Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #35: A Founder's Postmortem, Teachers And The AI Dilemma, Emerging GTM Across AI

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Episode #35: A Founder's Postmortem, Teachers And The AI Dilemma, Emerging GTM Across AI · The Learning Corner by Precursor

• 0:00
  You're not meant to suffer for your startup.
• 0:02
  You will have time for you to work really hard.
• 0:04
  You will have difficult moments, but suffering is not the objective.
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  And if you find yourself suffering, it's worth stepping back and saying, do I enjoy working on
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  this problem?
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  It's the week of June 2.
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  Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.
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  Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor.
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  I'm Mia Farnam, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will
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  be talking through the articles and Goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past
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  week.
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  Our first topic is an honest and deeply reflective piece from Quinn Wang, one of
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  Precursor's founders, who shares the emotional and strategic lessons from shutting down her
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  company, Quadrant I.
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  Rather than focusing on market metrics, Wang writes about five patterns she noticed on her
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  journey, avoiding founder identity, chasing external approval, over relying on startup
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  playbooks, failing to realign the team as the mission involved, and deferring joy.
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  Central to her message is the cost of ignoring intuition and the need to build in a way that
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  honors core values.
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  Now with her next venture, she's staying closer to the problems she knows, rejecting
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  performative startup behavior, and intentionally prioritizing joy and clarity.
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  It's a really compelling look at what internal product market fit means for a founder, and how
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  being true to oneself might just be the real growth hack.
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  So this post isn't just a postmortem.
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  It's also a really internal reflection of the founder journey.
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  So Charles, how often do you see these patterns show up in first time founders, and how do you
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  coach and encourage founders through these difficult internal struggles?
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  I think Quinn captured a lot of the things that I talked to founders about, and about two
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  thirds of our founder population is doing this for the first time.
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  And my LP is always asking me, like, what are some of the big differences between first time
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  founders and second time founders?
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  Is it recruiting?
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  Is it fundraising?
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  I'm like, well, those things matter.
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  I think the biggest thing is this whole intuition and how to interpret advice.
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  I find most first time founders tend to be overly deferential to more successful or more
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  powerful people who give them advice, and that advice ends up being prescriptive even if the
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  person delivering the advice didn't intend it to be.
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  And I find second time founders tend to be better at taking advice as input, listening to
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  it, weighing it, and saying, 30% of this applies to my company.
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  The other 70% is not, so we're not gonna do it.
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  Or we're gonna take from this what's useful.
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  I there's a lot of first time founders who don't believe that they can or should trust
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  their intuition unless it matches something that they're hearing from someone else.
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  And, you know, I tell founders, many of them early in our journey, think about it this way.
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  There's a two by two matrix for these decisions you're gonna make.
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  There's was the outcome good, and did you listen to my advice as a VC?
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  If the outcome is good, listen to my advice.
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  Everybody's happy.
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  I feel smart.
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  We got a good outcome.
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  If you have a good outcome and you don't listen to my advice, I'm like, wow.
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  What a great independent thinking founder.
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  I'm really glad you didn't take my input.
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  If you listen to my advice and it doesn't work out, reflexively, I'm probably gonna tell you
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  it wasn't advice.
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  It was perspective or input.
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  And if you don't listen to my advice and it doesn't work out, who cares?
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  We're both frustrated.
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  So the moral of the story is it's the outcome that matters, not whether you listen to my
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  advice or kinda how you got there.
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  Working on trusting your instincts as a first time founder is a really important skill.
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  And I think the irony is that in the olden days when I started Inventure, there was a lot less
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  content.
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  So the only way to get perspective was to go talk to other people.
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  So you kinda were forced to follow your instincts more often.
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  And now on any topic, you can find 10 or 15 really smart people arguing both sides of the
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  same issue.
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  What are you supposed to do as a founder?
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  So I think that's one.
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  Second, I I tell people all the time, like, you're not meant to suffer for your startup.
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  You will have time for you to work really hard.
• 3:45
  You will have difficult moments, but suffering is not the objective.
• 3:49
  And if you find yourself suffering, it's worth stepping back and saying, one, do I enjoy
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  working on this problem?
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  Do I enjoy solving this on behalf of my customers?
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  Is this something I really like doing?
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  And second, am I trying to solve an insights problem with effort?
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  And I think a lot of what robs people of joy is burnout.
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  And for me, burnout happens most often when you have a problem where what you really need to do
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  step back and reimagine it or take a breath, and instead you try to double down and kinda
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  muscle your way through it.
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  And that's how you that's one of the many ways to get to burnout.
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  And so the last thing I'll say is I wrote this post a while ago about why I don't like rebound
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  startups and people who, you know, shut down on Friday and come back on Monday a new idea.
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  Having known Quinn for a while, I think some of these insights are born of perspective.
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  And having been far enough away from Quadrani to have a clearer picture of what happened, her
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  role in it, and why it happened.
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  And I don't think it's easy to have these insights the day after a startup shuts down
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  because it's still too raw.
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  And most people, but not all people, but most people are reflexively defensive about what
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  happened when it shuts down.
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  And it's kinda hard to see your own role.
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  And I am speaking from personal experience, having shut down a startup myself, it wasn't
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  until maybe a year later, I was like, well, these are bad decisions I made that caused our
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  company to have these problems.
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  Yes, others were at fault, but, like, let's be honest about my contribution.
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  She had a really good quote, and it was, I was so focused on getting everything right that I
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  let the company's performance dictate how I felt about myself.
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  When things went wrong, I was discouraged.
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  When they went well, I didn't feel proud or happy.
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  I just felt relieved and immediately started bracing for the next shoe to drop.
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  So in that mentality, you're never enjoying the journey, and you're probably always just
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  seeking input.
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  To her point, she just never trusted her gut.
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  But I imagine as a founder, when you're bringing around all these awesome investors and
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  advisers to the table, you're trying to arm yourself with as much information as you
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  possibly can.
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  How do you decide who to bring in and and who not to?
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  I also think to that point yeah.
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  Like, this is somewhat related to but it just sparked this for me.
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  A long time ago, one of our LPs asked us, what would happen if Precursor ceased to exist?
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  I'm like, what do you mean?
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  He's like, what if you couldn't raise a fund on a business?
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  I'm like, no.
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  What do you mean?
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  I understand the question.
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  He's like, I go, my whole identity is not this firm.
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  I'm a husband.
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  I'm a father.
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  I'm a human being.
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  There are other parts of my personality that are not being the founder and managing partner
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  of this firm.
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  Now, granted, it's a big part of my life and personality now, but it's not the totality.
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  And I think one of the challenges for first time founders is sometimes being the founder of
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  x y z company becomes your whole personality and identity.
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  And when you lose that, you've kinda lost yourself.
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  And so I just told somebody this on yesterday before I saw you in New York.
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  Was telling the founder was having a tough time, and I said, well, couple things.
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  If this startup doesn't work out, you will be fine.
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  You will rediscover who you are separate from being the founder.
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  And second, never quit on a bad day.
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  Yeah.
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  I was, you're having a bad day.
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  Never quit on a bad day.
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  It's just a good rule of thumb.
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  But I think for a lot of first time founders, being the founder and CEO of XYZ startup
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  becomes the dominant part of their personality, which is what makes shutting down the company
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  so traumatic.
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  Venture culture or a large portion rewards.
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  Hustle culture, which I think is a bit toxic in the end.
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  I mean, you can watch Silicon Valley on HBO to figure out, like, people love to see the tents
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  and the offices of people living in their place where they work all day.
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  I think a large part of that performative.
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  I literally heard that that is an actual thing happening, like, in San Francisco.
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  It's back.
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  No.
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  It's back.
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  But to the point of if at one point, it doesn't seem like the company is gonna go where it
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  needs to go, one, you need to be able to separate yourself from that eventually.
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  And in this specific scenario, you, like, also need to find a place to sleep.
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  You actually physically have to move.
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  So much.
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  I wanna say that.
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  One of things is we have two founders who just told me they were gonna get a live work
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  situation.
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  They were gonna live upstairs and work downstairs.
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  I was like, please don't do that.
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  No.
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  And they're like, why?
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  I'm like, you need actual separation between where you live and where you work.
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  This isn't school.
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  It sounds cool.
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  It sounds convenient.
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  It's like actually not a great idea in my opinion.
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  And second, I've heard a bunch of these nine nine six stories in San Francisco again, you
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  know, nine to nine, six days a week.
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  And they're all AI companies, and I think some of it's performative.
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  But I find when people work that way, it's usually driven out of fear.
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  Yep.
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  You know, a long time ago, one of my VC mentors was like, listen, if you have a company that's
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  successful, and he's he's been around a bunch of companies, he's like, there were times that
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  every one of my top performing companies where everybody was working seven days a week, but it
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  was to keep up with business.
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  It wasn't to do random code.
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  It wasn't to hang out.
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  It was because they had so much stuff to stay on top of that the only way to do it was to
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  work all the time.
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  He's like and they didn't work that way forever.
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  Yeah.
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  They worked that way until they could hire the people they needed to bring it back down to
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  something sane.
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  And it spiked again, and he's like, you can't do nine ninety six in perpetuity.
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  That's something you do for a crunch or a push or for a season or for a moment, not as a
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  standard operating procedure.
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  But I've heard more of this, and it's all AI companies who I think and I think it's anxiety
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  driven.
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  The feeling that if we're not working all the time, this technology is moving so fast,
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  somebody's gonna out someone's gonna outwork us and and leapfrog us.
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  And I'm sure they're hearing about their competitors, which in this space is many people
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  coming up every day, and they're probably hearing of those stories of of them living in
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  their office.
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  It's also the downside of having, you know, SF be the epicenter of AI is that, like, you go to
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  brunch on Saturday, and everybody else is like, can't come.
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  I'm at the office.
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  And they're like, well, am I doing this wrong?
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  And I'm like, at brunch, maybe I'm doing this wrong.
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  And you see it.
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  It's just not theoretical.
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  You actually see it.
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  I always think about this.
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  A great manager that I love said, I don't know why people brag so much about how busy they
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  are.
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  Wouldn't you wanna brag about how efficient you are with your time and how unbusy you are
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  because it means you've freed yourself of unnecessary tasks?
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  Needless to say, I don't think anyone's going to be pitching tents in Precursor's office.
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  Anyone No.
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  That is not our culture.
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  Our next topic is an article from Jason Kupler via the four zero four media blog, which
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  discusses the challenges teachers are facing with the growing use of AI tools like ChatGPT
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  in classrooms.
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  Teachers are feeling overwhelmed, particularly when it comes to academic integrity as students
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  use AI to complete assignments.
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  The article outlines concerns about the loss of critical thinking skills, the ability to
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  discern misinformation, and the increasing difficulty of grading.
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  While some educators are finding ways to incorporate AI positively, there's a growing
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  anxiety about how AI could change the role of teachers in the classroom and the overall
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  educational experience.
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  One noteworthy quote from a research chair at York University said, honestly, if we ejected
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  all the Gen AI tools into the sun, I would be quite pleased.
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  How are we supposed to respond to this as investors who work to place capital in
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  companies that not all the time, but ideally improve communities and the broader ecosystem
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  overall.
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  There are two articles I read in the last two weeks that I enjoyed.
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  One, think, in the New York Times, which was basically like teachers fight back.
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  Yeah.
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  A lot of the narrative in the beginning was students are using AI to cheat or to do their
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  homework, and teachers are on the back foot.
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  And that article in the Times was like, nope.
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  Teachers have kind of, you know, figured out some ways to sort of arm themselves too.
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  And the reason I really enjoyed this article is, to me, a lot of the discourse on this topic
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  has been flat.
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  It's that students are using AI to cheat, and teachers are mad because students are cheating.
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  And I think for those who have the chance to read the article, a lot of what comes through
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  isn't so much a fear of cheating, it's a fear of learning loss.
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  Yeah.
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  The teachers aren't so much like, it it's
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  People been cheating since the beginning of time.
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  Yeah.
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  I was gonna think.
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  Writing answers on their hands.
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  Like so but I think what really just came through with me is that people who are
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  passionate about being educators are more worried about it's that old I mean, it sounds
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  like a bad parenting hack, but what these students are robbing themselves of by cheating
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  more than and, look, there are few things that resonated with me.
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  One person was like, how much time should I spend grading and providing comments on an
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  essay that someone just sped out of ChatGPT?
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  I feel that way with some of the emails I get in my inbox.
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  And like Yeah.
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  This feels like somebody took my name and I was part of a big email list, and they either
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  dumped it in Outreach or dumped it in ChatGPT and sent me an email that's either creepily
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  familiar or super vague.
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  And I'm like, do I owe this person anything?
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  In terms of a reply, I don't know.
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  Depends on the day.
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  But I was just fascinated by the genuine concern that a lot of these teachers had about
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  the implications.
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  One that really got me was the Spanish teacher who talked about students not knowing the
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  English word for the thing they were.
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  And look, there's a quote.
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  I'm on a advisory council at Stanford, and every couple of meetings, we read this quote
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  about how students are not learning.
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  They're lazy.
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  They're terrible.
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  And it was written sixty years ago.
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  So this is a Kaufman dialectic between but this does feel different because I wasn't around
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  when calculators got introduced into math class.
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  But I'm sure there was also a similar panic about people aren't gonna know how to multiply,
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  subtract, add, or divide and do math.
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  This feels substantively different because the level of effort I don't know.
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  I just read it.
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  I was like, I just really felt for the teachers in this article, many of whom wanna create an
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  environment for their students where they're challenged to learn.
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  And getting an answer out of a system with very little effort robs you of the struggle of
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  learning.
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  And part of learning is, like, wrestling with things and coming to conclusion.
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  My sense, though, is it's gonna be impossible to keep these tools out of the classroom.
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  And it's probably not advisable because many of these students are gonna go into jobs where the
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  expectation will be that they have some facility with these tools.
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  If I were a teacher, I'm like, look.
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  Don't wanna be the chatty bitty police.
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  I think this is also new.
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  There's still work to be done, but it's funny.
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  I just went to this session where I was hanging out with someone who's a little older than me,
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  who's an alum of my college, and we were talking about our favorite classes, and his
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  favorite class was the hardest class he took.
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  Mhmm.
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  And he's like, goes, my favorite class?
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  Because it really stretched my mind.
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  It really made me work hard to get to the answer.
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  He's like, I felt like I worked the hardest and I learned the most in that class.
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  And that's something that, like, stuck with me.
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  And I I don't know.
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  I really identified with the struggle that the teachers in that article outlined that they
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  were that they were going through.
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  What does school look like if there's no such thing as a difficult class anymore because it's
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  just become too easy for inputs?
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  I think it's ironic.
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  I think we're gonna go back to less technology.
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  Yeah.
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  And this is happening in colleges already.
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  Hey, your final is gonna be a handwritten despite the the the decline in student
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  handwriting.
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  It's gonna be handwritten essays in blue boats with no computer.
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  You're gonna come in, you're gonna have to write without an aide.
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  It's gonna be potentially an old school Socratic oral examinations.
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  Yep.
• 13:48
  I think people are gonna find a way to get back to measuring whether or not you learned, and
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  it's probably gonna be different than what it's been in the past, which has been a steady march
• 13:56
  toward more technology.
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  I think this time around, different from the olden days when Socratic seminars, Blue Books,
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  that was all they had.
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  I think now we'll have maybe technology probably fueled by AI that could support the
• 14:08
  teachers to basically manage that so they can review and grade more things, be able to kind
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  of even out the ratio between one teacher to, like, 40 students.
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  So hopefully, we can find that balance.
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  Also, just think, like, a chat GPT TA that's available twenty four seven Yep.
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  That understands all the material, that has infinite patience, that would be great.
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  Yep.
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  No.
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  I agree.
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  I distinctly remember being in the sixth grade, and I remember the kid next to me.
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  I think it was in math class.
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  He cheated on a test, but he had written all the answers on the inside of a Poland Springs,
• 14:38
  like, water bottle, like Yeah.
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  Something.
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  He was caught.
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  But I remember the teacher being like, you have to get Kudo points for this.
• 14:44
  I'm not gonna fail you today, but this is obviously unacceptable.
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  Cheating has existed since the beginning of time.
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  I just hope that we've created some sort of guardrails to retain some sort of purpose for
• 14:54
  education.
• 14:55
  I'll ask one last question.
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  Obviously, are arguments of the pros that AI can exist across class rooms.
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  I'm thinking maybe a world where highly personalized learning plans can exist for each
• 15:04
  student to meet them where their learning abilities and learning speeds are.
• 15:07
  But at what point does this, quote unquote, leveling of the learning field maybe overstep a
• 15:11
  little bit?
• 15:12
  I think different classes and different courses have different resource demands.
• 15:15
  It seems like I mentioned the idea of an always on TA to answer questions and provide support
• 15:20
  to me seems like an unambiguously useful thing, properly programmed and properly deployed.
• 15:25
  It's a way to help people get help.
• 15:26
  I can envision a world where not everybody takes the same test, where the test you take is
• 15:30
  a function of the things that you maybe struggled with during the quarter, and it kind
• 15:33
  of skips over the things that it seems that the AI seems to believe you've largely mastered.
• 15:37
  Yeah.
• 15:37
  I can envision a world where the use of AI as an input in the class, how clever were you at
• 15:42
  quizzing and asking the AI for help?
• 15:44
  And I can even envision things where it's like, hey.
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  Here's an AI output.
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  Find the things in here that are incorrect.
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  I think we're just so early in grappling with this.
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  We haven't figured out how to adapt.
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  And right now, I would say the simplest explanations are winning, which is people are
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  just using this to cheat.
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  Or people are and I think music is just to cheat per se.
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  It offers a very fast off ramp to the lazy.
• 16:04
  But look, we've had cliff notes forever.
• 16:05
  If you didn't wanna read the book, you read the cliff notes, and do you miss out on some of the
• 16:09
  richness of reading a text?
• 16:10
  Yeah.
• 16:11
  But if your goal is like, I just wanna pass my test, I I need to know what happens in this
• 16:14
  book.
• 16:14
  And I always got caught in the live discussions, like, when I do Well, our last
• 16:18
  piece is Bonkap's very deep dive.
• 16:21
  It's literally 340 slides on how AI is transforming infrastructure, applications, and
• 16:26
  markets, along with where they see the most value accruing.
• 16:29
  They explore a few critical themes, including how AI landscape is continuing to evolve from
• 16:33
  copilots to autonomous agents, shifts in UX of software and reshaping of how our companies are
• 16:38
  built and monetized.
• 16:39
  As foundational models become commoditized, defensibility will hinge on proprietary data,
• 16:44
  embedded workflows, and distribution, not just on raw model performance.
• 16:48
  Bond also highlights that AI native companies are blurring b to b and b to c playbooks with
• 16:53
  novel go to market and pricing strategies that reflect the growing role of agents as real
• 16:57
  time, like oracles, so, like, validators and interpreters across regulated sectors.
• 17:01
  It's an incredibly comprehensive body of work.
• 17:05
  So, Charles, first question, like, what trend did you find specifically insightful?
• 17:09
  It was a lot.
• 17:10
  I decided I wasn't gonna put it through an LLM and ask you to tell me what's exciting.
• 17:14
  I'm just gonna, you know, click through it myself.
• 17:16
  I felt better reading this because a lot of the things I've been struggling with in AI, I felt
• 17:20
  like this highlighted the cool a couple things, the global nature of competition in AI.
• 17:25
  And I think being in The US, we talked mostly about The US companies, but this really is a
• 17:29
  global phenomenon.
• 17:30
  I think the scale of dollars that are going into both the hard infrastructure and the
• 17:34
  software side are, like, really, really, really unprecedented in terms of the velocity.
• 17:39
  All these questions about the business model.
• 17:40
  And there are a whole bunch of sections on just, like, business model, which I read and I
• 17:43
  was like, oh, cool.
• 17:44
  The things I have questions about are not answered in this presentation, but they are
• 17:48
  framed well.
• 17:49
  So I was like, okay.
• 17:50
  I feel slightly better that, like, the things that are giving me pause, I'm not the only one.
• 17:54
  But sometimes just, like, seeing some of those charts about just the amounts of money that are
• 17:57
  being invested on the infrastructure side, they're just staggering.
• 18:01
  Also, the rate of change in adoption for some of this technology is also just staggering.
• 18:05
  And I think it just put a lot of flesh around feelings I've had that this really is a super
• 18:10
  dynamic world, and things are moving so fast.
• 18:12
  On the days where I'm just like, I'm not sure what to do, I was like, oh, this is why.
• 18:16
  Right.
• 18:16
  This is why.
• 18:17
  That AI adoption piece outside The US, that's where I found metrics that were the most
• 18:20
  staggering.
• 18:21
  From the slide that said it took twenty three years for the Internet to reach 90% non US
• 18:26
  usership.
• 18:27
  In contrast, a leading USA based LLM reached 90% non US usership in three years.
• 18:34
  So how much of this adoption is due to the product versus the underlying rails?
• 18:39
  The Internet, software.
• 18:40
  We've talked about it this a little bit in previous podcasts.
• 18:43
  I mean, everyone stands on the shoulders of someone.
• 18:46
  The fact that the Internet is in many places meant that ChatGPT could be in many places.
• 18:50
  And because LL if you think about it before, localization, internationalization was so hard,
• 18:55
  and LLMs were actually pretty decent at that the bat.
• 18:57
  So you have a product that almost out of the box works in lots of languages.
• 19:01
  I don't know.
• 19:02
  It's the thing I kept looking at was tying it back to something we talked about a few weeks
• 19:05
  ago.
• 19:06
  If the scale of outcomes for the winners in venture continues to grow and get bigger, you
• 19:12
  can actually invest hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital to create companies
• 19:17
  that are worth trillions of dollars at the turn of we just have never seen it before.
• 19:21
  Yeah.
• 19:21
  We've seen investing hundreds of even with, like, the last cycle, we saw investing tens of
• 19:26
  billions of dollars in companies like Uber to build companies that were worth tens of
• 19:31
  billions of dollars on the end.
• 19:32
  This is new.
• 19:33
  Hundreds of billions of dollars to produce companies that are worth trillions of dollars
• 19:37
  in value.
• 19:38
  That's like a new order of magnitude step function for the industry.
• 19:41
  And we're doing it all without, I would say, high confidence that we figured out the
• 19:45
  business model and monetization piece.
• 19:48
  Yeah.
• 19:48
  That's the key part.
• 19:49
  The key takeaway is the monetization piece has not been figured out.
• 19:52
  It looks like consumer, but monetizes like SaaS.
• 19:54
  Like, you say it all the time.
• 19:55
  AI hasn't had its AdWord moments yet.
• 19:57
  When will that happen?
• 19:58
  It could be a year from now.
• 19:59
  It could be ten years from now.
• 20:00
  I don't know.
• 20:01
  Because I feel like once people realize, okay, ads are gonna be a big part of the business
• 20:04
  model of the Internet.
• 20:06
  The only question was how quickly can we get advertising dollars that are being spent
• 20:09
  elsewhere to move to the Internet?
• 20:11
  And I think people forgot the Internet will allow you to just actually spend more on
• 20:14
  advertising than you ever could do the old it's not just a shift.
• 20:17
  It's actually an expansion of the pie.
• 20:19
  I kept reading this deck hoping to figure out, well, what's gonna be the inflection?
• 20:22
  They talked about, like, moment of reckoning for Amazon, the moment of reckoning for Uber.
• 20:26
  I'm like, it doesn't feel like the moment of reckoning for Open Air Anthropic is happening
• 20:30
  anytime soon.
• 20:31
  The only thing I can imagine is some macro event that makes capital far more expensive for
• 20:36
  those companies.
• 20:37
  I don't know what that event would be, and I hope it doesn't happen because it would be bad
• 20:40
  for everybody.
• 20:41
  Yep.
• 20:41
  I agree.
• 20:41
  Well, we are all out of time for today.
• 20:43
  Thank you, Charles, for stopping by.
• 20:45
  Please like and subscribe, and we will talk with you all next week.
• 20:47
  Thank you.
• 20:48
  Bye.
• 20:49
  Goodbye.