VC is an access game: 50 startups later

The Three-Year Compounding Loop Between Media and Venture

Three years ago I started writing on Substack. Everything changed from there

I didn’t have a master plan, just a habit of putting my thinking on product, founders and venture into the open, one post at a time.

What began as a newsletter slowly compounded into an audience, the audience compounded into relationships and those relationships compounded into new opportunities.

Today the writing and the investing are inseparable. My channels are the value-add I bring to the companies I back and I wouldn’t have access to many of those companies without the channels. Later it became my thesis.

Venture capital is going through a structural shift. Capital has been commoditized and money on its own no longer wins the best deals. To get into a competitive round you have to bring something the founder genuinely needs and increasingly that something is distribution. Building a product has never been faster or cheaper, so the market is crowded and noisy and getting heard has become the hard part.

I built my model around exactly this. My large-scale, founder-centric media platforms are a proprietary distribution layer that I put to work for the companies I back. Over three years it turned into 50+ investments, most of them next to top tier funds.

📚 Below is the full story: why the VC market is structurally broken, how I turned media into a distribution layer and the portfolio it opened the door

Inside you will find:

1. Why the VC Market Is Structurally Broken

2. The Three Pillars of My Distribution Engine

3. From Distribution to Access: The Portfolio

4. Backing Founders With Distribution, Not Just a Check

5. What Three Years Taught Me About the Real Moat

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1. Why the VC Market Is Structurally Broken

Over the past decade, venture returns have become increasingly concentrated. A small number of top-tier funds consistently capture a disproportionate share of the outcomes, while the majority of funds compete for a much smaller slice of the value, often fighting over lower-quality opportunities.

The dynamic is driven by a simple structural imbalance:

• Capital has become abundant.

• Truly exceptional founders and companies remain scarce

When the scarce resource is the founder and not the money, the power flips. The best founders are now in a position to choose their investors rather than the other way around, and in that world brand and distribution become the primary drivers of access.

Firms like a16z, Sequoia, Founders Fund, Accel and Index Ventures keep winning allocations not only because of the capital they provide, but because they offer a differentiated value proposition on top of it.

a16z made this explicit by building a media and distribution layer around its capital, positioning itself as a launch partner rather than simply a financial backer. They just published a wrap up of their first year into new media. Read it here!

That reframes the whole competitive landscape.

Venture is no longer only about deploying capital efficiently. It is increasingly about controlling access, attention and narrative and the firms that understand this are the ones quietly winning the rounds everyone else only reads about.

2. The Three Pillars of My Distribution Engine

If capital is commoditized, then access has to be earned through distribution.

So I focused on building large-scale, founder-centric media with global reach, designed to consistently attract high-quality founders, operators and investors. The distribution layer rests on three pillars:

1. Daily newsletters

2. A large social presence (Linkedin)

3. Recurring interview series with some of the most relevant operators and investors in tech

Newsletters, roughly 1M views per month combined:

• Product Market Fit: 77k+ readers, 350+ posts published

• AI Market Fit: 43k+ readers, 100+ posts published

Brands that have sponsored the newsletters include Attio, Framer, Deel, Polymarket, Evertrace, Nova and Granola.

Linkedin Profile: 250k+ followers, generating 2 to 4M impressions per week, a direct and recurring touchpoint with the ecosystem

Interview series, direct and on-the-record conversations with leading founders and investors, including:

• Staffan Helgesson, Co-founder, Creandum

• Chris Best, Co-founder and CEO, Substack

• Mark Cuban, Investor and Entrepreneur (Shark Tank)

• Spencer Skates, CEO and Co-founder, Amplitude

• John Santora, CEO, WeWork

• Robert Herjavec, Investor and Entrepreneur (Shark Tank)

• Anna Piñol, Partner, NFX

• Martin Mignot, Partner, Index Ventures

• Anish Acharya, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)

• …

The strategy itself is simple to describe and hard to execute. Identify high-signal insights and resources, distribute them consistently and ahead of the curve and build long-term trust with a global audience of founders.

Do that for long enough and it compounds into a distribution advantage that becomes very difficult to replicate.

3. From Distribution to Access: The Portfolio

The portfolio is the proof point of the thesis: high-signal content opening the door to competitive rounds, consistently alongside top-tier funds and accelerators like a16z, Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Index and others.

Companies I invested in:

• Replit: AI-powered browser IDE to build and deploy software instantly (a16z, Coatue, Prysm Capital, Google AI Futures Fund)

• HappyRobot: Enterprise AI workforce platform for logistics and supply chain (a16z, Y Combinator)

• Peec AI: Analytics for brand visibility in generative AI search (Singular, Antler, 20VC)

• Throxy: Vertical AI agents automating the full B2B sales funnel (YC W25, Base10 Partners)

• Cubic: AI code-review platform flagging bugs and technical debt in PRs (YC X25, Peak XV)

• Karumi: AI agent delivering interactive product demos on live calls (YC F25, Rebel Fund)

• Momentic: AI-native automated software-testing platform (YC S23, General Catalyst, Standard Capital)

• Azimov: AAA game engine plus multimodal ML for AI-native character IP (a16z Speedrun, NFX)

• Veritus Agent: Voice-first AI agents for consumer lending (Crosslink, Threshold, Emergence Capital)

• Agaton: Agentic platform turning sales conversations into revenue intelligence (Inception Fund, Alstin Capital, seed+speed)

• QFEX: 24/7 global exchange for equities, commodities and FX (YC W25, General Catalyst)

• Agemo AI / Codewords: AI agent platform running business workflows from plain language (Visionaries Club, Firstminute Capital, Sequel)

• Quiver AI: AI lab for vector design and visual code (SVG) generation (a16z)

• Nozomio: Context layer for AI agents, indexing code, docs and sources (YC W25, CRV, LocalGlobe, BoxGroup)

• Flai: 24/7 AI voice and text workers for car dealerships (YC S24, First Round Capital, Toyota Ventures)

• OrangeSlice: Agentic sales enrichment from real-time buying signals (YC S25)

• Keystone: On-call AI engineer that triages alerts and drafts PRs (YC S25, True Ventures, Pear VC)

• Mito AI / Mito Films: AI-native collaborative video creation platform (Lightspeed, KFund, Kibo Ventures)

• Frontnow: GenAI virtual shopping advisor for e-commerce, 117 languages (Peak, PROfounders Capital, Identity Ventures)

• InfiniteWatch: Customer-interaction intelligence monitoring 100% of web sessions (Base10 Partners)

• Omnia: Brand-visibility platform for LLM search engines (Visionaries Club, KFund, Baobab Ventures)

• Zalos: Computer agents automating finance ops inside enterprise systems (YC F25, 20VC, Cohen Circle, 14 Peaks)

• GETASAP Asia: Tech-enabled retail distributor, 8-hour delivery across SEA (YC W25, General Catalyst, Pioneer Fund)

• Novoflow: AI voice employees automating clinic operations and EHR workflows (YC X25)

• Modern Relay: Context-graph infrastructure for enterprise AI (Point Nine, Emerge VC, Amino Collective)

• Minerva Intelligence: AI-native accounting firm for SMBs (YC X25, Amino Capital, Goodwater)

• Didit: Modular identity and fraud-verification infrastructure (YC W26)

• Sellraze: AI reselling assistant pricing and listing items via camera (YC F25)

• Pally: AI relationship manager unifying messaging across WhatsApp, iMessage, X and email (YC W24, Pioneer Fund, Founders Inc)

• YouShift: AI-native OS automating hospital shift scheduling (YC W25, Harvard Ventures, Xfund)

• Fenrock AI: AI back-office agents for banks, starting with compliance (YC W26)

• Gru Space: Space infrastructure, building the first hotel on the Moon (YC W26, NVIDIA GPU Ventures)

• ETN (European Tech Network): European live-streaming tech media network, “Europe’s TBPN” (Angel investors)

• Cua: Open-source “Docker for Computer-Use Agents” (YC X25, Peak XV)

• Klavis AI: Open-source, hosted MCP integration platform (YC X25)

• Hyperspell: Memory layer for AI agents across Notion, Drive and more (YC F25)

• Imagine AI: B2B content pipeline for executive teams (YC F25)

• April: Hands-free AI voice executive assistant (YC S25, Scale Asia Ventures)

• Slashy: AI work assistant executing tasks across Notion, Sheets and more (YC S25)

• Floot: AI full-stack app builder for non-coders (YC S25)

• Hera: AI motion designer generating animations from text (YC S25)

• Fernstone: AI-native full-stack insurance brokerage for businesses (YC F25)

• Grade: API for performance-based payroll for workers and AI agents (YC W26)

• Selfin: AI bank that learns behavior and manages money automatically (YC F25)

• Clova: “Cursor for video editing”, full edits from a text prompt (Founders Inc)

• Gojiberry AI: AI go-to-market agents for B2B teams (YC Spring 2026)

• Lightsprint: Collaborative product development with cloud agents (YC Spring 2026)

• PerfectBit: “Correct by construction” AI training data, verified against physics simulators, scientific databases and formal proof systems (YC Spring 2026)

• Trellis: Agents that run short-term rental operations end-to-end (YC Spring 2026)

• Thomas: “The first AI founder”, a virtual human that runs his own companies (YC Spring 2026)

• Arga Labs: Real-world sandboxes to test agents and agent-facing software (YC Spring 2026)

• Apollo Atomics: The most compact nuclear reactors (YC Spring 2026)

• Standout: Agentic hiring marketplace (YC Spring 2026)

• Akkary: Autonomous Customer Operations (YC Spring 2026)

• Movoa AI: Founder ex-11X, Ari (stealth)

• Nota (stealth)

• HeyL (stealth)

• Litmus Labs (stealth)

• Theorema Inc (stealth)

4. Backing Founders With Distribution

Capital is only part of what I bring. Over the past year I’ve worked with teams directly on distribution and growth, on product launches, visibility and early momentum, including with companies like Vanta, Synthesia, ElevenLabs and HappyRobot, where the channels amplified their reach and positioning at moments that mattered.

The outcomes are measurable. Millions of views generated across the channels, more inbound demand, stronger investor momentum, and in several cases faster revenue growth at an early stage.

That is the part most checks can’t replicate and it is exactly why distribution is becoming a core component of venture value creation rather than an optional layer sitting on top of it.

5. What Three Years Taught Me About the Real Moat

Three years in, the model works. Writing every day brought me closer to founders, and that proximity is what now gets me into rounds I’d otherwise never see.

The newsletters and the following aren’t marketing wrapped around a fund. They’re the reason founders pick up the phone.

The plan from here is simple: keep growing the audience, get to the best founders earlier and back more of them. Capital has become easy to find. The trust and attention behind these channels took three years to build, and that is the real moat.

If you’re a founder building something I should see, or an investor starting to treat distribution as your edge, this is the thesis I’m betting the next three years on.

Cheers,

Guillermo!