Chris Curran

Entrepreneurship professor and incubator leader at Texas A&M University. Technology advisor. Retired #CTO and partner at @PwCUS.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

The hottest new programming language is English

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

@NotebookLM Interactive mind maps
Allows model selection including DR
Code integration

[Paul Graham @paulg]

A high school student asked if he should join a startup or go to university. I said that if he was ambitious he could learn a lot more at a university. The work you do in a startup is severely constrained. If it isn't, the startup is inefficient.

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

Enjoying AI Daily Brief by @nlw for a quick daily AI news blast. Part of the learning toolkit. https://t.co/ooKgkSX2rY

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

@jjsviokla Love these knowledge nuggets JJ. Brings back memories.

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

So proud of Aggie Engineering student @Clubgirlkatie who just launched her new putter! Early customers can use FoundersClub code for a discount.

https://t.co/nP3NvtiTRE

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

@AKazlow Question is who’s doing the mid-funnel diligence and does it matter how your investment thesis/interests. Same goes for bottom of the funnel.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I remain confused by the "GenAI is a dud" arguments.

We have controlled experiments showing 20%-40% gains in real work using GenAI. Adoption rates are the fastest in history. There is value.

I think what folks may mean is that "companies haven't captured the value created yet."

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

@AKazlow @JohnWarrillow Along with The E-Myth. “Work on your business, not in your business”

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

@emollick Organizations still figuring out how to get the most out of cloud, SaaS, Bi, etc. It will come but take time.

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

@AKazlow Speed indicate priority however.

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

@AKazlow Because your personal investment thesis is different from theirs. Each of them have different ones. A great angel network or syndicate finds the maximum overlap.

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

@AKazlow @ricealliance What were the biggest misconceptions? Check sizes? Level of involvement?

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

@AKazlow Which one? Share some photos!

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

@AKazlow What kinds of events? Industry conferences? Meetups?

[Andrew Kazlow @AKazlow]

Angel network applications suck. 📝

I recently spent 11.7 hours making "The Beast" - a mega application for 12 networks.

Applications are repetitive with slight variations, making them time-consuming. Would love to see networks streamline things for founders.

#Application

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I have talked to a lot of executives buying Microsoft Copilot for their firms. Not one seems to have considered what it means to suddenly automate the vast majority of management writing without training or reconsidering the meaning of the work.

From my book, Co-Intelligence:

[Chris Curran @cbcurran]

Working for yourself <> Working by yourself.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Software recession has ended.

[Chris Koerner @mhp_guy]

I love "foot in the door" B2B business models

This means offering 2+ services, where 1 is the easy sale to get your foot in the door, & the other is the real cash cow

2 cool examples:

1. My buddy owns a company that does vent hood cleaning for restaurants, but that's not his moneymaker.

He'll quote the job at break-even to undercut his competitors that only offer that 1 service. Once he's done the job and earned their trust, he'll sell them on the real recurring moneymakers:

Degreaser & frying oil recycling.

He'll sell them 5 gallon buckets of powdered degreaser that he white labels and drop-ships from a manufacturer, and they LOVE IT. It takes almost no work on his part. That's good for a couple hundred per month. But the real money is in the frying oil...

Restaurants will pay him to pick up their used frying oil. >100% gross margins? Yes, please!

If the oil is in good condition then he will actually pay the restaurant for it, because of how much easier it is to recycle.

He takes it back to his processing facility where he refines and and resells it to a wholesaler. This is where the stupid margins are made.

His biggest customers are regional franchisees with 10-50 locations. He has operations in about a dozen states and it's a massive biz.

You'll never see this guy on X, or any social media for that matter. His website is ugly and he drives a beat up truck. But he is quietly printing millions.

2nd example: I once owned a company that would recycle broken iPhone screens. The sales call went like this,

"Hey, you know that box of broken iPhone screens under your desk right now? We'll pay $4 each for them. Where should we email the shipping label?"

Stupidly easy.

Once we earned their trust we'd sell them $2,200 worth of new iPhone parts every month, with a 93% reorder rate.

We scaled to 8 figures and then exited with that exact model.

What other foot in the door B2B opportunities are out there?