Michael Taus

Today I'm presenting to The Council Angels' latest cohort, focused on product leaders. They're on week 6 of our angel investing 101 curriculum. By now, it's becoming more clear to most of them whether angel investing is likely to be a hobby or an accelerator into to a future career in VC. My biggest advice to those who want a career in VC someday is to build their own proprietary flywheel for deal flow. It may start with angel communities and syndicates, but eventually putting in the work to build their own sourcing mechanism will make them very attractive candidates! I love to highlight these 4 who have masterfully executed this pole vault into VC: ⭐ Ruffin Mitchener: (TikTok → MALIAM) ⭐ Sri Varre (Lazy Girl Capital → Pivotal VC) ⭐ Zehra Naqvi (The Z List → Headline VC → founder of Lore) ⭐ Michelle F. (SF IRL on X → Headline VC) #angelinvesting #venturecapital #risingstars

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"So what exactly is a venture studio?" I'm not sure how many times I've had this conversation over the last few years. At least a few times / week. For aspiring venture builder - especially those in institutional settings, 'getting' the model - and understanding how it differs from others - is critical. So, we're starting at the beginning. On March 19, I'm sitting down with Matthew Burris for the first session of the The Venture Studio Forum's University Track Speaker Series. Matt is widely credited for helping to define the venture studio asset class - he co-authored the Venture Studio Index and built the Three-Role Framework that the industry uses to classify studios. He's spent more time researching what makes a studio a studio than anyone I know. If you're at a university, research institution, or economic development org trying to figure out whether a venture studio makes sense for you, this is where to start. Note, this event kicks off a five part-series we're running through the VSF, all focused on helping institutions understand and evaluate the model. Here's the full program: Mar 19: What Is a Venture Studio? Apr 16: University Studio Examples May 21: Funding Mechanisms Jun 18: Finding & Working with Studios Jul 16: Sourcing & Evaluating Founder Talent Registration link in the comments!

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I am amazed at how much time is wasted on boards discussing topics that are not strategic and core to the business. Founders are asked to answer informative questions, which can be addressed during a catch-up call with the founder, rather than at a board meeting. I’d love to learn some best practices to get the most out of board meetings. 💡 From my perspective, preparation is the absolute key. Founders spend hours pulling together materials. The least we can do as board members is read them before walking into the room. It’s an absolute pet peeve of mine to sit in board meetings where half the board hasn’t even reviewed the deck - it’s so disrespectful to founders spending hours on preparing the deck in advance. Some other good practices I’ve seen: 📊 Using a live metrics sheet – that is constantly uploaded, and we (investors) can review at our own time. This helps avoid wasting time reading through financials during the actual board meeting. 🎥 Record a short video – I love what Matthijs Welle from Mews does. He summarises the highlights and lowlights ahead of the session, so everyone arrives aligned and with up-to-date questions. 🧠 Use the time for checking on strategic discussions – the board should be the founders’ sparring partner, not a silent audience. Focus on how the board can help and support the business. Board meetings don’t have to be painful or performative. With the right prep and practice, they can be high-value and high-trust sessions that actually move your business forward. I’d love to hear what other best practices you’ve seen in your board meetings. I am tagging a few founders and investors - I would love to hear what works and what doesn’t for you on boards Chris Tottman, Kamil Mieczakowski, seth m phillips, Dan K., David Sutter, Jeff Handler, Niklas Radner, Maxime Eduardo, Côme Dartiguenave, Tom Le Bras, Harrison Rose, Avinav Nigam, Hugo Fdez.-Mardomingo, Henri Tilloy, Oriol Juncosa #VC #Startup #BoardMeeting #Founder #StartupAdvice #Leadership

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Checked out Forerunner/Kirsten Green's "The Architects of Experience" piece (linked in comments). Sharing some thoughts below. Every 10-year platform shift resets consumer expectations (Web → Mobile → AI). Kirsten says the AI era belongs to products that feel effortless: proactive, predictive, always learning. It’s not about adding an LLM garnish; it’s about architecting the entire business around a compounding data loop. So, why does it matter? Moat ≠ code → The defensible layer is a proprietary data flywheel that learns faster than users can churn. Talent remix → Winning teams look less like pure engineers, more like “orchestrators” who weave off the shelf AI, data strategy, and distribution. Trust is the gate → Human in loop design and transparent governance are table-stakes for adoption, and eventual regulation. Questions to consider for consumer AI founders... 1. Moat depth: What makes your data flywheel unique, and how quickly does it compound vs. the big LLM platforms? 2. Distribution edge: When AI tooling is commoditized, what non-technical channel (community, brand, regulated access) gets you in front of users first? 3. Human-machine balance: Where does your product deliberately stop automating to preserve agency and delight? 4. Regulatory resilience: How will privacy portability rules affect CAC, margins, or data lock in? My counterview: Total automation can flatten delight. Some categories thrive on intentional friction (e.g. luxury, craft, serendipity). Winners will know when to keep a human in the loop.

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My friends at Forum Ventures run a great program to teach you how (and why) you should build a company. I wish I had this when I first started. Builders Between Ventures is their Venture Studio’s 6-week early validation sprint, designed for experienced founders, senior operators, and domain experts who have an insight they’re seriously considering building around They just opened applications for our second cohort. Many explore this while still in a full-time role... they use the sprint to get clarity on whether an idea is worth building or not. Participants work closely with their Studio team to: – Run market and customer diligence – Get clear answers on market size, competitive positioning, and investor appetite – Learn how investors evaluate opportunities at this stage – Potentially pitch their Studio team for $250k and a chance to build with us This is the same validation process they use internally within our venture studio. From their first cohort, some participants are now pitching their venture studio for investment, while others have realized that their idea wasn’t worth pursuing. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/ekNHCRXR

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The SMS interactions between brand & consumer contain incredibly rich context for 1:1 personalized commerce experiences. Postscript is the platform enabling such experiences. On this week's episode, Rishabh and I sat down with Adam Turner to explore how SMS evolved from an abandoned-cart afterthought to a 1:1 sales & marketing channel. We covered: - Category creation and the rise of the “SMS marketer” - Compliance and quality as product design principles - Moving from broadcast to conversational journeys - Building distribution in the Shopify ecosystem, then scaling a sales-led motion - Where AI has augmented vs reinvented both marketing products and teams Link in comments

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Today we're changing Clay's pricing. Pricing changes are scary (for you and me!), but we are trying to do this in the most authentically Clay way possible - thoughtful, transparent and community-first. We've been thinking about this for almost a year (maybe too long Karan!), and have talked to hundreds of customers and partners. We want to align our business model with how our product is being used today, and set us up to grow sustainably together. When we launched, our customers used us for data enrichment. And now our community is using Clay to power their GTM engineering motions. But the pricing model hasn't evolved, so we're making some changes to reflect that. Here’s what’s important to note: First: nobody is getting forced off their plan. Every existing customer can stay on their existing plan. We have to earn the right for you to move to a modern plan. Second: most customers will see better value for their money with this change. If we think you'll save money by switching to the new pricing, we're going to reach out and tell you proactively. Third: we're separating the cost of data from the cost of the platform. We want to keep bringing down the cost of data in Clay, and make the value tied to what you orchestrate and build with it. Fourth: our best features are now more accessible. The new Growth plan includes things that used to live exclusively on Pro at a 38% lower price. Many of our most advanced users will save thousands a year. Our plans now come with a new metric called Actions, which measures the orchestration work Clay does for you: the workflows, AI research, and logic that turns raw data into a GTM motion. 90% of customers will never hit their Actions limit. We want most people to never think about it. That way, we’re only winning if you are. Data Credits now cover just the data - and they're cheaper. We’re reducing the cost of the data in our marketplace by 50–90%, making prices comparable to what you’d pay externally. Karan and I recorded a video walking through the full reasoning and who gets affected - positively and negatively (including us – we’re taking a 10% revenue hit). If you're a Clay customer and have questions, we want to hear them! Full pricing announcement and the internal memo we sent our team below. Announcement: clay.link/nF1eKMH Internal memo: clay.link/wiw2NHK

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In 2026, everything I do will be in service of founders. Specifically: helping founders cross the line from 'builder' to 'operator.' It’s the first Sunday, and I felt inspired to share a mini-manifesto for the year ahead. This transition (from builder to operator) is where I see many high-potential founders struggle most. Building is the easy part (for most of you). - You can ship. - You can hustle. - You can close early deals. Where companies actually die? Business systems and operations. I’ve helped build three different businesses past $20M ARR. Never alone. Always with teams. Always with systems. At a certain point, founder-led everything becomes the bottleneck. Sales is usually the first place this shows up. When sales lives in the founder’s head + inbox, growth caps. Not because the founder can’t sell, but because the business can’t operate without them. From ‘Founder Chapel’ to ‘David Beats Goliath,’ and through the projects and partnerships I take on this year, everything will serve one goal: Helping founders transform into EXCEPTIONAL operators. The kind people want to work with, follow, invest in, and trust with real responsibility. Builders are common these days. Operators are much rarer. Companies scale when systems carry the weight founders were never meant to carry alone.

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🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg

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Boards are supposed to help founders. Over the past 19 years, I've watched many trap them instead. As companies scale, many boards turn from insight to oversight and stop doing what founders actually need: Help making big, hard decisions. Early boards tend to be small, the board members are close to the business and highly invested in it. They argue from first principles. They help founders think. Later-stage boards often look more impressive on paper - they have more independent directors, committees and process. Somewhere along the way, collective problem solving gets replaced with oversight. The board shifts from helping the CEO make better decisions to monitoring decisions that have already been made. Strategy discussions get safer, real debate gets rarer and meetings become more about risk management than judgment. This usually coincides with the introduction of more professional board members. For better or worse, they often optimize for governance, optics, and liability management. That’s their job. But it’s not always what the company needs in moments of real uncertainty. Then, CEOs stop using them as thought partners. That’s a problem. So what should founders do? A few principles that help: • Keep the board as small as you can for as long as you can • Add directors for new insight they bring, not what boxes they check • Treat board seats like senior hires, not trophies • Design meetings for debate rather than reporting • Be explicit about when you want input vs approval Good boards should improve decision-making. If your board isn’t making you think harder, it’s probably not doing its job.

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Orange Health Labs has always been committed to six-hour reporting. Not "as fast as possible" but specifically six hours, no exceptions. This one constraint made them build everything differently. They couldn't use standard labs designed for average daily volume - they had to build for peak hourly capacity. They couldn't have doctors at each location, so they built remote pathology, where one doctor reviews slides from multiple cities. They couldn't rely on traditional logistics - so they created dedicated networks covering four times the area of competitors. Now incumbents can't copy it without scrapping their existing infrastructure. They have hundreds of labs built the old way, doctors hired locally, and established logistics. Retrofitting would cost more than starting from scratch, and starting from scratch means abandoning their existing business. I like how Orange Health's edge is that matching their model means incumbents must treat their current infrastructure as sunk cost. This is the kind of advantage that compounds.

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Founders are often optimistic about growth. Sometimes, that confidence leads to funding ideas that don't fully pan out. Royalty-based growth capital is structured to limit downside risk compared to traditional venture-backed paths. Vik Thapar of Cypress Growth Capital explains that, even if outcomes fall short of early expectations, founders often still exit with meaningful results because they retain the majority of ownership. 🎙️ Tune into the Private Equity Value Creation Podcast: https://lnkd.in/gxkEsH3Z 👇🏽 Find Us Here https://lnkd.in/gTdPMk8P #privateequity #privateequitypodcast #privateequityvaluecreation

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Three years ago, we launched Wisdom Ventures with a clear intention to support founders building at the intersection of well-being, human connection, and transformative tech. Since then, we’ve made 37 investments from our oversubscribed "minimum viable" $10M Fund I, backing early-stage companies in physical and mental wellbeing, women’s health, ethical AI, and human connection-centered innovation. We’ve always known we are on to something—what we didn’t expect was how quickly the data would back it up. Recent industry benchmarks show that most 2022-vintage emerging funds are experiencing the usual J-curve dip. In contrast, Wisdom Ventures is showing strong early performance: 📈 Net IRR (internal rate of return): >10% 📊 MOIC (multiple on invested capital): ~2x* ⏰ Median investment age: 18 months 💥 ....and # of our companies have a diverse founder by gender, race, or sexual orientation: 75% As we get ready to make our 38th and final investment out of Fund I and start deploying out of our significantly larger Fund II (first close May 1st), we’re filled with gratitude—for our founders, our LPs, our early supporters, our early believers, and this growing movement toward a more conscious, connected future, fueled by innovation from the ❤️ *Based on most current reports **Not in photo: Our fantastic operating partner, Zoe Rogers #WisdomVentures #ImpactInvesting #ConsciousTech #Wellbeing #AIForGood #FutureOfWork #VentureCapital

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A week can look productive on the surface, yet still lack any real coherence. Constantly moving between maker/manager mode is exhausting, but more importantly, it breaks momentum. Since the start of the year, we stopped trying to patch around this problem and built something to solve it. If you're a technical founder who feels this problem firsthand, please reach out or sign up in the link below.

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At Firmable, we’re a demand-led business, and so much of demand creation is still about judgment and feel. We succeed if we create demand. And creating demand is both a bit of science and a bit of art. In an era of super-saturated channels and noise, customers are overwhelmed. I think going a little retro and focusing on increasing brand awareness/ perception and word of mouth/ referrals from people they trust is the way forward. There’s a lot of science at the bottom of the funnel. You can measure conversion, velocity, and outcomes pretty clearly. But at the top of the funnel, awareness and trust don’t move in straight lines. It’s messier, it takes repetition, and it often shows up later than you’d like. I’m an analytical guy, so I love the bottom-of-funnel stuff. But it’s easy to over-optimise what you can measure, and under-invest in what’s creating awareness in the first place. Spending more time thinking about influence, conversations, podcasts, and people talking about you in the market matters more than most dashboards capture. The inputs can look soft, but the compounding effect is real. I love to talk about the power of “ecosystem activation”… I am still not quite sure how to measure it, but I am convinced it has been at the core of Firmable’s growth over the last 12 months. You still need rigour, but you also need to accept that some of the most important growth signals show up before they’re measurable. For me, the commitment is to keep making space for that work. Stay disciplined on the fundamentals, while still backing the things you can’t fully quantify yet.

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Seed VC isn’t just in a downturn—it’s facing extinction unless it evolves fast. Great read from Rob Go & David Beisel at NextView Ventures... - YC and mega-funds now dominate the early-stage landscape, squeezing out traditional seed investors - Power law thinking has gone mainstream—everyone’s chasing trillion-dollar outliers - AI isn’t helping seed VCs—it’s raising the stakes, crowding the field, and disrupting VC itself - The middle of the market has collapsed, and excess profits are gone - Hope isn’t a strategy—seed needs a new model, now Link here... https://lnkd.in/ek2MZGhm And if you like this topic, I wrote a piece on venture bifurcating into inception funds and mega funds here: https://lnkd.in/eJz5DmX6 #ai #venturecapital #vc

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🥾 #bootstrapping as a mindset should be ephemeral, one that requires a deliberate transition away from as a business enters sustained growth Appointing an established auditor is often regarded as a luxury and not part of bootstrapping Audits discipline a business - to be methodical, thorough and deliberate - traits that acquirers often seek in due diligence After all, "What gets inspected, gets respected," Anon We will share the traits of venture businesses sought and respected by MNC acquirers, join us if your business is out of the #bootstrapping mindset #fulfillingpotential #hepmil #oobmil

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