BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

VC Accelerator 🚀 

YC for VCs

Available Domain: VC Foundry

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: There are tonnes of startup accelerators out there to help aspiring founders build their businesses. Y-Combinator. Techstars. Angelpad. But what everyone out there who wants to become a VC? They’ve clearly been forgotten about, which is why they feel the need to gas themselves up so much.

So let’s create an accelerator for all the aspiring VCs out there.

Market Size: According to data from industry associations and research firms, there are approximately 8,000-10,000 active venture capital (VC) firms globally as of 2022 with hundreds of thousands of people hoping to get into one of these firms

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: An accelerator where aspiring VCs can join to learn the business

How it Works:

• There are 2 - 3 cohorts per year. Some cohorts are full-time, some are part-time

• During the program participants are taught how to raise and run a fund, are given talks from VCs and can also participate in a VC simulation game to show off what they’ve learned

• There’s also a program for aspiring aspiring angel investors too

Go-to-market: Start pitching this idea to MBA programs and business schools where many people are aspiring to become VCs to gauge interest

Business Model: Charge for the program

Startup Costs: All you need is tome to pull together the materials here and some connections in the VC space and you’ll bee good to go

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Hold: You’ll built up an incredible network with this business, so best to keep it for as long as you can

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Extreme altitude wines are hand-harvested from the highest vineyards in the world, with these intense flavors only come from pushing limits.

One problem though. They’re rare. So get them while you can.

The first 10 people who order with the link below will get $25 off & free shipping.

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

My First Fire

We all think that kids need to spend more time outdoors, learning skills that don’t involved tapping on a screen, right?

Well with their first fire kit they can do exactly that, learning about the magic (and dangers) of fire like cavemen did many moons ago.

Is there a high probability that your house will get burned down? Sure, but ask yourself can you afford not to take the risk of teaching your child about the wonders of fire? We thought so…but also take no responsibility if your house does happen to burn down.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Japanese Concepts

Japanese culture is fascinating, and the more we learn about it the more we want to know about it. It’s no wonder that Japanese concepts like Ikigai (sense of purpose) or kaizen (always seek to improve) have become hot topics and search terms in recent years. And these different concepts can be leveraged to build businesses.

Business Ideas

• Zen Garden Design: Create custom zen gardens for homes and offices to promote mindfulness and relaxation.

• Tsundoku Book Subscription: Curate and deliver carefully selected books to embrace the concept of tsundoku - collecting books without reading them all immediately.

• Ikebana Workshops: Host online or in-person classes teaching the art of Japanese flower arrangement.

THE MONEYSHOT

From $0 to $400m in 2 Years

What do Buzz Aldrin, Richard Feynman and Drew Houston all have in common? And no this isn’t the start of a bad joke.

In fact they all have the same thing in common that these 4 founders have, who have managed to build a $400m business in 2 years.

This is their story.

Aman Sanger, Arvid Lunnemark, Sualeh Asif and Michael Truell (L - R) are names you’ll need to remember for the future.

These four coding wizards met at MIT which boasts incredibly successful graduates like Aldrin, Feynman, Houston and many others. But these four founders, like every single coder who has gone before them, have always found certain parts of coding, like debugging for example, painful. Turns out coding isn’t as fun or sexy as it’s portrayed in Hollywood.

So these four decided to team up and do something about it and in 2022, when they were in the final year at MIT, they decided to take a fork of VS Code (a code editor developed by Microsoft) and heavily customized it for AI-assisted programming.

They name their company Anysphere and their product Cursor.

Very quickly the business took off as developers switched to using Cursor, which makes coding faster and easier to do. Just how easy? Well last month a video went viral of this 8 year old used Cursor to build a chatbot in just 45 minutes.

Soon after launching investors could see the potential in this product and just 1 year after founding the business they raised an $8 million seed round led by OpenAI’s Startup Fund with participation from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi and other angel investors.

And since 2023 growth has accelerated, so much so that just last month they raised $60 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Thrive Capital, OpenAI Startup Fund and Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean. With the new investment, the startup is now valued at $400 million and has more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue already. That seems like a pretty high valuation multiple to us, but since they’re growing fast we expect they believe they’ll grow into it.

But so far these guys have killed it and are surely on a path to building a billion dollar business. But what can we actually learn from them apart from the fact that people who go to MIT are clearly super smart? Well it’s actually incredibly simple.

Go find your smartest friends and start a business. It could be the best thing you’ll ever do.

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