The VYS: Startup Pitch Competition + VC/Founder Mixer is this week.

Here are the event stats: 658 people applied to attend. 458 were approved, for a 70% acceptance rate.

We kept the bar high because this event is designed for founders to network with fellow founders, angel investors, investment scouts, VCs, and corporate development representatives.

Oh, and I ordered this as our 1st-place trophy for the pitch winner.

The response to the competition was far bigger than we anticipated. 239 founders applied to pitch. 55 decks were submitted. 5 were selected to pitch. And 1 received an honorable mention. I was expecting 10 to 15 decks. So the filter from application to getting on stage was just 2%. But if you submitted a deck, it rose to 9%.

For all future events, founders will submit their pitch deck as a link during signup to make it easier to manage for everyone.

📢 SHOUT OUT to every founder who submitted. You all rock! 📢

Remember that no matter where you are on your journey, keep going. Entrepreneurship is an endurance sport. And just like bicycle racing (my favorite sport), winning is all about outlasting your competition. Winners do whatever it takes to stay in the race.

Now, here are the 5 pitch competition finalists:

Honorable mention went to Trotta.

While we received a ton of outstanding entries, we felt that these companies excelled across all five of our selection criteria listed on Luma:

The final 5 all have innovative products, are pursuing venture-scale opportunities, demonstrate strong product execution, are led by well-rounded, experienced teams, and have clear business models.

If you weren’t selected, we encourage you to submit again for future events. The Vibe Your SaaS // IRL calendar is now updated with our Q2 and Q3 events.

And we still have one or two slots if you’re a founder or investor and want to attend.

Founder and CEO: Sandra Bustos
Location: Palo Alto, California
Stage: Pre-Seed
Website: Meshly.ai
Social: LinkedIn

Meshly prevents revenue leakage by reconciling CRM, contracts, and billing before errors compound. It creates a single validated view of every deal across systems. Finance teams fix issues early instead of chasing discrepancies at month-end.

Meshly pulls data from tools like Salesforce, Stripe, and NetSuite and checks for mismatched fields, terms, and pricing. It flags gaps and exports a clean file for review. Teams validate once instead of reconciling three systems manually.

System drift quietly costs SaaS companies time, margin, and credibility. Meshly focuses on the revenue handoff, where most leakage starts. As pricing and deal complexity grow, a dedicated validation layer feels necessary.

This playlist is a tribute to the coming onslaught of autonomous agents. Industrial pulse, dark techno minimalism, and cinematic escalation built for founders operating inside the machine. Remember, AI agents are relentless and never stop until they have killed Sarah Connor to prevent the birth of John Connor.

When the cost of building software collapses, the company is no longer defined by engineering alone. The advantage shifts to narrative, trust, distribution, and the ability to operate in both the digital and physical world.

These new roles are quietly emerging at the best AI companies. They are not titles you will see on LinkedIn, at least not yet, but you will soon.

No, this is not just an events person. It’s a critical roles that own everything the company does face-to-face in real life. With so much spam online these days, getting the right people together in a room is now the most powerful GTM move a startup can make.

What they do:
They organize founder dinners, invite-only demo nights, meet-ups, hackathons, and trade show strategy. They obsess over the list, find awesome venues, keep conversations flowing, and handle follow-ups. They transform a boring event into something that gets people talking for months.

Who is a good fit:
Obviously, someone who's thrown great events before. They need a sharp taste for vibes and people, must be particular about who gets invited (and who gets turned away), not mind working nights and weekends, and can turn one night into long-term relationships without it feeling forced.

With AI, content production is nearly infinite. It spits out endless generic crap in seconds. Taste is what keeps you from sounding like everyone else. This person understands audiences, what goes viral, and what your users care about.

What they do:
They develop narratives, write or oversee copy and content, launch announcements, executive posts, onboarding flows, and error messages. Everything the company puts into words. They kill anything robotic, corporate, or boring. They decide what gets said, how it gets said, and what stays unsaid.

Who is a good fit:
Look in non-obvious places. English majors can be great, but they can also be a disaster. You want someone who’s in touch with your audience, has shaped a voice at scale online, and has dealt with real users, real opinions, and real feedback. Ideally, they have a few thousand followers on X. Because if you can do that, well…

This person knows how to make the product spread like a virus. Unlike the government, it is intentional. They do what works. Organic or paid. It doesn’t matter. They aim for real momentum to accelerate the business.

What they do:
They set up experiments across communities, creators, partnerships, weird side channels, anything that might work. They test fast, kill losers, double down on winners, and keep tweaking until users start pulling the product in naturally. They watch real signals: friends inviting friends, and of course, revenue growth.

Who is a good fit:
Someone who's already made something blow up once, grown a real community from scratch, or run growth at a startup where the numbers actually curved the right way. They're not obsessed with data. They are obsessed with winning. And love trying out odd growth ideas, and can find that one lever that moves everything.

People must believe your product works, even when other startups are yelling that they can do the same things. They dive in deep and don’t come back up for air until they have uncovered undeniable evidence of your product’s greatness.

What they do:
They gather customer stories that hit hard, line up third-party benchmarks, build live performance dashboards, turn security audits into trust signals, write straight-up case studies, and get happy users to talk about the company in public. They push the team to be open about how it really performs, so nobody thinks it's just hype.

Who is a good fit:
They love the product and love making customers happy. Look for someone from customer marketing, sales support, trust & safety, or compliance who can also tell a story. They're credible, detail-obsessed, good at getting customers to speak up, and okay with being transparent even when things aren't flawless.

Clawdbot showed us what’s possible with agents, and Perplexity Computer takes it to the next level. This emerging role is responsible for ensuring the product works for AI agents, who are becoming real users acting on behalf of humans.

What they do:
They build APIs that agents can rely on, set up permissions and guardrails, add human-override controls, create dashboards to track what agents did, support multi-agent flows, and nail the basics early so other agents start plugging into us by default. They design with both product and agent logic in mind.

Who is a good fit:
Someone who's built solid developer tools, APIs people love, or already shipped for today's LLM agents. They get product instincts, care about the dev experience, can see where agents are going, and get fired up about becoming the underlying pipes rather than just another shiny app.

But harder than ever to market and sell.

The defensible moats are shifting to narrative, trust, distribution, IRL execution, and agent-native infrastructure. These new GTM roles are what will separate breakout AI companies from the noise.

The founders who will win in this next wave will find these people and hire them early. This way, they’ll own the conversation, the room, the feed, and the agent layer and have the evidence to prove why they are the best solution in the market.

🎙️ 036 Gregory and Paul Show - The Agent Economy Is Here

This week, Gregory and Paul cover one of the strangest mixes of topics yet. A Pentagon showdown with Anthropic. Autonomous coding agents that work while you sleep. A viral lawyer claiming to run his entire firm on Claude. The collapse of internet distribution. And the McDonald’s burger marketing war that somehow became the most entertaining story on the internet.

I'm Gregory Kennedy, founder of Vibe Your SaaS. After 20 years in Silicon Valley, devising new ways to get people to click on things, I now help early-stage SaaS companies scale their businesses through strategic GTM consulting.

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