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Investors see ANOTHER return from Masterworks (!!!!)

That’s 6 sales in 7 months. 29 all time. And the performance?

16.5%, 17.6%, and 17.8%, net annualized returns on sold works held longer than one year (See all 29 at Masterworks.com)

It’s not from stocks, private equity, or real estate… it’s from contemporary and post war art. Crazy, right?

With Masterworks, you don’t need to be a BILLIONAIRE to invest in multi-million dollar art anymore.

Historically, the segment overall has had attractive appreciation and low correlation to stocks.*

Masterworks targets works featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso, identifying what they believe to have significant long-term appreciation potential, not just at the artist level but at the level of individual artworks.

As one of the largest players in the art market, with $1.3 billion invested over 500 artworks, they pass critical advantages through to their 70,000+ members to add art to their portfolios strategically.

Looking to diversify your investments in 2026?

*According to Masterworks data. Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. See important Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd.

Registration is open for the Vibe Your SaaS Startup Pitch Competition and VC/Founder Mixer at Snowflake HQ in Menlo Park, California, on Sep 10, 2026.

We have secured two incredible speakers:

For the pitch competition, we select 5 startups to pitch to our panel judges for 90-seconds using one slide, and we will crown one winner of the event, who will receive the highly sought-after VYS trophy: a Nano Pac-Man.

​Startups are judged on a 5-point criteria:

  1. Innovation: Originality of the idea and strength of the AI advantage.

  2. Market Potential: Size of opportunity and clarity of target customer.

  3. Product Execution: Quality, usability, and stage of product development.

  4. Team: Capability, vision, and ability to execute.

  5. Business Model: Revenue strategy, scalability, and traction potential.

We will also select another 5 to demo, for a total of 10 startup demos.

And of course, there is pizza, networking, and the rare opportunity to talk to other experienced operators, founders, and even investors who might be interested in learning more about what you’re working on.

I look forward to seeing you all in Menlo Park this September.

BuddyPro AI: AI Digital Twins for Experts

Co-founder & CEO: David Riha
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Stage: Bootstrapped
Website: buddypro.ai
Social: LinkedIn

💥 The Big Idea:

BuddyPro helps experts turn their knowledge into AI-powered digital twins. Instead of trading time for consultations, creators, coaches, and operators can launch AI versions of themselves that guide clients 24/7. It turns expertise into a scalable subscription product.

🧠 How It Works

Experts train BuddyPro on their knowledge, frameworks, communication style, and methodologies. The platform then creates a personalized AI expert that can answer questions, guide users, and maintain long-term conversational memory. It is designed for coaches, educators, consultants, and creators who want to scale personalized support without losing their voice. 

🔥 Why We Like It

Most AI tools focus on productivity. BuddyPro focuses on monetizing and replicating expertise. It taps into a much bigger shift: people increasingly want direct access to trusted individuals, not generic content libraries. As AI becomes more personal and conversational, “AI versions” of experts could become an entirely new category of digital product. 

The humans left. But the drones kept fighting. Hard techhouse, electro, warehouse beats, for midnight raids conducted from behind a Faraday cage.

Fire Your PR Agency

Yeah, I said it. And I know I might lose some friends who are still working in PR. But it’s true. Most startups are just wasting money and time chasing journalists with little influence and even fewer followers.

Here is the data.

In 2016, 51% of Americans followed the news all or most of the time.

Today, that number is 36%.

Among adults under 30, it fell from 27% to just 15%.

This is not a blip. This is a structural collapse in how people consume information. And it has profound implications for how you communicate as a founder.

Nobody is reading about you in TechCrunch

It used to work. A founder would get featured in the right publication, the right people would notice, and the company would get a moment. That was the game.

That game is over.

The people you want to reach, investors, potential hires, customers, and partners, are not sitting down with their morning coffee, reading industry publications as a printed broadsheet. They are scrolling LinkedIn and X on their phone. They are also commenting on Reddit threads, watching YouTube, and listening to podcasts recommended by someone they trust.

Attention has moved. PR agencies largely have not.

Where perception actually forms now

  • YouTube has over 2 billion logged-in users each month

  • LinkedIn has over 1 billion members

  • Reddit has 471 million unique weekly active users and ranks among the most-cited sources in AI conversations

  • X is still where important conversations start first

If you check any of the numbers, traditional media reaches only a fraction of this. And unlike a press placement, which you don't control, these platforms let you speak directly, consistently, and in your own voice. This is even more important given that it’s all-out war between traditional pubs and the tech industry.

The playbook that actually works in 2026

Here's what founders who are winning the attention game are doing instead:

1. Replace press releases with points of view: Stop announcing and start arguing. A LinkedIn post with a contrarian take on your industry will reach more of the right people than a press release picked up by three trade publications.

2. Replace journalist pitches with community presence: The Reddit thread where your customers are debating a problem you solve is worth more than any feature story. Show up there. Be useful. Be real.

3. Replace the agency retainer with a content cadence: You don't need an award-winning firm to manage your reputation. You need a clear point of view and the discipline to show up every week. (A smart ghostwriter will help.)

4. Replace coverage with conversation: The companies winning right now are not the ones getting press. They are the ones defining the conversation in their category. That is a fundamentally different approach.

Should you really fire your PR agency?

I am not going to sugarcoat this. The answer for nearly every early-stage high-tech SaaS or AI company is, yes. Do Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI need a professional PR agency? Absolutely. Should Elon Musk get one? God, I hope so. But seed and series-A startups do not.

If you’re still not sure, ask them what they are working on. If they tell you mostly earned media, pitching journalists, managing press relationships, writing press releases, well, you are spending money in the wrong place.

In my experience, the people who are good at what founders need, like ghostwriting viral bangers on X, creating brilliant and attractive charts to post on LinkedIn, or clipping up your most recent podcast and distributing it across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and X, are not what traditional PR agencies are good at.

The founders building industry visibility right now are doing so through direct communication. They post. They appear on podcasts. They engage in the communities where their customers live. They have a point of view, and they express it consistently in public.

That is the new PR. And a traditional PR agency will just get in the way of you and your team executing on it.

🎙️ 047 Gregory and Paul Show - OpenAI is Going Public + Google Rewrites Search

This week, Gregory and Paul dive into one of the biggest shifts in tech right now. OpenAI appears to be preparing for an IPO while Google moves aggressively to reinvent search with AI at the center. The conversation expands to include AI video, changing consumer behavior, billionaire debates, growing anxiety about jobs, and a very real lesson about the gap between AI demos and reality. The recurring theme throughout the episode is that distribution still wins, but expectations around AI may be running far ahead of reality.

I'm a former creative director, 3x head of marketing, and 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 B2B SaaS companies scale their businesses through strategic sales and marketing consulting.

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