Darijan Ducic

20yo building stuff 🫪

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

Suno just raised $400M at a $5.4B valuation.

But the funding round wasn't the thing that caught my attention.

Alongside the announcement, Suno revealed that it's working on a new music model built directly with the music industry. That's pretty surprising considering the music industry has historically been one of the most skeptical and hostile industries toward AI.

Another thing I find fascinating is how people actually use Suno.

Sure, there are producers, songwriters and artists using it (even if many won't publicly admit it). But millions of people are creating songs for friends, birthdays, family jokes, group chats, graduations and random moments in their lives.

It will be fascinating to watch what happens to the music industry over the next couple of years.

I'm a huge Suno fan.

One of the few AI products that genuinely feels magical the first time you use it.

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

@heart_jpg tiktok and insta togheter

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

@JunaidAckroyd @roy_clu

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

University is fucking useless.

The only exceptions are professions where society requires credentials. Doctors. Lawyers. A few others.

For almost everything else, especially entrepreneurship, it's a complete waste of time.

We've been seeing this for years.

The problem is that theory cannot keep up with practice.

The world is changing at an insane pace. Microsoft struggles to keep up. Meta struggles to keep up. Oracle struggles to keep up. Entire industries are being rewritten in a matter of months.

If some of the largest companies on Earth can't stay fully up to date, what makes you think universities can?

Most people teaching have spent their entire lives inside the system.

Marketing professors who have never scaled a campaign.

Entrepreneurship professors who have never built a company.

Researchers who spend years writing papers while the real world moves forward without them.

The real world is not made of papers.

It's made of customers, products, distribution, hiring, sales, competition, mistakes, pressure and execution.

Nobody becomes a great entrepreneur by studying entrepreneurship.

You become a great entrepreneur by building companies.

Nobody learns how to sell by reading about sales.
Nobody learns leadership from a textbook.
Nobody learns how to swim from reading a book.

At some point you need to get in the water.

The people winning today are not waiting for certificates or degrees.

They're doing the work.

Because practice will always move faster than theory.

John Locke was right.

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

New logo?

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

@sama tell us also why?

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

👑

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

@collinmelink btw I been in that caffee

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

@collinmelink ahhaha love it

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

Yesterday we had our 8x team call.

At this point we're around 20 people across the team, and I have to say it was probably the most fun team call I've ever been on.

I spent about 7% of the time talking and 93% laughing.

The energy is high. Everyone is excited. Everyone is building.

We're ready to make it big.

This summer is going to be fun 😎

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

VCs spend weeks on due diligence.

The answer was 5'7 all along.

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

W H E R E D O E S A S T A R T U P A C T U A L L Y B E G I N ? 🚢

An idea? Not really. Capital? No. Talent? Not that either.

The more I think about it, the more I believe every startup starts with a vision. A clear picture of where you're going, why you're going there, and why anyone should care.

Because vision attracts capital. Capital attracts talent. Talent builds great products and creates distribution. Distribution generates revenue. Revenue creates enterprise value. Enterprise value rewards everyone who believed early: founders, employees, and investors.

What's interesting is that most people look at these as separate things. Fundraising. Hiring. Product. Sales. Revenue.

They're not.

They're all part of the same loop.

And if the vision isn't strong enough, eventually the whole thing breaks.

Maybe that's why the best founders spend so much time talking about the future. They're not selling a product. They're creating alignment around a destination.

Curious if you agree.

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

Coralogix just announced a $200M Series F.

The company has now raised a total of $550M and is valued at around $1.6B. They operate in the observability space, helping companies monitor software systems, investigate incidents, and increasingly manage AI-powered applications and agents. Think of them as a competitor to Datadog.

The company reportedly surpassed $100M ARR and grew revenue by more than 60% over the last year.

The observability market is clearly benefiting from the rise of AI. The more AI agents companies deploy, the more they need tools that explain what those agents are doing, why something broke, and how to fix it.

That said, $550M raised on a business doing a little over $100M ARR is a lot of capital. Congratulations to the CEO for being able to raise at that scale. Personally, I'd be curious to see how efficiently the company can turn that capital into long-term growth, especially when competing against giants like Datadog.

Still, it's another sign that investors are willing to place very large bets on companies building the infrastructure layer for the AI.

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

twitter is like the smoking area for social media

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

At 16, I was working as a waiter.
At 17, I was making gin and tonics behind a bar.
At 18, I was organizing events in nightclubs.
At 19, I started my first company.
At 20, I moved to Berlin.

A few months later, I left everything behind and moved to San Francisco.
Since then, I've tried more things than I can count.

Some worked.
Most didn't.

But for the first time in my life, when I go to sleep at night, I feel pretty good about where I am.

I've lived in different countries.
Met incredible people.
Learned what I like.
Learned what I don't.

I made more money at 18 than my father did.
Then I ended up with almost nothing because I decided to chase my dreams.

And honestly, I wouldn't change a thing.

There's still this thing inside me that never switches off...
I can't stop thinking about new ideas.
I can't stop building new things.
I can't stop being curious about the world.

I feel an insane amount of FOMO.

The feeling that there's too much happening out there.
Too many places to see.
Too many businesses to build.
Too many things to try.

Sometimes the idea of not being everywhere at once drives me crazy.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much noise there is out there, and how important it is to separate what's real from what's fake.

In 9 days, I'll turn 21.

I have a feeling this year is going to be a lot of fun. 😉

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

OpenAI launches Codex for non-technical folks 👩‍🌾

The company just launched dedicated Codex agents for sales, investment banking, investing, product design, creative production and data analytics. At the same time, knowledge workers are becoming one of the fastest-growing user groups on the platform.

The interesting part is that these aren't being positioned as tools.

They're being positioned as jobs.

We're slowly moving from a world where software helps people work, to a world where software does part of the work itself.

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

@sflorimm Stealth not sharing yet 😜

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

Tutorial: How to get a Green Card… just marry an American citize

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

Does this look familiar?

[Darijan Ducic @darijan___]

@Anaya_sharma876 Future