One brand built 30+ landing pages through Viktor without a single developer.

Each page mapped to a specific ad group. All deployed within hours. Viktor wrote the code and shipped every one from a Slack message.

That same team has Viktor monitoring ad accounts across the portfolio and posting performance briefs before the day starts. One colleague. Always on. Across every account.

Start free. $100 in credits →

Over 256 people are registered, and pitch decks keep coming in.

Our next event at Entrepreneurs First in SF on Tuesday, May 12, promises to be the best one to date. Why? Not only will we have 5 amazing startup pitches, but we will also have 10 different startups with demo stations.

Plus, the SaaStr conference kicks off in San Mateo on the same day, and we are an unofficial SaaStr partner, and if you bring your SaaStr badge, you’re in!

But you expect more.

Well, you should, and I am excited to announce that our second speaker is Chris Farmer, the founder and CEO of Signal Fire.

We already have Kyle Lui, General Partner at Bling Capital. And I have secured another incredible founder as a guest judge who sold his company to Yahoo for $300 million. I will reveal who they are next week.

Now, if you’re a founder, investor, have significant startup experience, or work at a highly regarded high-tech company, you know what to do. Apply here to attend.

Sponsorship opportunities are always available. Reply for details.

Co-founder and CEO: Jeremy Vince
Location: San Francisco
Stage: Bootstrapped
Website: Nexdiscovery.com
Social: LinkedIn

NexDiscovery is building a proactive intelligence platform for enterprises. Instead of waiting for someone to ask a question, it continuously scans internal systems to surface revenue opportunities, cost leakage, and emerging risk.

The platform is deployed within a customer’s own environment, either in a VPC or on-premises, so sensitive data does not leave the company. It connects systems like CRM or ERP and correlates signals to generate insights and actions.

Most BI tools are still rearview mirrors. NexDiscovery is turning enterprise data into an early warning system. The secure deployment model also gives it a cleaner wedge into larger companies that want AI outcomes without the risk.

This no-bounds 90s nostalgia playlist covers everything from jungle to grunge to trip-hop, hip-hop, hip-house, rave, and britpop.

No 90s hipster trend is left unexplored.

I hear it from people I know back East all the time. “I can’t believe people out there in California make these crazy investments in these dumb startups. What are they thinking?”

Well, I can tell you exactly what they are thinking.

The smartest people on the planet don’t invest in dumb startups because they are dumb. They do it because they are really, really smart.

Let me explain.

Here is a list of startups that looked dumb when they launched.

All huge hits. Massive companies.

There are tons more. Shopify, Instacart, Discord, TikTok, and Hugging Face all looked a bit crazy when they first emerged.

Even Yahoo, when it first launched in 1994, was chasing a really small market of nerds who wanted to go on the “internet.” It was billed as a downright dumb business idea. “How will they make any more?” Eveyone asked. (Fun fact: Yahoo is still a $5 billion business today.)

The truth about startup investing is that the very best investment is in things that look dumb to everyone else. But identifying them? Hard.

Why? Because big companies are already working on them. They have distribution channels, network effects, resources, money, patents, and tons of advantages that a startup lacks. And they will maximize those advantages.

They can easily crush tiny startups.

The very best example of this is the smartphone market and the iPhone. Only a company like Apple had the resources required to make that happen. Hardware startups are notoriously challenging. You probably don’t remember all the failed attempts, like Danger, Helio, Treo, and other smartphone-concept companies that never got off the ground. Even Microsoft, Amazon, and Nokia pushed out smartphone ideas that never took off. It was a smart and obvious category that only a big company could win in.

Juicero, a $700 internet-connected juice machine, is the category winner for dumb and obvious. It was just an expensive way to make something at home that could easily be made just as well with cheaper equipment, which is not a great business.

But why did it get funded at all?

Because it’s a fine line between obvious and non-obvious. I don’t know if there was a way to save Juicero, but WeWork and the app Clubhouse also fall into this category, and in my opinion, they aren’t all that dumb. WeWork still has a business, and Clubhouse, I think, was just early.

They get funded because someone thinks they have the potential to not be so dumb, someday. Sometimes it’s true.

This category is particularly challenging because it usually requires a significant amount of investment dollars and a lot of faith.

What we think of as venture capital that invests in tech startups is designed for private investors seeking returns within a short timeframe, such as 5 to 10 years.

But smart non-obvious ideas are usually deep-tech, research-driven, and require backing from a university or public/private lab. They have long time horizons and often require specialized equipment and a team of PhDs.

OpenAI is in this category, and it worked. But it’s hardly a low-cost, high-impact invention of kids drinking coffee and taking Zyn all night, coding in a dorm room, garage, or basement. (Or a 4th-floor walk-up in NYC on a borrowed laptop.)

My all-time favorite example of a dumb and non-obvious startup idea is Twitter. If I told you I wanted you to invest a million dollars to help me launch a 140-character microblogging product that worked on SMS and AOL Instant Messenger in 2005, you would have thought it was really stupid. And you probably would have passed. But you would have been oh so wrong.

Twitter was a massive success. Just like Twitch, a video network dedicated to streaming live broadcasts of other people playing video games. I am a big fan of Twitter, I mean X. I don’t get Twitch at all. But other people do.

This category is the sweet spot of venture-backed startup success. But at the earliest stages, they often are perplexing. Weird. Even dumb.

What the smartest people in Silicon Valley have figured out is that most smart ideas end up as dumb ideas for a startup. And most dumb ideas are still just dumb ideas for a startup. But every once in a while, a dumb idea for a startup is actually a really smart one.

So if you're struggling with your startup. Maybe your idea is too smart. And if you just dumb it down a bit, you may have one that is just dumb enough to be a success.

Note: I will be giving a talk on the same topic at Venture Saturdays at Bellevue College Building U on Venture Saturday, May 16.

🎙️ 040 Gregory and Paul Show - OpenAI Acquires TBPN, LLM Ad Wars, Cyber Hacks, and the Return of Space

This week’s episode is all over the map in the best way. OpenAI acquires a niche tech media property. Ads quietly go live inside AI. A massive open-source library gets hacked via social engineering. Fake doctors power a billion-dollar startup. Waymo hits real scale. Tech layoffs keep rolling. NASA heads back toward the moon. And somehow, the episode ends with the internet’s latest bizarre philosophy, “retard maxing.”

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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