The Learning Corner by Precursor

This week on The Learning Corner, Mia and Charles dig into Andreessen Horowitz's $35 million bet on the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a two year college alternative backed by Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia and OpenAI. They then unpack a sharp post from signüll arguing this may be both the best and worst time to start a company, as AI makes building cheap and advantages disappear just as fast, with...

This week on The Learning Corner, Mia and Charles dig into Gil Dibner's argument that venture has barbelled into two extremes, a tiny set of consensus darlings that can raise at any price and everyone else, who are increasingly paying pure gold prices for fool's gold. Then they turn to Dario Amodei's essay "We Must Pace the Frontier," the rare moment where Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk all agr...

This week Mia and Charles dig into a market that only seems to have two speeds. Ethan Kurzweil of Chemistry argues the trillion dollar startup is a pink elephant nobody can unsee, and that the pedestrian double or triple has become a relic of a bygone era. David Cahn looks at what happens after the money lands: a generation of well funded teams with big visions and no clear steps to get there. Nik...

This week we sit down with Nic Poulos, Co-Founder and General Partner at Euclid Ventures and one of the sharper voices on vertical AI, to pressure test the thesis as we head into the end of Q3. We dig into what defensibility actually looks like when any founder can spin up a vertical AI product in a weekend, why a $500M median exit is great math for some funds and tough math for others, and where...

This week on The Learning Corner, Mia and Charles dig into how the rise of AI agents is paradoxically driving startup founders to work longer and harder than ever, with some monitoring their bots around the clock and describing the experience as nothing short of addictive. They then unpack a wave of CTOs and engineering leaders quietly walking away from their roles, driven by founder mode, prefere...

This week on The Learning Corner, an observation from investor Matt Turck that startups today are either AI-native rocketships or left for dead opens up a real conversation about what that binary actually means for founders building outside the hype cycle. Michelle Volz's essay "To Be or To Do" uses military legend John Boyd's framework to argue that Silicon Valley has quietly shifted from rewardi...

This week on The Learning Corner, Mia and Charles dig into Gil Dibner's argument that Series A investors have fundamentally abandoned their core function, opting instead to invest way too late, way too early, or simply accumulating options without conviction. They then unpack Sequoia's twenty-year hype analysis that shows the most valuable companies are almost never founded in the peak hype year o...

This week on The Learning Corner, we dig into three pieces that all orbit the same uncomfortable question: who is actually accountable when things go wrong? Angela McNeal's "The Architecture of Blame" argues that AI does not invent accountability gaps, it industrializes them at machine speed across every workflow at once. New academic research reveals that VC-backed startups are statistically more...

This week Mia and Charles are joined by Precursor intern Aleena to dig into three good reads. First up, Ashley Smith's piece on the pressures young founders face today, including predatory incubators that trade small checks for outsized equity stakes. Then, YC's Fall 2026 Requests for Startups, featuring the first ever entry from a sitting US Secretary of the Army. They close with Frontier, a piec...

This week on The Learning Corner, Mia and Charles dig into Nick Chirls' case for patience as an underrated venture strategy, using the owners versus tenants framing to explain why short term thinking is eating the industry. They then explore David Deming's argument that humans still hold a real edge over AI in social learning, especially in reading people and building trust from just a handful of...

This week Mia and Charles dig into whether using AI tools means quietly giving away your most valuable knowledge, what Sierra learned building a single company wide AI agent instead of one per department, and why data, not tokens, might be the next trillion dollar category in AI. They also touch on New York's new one year moratorium on large data center construction. Tune in for a debate filled co...

Is AI venture living through its biggest bubble yet, or its biggest winner-take-all cycle ever? Charles and Mia break down Samir Kaji's read on the duality driving valuations to record highs. They also dig into a Stanford field experiment proving cold pitches to investors work far more often than founders think, and challenge Tomasz Tunguz's take on why most startups don't actually have a real moa...

This week we dig into a piece from Halle Tecco exploring how healthcare VCs are splitting into two camps on ownership discipline as AI drives valuations to decade highs. We also break down Sam Lessin's argument that the SpaceX IPO signals the end of the DCF as the only globally scalable story of value, and what it means that minority belief systems can now pool conviction at trillion-dollar scale....

This week we featured Tony Fadell's interview with Lenny Rachitsky, covering how great products are built with pain at the center and why fast software is the new fast fashion. We also dig into Hunter Walk's practical framework for how early-stage VCs should communicate SAFE note markups to their LPs. And we close out with Reuters' reporting on Kirkland and Ellis committing $500 million to build a...

This week on The Learning Corner, economist Alex Imas makes a counterintuitive case that AI will not eliminate human labor but instead relocate scarcity toward a "relational sector" of nurses, teachers, craftspeople, and care workers where human presence is the product itself. Lisa Kostova shares one of the most honest accounts of vibe coding gone wrong, arriving at a major conference with 40 read...

This week on The Learning Corner, we dig into Rachel Karten's viral piece on AI-obsessed leadership and what happens when organizations adopt AI without any real strategy. We then discuss Karan Dhir's framework for career bets that actually compound versus the ones that just look like progress, including a debate on whether the AI era has quietly rehabilitated the generalist. We close with Charlie...

This week on The Learning Corner, Charles and Mia discuss a good read explaining why the quiet builder playbook is no longer enough and why founders must now own their narrative to win. They dive into a provocative take on the job market arguing the signal collapsed, not the opportunities, and what that means for the next generation of candidates. They also explore the rise of the High-Impact Indi...

This week on The Learning Corner, we open with an argument on why traditional networking culture is mostly negative selection and why broadcasting your work publicly is the stronger play. We then dig into why AI is making the "what" of your work more important than the "how," and which skills actually become load-bearing in that world. We close on a sobering piece about AI psychosis spreading thro...

This week on The Learning Corner, Charles and Mia dig into who actually owns the AI agents you build at work and whether you can take them with you when you leave. They unpack what happens to a founder's standing inside a VC firm when their partner walks out the door, and why that moment is really the start of a new fundraise. They close with a sharp framework for separating companies that are tru...

This week on The Learning Corner, Charles and Mia dig into Lucas Vaz's viral thread arguing that the era of easy, low-priced, diversified venture investing is over and that seed fund math is fundamentally broken. They also break down Garry Tan and YC's official guidance on why founders need to stop conflating LOIs, GMV, and ARR before it costs them investor trust. The episode closes on China's dec...

This week on The Learning Corner, Manny Medina, co-founder of Outreach, shares his biggest regret as a founder and why he believes killing your competition is the actual job description of a VC-backed founder. Samir Kaji breaks down his fundamental truths in venture capital today, touching on the widening barbell between large and small firms, ARR reporting concerns, and honest uncertainty around...

This week we are diving into whether domain expertise is becoming more important in Vertical AI, not less, breaking down new data from The Euclid Ventures team that challenges the narrative that youth and technical ability are all you need to build a winning company. We then get into Micah Rosenbloom's breakdown of seed valuation inflation and what it means for early stage return math in today's m...

This week on The Learning Corner, Mia and Charles dig into a piece by Ashley Smith of Vermilion Cliffs Ventures on why seed round names have become essentially meaningless, with YC Demo Day valuations hitting $40M post for companies with eight weeks of runway. They then unpack Auren Hoffman's sharp and practical breakdown of how to actually ask for advice without wasting people's time, and why clo...

This week on The Learning Corner, Ashley Mayer makes the case that tech's biggest players have forfeited the narrative and it is now up to startup founders to give people a reason to root for the future. Pavel Prata at Murph Capital argues that the value-add model that transformed venture is now playing out one layer up at the LP level, and most allocators haven't caught up yet. We also dig into J...

This week we cover the explosive whistleblower exposé on Delve, a YC-backed compliance startup accused of fabricating audit evidence and leaving hundreds of clients unknowingly exposed to legal liability. We then dig into Jerry Neumann's "We Have Learned Nothing," a data-backed argument that decades of startup frameworks have produced no measurable improvement in whether companies actually succeed...