Ray Walia

Entrepreneur/Investor - Building AI for Human Performance @OpenSportData
@LaunchVC | @LaunchAcademyHQ | @TractionConf_io
AI Clone:

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

Most founders who try to delegate marketing to AI make the same mistake.

They mistakenly delegate the 20% only they can do, and focus their own valuable time on the 80% that can be delegated.

We built https://t.co/bmWLJK4tLt to solve that very problem.

Here’s what the split looks like after going though Revenue Factory.

The 80% Claude handles:
Researching your market and competitors. Writing first drafts. Building your messaging framework. Generating content, sequences, and campaigns. Keeping the pipeline running week after week.

The 20% only you can do:
Your positioning. The way you talk about the problem you solve. The customer conversations that reveal what actually resonates. The judgment call on what sounds like you — and what doesn't.

That 20% can't be delegated. Not to an agency, not to a hire, not to AI. It's the part that makes everything else work. It's also the part that takes 20% of the time, not 80%.

The mistake isn't using AI for marketing. It's using it without a system that keeps your voice in the right place: at the top, as the filter, not buried in execution.

The Revenue Factory is built around that split. Claude does the 80%. You do the 20% only a founder can do: review, fact-check, approve, and make it sound like you.

12–24 hours to build it. Then, 15 minutes a week to run it.

→ https://t.co/4oRAYd8yj3

[sam chan @samdotchan]

Excited to team up with @colineapp on this, all @buildrsdotdev users will get 3 months free - coline is an all in one integration tool, think clickapp but better And buildrs gets it for free.
Buildrs helping buildrs. Thanks @kodahhhhh

[Traction Conf @TractionConf_io]

Most people look for better health in supplements, wearables, and hacks.

After 40 years in AI, biology, and drug discovery, AI pioneer Dr. @StevenMuskal has a simpler answer:

Listen to your own data, not someone else's protocol.

Link in comments.

[Launch @launchacademyhq]

35 events at @GlobalRelay's Gastown space. 2,000+ attendees.

What started as a simple idea became a home for Vancouver tech community. @launchacademyhq was proud to help curate the space.

One last gathering: June 25 for the final Launch Builders Demo Night.

Tickets in comments

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

YouTube: https://t.co/C6ycPXGaNC

Spotify: https://t.co/ZYgcTeG8w5

Apple Podcast: https://t.co/QzZEmIWzTu

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

What if longevity has less to do with healthcare and more to do with how often you walk to a neighbour’s house?

In this clip from the latest episode of Traction, Dr. Tom Elliott explains why some communities around the world have dramatically lower rates of obesity and longer life expectancy than we see in North America.

Watch below 👇 The full episode is linked in the comments.

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

@DanEbs @GetKoho @tobi 🔥🔥🔥

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

YouTube: https://t.co/C6ycPXGIDa

Spotify: https://t.co/ZYgcTeGGlD

Apple Podcast: https://t.co/QzZEmIX7J2

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

What if the biggest threat to your long-term performance isn’t a lack of ambition, but your metabolism?

In my latest conversation, I sat down with Dr. Tom Elliott, founder and Medical Director of @BC_Diabetes, Associate Professor at @UBC, and one of Canada’s leading experts in diabetes, obesity, and metabolic health.

Dr. Elliott has spent decades working at the intersection of medicine, research, and prevention. We discussed why obesity, insulin resistance, and prediabetes are becoming increasingly common — even among high-performing professionals.

Some of the topics we explored:

→ Why millions of people may be prediabetic without knowing it
→ What GLP-1 medications like Retatrutide actually do in the body
→ The connection between metabolism, stress, sleep, and performance
→ Why muscle mass becomes increasingly important as we age
→ What the future of obesity treatment and preventative medicine may look like

Links in comments.

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

Day 2 at Toronto Tech Week. Talks spanning quantum computing with Christian Weedbrook from @XanaduAI and @fnthawar @Shopify, longevity with some of Canada’s leading experts, and an epic discussion on data centers and energy with @omaikasei.

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

The Revenue Factory is live!

Build a complete AI driven marketing engine in 9 weeks. Then run it in 15 minutes a week.

You've built something real. Customers are using it, paying for it. The product works.

But you are personally driving sales for every new customer. Marketing runs on your energy, not a system. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that doesn't scale.

That's who The Revenue Factory course is for.

Not for founders still searching for product-market fit. Not for people who want an agency to handle it. For the ones who are ready to build the system themselves, put in 2 to 4 hours a week for 9 weeks, and come out the other side with a marketing engine that runs in 15 minutes a week.

Claude does 80% of the volume work. You do the 20% only a founder can do: positioning, voice, and the real customer conversations.

Right now, the course is $100 off. $399 instead of $499, but only for a few more days.

If that sounds like where you are right now 👉 https://t.co/UVFprKjU3d

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

I’m seeing more of this every time I’m in SF.

Talks on digital twinning and rebuilding of legacy businesses. Big focus on revamping brick and mortar businesses in smaller markets.

Everyone is a builder now, young and old. Entrepreneurship is set to explode again.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Launch @launchacademyhq]

Launch CEO @raywalia and VP of Programs @samdotchan are named to @BetaKit Most Ambitious 2026 🎉

This one means a lot. Launch Academy has always been about the founders, giving them the space and community to build something real.

Congrats to all 2026 honourees!
#MostAmbitious

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

The founders we work with don't have a product problem. They have a "we can't seem to grow fast enough" problem.

Since 2012, we've sat across from more than 6,000 entrepreneurs from 100+ countries. Brilliant builders shipping serious products. And the story tends to rhyme.

They found product-market fit. They landed real customers. The early traction is there.

But growth? Growth stalls.

The channels that worked early don't scale, and every new customer takes more effort than the last.

Marketing your product consistently is a job. A whole one. And for most tech founders, it's the job they like least and understand least.

So we built something for them.

Today, we're launching The Revenue Factory.

A self-paced course for founders who'd rather build the product than build the funnel. Video modules + Claude prompts that automate your marketing pipeline end-to-end. No agency. No marketer to recruit. No six-month detour learning a job that isn't yours.

What's inside:

→ A marketing engine that runs on autopilot the day after your last module
→ AI prompts that target the right prospects at the right moment
→ ~20 hours a month back in your calendar to do what you do best: build

This is the course we wish we could've handed every founder who's walked through our doors over the past 14 years. The one that closes the gap between "great product" and "great traction."

Check it out 👉 https://t.co/U4WxRdVgQq

[Traction Conf @TractionConf_io]

Most high performers don’t have a discipline problem.
They have a nervous system problem.

@klimjuls, former Head of Strategic Partnerships at @Equinox Group, explains why burnout, fatigue, anxiety, and brain fog are often signs of chronic dysregulation, not lack of effort.

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

YouTube: https://t.co/1JZR2XwETh

Spotify: https://t.co/DhNiWIVX5f

Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/HRGsc21AP4

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

One of the biggest myths about aging? How early people think metabolism starts slowing down.

This short clip from our @TractionConf_io conversation with @CarolineMundell changed how I think about it.

Caroline is the Founder & Owner of Function Health Club, a 7x Provincial Masters Olympic Lifting Champion, 2x National Champion, Bronze Medalist at the 2018 World Championships in Barcelona, and the 2025 National Functional Fitness Gold Medalist.

She shares a perspective on metabolism and strength training that more people probably need to hear.

[Ray Walia @raywalia]

Packed house for ClawCon Vancouver brought to you by @gching @realsigridjin @sauravroyX @msg and team!

Hosted by @samdotchan @Launch_Academy and @GlobalRelay