquid, accessible, and efficient — but its applications go beyond finance. In my latest piece for Forbes, I explore how tokenisation could be used to drive social impact. For instance, blockchain could serve as an enabler for peace credits, a novel mechanism that I've been developing with Professor Timothy Fort, to foster peace and abate emissions by curbing the explosion of munitions. Beyond this, I talk about what I look for in successful projects. Credits to Tommie Ethington for editing and Ahmed Sohaib Tahir for additional research.

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