how to hire a good marketer for your startup: 1. find someone who's already grown a company from your current stage to where you want to be. hiring someone from a big corporation usually makes no sense when you're an early-stage startup. it's a completely different game 2. if you're not great at marketing yourself, pay an experienced marketer to join the final interview. they'll quickly figure out if the candidate actually knows their stuff or is just talking bullshit 3. always ask for references from previous companies. it's one of the easiest ways to check if they've actually delivered the results they claim

don't have ambitious people around you? build your circle online here are some of the best young builders on X to learn from and connect with - @gajesh (18, engineer eigenlabs, building darkbloomai) - @richardzphotoz (19, media & brand a16z) - @zach_yadegari (19, sold cal ai, building yourpersona) - @DeRonin_ (20, ceo arcane, angel investor) - @jia_seed (22, co-founder jam, ex-big tech) - @im_roy_lee (ceo cluely, raised $15m from a16z) - @sandylikesfrogs (Stanford, experiments with AI agents running businesses) - @0xSigil (Thiel Fellow, founder underdogai, backed by a16z) - @ansonyuu (hardware normalfactoryco, AI + manufacturing) - @mathurahravi (design engineer netflix, runs rabbitholeathon) - @AnnieLiao_2000 (founder solaris_ai, grew buildclub to 70k+) - @_rajanagarwal (AI research openai, ex-Amazon AGI) - @aditabrm (built r-1, reducto's document parsing model) - @schisofrenia (co-host MTSlive, AI interviews) - @hannahsgao (math/CS stanford, ex-openai) who else should i add?

if you're 15–19, these are some of the best programs you can apply to in 2026 1. Hack Club (free clubs + hackathons, ages 13–18) 2. Emergent Ventures (grants, ages 13+, rolling) 3. +EV ($1k–$50k grants, no equity) 4. Z Fellows (1 week, any age, optional $10k investment) 5. MIT THINK (up to $1k + MIT trip, deadline ~Jan 1) 6. Thiel Fellowship ($250k, no equity, must drop out) 7. RSI (free MIT/Stanford research, deadline Dec 11) 8. MIT PRIMES (free math research, deadline Nov 2) 9. Simons Summer Research (lab research, US juniors 16+) 10. MITES Summer (free 6 weeks at MIT, US juniors) 11. Beaver Works Summer Institute (4 weeks, AI + engineering) 12. Summer Science Program (5-week research, juniors only) 13. PROMYS (6-week math program, ages 14–18) 14. Canada/USA Mathcamp (5 weeks, ages 13–18) 15. Ross Mathematics Program (6-week math, ages 15–18) 16. SUMaC (Stanford math, grades 10–11) 17. Davidson Fellows ($25k–$100k scholarships, US) 18. Breakthrough Junior Challenge ($250k, video competition) 19. Neo Scholars (CS undergrads, optional $40k + residency) 20. Interact (2 fully funded retreats, ages 18+) 21. Dorm Room Fund ($40k investment for student founders) 22. MLH Fellowship (12 weeks remote + stipend, ages 18+)

read the summary before bookmarking another article you'll probably never open again learning from other people's experiences in your 20s could save you years of mistakes and wasted time

the most active crypto investors who are early on Cosign: cosign.co/lists/paulklayvc/w… lmk who I'm missing!

from 0 to 3,000 followers in just 2 months! drop your best piece of content in the replies, I'll quote a few of my favorites always happy to support smaller creators

one bad agreement can cost you the company you've spent years building and most founders don't fully understand what they're signing until something goes wrong so I built an open-source AI skill that reviews investment agreements and helps you spot the risks before you sign it works with term sheets, SAFEs, SAFTs, convertible notes, and full document sets it checks the terms against frameworks like YC, NVCA, and BVCA, flags risky clauses, explains what they actually mean, and helps you figure out what to negotiate one of my favorite features is that it can also model different exit scenarios and calculate exactly how much each shareholder would receive almost nobody does this properly, even though your liquidation preferences, dilution, and other terms can make the difference between walking away with millions or literally nothing to test it, I uploaded an old SAFT from our first startup we were 19, had lawyers involved, and thought the agreement was perfectly normal within 6 minutes, it found a bunch of things we should've questioned: personal guarantees, investor protections that heavily favored the other side, restrictions on how we could price our tokens, and even a reference to a separate agreement we'd never seen knowing all this beforehand would've completely changed how we approached that deal of course, AI won't replace a good lawyer, but it can help you understand what matters, ask better questions, and catch expensive mistakes before signing it's completely free and open-source just send this to Claude Code, Codex, or any other AI agent with terminal access: run npx skills add paulklayvc/skills --skill vc-terms-review and set it up for this agent

the exact same principles that apply to poker also apply to venture capital 1. the right decision can still lose going all-in with pocket aces is usually the right move, even if your opponent ends up hitting the card they need. investing in a great company can also be the right decision, even if it eventually gets written off you always need to think long-term. if you're consistently making bets with positive expected value, you should come out ahead over enough repetitions but you can still lose money in the short term, and that doesn't make you a bad investor 2. trust your intuition only when you've seen the same situation a hundred times intuition should work like a trained neural network. with enough training data, it performs well in familiar situations. but when it encounters something completely new, it's much more likely to get things wrong that's why decisions in unfamiliar territory deserve more time and careful thinking 3. discipline starts with your deal funnel we see dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pitches every day, but we've invested in just over 28 companies you need real conviction before making an investment. there's no reason to deploy capital just for the sake of deploying it at the same time, you can't afford to move slowly when a great deal comes along the trick is knowing how to wait patiently and act fast when it matters 4. remember what founders promised you one of the most useful habits I've developed is writing down the promises and milestones founders give you, then comparing them with what actually happens this works for companies you've invested in, companies you might invest in later, or even just to test your own judgment and with AI, tracking all of this has become incredibly easy if the actual numbers are even remotely close to what the founder projected, that's already a great sign even better if they managed to pivot and achieve much better results in my experience, 95% of the time, the results look completely different 5. know when you're going to fold before the hand starts you should have a clear plan for when to walk away before you even play the hand in venture, this becomes especially important when a portfolio company asks for a bridge round I think the best approach is to evaluate the opportunity as if you were seeing the company for the first time would you invest in this company today, knowing everything you know now? if the answer is no, you probably shouldn't put more money in the fact that you've already invested isn't a good enough reason to invest again 6. be honest with yourself you're going to make mistakes in both poker and investing. the important part is learning from them and constantly improving your judgment one of the GPs at Begin Capital always says something I really like: after your first 100 deals, you love everything. after 2,000, you think everything is terrible. only after that does your radar finally become calibrated, and you start making good investment decisions and there are some great examples of people who went from professional poker to successful careers in VC: @hosseeb, @pratyushbuddiga, @seanlippel, @gametheorizing, @JeffGrossPoker, @phil_hellmuth, @zachcoelius

the whole idea behind late-stage investing is that it's supposed to be less risky but what's interesting is that this is becoming less and less true in today's market businesses and business models used to be much more stable if a company had $5M in revenue and 40% margins, you could reasonably expect those numbers to stay relatively stable. they weren't going to change dramatically in a matter of days now that can happen all the time margins can change overnight, customers can quickly switch to a better solution, and an entire business model can become much less attractive in a very short period of time and there's another thing I think a lot of people are overlooking we're now entering a world of trillion-dollar companies but the number of investors who can actually participate in rounds at those valuations is much smaller think about it if you invest at seed and want to exit at Series B, there are plenty of funds that can participate in that round and potentially buy your stake but if you invest at a valuation of several hundred billion dollars and the company eventually reaches $1T, who are you going to sell to? there are very few investors capable of writing checks that large at that point, an IPO might be your only realistic exit opportunity, and the company might have plenty of reasons to stay private so you could end up taking on significant risk at a late stage, while also having far fewer options to exit which makes the traditional idea that later-stage investing is automatically safer a lot less obvious than it used to be

find the right decision-maker, figure out what they actually want, and get a message worth replying to you can now add this to your AI agent with one command here’s how it turned one sentence about a startup into an entire pipeline of potential partners: “I run a B2C meditation app. help me find partners who already have my audience.” it asked 4 quick questions: - what do your best users use it for? - how big are you? - what can you offer? - which market are you targeting? answers: - falling asleep - under 10k users - rev share - global english first, it told me who not to target: sleep podcasts and sleep-story creators they solve the same problem as the app, so they’re basically competitors, not partners instead, it pointed at mattress and sleep-accessory brands why? their customers already return products because “it didn’t help me sleep” that’s a problem these companies already lose money on so instead of: “want to cross-promote?” the pitch becomes: “put a card in the box, your buyers get a free month, you get a share of every subscription, and your refund rate drops” then it found who actually owns this decision the affiliate manager listed on the company’s own affiliate page wrote the first email and built a two-week outreach plan all from one sentence I open-sourced the skill, so you can run the same process for your own business send this to Claude Code, Codex, or any other agent with terminal access: run npx skills add paulklayvc/skills --skill decision-maker-outreach and set it up for this agent