R A C H Ξ L

Founder & Principal @ Sonnenberg Advisory | Previously @aws, @kindredventures, @ycombinator, North Run Capital, @audaxgroup, @ritzcarlton

[Peter Walker @PeterJ_Walker]

1) yes, pre-seed still exists

2) There is no "right" valuation, cap or otherwise, for an early stage startup.

[R A C H Ξ L @rsonnenberg]

@BillAckman The right answer isn’t just to fight - it’s to build with the right foundation from the start.
This is why I started my company, Sonnenberg Advisory, providing fractional operations, consulting, and strategic advisory services to family offices. We help families avoid bloat, reduce risk, and bring disciplined oversight to complex situations - before they become crises.
https://t.co/fe4l7zMBZZ

[R A C H Ξ L @rsonnenberg]

@km it’s honestly the worst… although, for me it’s a forcing function to reevaluate my top apps

[R A C H Ξ L @rsonnenberg]

🚨 Sonnenberg Advisory has space to onboard one more fractional client! We provide boutique operations, consulting, and strategic advisory services to venture capital funds, family offices, angel investors, hedge funds, and private equity funds.
◾https://t.co/qimCqTfH5X

[Aleksander Madry @aleks_madry]

Season 2 of Before AGI rolls on! This week I sat down with Harvard Law professor & Berkman Klein Center co-founder @zittrain to ask: What happens when AI agents don’t just assist—but act for us?

Insights into law, tech & trust in an autonomous-agent world incoming!

[The Figen @TheFigen_]

Switzerland uses a mobile overpass bridge to carry out road work without stopping traffic.

[steve jang @stevejang]

after a 3 year journey and filming in 15 countries, our feature documentary film @EthereumFilm is ready for release. very excited to share the short teaser trailer below!

this has been such a fun and fascinating mission for the crew @Optimist @ChrisTemple8 @Zachingrasci and @lindaxie: to make and distribute a feature film in a new decentralized crypto-native way for the community. honored to be an executive producer and backer of the film! 🤝

Watch and mint the full trailer at https://t.co/THMtd1VHfg

[Marques Brownlee @MKBHD]

Boston Dynamic just unveiled their newest Atlas robot. This is not a render. Oh my god

It's giving "call an ambulance... but not for me"

https://t.co/mPUKDlW7WY

[R A C H Ξ L @rsonnenberg]

If you or someone you know might be a good fit - please reach out!

[R A C H Ξ L @rsonnenberg]

I'm excited to share the launch of my new operations consultancy, Sonnenberg Advisory. I provide operations, consulting, and advisory to venture capital funds, family offices, angel investors, hedge funds, and private equity funds.

https://t.co/I3pWqHfoFU

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

Tomorrow on 20VC... 👇

@sama and @bradlightcap

X, what are the must-ask questions? What do we have to discuss?

Work your magic... 🚀

[Ben Lang @benln]

My wife and I use Notion religiously to manage our day-to-day life. Here's a screenshot of our set-up.

I turned this into a template, let me know if you'd like to see it!

[Daniel Ek @eldsjal]

We just launched a new beta test - AI playlists. It’s a feature that uses AI chat prompts to help you curate personalized playlists. It’s still a work in progress but I’m excited for you to give it a try. We’re starting with Premium users in the UK and AU, so let me know what you guys think.

[Todd Jackson @tjack]

Big @firstround news today!

We’re launching Product-Market Fit Method (a free intensive 14-week experience for early founders building epic B2B SaaS companies) and publishing the first session on our internal framework for all to read (with benchmarks, Looker's real data, and tactical advice from iconic enterprise founders).

Even though finding product-market fit is the single most important thing for a startup, it’s still underexplored and seen as more art than science. We wanted to change that.

I’ve personally talked to hundreds of founders about this topic, digging into what they did in the first 6-9 months of company building. (We’ve published dozens of those interviews on The Review in our “Paths to PMF” series.) This video previews some of what we learned — thanks to @christinacaci, @zachperret, @lloydtabb, @jboehmig, & @jaltma for sharing their lessons!

In addition to that research, we’ve also drawn from our own 20 years of data and 500+ pre-PMF investments. What emerged was a very consistent set of patterns for sales-led B2B companies — the basis for our new framework and PMF Method’s 8 tactical sessions.

In the program, we help early founders discover what customers really want, build the right v1 product, and close their first enterprise sales. We ran a beta version late last year with a tight-knit group of founders (ex Stripe, Plaid, Airbnb, Twitter, Greenhouse, Grammarly) and the feedback was great — my personal favorite was: "I feel like I shaved 12 months off the time it would take us to get to PMF.”

Here are a few key dates and details:

- The Summer 2024 session of PMF Method runs 5/29 - 8/28.
- Application deadline is 11:59 PDT May 7th.
- Any early founder working on a new B2B SaaS company is welcome to apply. Bonus points if you’re technical, have a clear product idea but haven’t raised yet and are <12 months into working full time on your idea.
- PMF Method is 100% free. It costs you $0 and we own 0% of your company.

Like with The First Round Review and Angel Track, our mindset is to openly share knowledge that we’ve put hundreds of hours of work into curating with the broader startup community, and give it away for free. That’s why we’ve also published our framework, so every builder can use this resource, even if they don’t do the program (it’s linked in the next post).

Check out the links below for more details. Can’t wait to read applications!

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Amazing text to music generations from @suno_ai_ , could easily see these taking over leaderboards.

Personal favorite: this song I fished out of their Discord a few months ago, "Return to Monkey", which has been stuck in my head since :D

[00:57]
I wanna return to monkey, I wanna be wild and free,
I wanna return to monkey, modern life is not for me.
No more emails, no more bills, no more endless strife,
Just the sound of the river, the hearbeat of life
😂

[R A C H Ξ L @rsonnenberg]

@stevejang @KindredVentures happy holidays to team kv!

[prayingforexits 🏴‍☠️ @mrexits]

Phil Knight’s manifesto for Nike from 1980 should honestly be hung in every startup office ever -

[Esther Crawford ✨ @esthercrawford]

When you recognize an adult is needed to handle a situation… and then realize you’re the adult.

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

Amazing data for whoever is building venture portfolio construction models.

The data shows that it’s actually a statistical coin flip for every investment to return 1x.

[Steph Mui @stephmui]

observation: founders are bootstrapping more often because a) it's harder to raise VC these days, and/or b) because they've lived through the ups and downs of VC and don't want to again

we really enjoyed talking about this with @jamesbeshara, who raised $50m+ of VC money for his first company, Tilt, and decided to build his new company, @magicmind, with no VC at all (and is now doing $10M+ with just 3 full time employees 🤯)

on @somethingnewp0d this week we talk about:
✨ how to know when to take VC vs. not
✨ how to know if a problem is one worth building a company around
✨ his lessons learned from being an angel investor (in companies like mercury, gusto, and alchemy, now collectively worth $50B+)

links to listen below: