What Sex Work Taught Me About B2B SaaS
I'm only kind of kidding.
This week, we’re talking:
Anora won Best Picture with an all-in budget of $6M—startups, pay attention. 🎬💡
Compete fiercely but honorably and you might get a new GP out of it. 🤼♂️ 🤜🤛
Jon Stewart on Zelenskyy’s meeting: “A man with no suit and two suits with no men.” 🫳🎤
A look back at VC in 2024: resilient, AI-driven, but exits are still stuck. 📉🤖
Russia is gaming AI—3.6M propaganda articles are shaping chatbot responses. 📰🎭
Skype was a category creator—so how did Microsoft break it? 📞💀
The CFPB drops its Zelle fraud case—signaling big changes under Trump. 🏦💸
Alexander Dugin: Putin’s philosopher, imperial ideologue, or just a brain full of porridge? 📖🔥
From a prison cell to the anchor desk—how Foo News Network was born. 🏛️📺🔒
My Take:
Last weekend, Anora won Best Picture at the Oscars. With an all-in budget of just $6 million. That’s less than what some blockbusters spend CGI-ing movie stars' abs.
One reason we’re seeing smaller-budget films win? Technology.
Directors don’t need $100M budgets to tell a compelling story anymore. Case in point: Anora’s director, Sean Baker, shot his first award-winning film, Tangerine, entirely on an iPhone 5S. Fast forward, and now he’s taking home Hollywood’s biggest prize.
This shift isn’t just happening in film. It’s happening in startups, too.
Not long ago, launching a tech company required millions in upfront capital—buying servers, hiring expensive engineers, and navigating a maze of infrastructure costs. That's no longer the case.
Cloud computing (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) eliminated the need for massive IT investments.
No-code/low-code tools let founders build MVPs without hiring a full engineering team.
AI automation is slashing costs across customer service, marketing, and operations.
What used to take a $10M Series A can now be bootstrapped on a much leaner budget. Just like indie filmmakers are competing (and winning) against major studios, lean, smart startups are taking on—and beating—incumbents with way more money.
I used to look at huge $$$ in a Series A with admiration and maybe a little envy. “That team is set. They can do anything.”
More recently, my reaction is more like, “Damn, I hope they’ve thought this through.”
Because here’s what I’ve learned: money doesn’t fix every problem—but it sure can magnify them.
A startup with shaky fundamentals and a bloated $50M war chest isn’t in a better position than a scrappy, disciplined one operating on a fraction of that. More money means bigger teams, faster spending, and higher expectations—without necessarily increasing focus or execution. Instead of forcing hard prioritization, abundant capital can encourage distraction, bad hires, and over-engineered solutions.
Constraints don’t kill innovation. They fuel it.
The next time you think you need more money to solve a problem—channel Anora. (Sex work optional.)
News from the Hive:
A startup studio is a tricky thing—you’ve got companies solving completely different problems at completely different stages of growth. Each one needs the independence to forge its own path, but they all need to be bound together by something deeper and more durable.
When Vivek and I founded super{set}, we decided that unifying force would be a shared set of values.
That led to many up-all-night conversations about what those values should be. This wasn’t a branding exercise or an afterthought—we were defining the through-line for super{set}, the North Star that would guide us, our investors, and ultimately, our teams.
Luckily, this wasn’t our first rodeo. One of our values practically wrote itself: we compete fiercely and honorably. And I learned that from Omar Tawakol.
Back when I was building Krux, Omar was the CEO of BlueKai—our biggest competitor.
When I first went to meet him, my younger, less mature self was geared up for battle.
But the moment we sat down for coffee, I realized something: Omar wasn’t some villainous rival—I was facing someone just as obsessed as I was with solving the problems that kept me up at night.
Today, Omar joins super{set} as a general partner. We don’t need to onboard him to our values. He embodies them already.
There could be no greater endorsement of the work we’re doing at super{set} than Omar’s desire to join us and build alongside us.
I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish now that we’re finally on the same side of the table.
My Media Diet:
The State of Venture Capital: an eye on 2025 via Juniper Square
2024's U.S. venture capital performance wasn't bad. It showed resilience, but certainly wasn't a return to 2021 as the industry had hoped a year ago. Large firms dominated fundraising in 2024. The dealmaking picture was complex; its slight improvement came from AI companies, which made up 29% of completed transactions. On the other hand, down and flat fundraising rounds represented 30% of deals. Exits stayed resolutely stuck despite three interest rate cuts, with companies in their A and B rounds making up 90% of the activity. As a result, distributions to Limited Partners (LPs) remained depressed, and future fundraising performance is still uncertain.
A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda via NewsGuard
A Moscow-based disinformation network named “Pravda” — the Russian word for "truth" — is pursuing an ambitious strategy by deliberately infiltrating the retrieved data of artificial intelligence chatbots, publishing false claims and propaganda for the purpose of affecting the responses of AI models on topics in the news rather than by targeting human readers, NewsGuard has confirmed. By flooding search results and web crawlers with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, the network is distorting how large language models process and present news and information. The result: Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda.
What went wrong with Skype? via the Verge
As Skype increasingly turned its focus to mobile, the problems with overhauling its aging peer-to-peer infrastructure started to emerge. Microsoft began migrating Skype users to its Messenger platform in 2012, which previously helped power MSN Messenger, to improve the ability to send chat messages and pick up calls on multiple devices. This transition lasted years and resulted in many bugs, including calls, messages, and notifications repeating on multiple devices. There were countless app redesigns, and basic problems with calling and messaging were becoming apparent. I wrote in 2016 that “Microsoft needs to fix Skype” after a painful couple of years of issues with the service. Microsoft was too busy adding emoji and trying to compete with the rise of WhatsApp, FaceTime, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger that it had fallen short on the very basics of Skype. It had gotten to the point, in 2016, where people were using Skype begrudgingly, simply because it was ubiquitous and nothing had replaced it yet.
The CFPB drops its case against payment app Zelle, in another sign of a Trump pivot via NPR
The bureau had filed the lawsuit in late December against the operator of Zelle, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo "for failing to protect consumers from widespread fraud." Customers of the top three banks lost more than $870 million over seven years due to the banks' failures to protect them, according to the CFPB. However, that was then. On Tuesday the administration dropped its case against Zelle, according to a filing in U.S. District Court in Arizona.
The Imperialist Philosopher Who Demanded the Ukraine War via The New Yorker
Only some of Dugin’s writing is about matters of state. Other pet subjects are literature, art, theology, music, and philosophy. He composes poetry (the not bad “In a Soviet Basement” contains the lines “He spins in a waltz, black as a cat / In his hands a Walter, in his hands a Walter / In his hands, Walter Scott”), records experimental music, and translates an array of right-wing European writers into Russian, releasing the books through his publishing house. Until 2014, he taught sociology at Moscow State University. He is not a Kremlin insider but, rather, a member of Moscow’s intelligentsia—or what now passes for it. He has written, co-written, or edited nearly a hundred books, and in his graphomania, if not in the quality of his work, he is a throwback to the Golden Age of Russian literature, in the nineteenth century. And, like the conservative Slavophile authors of that era who first formulated the nativist views that have resurged under Putin—such as the historian Mikhail Pogodin—Dugin assails the West and its values. He inveighs against democracy, secularism, individualism, civil society, multiculturalism, human rights, sexual openness, technology, scientific rationalism, and reason in general, which he rejects in favor of the mystical revelations of the Russian Orthodox Church. Although he is an avid tweeter and frequently posts on Telegram and Facebook, he claims to have no use for modernity. He once wrote that “the best course would be to eradicate the state and replace it with the Holy Empire.”
After decades in prison, he transformed himself into the Inland Empire’s homeboy news anchor via LATimes
He got out of prison on parole in 2015 and worked as a tattoo artist throughout the Inland Empire for several years. Then, in 2023, he created his first news-focused social media account — calling it Foo News Network, a mash-up parody of CNN, Fox News and foo, the Chicano slang term for friend — that was meant to serve as a meme page. “I know how journalists talk, I know how they present a story,” Bellozo said, recalling his years watching them while imprisoned. “So I just said, ‘I could do that.’” As he grew his viewership he started receiving news-related tips from residents, direct messages about incidents from first responders and video requests… Bellozo said he knows that his past most probably would bar him from being hired at many jobs. For now, he is content building his own enterprise. He has been increasingly making money off businesses that advertise on his page and sometimes solicits them in his videos. “I created something, dog,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to show people, that I created something on just my phone.”