I became among the first solo-founders in my country to receive official funding from a VC.

How?

I've spent the last decade running Guyman Studio (animation/design - 5,000+ projects).

Hi everyone! I m Ivan

Long-time lurker, finally jumping in here.

A little about me:

- Spent 7 years as a VC, before that worked as a consultant

This is more of a feedback for marketers who are trying to establish contact with bigger influencers.

Thanks to my experience from "both sides", I noticed certain patterns that could work better and satisfaction would be on both sides. :)

I launched my SaaS company, Encharge, in 2019 with less than $1,000 in my account, no funding, no network, no audience, and no accelerators. It generated $2 million before we sold it. Here are 17 things I learned from it.

1. Startups are a last-man-standing game.

The one to win is not the fastest, smartest, or best. It's the most persistent and resilient.

I work at an early stage startup and I'd estimate 70-80% of our codebase is vibe coded (510k lines). To be clear, it's not 1 shot "build this feature." More like, "implement get_slim_documents for Jira in the exact same way we did it for the Confluence connector."
Comfort with AI coding tools is actually something we gauge during interviews/work trials. Looking at our peer companies, it's exactly the same.
My hypothesis/assertion is that companies founded ~2022+ are fundamentally intertwined with "vibe coding." In 5 years, programming will connote vibe coding more than it will connote non-AI assisted work.
Am I crazy? Pigeon-holed in the SF startup world? Naive? Would love to hear more thoughts/diverse perspectives on this.