@AndreRetterath
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General Partner @EarlybirdVC. Building @datadriven_vc. I study how outlier startups and investors win - and share their playbooks, tools, and AI workflows
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Joined December 2017
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Andre Retterath | Decoding Outliers retweeted
Most VCs are aiming at a bullseye on a target they can barely see.
Last year the venture industry did about 15,000 deals. A typical early-stage firm backed twelve of them. The one that cost it most is the one it never saw.
Interesting to see many of the fastest growing companies only talk about the time from launch to 100m ARR, not the months and years of hard work put in between company formation and launch
Dilutes the picture, a lot, and makes it seem even more outlandish growth than it already is
Andre Retterath | Decoding Outliers retweeted
I think about this line often:
“You can beat someone smarter, better, and faster than you if you just work longer, harder, and in more focused ways than them.”
The market today:
VCs: We invest in contrarian founders.
Founder: I have a contrarian idea.
VCs: Interesting. Who else is investing?
I have so many emerging VC friends who struggle to raise their funds
One big blocker is to find and access the right LPs
Any trustful fundraising platform for funds out there that has verified LP dataset, network integration with CRM and LI, and a process management system?
Code is getting cheaper.
Content is getting cheaper.
Design is getting cheaper.
Intelligence is getting cheaper.
Attention, trust, and distribution aren’t.
Guess where the next generation of moats will be built.
AI competitiveness requires the trinity of algorithms, data, and compute
Europe got 2/3 but needs to urgently ramp up compute, which requires heavy investment into our energy grid and affordable electricity
For comparison, the average age of power grids:
- China 20yrs
- Middle East 25yrs
- Africa 30yrs
- North America 40yrs
- Europe 50yrs
There are no low electricity, rich countries
There will be no low compute, rich countries
There will be no low AI, rich countries
Europe needs to invest now
Theoretically, yes
Practically, don’t overestimate real-world adoption
Humans are slow and we already underutilize the power of AI
The next generation of exceptional founders will look very different:
Historically, building a venture-scale company required assembling a great team.
Engineering. Product. Design. Sales. Operations.
AI is changing that equation.
A single founder can increasingly do the work of an entire early-stage team.
But here’s what I find interesting:
As execution becomes cheaper, judgment becomes more valuable.
Knowing what to build.
Understanding what customers actually want.
Choosing the right distribution strategy.
Knowing when to move fast and when to wait.
AI is reducing the premium on execution capacity and increasing the premium on exceptional judgment.
That’s going to change what investors should look for in founders.
We‘ve spent years building AI and automation workflows for venture capital.
One thing surprised me:
The biggest bottleneck isn’t technology. It’s organizational behavior.
Most investment firms already have access to more tools than they need.
They can automate sourcing, enrichment, screening, portfolio monitoring, and reporting.
Yet many still operate almost exactly as they did five years ago.
Why?
Because buying software is easy.
Changing how investment professionals work is hard.
The most successful firms won’t necessarily have the best AI stack.
They’ll have the highest percentage of decisions and workflows meaningfully improved by AI.
That’s a cultural advantage, not a software advantage.
Andre Retterath | Decoding Outliers retweeted
AI for VC Fund Operations, put to work.
Three days in Berlin with real fund-ops challenges. Teams working across reporting, deal flow, portfolio monitoring and institutional knowledge with workshops, build sprints and plenty of comparing notes along the way.
Thank you to everyone who participated and to our partners!
AI is making it cheaper than ever to build a startup.
Ironically, it’s making it more expensive than ever to win a category.
Lower barriers to entry.
Higher barriers to dominance.
That’s the paradox defining the next decade of outlier company building and venture capital
Andre Retterath | Decoding Outliers retweeted
FLUX 3 is the strongest world model in the world.
FLUX 3 is #1 on Physics-IQ, @GoogleDeepMind's benchmark for physical world understanding in video models.
How Physics-IQ works: given the start of a real filmed experiment, can a model predict what physically happens next? Tests span fluid dynamics, optics, solid mechanics, magnetism and thermodynamics, covering how liquids flow, light behaves and objects interact.
In most cases, we substantially outperform all other frontier models, Seedance 2.5, MiniMax H3, Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash, Veo 3.1 and Sora 2, Cosmos3.
The FLUX 3 base model outperforms all other foundation models, while FLUX 3 paired with a physics verification layer scores even higher.
The FLUX 3 backbone, with its strong physics understanding, gives FLUX 3 Action it’s strong action prediction for robotics, while also giving FLUX 3 Video physically accurate motion when you’re creating content, making ads, films and product shots.
Andre Retterath | Decoding Outliers retweeted
One of the clearest signs of intelligence:
How many words it takes you to say something. Signal > noise.
Andre Retterath | Decoding Outliers retweeted
Where AI will disrupt the wealth management value chain
AI won’t hit wealth management evenly: Standardized advice is far more exposed than complex, relationship-driven work
The more bespoke the service, the safer it is:
Trust, judgment and complexity remain harder to automate
Bolting AI onto old processes only gets you so far:
The real gains come from rebuilding workflows around AI
AI-first firms should pull ahead fast:
Lower costs, better margins, more customization and stronger pricing power
Bad data will kill the opportunity:
Siloed systems and fragmented infrastructure will keep firms stuck in pilot mode
The advisor role is changing:
Less process management, more oversight of AI, with humans focused on the decisions that actually matter
Light green: primary AI
Dark green: AI augmented (50%+AI)
Grey: human led (10-20% AI)
Green dot: top opportunities
BCG Wealth Report 2026
