Episode #89: Industrializing the Blame Game, VC-Backed Startups and Fraud, Will You Quit on Me?

This week on The Learning Corner, we dig into three pieces that all orbit the same uncomfortable question: who is actually accountable when things go wrong? Angela McNeal's "The Architecture of Blame" argues that AI does not invent accountability gaps, it industrializes them at machine speed across every workflow at once. New academic research reveals that VC-backed startups are statistically more likely to commit fraud, and that investors are not passive victims but active co-creators of the conditions that make it happen. We close with a Wall Street Journal investigation into how the AI talent war is turning founders into acquihire targets, with VCs now explicitly asking in diligence: will you quit on me?

Episode #88: Supporting Young Founders Well, YC's Fall Requests For Startups, Why Labs Say Frontier Not Foundation

This week Mia and Charles are joined by Precursor intern Aleena to dig into three good reads. First up, Ashley Smith's piece on the pressures young founders face today, including predatory incubators that trade small checks for outsized equity stakes. Then, YC's Fall 2026 Requests for Startups, featuring the first ever entry from a sitting US Secretary of the Army. They close with Frontier, a piece unpacking why AI labs stopped calling their models foundation models and started calling them frontier models, and what that shift reveals about how durable their moats really are.

Episode #87: Patience Pays In Venture, Why Humans Beat AI, Managing Your Agent Workforce

This week on The Learning Corner, Mia and Charles dig into Nick Chirls' case for patience as an underrated venture strategy, using the owners versus tenants framing to explain why short term thinking is eating the industry. They then explore David Deming's argument that humans still hold a real edge over AI in social learning, especially in reading people and building trust from just a handful of interactions. The episode closes with George Sivulka's provocative piece comparing AI agents to a workforce, drawing parallels between tokenmaxxing and headcount bloat, and looping and meetings about meetings. Tune in for a conversation on long term thinking, the future of human judgment, and how to actually manage an AI agent workforce well.

Episode #86: Paying For AI Twice, Sierra's Bet On One AI Agent, Data's Next Trillion Dollar Category, NY Halts Data Centers

This week Mia and Charles dig into whether using AI tools means quietly giving away your most valuable knowledge, what Sierra learned building a single company wide AI agent instead of one per department, and why data, not tokens, might be the next trillion dollar category in AI. They also touch on New York's new one year moratorium on large data center construction. Tune in for a debate filled conversation about what it really means to adopt AI at work today.

Episode #85: Venture's Cognitive Dissonance Moment, Cold Pitches Actually Work, Building Your Moat Later

Is AI venture living through its biggest bubble yet, or its biggest winner-take-all cycle ever? Charles and Mia break down Samir Kaji's read on the duality driving valuations to record highs. They also dig into a Stanford field experiment proving cold pitches to investors work far more often than founders think, and challenge Tomasz Tunguz's take on why most startups don't actually have a real moat at founding. A fast, sharp look at three ideas shaping venture right now.

Episode #84: Convicted vs. Disciplined Healthcare VCs, The Capitalist Multiverse, The Untrainable

This week we dig into a piece from Halle Tecco exploring how healthcare VCs are splitting into two camps on ownership discipline as AI drives valuations to decade highs. We also break down Sam Lessin's argument that the SpaceX IPO signals the end of the DCF as the only globally scalable story of value, and what it means that minority belief systems can now pool conviction at trillion-dollar scale. We close with Sarah Guo's "The Untrainable," a sharp framework for understanding where real moats exist in the AI era and why the defensible work is exactly the stuff that can't be benchmarked. Tune in for a packed episode touching on venture math, narrative-driven markets, and what it actually takes to build something durable when the models keep getting smarter.

Episode #83: Tony Fadell on Building Products That Last, SAFE Adjusted TVPI, Kirkland's $500M AI Bet

This week we featured Tony Fadell's interview with Lenny Rachitsky, covering how great products are built with pain at the center and why fast software is the new fast fashion. We also dig into Hunter Walk's practical framework for how early-stage VCs should communicate SAFE note markups to their LPs. And we close out with Reuters' reporting on Kirkland and Ellis committing $500 million to build a fully proprietary AI platform, and what that signals about where the legal industry is heading.

Episode #82: What Will Be Scarce in an AI World, The Real Cost of Vibe Coding, The End of the Software Engineer

This week on The Learning Corner, economist Alex Imas makes a counterintuitive case that AI will not eliminate human labor but instead relocate scarcity toward a "relational sector" of nurses, teachers, craftspeople, and care workers where human presence is the product itself. Lisa Kostova shares one of the most honest accounts of vibe coding gone wrong, arriving at a major conference with 40 ready buyers and a product too broken to sell. We close with Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, who argues the title of software engineer is dissolving but predicts 100 times more people will be writing code in the near future. Three reads, one big question: what does human work actually look like in an AI economy?

Episode #81: Does Your Boss Have AI Brain?, Career Bets That Compound, Too Much Is Happening Too Fast

This week on The Learning Corner, we dig into Rachel Karten's viral piece on AI-obsessed leadership and what happens when organizations adopt AI without any real strategy. We then discuss Karan Dhir's framework for career bets that actually compound versus the ones that just look like progress, including a debate on whether the AI era has quietly rehabilitated the generalist. We close with Charlie Warzel's Atlantic piece on AI malaise and whether the anxiety around AI is actually a geography problem more than a technology one.

Episode #80: Narrative Above All, The Job Market Signal Collapsed, IC Work Is the New Career Flex, OpenAI Files for IPO

This week on The Learning Corner, Charles and Mia discuss a good read explaining why the quiet builder playbook is no longer enough and why founders must now own their narrative to win. They dive into a provocative take on the job market arguing the signal collapsed, not the opportunities, and what that means for the next generation of candidates. They also explore the rise of the High-Impact Individual Contributor and how AI is reshaping career paths at every level. Plus a quick flash on OpenAI's reported plans to file for IPO as early as September at a valuation of up to one trillion dollars.

Episode #79: Networking Is Mostly Cope, AI Is Changing What Skills Matter, CEO AI Psychosis

This week on The Learning Corner, we open with an argument on why traditional networking culture is mostly negative selection and why broadcasting your work publicly is the stronger play. We then dig into why AI is making the "what" of your work more important than the "how," and which skills actually become load-bearing in that world. We close on a sobering piece about AI psychosis spreading through executive suites, the sycophancy loop baked into AI tools, and what it means when the feeling of running a massive organization is completely disconnected from what is actually shipping.

Episode #78: Owning Your AI Agents, When Your VC Leaves, Are You Actually AI-Native?

This week on The Learning Corner, Charles and Mia dig into who actually owns the AI agents you build at work and whether you can take them with you when you leave. They unpack what happens to a founder's standing inside a VC firm when their partner walks out the door, and why that moment is really the start of a new fundraise. They close with a sharp framework for separating companies that are truly AI-native from those just using better autocomplete. Three great reads, one tight conversation.

Episode #77: The Broken Seed Model, YC's Revenue Honesty Rules, China Blocks Meta's Manus Deal

This week on The Learning Corner, Charles and Mia dig into Lucas Vaz's viral thread arguing that the era of easy, low-priced, diversified venture investing is over and that seed fund math is fundamentally broken. They also break down Garry Tan and YC's official guidance on why founders need to stop conflating LOIs, GMV, and ARR before it costs them investor trust. The episode closes on China's decision to block Meta's $2 billion acquisition of Manus AI and what it signals about the closing window for cross-border AI deals.

Episode #76: My Biggest Founder Regret, Fundamental Truths in VC, SpaceX Cursor Partnership

This week on The Learning Corner, Manny Medina, co-founder of Outreach, shares his biggest regret as a founder and why he believes killing your competition is the actual job description of a VC-backed founder. Samir Kaji breaks down his fundamental truths in venture capital today, touching on the widening barbell between large and small firms, ARR reporting concerns, and honest uncertainty around AI. We close with the bombshell SpaceX and Cursor partnership announcement, unpacking what a $60 billion acquisition option and a million H100 equivalent supercomputer really signals about where the AI arms race is headed.

Episode #75: Domain Expertise in Vertical AI, The Changing Math of Seed Investing, A Generation of Cheaters

This week we are diving into whether domain expertise is becoming more important in Vertical AI, not less, breaking down new data from The Euclid Ventures team that challenges the narrative that youth and technical ability are all you need to build a winning company. We then get into Micah Rosenbloom's breakdown of seed valuation inflation and what it means for early stage return math in today's market. We close on Kyla Scanlon's piece on AI and academic cheating, and what it really signals about the generation of workers and founders entering the workforce.

Episode #74: Round Names Are Dead, How To Ask For Advice, Private Wealth Goes Direct

This week on The Learning Corner, Mia and Charles dig into a piece by Ashley Smith of Vermilion Cliffs Ventures on why seed round names have become essentially meaningless, with YC Demo Day valuations hitting $40M post for companies with eight weeks of runway. They then unpack Auren Hoffman's sharp and practical breakdown of how to actually ask for advice without wasting people's time, and why closing the loop is the most underrated relationship builder in your network. The episode closes on a major structural shift in venture: family offices and private wealth firms cutting out VC middlemen and going directly into startups, as covered in a recent TechCrunch Equity episode. Tune in for a conversation spanning venture pricing, shifting capital dynamics, and the soft skills that still matter in a world full of AI answers.

Episode #73: Startups Need Better Stories, The Value-Add LP Era, Agile Funding Is Back

This week on The Learning Corner, Ashley Mayer makes the case that tech's biggest players have forfeited the narrative and it is now up to startup founders to give people a reason to root for the future. Pavel Prata at Murph Capital argues that the value-add model that transformed venture is now playing out one layer up at the LP level, and most allocators haven't caught up yet. We also dig into Jenny Fielding's take on the return of agile funding and whether stacking small SAFEs in an AI-driven world is a founder-friendly evolution or a short-term optimization with long-term consequences. All that and more on this week's episode.

Episode #72: Delve's Compliance Fraud, Has Startup Advice Ever Worked, OpenAI Refocuses

This week we cover the explosive whistleblower exposé on Delve, a YC-backed compliance startup accused of fabricating audit evidence and leaving hundreds of clients unknowingly exposed to legal liability. We then dig into Jerry Neumann's "We Have Learned Nothing," a data-backed argument that decades of startup frameworks have produced no measurable improvement in whether companies actually succeed. We close with the Wall Street Journal's reporting on OpenAI's major strategic pivot away from its "do everything" approach to refocus on coding and enterprise, and what that signals about competition with Anthropic.

Episode #71: Symbolic Capitalism and the Attention Game, Token Output as a Performance KPI, Choosing Your Intellectual Shoulders

This week on The Learning Corner, Om Malik makes the case that reputation and perceived authority now convert faster than financial capital, and that the tech ecosystem has fully internalized that game. We then dig into a provocative LinkedIn post from CRV's Reid Christian, where CEOs are starting to build token output per month into formal performance reviews as a core KPI. We close with a thoughtful piece from Deciens on intellectual lineage and why choosing whose shoulders you stand on is one of the highest leverage decisions a founder or investor can make. Three reads, one tight conversation.

Episode #70: The VC Returns Suck Narrative, Venture's Nifty Fifty Moment, The Four Approaches to Early Stage Venture

This week on The Learning Corner, Micah Rosenbloom from Founder Collective challenges the viral narrative that VC returns suck and asks whether we are all just spinning data to fit our own models. Jeff Weinstein draws a striking parallel between today's AI funding frenzy and the Nifty Fifty stocks of the 1970s, arguing that being right about a company has never been enough if you are wrong about the price. Rob Go at NextView rounds things out with a sharp framework breaking down the four approaches to early stage venture and what the real failure mode looks like for each. Three great reads with a lot to unpack across all of them.