Hey les anciens et anciennes du Collège Saint-Alexandre — faites comme moi et ajoutez votre point sur la carte pour montrer le rayonnement de notre école à travers le monde! https://t.co/bv9tfugKSW
What drives startup success after investment?
It's a question I see from both sides — as a founder and venture partner.
It comes down to 3 things:
1. Quick iteration
You need a founding team that can rapidly iterate on their ideas.
They must gather feedback and constantly tweak their strategy, product, and go-to-market based on what they learn.
This is fundamental.
2. Strong relationships
This is core to what we're doing at Bloks: building strong relationships across your ecosystem.
Through partner organizations, other investors, customers, and distributors — you need to build that track record.
When you can say "I now have these well-known customers using our product"... that builds credibility in the space.
3. Complete alignment
As you pivot and adjust course, you need to make sure everybody is always on the same page:
- Your investors
- Your founders
- Your team
The startups that master all 3 of these are the ones that thrive.
Workplace coordination isn't about scheduling anymore.
When we started looking at this problem, we discovered it was really a coordination issue.
The calendar was at the center of it all, but traditional tools weren't solving what mattered most.
3 critical coordination points kept emerging:
1. How do you better prepare for your meetings?
2. How do you take effective notes during them?
3. How do you do the right follow-ups afterward?
This realization led us to iterate around these problems, helping people manage their interactions better.
That's what we’re building at Bloks.
I hear the same concern from professionals about AI in relationship management.
They're worried about losing the human touch.
If you're looking at AI to be the one managing your relationships and interacting with people, I agree — it can be very inauthentic.
AI-generated emails don't bring out your personality or understand the small details of what you need to do.
That's why you need human intervention when interacting with people.
Where AI truly helps is getting you 80% of the way there:
- Gathering essential information
- Crafting the right message
But you still need to do that 20%...
…and that 20% is the magic.
Let technology handle the groundwork while you focus on building relationships.
Many venture capital firms are looking at far fewer deals than they could be.
After years of working with VCs, I see it every time…
They tell me:
“My plate is full. I’m already in discussions with 4 other companies. I can’t look at new deals right now because I’m too busy.”
But AI tools have transformed what's possible in deal management.
With the right ones, you could run 15 to 20 different company conversations in parallel, maintaining the same depth of analysis without increasing headcount.
AI does 80% of the heavy lifting…
…keeping track of all your conversations and allowing you to be more productive and focused on what matters.
VCs today don't need to limit themselves to managing just 5 deals.
CRMs have a fundamental problem: people just don't want to use them.
I've spent years watching sales teams, BD professionals, and executives struggle with the same frustration:
CRM and other enterprise software create more work than they solve.
Users have to go through an endless cycle of...
- Entering information
- Analyzing data
- Maintaining the system
This was accepted as the cost of doing business — until AI changed everything.
When AI really started to take off, I realized all that manual work people dread could be replaced.
Traditionally, we looked at information on people as a database.
Every contact needed their name, title, telephone number, address, and last interaction manually entered into specific fields.
That's how you kept a system of record… but AI has changed the game entirely.
The notion of a rigid database is obsolete because AI is incredible at dealing with unstructured data.
Instead of manual entry, you just ask questions.
AI finds and connects the right information across your entire ecosystem — instantly.
We don't need databases to manage relationships anymore.
We need AI to understand them.
. @oliveur@datadoghq hey Olivier, after testing your platform for two weeks - we applied for your startup program and got refused for the only reason that we already had an account open. This makes no sense. We will therefore be looking for an alternative. Thought you should know.
Complexity is a necessary ingredient to progress. But it is not where we stop. We are not done by the time we’ve “solved it”. We’re done by the time we’ve made it simple
— @dhh
@Scobleizer@LimitlessAI@bloks_app@Scobleizer I know you said you will give Bloks a try - but in the meantime - here is the summary of your interview as summarized by Bloks
https://t.co/a55O5KNlC8