Coldbrew Capital

Journeyed from IC to Chief Product Officer. Serving up takes on product, tech, finance, sports, and memes. all takes adequately infused with cold brew ☕️

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

Parted with OG Twitter account (circa 2008) after my company got a bit ridiculous on social media monitoring. Came back to X in March with fresh now anon acct -mind blown by how sensitive the algorithm is to push political content (and polarizing on both ends). 1 meme, it’s over

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

@anothercohen What’s the sodium content on these ?

[PsudoMike 🇨🇦 @PsudoMike]

SoFi just acquired Composer, a Toronto fintech, for an undisclosed amount.

Composer built one of the more interesting products in retail investing: a no code way for regular people to run hedge fund style strategies.

It's never been available to Canadians. Built in Toronto, sold to a US bank, still locked out here.

That's the pattern with Canadian fintech more than anyone wants to admit.

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

@ansonlin They killed their own TAM expansion with feature bloat. The Figma from 3 years ago was genuinely easy to use and really powerful.

We exposed it to a few of our summer interns this year and watched them struggle. It’s no longer intuitive or easy to pick up. It’s Adobe now.

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

@GergelyOrosz Hiring a few tech roles and the companies we work with to help recruit are insistent on these types of heavy postings listing everything under the kitchen sink. It turns applicants off. If you can’t distill what you want out of the role in 3 bullets and what you need in 3 , flag.

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

@GergelyOrosz But even before AI really broke through in 2022 it was on a long ride down. Generic frameworks, useless also-ran strategic pitches, reams of juniors with no actual experience running point. AI convinced them they didn’t need to change (more content, less people).even worse slop.

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

@GergelyOrosz The best way to learn about why Accenture is getting crushed is to actually allow them to pitch you for a project.

When I graduated Uni, Accenture wasn’t S-tier but it was still considered a top firm and you got genuinely good experience for 2-3 years before you dipped. (1/2)

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

There’s not a single person at $SNAP able to stand up and tell Evan Spigel that those Snap AR glasses are the death of the company.

Tech is cool, but nobody is buying these. And he’s bet the company on it!!!

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

@HarryStebbings Although not in love with my current job, still feels a millions times better than school ever did. Hard problems and good people await!

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

Knicks WIN!!!!

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

Knicks can’t free throw for shit. This is unbelievable. #NBAfinals

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

@toddsaunders Cool demonstration of a capability. This would be my nightmare come to life though. Every single customer request getting bloated into the product. Yeah no thanks !

I could see this being a great way to set up a survivorship bake off with the top tickets and real demos though

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

Canada’s fall is just depressing to watch.

[Shazi @ShaziGoalie]

Canada now has full-time workers living in Highway 401 carpool parking lots.

They're not unemployed. They're not refusing to work. They're working, showering, sleeping in trailers, and hoping to save enough for first and last month's rent.

Meanwhile politicians celebrate population growth, record housing targets, and labour shortages.

The reality is working Canadians are being priced out of their own country.

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

@lpolovets When Anthropic finally launches its Vercel/Replit self-contained deployment features, that’s when you’ll see the expansion like Figma had for non-designers.

Talk to the “normies” there’s is still quite a bit of friction to get what they build live. Shift from ‘how to’ to ‘done’

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

This guy is delusional. B2B insurance sales being compared to Manhattan Project…

[nico laqua @nico_laqua]

Maybe that culture is fine for you at linear, and it looks like it’s working great for you! You’ve created something worth over a billion dollars in 7 short years, that’s something very few people on the planet have done before.

But sometimes there are big problems that need solving, and there is more creative thinking, not less, that happens with contact with the big problems. In our case, creating the financial operating system that owns the creation, transfer, financing, and investment of risk, using AI to automate the paperwork of the most regulated entities to make every business and person a little more profitable, waste a lot less time, and be more protected, is a big problem.

Maybe there were super geniuses at the Manhattan Project working 1 day per week like zen masters. I doubt it though, because if you’re obsessed with a problem, you work hard. Nowhere did I or do I glorify lack of sleep (I always think sleeping right and exercise are very important), and different people have different visions, cadences, and ways they want to run their companies. And that’s ok, but you attacking our style based upon sound bites when we are solving a really important problem, by market sizing probably the biggest problem large language models can solve, isn’t it.

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

@khushkhushkhush @alexrkonrad Stealing this term: grindslop. Love it.

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

Now imagine this intensity applied to something meaningful and potentially world altering versus a better business quote calculator.

Will Corgi be a big business? Make its founders and early employees very wealthy? Probably. Did you need to skip life to do it? Defintiely not.

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

"If you are not working 7 days per week, you are going to lose".

Corgi Insurance is the most intense workplace culture in startups.

- The company works 7 days per week.

- Founder (@nico_laqua) lives and sleeps in the office.

- He built a cafe in the office because there was no local cafe that was open 24/7.

- 2/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo.

Today I went behind the scenes with Nico, who has used this culture to scale the company to a $2.6BN valuation in just two years.

My condensed notes below:

1. If You Are Not Working 7 Days Per Week, You Are Going to Lose:

Whatever you can get done in 5 days, you'll get more done in 6 and 7. If you are trying to solve the world’s hardest problems, a standard 5-day workweek will not cut it.

2. Work Trials Repel the Mediocre:

Corgi forces candidates into mock work trials over the weekend. If seeing a full office on a Saturday scares them, they don't belong. True intensity acts as a natural filter to attract killers and repel clock-watchers.

3. Lead from the Front Lines

You can’t demand 7-day weeks while sitting on a yacht. Nico sleeps 3–4 hours a night on a mattress inside the office. If you want your troops to bleed, you have to be in the trenches with them.

4. Culture Only Means One Thing: Winning

Forget superficial jargon like "hackers" or "ex-founders." Strip away the corporate fluff. A great startup culture is aggressively optimized around one single word: Winning.

5. Lifespan vs. Victories

Building something world-historic requires radical sacrifice. When asked if he'd rather build a trillion-dollar company and die at 50, or fail and live to 80, the answer was easy. "I would rather measure my lifespan in victories."

6. Reject the Comfort of "Quiet Quitting."

If you are operating in a hyper-growth environment and your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every single week, you are quiet quitting. To win, you must deliberately bypass the off-ramps of personal comfort and low volatility.

Corgi isn't for everyone—and that’s exactly the point.

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

@zodchiii Is the claude hosting available now? I’ve never heard of this basically built in VPS / Vercel?

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

@levie @harjtaggar Interesting - have they determined / convinced clients to allow some type of model training against a thicker slice of the case inputs and outcomes?

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

Love this and a great example of the augment > replacement thesis.

[Eric Wu @ericwu01]

Today, I’m launching my newco, NavigateAI. We are short hundreds of thousands of skilled workers and we're on a mission to give every field worker an AI copilot, so they can build faster and better when we need it most. https://t.co/8eOtvosfOn

[Coldbrew Capital @ProductColdBrew]

@JAYChi_Hawks Blackhawks haven’t shown they can build a team around him. He’s taking the Mike Trout route. Bag but guaranteed no Cup.