Founders

Author

Jorian Hoover
November 03, 2025

Hey friends, it’s Jorian—welcome to Into the Ring. I’m a startup fundraising coach and have worked with 50+ founders who’ve raised over $190M.

Every week, I share what elite VCs (a16z / Sequoia / USV / Founders Fund / etc.) invested in, and the strategies for how top founders are raising from them. Plus, I’ll share my two cents on the VC landscape and my favorite VC essays/podcasts for you to check out.

And thank you for being part of this Into the Ring tribe—I’m immensely grateful for this community of 1.7K+ startup founders and operators/investors from OpenAI, Anthropic, a16z, Lightspeed, etc.

If you think someone else might like this newsletter, they can signup here. And if you have any feedback on today’s edition, please do reply to this email. I read and respond to every message that comes through.

Now onto today’s newsletter!

In today’s issue:

  1. Jorian’s 1min take on the latest in VC: “Will today’s bubble produce new tech giants?”

  2. What funding rounds did a16z, Sequoia, USV, and other Tier 1 VCs lead last week? (Oct 25-31, 2025)?

  3. This week’s recommended VC essays & podcast episodes

  4. Today’s deep dive on how to fundraise like a pro: Leverage other founders

1. Jorian’s 1min take on the latest in VC: “Will today’s bubble produce new tech giants?”

On my bike ride this morning I listened to the latest Sharp Tech episode between Ben Thompson and Andrew Sharp.

Ben Thompson brought up the point that today’s AI bubble/mania (see last week’s newsletter for my discussion on that) may help disrupt today’s tech giants.

I worked at Microsoft from 2015 to 2020, and had a first row seat to their growth from a ~$300B company to a multi-trillion dollar company. It was an exciting ride to be a part of—the massive cloud transformation, and seeing Microsoft (re-)cement itself as a tech giant.

But entering 2020, the tech landscape was also becoming…boring. It felt like the big tech companies (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, etc.) were getting more nimble and either subsuming startups left and right, or directly competing with them head-to-head.'

The mania we’re seeing with AI has the potential to change all of that. Not only has it enabled new entrants to the trillion-dollar club (read: Nvidia…and likely OpenAI in the near future), but it is also berthing a group of dreamers that has a small but mighty chance to unseat today’s tech giants.

Take Substrate, the startup founded by Thiel fellow James Proud. Just this past week it raised a $100M Series A (co-led by Founders Fund, General Catalyst, etc.) to do the impossible: reinvent chip manufacturing and restore American leadership in semiconductor production. (PS - Ben Thompson had an in-depth interview with James Proud last week)

Maybe this has a 1% chance of working? Maybe 20%? I don’t know.

But what I do know is that without the AI mania/bubble, we likely wouldn’t get these dream-big investments into the likes of Substrate. And for that reason, even if this AI bubble pops, I’m feeling optimistic about the side effects.

Do you think today’s AI bubble will create new trillion-dollar companies? Email me by replying to this newsletter and let’s start a conversation.

3. This week’s recommended VC essays & podcast episodes

  • Podcast: Sharp Tech - “The Hidden Benefits of Bubble Economics, Microsoft and OpenAI Make a Deal, Notes on Taylor Sheridan, Sora, and Nexperia” (Spotify link - subscription required)

    • Every week, Ben Thompson (creator of Stratechery - IMO, a must-subscribe if you’re into tech) and Andrew Sharp sit down to discuss the latest in tech. As mentioned earlier in this newsletter, I especially appreciated their discussion on the hidden benefits of bubble economics.

  • Newsletter: “Our investment in Steven Bartlett” (link) by Megan Lightcap, Partner at Slow Ventures

    • I included the Steven Bartlett deal in the VC deals section above, but wanted to separately callout Megan Lightcap’s newsletter (she leads the creator fund at Slow Ventures). I think what Slow is doing in the creator economy is fascinating—they’re directly investing into some of the world’s largest creators. As the creator economy continues to boom, will be curious to see if other VCs follow suit.

  • Newsletter “$555B of Cloud Spend” (link) by Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner at Theory Ventures

    • Just unbelievable how Azure, GCP, and AWS have all re-accelerated their revenues over the past couple years, achieving growth rates many late-stage startups would be very happy with.

  • Podcast BG2 Podcast - “All things AI with Sam Altman & Satya Nadella” (Spotify link; Apple Podcasts link; YouTube link)

    • Microsoft & OpenAI finally reached an agreement that enables OpenAI to go public—Brad Gerstner (founder of Altimeter) sat down with the leaders of both companies to talk through the deal and all things AI.

Which VC essays and podcasts have I missed? Email me by replying to this newsletter and let me know your recommendations!

4. Today's Deep Dive on How to Fundraise Like a Pro: Leverage other founders

Most VC’s email inboxes & LinkedIn DMs are flooded with founders requesting to meet with them. As a result, many VCs take shortcuts to navigate through all this outreach:

  1. Is this founder reaching out to me cold, or are they getting introduced by someone I know?

  2. If they’re getting introduced to me, how much do I value the introducer’s opinion?

As to shortcut #2, the gold standard of scoring a high-quality intro to a VC is via another VC-backed founder. Partners at VC firms value their referrals deeply. It’s why founders who have strong friendships with other VC-backed founders are able to score 50+ meetings with VC in a super short window.

But what if you don’t have a strong network of VC-backed founders…

Many founders face this dilemma—they don’t know a deep bench of VC-backed founders. When they go out to fundraise, this presents a problem: they don’t have an obvious intro to many VCs on their list. Sure, they might have some LinkedIn connections to each VC, but many of those connections might be random or not even really know the VC.

Not having intros to VCs is only a big issue if you deal with it too late. For example, if you want to kick off your conversations with VCs two weeks from now, and you don’t know founders (or other people) who can intro you, that’s going to be a challenge.

If you instead recognize this problem 2-4 months ahead of kicking off your fundraise, here are some tangible steps you can take to build out your founder network:

  1. Use some kind of filtering mechanism to identify dozens, or even hundreds, of VC-backed startups that might be interesting to you. For example, you might use Crunchbase to find startups in a similar space as you, or you might try to find startups located within 100 miles of you.

  2. I’ve found that most founders want to help other founders, but they also want to know their time won’t be wasted. So unlike VCs, you have a higher chance of receiving a reply to your cold outreach! Just make sure your outreach is short and to the point, and makes them at ease that you won’t waste your time. Sharing traction and/or social proof can help, too.

  3. Start having conversations with VC-backed founders, ideally IRL but over Google Meets/Zoom is also okay. Ask them about fundraising guidance and learn about their story. If you hit it off and they think you’re a compelling founder, you’ve made a new founder friend and as a side benefit, they can likely intro you to VCs down the road.

  4. Remember: founders know other founders, so as you get to know a few, they can likely intro you to more of their fellow founder friends. And once you’ve made some new founder friends, make sure you invest in those relationships. No one likes the founder who just hits you up for an intro to a VC only to ghost you later on.

If you’ve followed these steps, you’ll begin to know many more VC-backed founders. And this will pay huge benefits when you want to get intros to VCs.

Making founder friends pays benefits far beyond VC intros

Yes, meeting more founder friends is helpful for VC intros, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t share some of the many other benefits:

First, being a founder is lonely and having a strong founder network is key to being able to share your wins and challenges. Other founders have likely faced similar challenges before, so they can hear you out and if you want, even provide some key advice.

Second, founders don’t just know VCs—they also know amazing operators, angel investors, service providers, lawyers, other founders, and potential employees. (and of course they know the best startup meme group chats, too) In building a startup, it’s so important to have the best people at your fingertips, and that’s made a lot easier through a strong founder network.

…plus, there are many other reasons you’ll be glad to have a strong founder network at your side that I haven’t mentioned.

So what are you waiting for? If you’re thinking of fundraising and don’t yet have a cadre of VC-backed founders behind you, then start building that network today. Your future self will be thankful you did.

If you have any thoughts or questions on how to best build out your founder network, feel free to reply to this email. I’d love to hear from you.

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I’ve helped 50+ founders run high-quality fundraises and raise over $190M. Check out jorianhoover.com to read founder testimonials and learn more about my approach.