Martin Bielicki

Three kinds of AI startups I’m especially excited to invest in and work with these days: 1. The Surprisingly Valuable Niche Workflow — small enough for OpenAI not to care about; big enough to make $100M per year. Sooo so many opportunities out there, from logistics to finance to healthcare to construction to manufacturing and on and on. 2. The Full-Stack Software Company — founders are realizing they can move up the value chain, to not just sell software to other businesses, but use their own software to provide end solutions to customers. Our own portfolio has inspired us here, from industrial solutions to life science to agrochemical to admin services and more. 3. The Bold Consumer Bet — it’s time for a new generation of consumer mainstays that are AI-native and fit the way people use software today. We don’t often invest in consumer apps, but we have seen great examples of this in language learning, personal finance, fashion, dating, social, messaging, etc. All three are great examples of building at new frontiers of the software-addressable economy, where advances in AI have opened up new opportunities for software founders. A good litmus test for this thesis: “If I had this idea 5 years ago, could I build it?” If the answer is no or maybe, you’re on the frontier. If you’re building something cool in one of these areas — or anywhere else on frontiers of the software-addressable economy — please get in touch with us at character.vc We’d love to learn from you. And we’d love to share how we help founders bridge the gap from possible to PMF in these categories.

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A Founder’s Guide to Seed Fundraising by Mike Wilner and Max Nussenbaum This book is for founders who are considering raising money, founders who are in the middle of raising money, and founders who have already raised an angel or seed round but find themselves needing to raise another one. It covers everything from the basics of seed fundraising for first timers to the advanced tactics that enable founders to create urgency for investors and close rounds quickly. This book is broken up into six chapters. If you’ve never fundraised before, you should read all six chapters. If you have fundraised before, you’ll get the most value out of Chapters 2–6. Chapter 1: Seed Fundraising 101: This chapter will give you a baseline understanding of the seed funding landscape, along with the implications of seed funding for founders, angel investors, and VCs. Chapter 2: How to Run a Swift Seed Fundraise Chapter 3: Fundraising Narrative Preparation Chapter 4: Researching & Engaging Angels Chapter 5: Researching & Engaging VCs Chapter 6: Pitching & Closing This book provides simple answers to address all of the issues. ~~~~~ ♻️ Found this helpful? Repost it so your network can learn from it, too. And follow me, Fazlur Shah, for more content like this. #startups #entrepreneurship #venturecapital #investing

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Founders: If you can't grow faster, here's what actually moves your exit valuation I analyzed the latest public SaaS data from Meritech to see which levers matter most for valuation. Wanted to validate what I saw in ICONIQ's State of Software 2025 report which showed a declining correlation between growth and trading multiple. The results surprised me. Here's what we could potentially infer for the private market: Everyone obsesses over growth (and yes, it matters). But if you're stuck at 10-30% YoY and can't push higher, you're not out of options. What the data shows: Impact on valuation per +1 percentage point improvement: • YoY Growth: +0.21x multiple • FCF Margin: +0.18x multiple • Net Revenue Retention: +0.17x multiple Translation: They're almost equally valuable. "Wait, doesn't this contradict the Rule of X?" Good question. Bessemer's Rule of X suggests growth should be weighted ~2x more than profitability. And at scale, that's often true. But here's the nuance: This analysis shows marginal effects at typical operating points. For a $3M ARR company growing 25%, improving margin by 1pp should have nearly the same valuation impact as growing 1pp faster. However, growth effects are nonlinear. Once you hit breakout growth tiers (40%+), the market starts paying disproportionately more. That's where Rule of X becomes relevant. What this means for you: If you're at $1-10M ARR growing 15% with 10% profit margin, improving your margin to 20% could have a similar valuation impact as growing 25% instead of 15%. Maybe an easier hill to climb. Same with retention. From my experience, founders often ignore retention issues for far too long. You have multiple levers to pull: fix churn, optimize pricing to drive more expansion, invest in CS for strategic upsells, etc. Small improvements compound quickly. → Can't accelerate growth meaningfully? Focus on profitability. → Hitting a retention ceiling? Optimize unit economics. → Already efficient? Double down on what's working. In M&A conversations for most sub-$10M ARR companies with modest growth, profit margin and retention carry nearly equal weight. Please give me a sign if you find this helpful. ✌️

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We had Tom Charman (Co-founder at Blok) on Ventures, Fresh out of stealth having raised $7.5m He explains why their star-studded team is building Blok "A lot of companies aren't particularly good at predicting how their customers are going to behave, but more importantly, they're not necessarily targeting the right customer." "Most companies will optimise for short-term benefit as opposed to long-term gain - what's actually happening is in the long term they're shooting themselves in the foot." "Nine in ten experiments are failing, it's taking too long to run experiments, teams don't know which experiments to run." "If we're going to move towards a world where it's multimodal interfaces with lots of different UI, knowing what to generate for who and when is going to become significantly more difficult." You can watch the full conversation by searching "Tom Charman, Co-founder @ blok: How We're Predicting User Behaviour Before Writing Code"

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The best startup ideas and the worst startup ideas have one thing in common: most investors they ask for money from will say no. Fundraising mostly sucks. It’s hard to maintain conviction when the majority of people you talk to don’t believe in your business the same way you do. But the biggest difference I’ve seen between the people who raise money and the ones who don’t is the ability to change nothing after getting a no. They might tweak their story if they realize they left out important info or said something confusing, but they don’t slow down. I recently heard a great definition of resilience: “how fast you resume normal behavior after something negative happens.” So if you’ve been getting no’s, remember each no is one no closer to a yes. And if you need a second pair of eyes on your materials, feel free to shoot me a DM with your deck attached and I'm happy to send some feedback. #startups #venture #fundraising #pitching #founders #VC #tech

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Firstly, this isn't a post about Europe vs US. They're different beasts at different stages of development… However, as a European VC, it's critical to be connected to the US VC market. If you are, on average, you'll get bigger markups for your portfolio by taking advantage of the UK/US arbitrage among other things. Two examples of this are Lawhive and StackOne from our portfolio. Both have founders who've moved to the US and both have raised from GV (Google Ventures) with deep US ties of course. Same with companies like Mimica (Khosla Ventures), Carwow (Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel) and many more. You need to be able to pick the phone up to tier 1 US VCs and get them to meet your portfolio. So when Adam Shuaib, PhD, Millan Suri and I went to SF a few weeks back, we tried to cover as much ground as we could, meeting about 40 of the tier 1 US funds like Founders Fund, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz…. It takes time to build this network but the rewards are great. As you can see, we also went surfing.

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What's going on in the venture capital market? While we see very large, highly valued rounds for AI companies, many founders struggle to secure funding at all. 😳 I see 4 founder profiles in the market: 1️⃣ Serial founders or scale-up executives → They raise big rounds (+20m valuations) led by Tier1 VCs. 2️⃣ Founders with traction (100-200k ARR) → They usually find a pre-seed lead after multiple VC talks and then fill rounds quickly on average valuations. Only works for VC Cases. 3️⃣ Founders with little traction but competitive markets → They struggle with endless VC conversations that often lead nowhere. Better off raising angel rounds or bootstrapping. 4️⃣ Software founders bootstrapping → They build MVPs, start selling, and skip early rounds altogether—or wait for better momentum. What are pre-seed investors looking for in 2025? 👉 Proprietary data sources 👉 Strong domain knowledge (vertical SaaS is a win!) 👉 Real customer traction 👉 Deep-tech with a clear edge Fundraising strategy matters more than ever. Here’s what works: • Cluster VCs - don’t pitch your dream fund first. • Use early NOs as free feedback to improve your story. • One term sheet creates momentum - then the round fills up fast. What has been your experience raising in this market❓ #fundraising #venturecapital #investments 📸 Fabian Klima

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🍿 Venture Capital today feels like what it must have felt operating a Blockbuster store at the early stages of Netflix... 🍿 ...it feels like things are changing. Some see it coming clearly and most have a gut feeling that something doesn't feel alright. I've tried to collect and structure my thoughts around the current (unfortunate) state of venture and how to navigate these uncertain times of AI disruption on the one hand, and AuM maxxing of big platform VCs on the other. 𝐌𝐲 𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞-𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬: - The promise of 𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞-𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐫𝐮𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 of every industry is largely overblown. Improving operational efficiency through AI != business model transformation. - Funds aggregating excessive capital with the promise of unforeseen opportunity are in for a very 𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬. - 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐨𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐀𝐈 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐡𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥, but actual financial innovation combining debt where necessary with equity. - To 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞 in early-stage venture, you need to 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐲 𝐧𝐢𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐞, 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐤 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 - chasing expensive consensus has never worked. You can read my full thesis here: https://lnkd.in/ee2SFYPs

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