Where early-stage founders MUST focus to success | E2244

I want you to unpack what you said before, which is founders, maybe especially first-time ones, have this order of operations wrong. They think they need to convince investors of their vision and land some giant amount of money and then deploy capital. Why is that wrong in 2026 as we sit here today? Well, I mean, I I think, you know, you've been in the industry for a good amount of time. I think, you know, a long time ago you would have to raise a lot of money and then build all this infrastructure, whether it's like servers, um, HR people, legal, you do all of those things to try and get a product out there in the hands of a customer.

And I think, you know, through a whole range of uh technology, you can now do a lot of that validation without needing a lot of money. And I think that's why it's kind of moved how people should approach creating an MVP. Before I even had a prototype built while that was being developed, I basically strung together screenshots that, you know, you would use in Figma and you can make it so that, you know, you click on a button and it opens another screenshot. So if you're showing it to a customer, it feels like the app is built. Like my mom thought the app was built, but it was really just a series of like eight screenshots hyperlinked to each other.

So you can kind of do these hacky things to just initially get some, do a temperature check with people to say, hey, would this be interesting to you? Today's This Week in Startups is brought to you by Quadratic, bringing the productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit quadratic.ai slash twist to sign up and use the code TWIST to get one free month of their pro tier subscription. All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calicanis.

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