Bradley Jones

Founder & CEO @ThatRoundUK — building the technology infrastructure in early-stage fundraising in the UK.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

Every founder now has senior-engineer leverage on tap. So the bottleneck moves: it's no longer whether you can build it, it's whether the right investors and customers can find you. Cheaper to build means relevance matters more, not less.

[Claude @claudeai]

Introducing Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use.

Its capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

@TTrimoreau When anyone can build it, the build stops being the moat. Distribution does. Getting in front of the right customers and the right capital before you run out of runway. That was always the hard part. AI just made it the only part.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

The real shift isn't talking about AI. It's embedding it into how you run the business.

Operations, marketing, CRM, sales, hiring. The companies pulling ahead aren't writing posts about AI. They're quietly rebuilding their workflows around it.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

Closing a round isn't an achievement, it's a liability you've taken on to go build. The founders I back lead updates with what the money bought: customers, retention, shipped product. The raise is the starting gun, not the finish line.

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

Raising a round should not be included in the highlights of a company update.

Closing customers. Solving problems for users. Shipping updates. Hiring amazing talent. Sure.

But do not have #1 highlight of the update being; round closed.

Customers first. Always.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

@izuruike Same trap on the raise side. Founders assume investors will find them once the product's good. They won't. Investor discovery is as much a distribution problem as customer discovery, and most founders only ever work one of them.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

Investors don't read decks start to finish. Most spend 2-3 minutes skimming before deciding whether it's worth more time.

There's no standard order either. But everyone's screening for fit. If stage, traction, round size or ask are missing, the deck won't get a second look.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

@egorkabantsov Builder feed unlocks the platform. UK side, building ThatRound. AI matching for early-stage fundraising. Always up for connecting with people deeper in the AI-rebuild-everything wave.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

Spent the last 6 months ditching slides for Claude. Rebuilt our matching, ops, intro flows myself. The compounding vs. delegating it isn't close. If a CEO isn't in the tools daily, they're running a slower company.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The only thing worse than having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI is not having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

@xuster The growth goal you don't know how to hit is the roadmap. Every quarter we've set one of those, the gap forced clarity we'd been avoiding for months. Hit-rate doesn't matter. Gap-size does.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

Bringing a fractional CFO into CROSSIP was the smartest move I made as a founder.

It gave the business the oversight it needed and freed me up to actually build.

If you're spending hours on something a part-time expert could do better, that's the role to outsource.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

@sflorimm Yes, but only if you'd build the same product without it. The tools change what's possible. The judgment of what to build doesn't. If GPT decided your product, you're not the founder. You're the operator.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

True, with a sharper version. Most businesses die from being irrelevant, not unknown. Plenty of founders get seen and still get ignored, because they're pitching to people who would never have backed them anyway. Reach without fit is just noise at scale.

https://t.co/756BD1k9wJ

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

Unfortunate Truth:
More businesses die from being unknown than being bad.

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

Unfortunate Truth:
More businesses die from being unknown than being bad.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

@aaron_epstein Agreed, with a caveat. The bet isn't on founder vs MM as an identity. It's on which role forces faster feedback loops. Put a middle manager into a startup and most turn into founders. Put a founder into a 1000-person company and most turn into frustrated PMs.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

Filtering pitch decks with AI just makes the wrong process more efficient.

A pitch deck is a pitch. It isn't a complete dataset. AI is only as good as the context it's given.

Cleaner inbox, but the deal flow isn't better. Fix the input, and the filtering takes care of itself.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

Real founders don't suddenly write like Bloomberg. The bigger problem isn't the AI tell. It's that you're outsourcing your voice before you've worked out what it is. The deck reads the same way three weeks later.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

@SebJohnsonUK Anthropic at £630k London. Seed-stage UK founders hiring AI engineers this year: you're not competing with other startups. You're competing with frontier labs that closed a Series E.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

Most founders jump straight into "how much do we want to raise?"

The question that comes before that: why are you raising in the first place?

Not "to grow". Not "to hire". What specific milestone does this round get you to?

If you don't know, it's too early to be pitching.

[Bradley Jones @ThatRoundBrad]

Procurement is half of it. Fundraising is the other half. The UK is great at first cheques, weaker at matching the right investor to the right stage. Both bottlenecks push companies abroad.

[Russ Shaw CBE @RussShaw1]

The UK doesn’t have a tech problem. It has a procurement problem - an excellent op ed from @SKellyCEO! https://t.co/mVAr29H9gh via @uktnofficial @CirataData @TechLondonAdv @GlobalTechAdv