Founder Weekly (Issue 670 January 22 2025)

Welcome to issue 670 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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General

A Call for Founders: Four Venture-Scale Ideas for 2025

Over the past three months, the Forum Studio team has evaluated five new ideas weekly, searching for ideas that fit our key criteria for venture success. After evaluating nearly 100 ideas, we’ve identified our top four opportunities:

The future of financial advice and wealth management

The blog post from QED Investors highlights key shifts in financial advice and wealth management. It emphasizes the ongoing "Great Wealth Transfer," where $85 trillion is transitioning to millennials, prompting a shift to tech-driven, real-time financial planning models. It also highlights the rising role of AI in enhancing efficiency and personalization in financial services, transforming traditional advisory approaches?

Marketing, Sales and PR

The anatomy of a breakthrough “Service-as-a-Software” business

How Chargeflow’s unorthodox approach led to explosive growth.

What GTM leaders are saying about AI

The article discusses key insights from GTM leaders on AI in sales and marketing. Key trends include the shift towards all-in-one AI tools, automation in customer support, and the need for rapid ROI from AI investments. Leaders are increasingly focusing on smaller, more nimble teams and are integrating AI into their workflows to enhance efficiency. Additionally, the importance of aligning customer success and sales teams is being emphasized, and AI's role in rethinking traditional business strategies is becoming more evident.

Money and Finance 

Founder Ownership Report

How do startups divide their equity among co-founders and other key shareholders? This first-of-its-kind data report offers a comprehensive guide.

Venture Capital Unbundled

Venture capital is unbundling due to the evolving business model focused on "2% of the biggest number," leading to a rise in smaller, specialized funds. This trend counters the shift towards large, multi-stage firms becoming asset managers, with new funds emphasizing a return to "adventure capitalism" and hands-on startup building.

The Most Powerful Way to Pattern Match With Investors

When entrepreneurs think about approaching VCs to cultivate a relationship, they often try to match their company with the sectors in which the VC has previously invested. That’s pretty rational. The investor likely knows more about the sector than the next person and theoretically has an inclination to invest in that sector again. However, counterintuitively, I’ve found this strategy often fails.