Телеграм канал «Цифровая иммиграция»

My team's captain wasn't celebrating the night we won promotion. He knew the next league needed different players. Better ones. He was right.

Wrexham AFC, same thing at scale. Reynolds and McElhenney took them through 3 promotions in 4 seasons. 76 players left. Only 3 remain from the original squad. The captain got released while celebrating in Vegas.

Startups work the same way. 65% of portfolio company failures = people issues. 20-40% of founders get replaced by their own investors.

Almost nobody asks themselves: "Am I still the right person for this role?"

https://www.si.com/soccer/2024/05/03/wrexham-releases-eight-playeres-roster-turnover

$12 million turned into 154 tonnes of gold and 7,440 tonnes of silver. Not crypto. The year was 1492.

Columbus's term sheet: 10% of all revenue, forever, hereditary. The Crown said yes.

Four voyages, $170M deployed, near-zero direct returns. Then the portfolio kicked in: Cortes ($0 invested, infinite ROI), Pizarro's $580M ransom haul, Magellan's 1,700% return, the Armada's $25B total loss.

The founder got diluted to zero. His heirs sued for 28 years.

The power law isn't a Silicon Valley invention. It's 500 years old.

https://italiantribune.com/the-financing-of-columbus/

Asked a VC colleague: what's THE founder skill? Expected "product" or "resilience." Got: "Selling the future."

Three buyers, three pitches, same magic trick:

→ Users pay for a half-built MVP trusting it'll become their forever tool
→ Investors write checks for 5-person teams they need to see as unicorns
→ Engineers leave FAANG salaries for 0.5% equity and a dream

Chesky sold sleeping in strangers' beds. Butterfield sold a gaming chat as enterprise software. The product wasn't obvious. The conviction was.

The moment a founder stops believing, everyone feels it. Selling the future might be the whole job.

https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful

In 1942, the Luftwaffe found something better than money to make pilots fight harder: vanity. The Knight's Cross medal.

Researchers from Chicago, Harvard, and Zurich studied 5,000+ WWII pilots. Medal chase = 6 extra kills per ace. Average pilot got 2-3 in entire career. After the medal? Performance dropped. Until a shinier tier appeared. Sprint, medal, slump, repeat.

Weakest pilots died at 50% above normal rates, driven by envy when rivals got recognition. Nobody was immune. The treadmill caught everyone.

Now replace "Knight's Cross" with "Forbes 30 Under 30." Replace "kill count" with "round size." The startup ecosystem runs the same treadmill. It works best on talented young founders of no particular background.

The Nazis discovered vanity is cheaper than bonuses. Silicon Valley discovered the same thing.

https://spectator.com/article/how-the-nazis-used-vanity-to-lure-pilots-to-their-deaths/

7 new AI pitch deck generators since January. Decks look like Apple keynotes. Investors still pass.

The generator market = epidemic. The analysis market = barely exists.

12 free tools that tell you what is actually wrong:

→ https://saastr.ai/pitch-deck-analyzer
→ https://www.openvc.app/decks
→ https://unicorn-nest.com/deck-review/start/
→ https://www.evalyze.ai/pitch-deck-analysis
→ https://pitchgrade.com
→ https://www.pitchai.com
→ https://pitch.guide/ai-powered-pitch-deck-review
→ https://www.roastmydeck.xyz
→ https://slidebean.com/pitch-deck-reviewer
→ https://www.pitchleague.ai
→ https://peachscore.com
→ https://pitchbob.io/products/ai-pitch-deck-feedback

Nobody with solid unit economics ever lost a deal because their font was wrong.

A founder asked to hug me at a pitch event. Right after I gave him honest feedback on his mediocre idea.

"Thank you for the honesty. I just really wanted you to remember me."

Forgot his idea within a week. The founder? Burned into memory permanently.

Six months later, similar event. He spots me across the room, opens his arms wide. We both crack up.

Maya Angelou: "People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

Most founders rehearse their pitch. Almost nobody rehearses their presence. Your deck expires in months. The way you handle rejection in 90 seconds? That stays forever.

The question that makes 90% of founders go quiet: "What non-branded Google query puts you on page one?"

Now there's a second one: "How often do AI tools recommend you?"

AI referral traffic = 1.13B visits in June 2025, up 357% YoY. ChatGPT = 87% of it. This is GEO: Generative Engine Optimization.

5 tools to start:
1. Profound (https://www.tryprofound.com) = market leader, 10+ AI engines, from $99/mo
2. Otterly.AI (https://otterly.ai) = Google Alerts for AI, free trial, from $29/mo
3. Frase (https://www.frase.io) = 8 AI platforms, from $15/mo
4. LLMrefs (https://llmrefs.com) = free plan, maps SEO keywords to AI visibility
5. Writesonic (https://writesonic.com) = tracking + content, from $16/mo

Do you know what ChatGPT says about your startup?

https://seranking.com/blog/ai-traffic-research-study/