š½Early stage investor in NYC š©āš¼Partner at Remedy Product Studio šāāļøFounder of Field Advantage Advisory š£Startup Cheerleader
New York, NY
Joined September 2011
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- Following612
- Followers627
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Does anyone actually work at @tiktok_us? Iām starting to think there are no humans there.
TikTok is where I got my start as a creator. I began posting about company building and fundraising last spring, and since then, I have built a little community of people who matter a lot to me.
But recently, I've had it with TikTok. For the past ~4 months, my account has shown a red notice on my profile saying itās āineligible for recommendation.ā But every time I run the standard account check to see if one of my videos was incorrectly flagged for a violation, it shows up all clear with no issues.
Why does this matter? Because TikTok normally shows a new video to at least 200 people within the first 24-48 hours of it being posted to test it's resonance for the For You page (part of the algorithim). This is true even for people with zero followers.
Since June, my new videos have consistently shown view counts well under 50 in that same determination period. This tells me something on the back end is very wrong, and it has nothing to do with my content. The only people seeing my content are people who visit my page directly.
Iāve reported this issue more times than I can count. What I get back are copy-paste messages from a robot, telling me to submit another ticket. Then the ticket gets closed before anyone fixes anything. Repeat.
Iām this close š¤ to giving up on the account completely and moving exclusively to Instagram. So if you work at @tiktok_us or know someone who does (ideally, on the creator support team), Iād be so grateful for an intro. All I want is to speak to a real person.
This is the worst customer experience Iāve ever had with any platform in my entire life. And I can't believe it's gotten so bad that I have resorted to X just so I can get in front of someone. š¤
Jess Schram retweeted
Major green flags in a founder:
1/ crazy grit, wonāt give up
2/ started building before pitching investors
3/ constantly moving, constantly generating new information
4/ deeply technical
5/ not addicted to founder cosplay
6/ obsessively talks to users / canāt stop talking to customers
7/ finds creative, experimental marketing channels
8/ genuinely cares about what theyāre building
9/ never blames others or external factors
10/ tinkered with projects obsessively
11/ constantly comes up with interesting ideas
12/ knows their metrics cold
13/ doesnāt chase hype, chases truth
14/ excellent storyteller, can sell the vision to hires, investors, and customers
15/ can clearly explain what they are building in one sentence
If you hit a good chunk of these, tell me what you are building.
Nobody breaks into VC by having the right resume.
They break in by having hot takes, controversial opinions, and unique ways of looking at the world that nobody asked for yet.
Good VCs will end up being right about topics people thought were crazy 5+ years ago and by betting on the founders who built in those lanes.
Stop optimizing your background. Stop chasing hype. Start publishing your opinion and building relationships with brilliant, beautiful weirdos.
Jess Schram retweeted
Where you live is a proxy for who you surround yourself with. SF has the highest density of high ambition, high drive, high horsepower people of anywhere in the world.
Move to SF and watch it change your life. NY is a strong second place contender. More people, less talent density though.
When Return on Cognitive Spend (RoCS) replaces EBITDA as a company's solvency metric, "headcount" stops meaning people. We're more than halfway through 2026. If you can't prove every dollar of electricity you burn produces a verified unit of intelligence, you're functionally bankrupt.
Really loved this essay by @alexwg and @PeterDiamandis. More here: solveeverything.org/#top
The best product doesnāt always win. The product with the best distribution does.
When a founder tells me, āour competitor doesnāt have X, Y, and Z, but we do,ā I donāt really care. Technically better means nothing if nobody knows you exist.
You want to beat the company with the slightly better product? Start selling harder than everyone else.
Distribution and execution win. Every time.
Donāt hate the messenger š¬
Jess Schram retweeted
If you want to start a startup, don't learn "entrepreneurship." Learn how to build things. The hard part of startups is not "entrepreneurship" but product: to know what to build, and to be able to build it.
Literally wrote this a year ago and shockingly still think itās incredibly relevant š medium.com/remedy-product-stā¦
Care less about being right.
Care more about *getting it right*.
Most people donāt actually seek truth, they seek self validation.
Donāt be that person.
Memory is becoming the moat in enterprise AI.
Not features. Not UI. The model that has absorbed 18 months of your workflows, your team's decisions, your customer patterns. That's the one that's impossible to rip out.
Switching cost used to be integrations. Now it's institutional knowledge. Different problem entirely.
The old problem had a price tag. The new one has no ceiling.
Good luck SaaS!
Jess Schram retweeted
@nikesharora told @HarryStebbings this week that long-term token pricing should be 1/10 of what it is today.
That's probably conservative. Token costs have already dropped 10x in two years.
When the cost of intelligence approaches zero, the SaaS companies charging by the seat have a real problem. They're already starting to face it...
The seat was never the value. It was always the work getting done.
Jess Schram retweeted
Founders who raise seed after seed, dilute their equity, and still canāt turn a profit get celebrated
Founders who bootstrap, stay risk on, have majority equity & profitable businesses get overlooked
Clout over cashflow nowadays.
Preach š
A significant portion of unicorn founders we met were rejected over 50 times before finding a VC that was willing to be anti-consensus and lead the round. We met one unicorn founder who was turned down 100 times during their seed raise because the product vision sounded like a science fiction movie and the team didn't tick any of the usual AI founder boxes. In reality the company was 5yrs ahead of its time and investor consensus was a lagging indicator of its potential.
Most people see rejection as a big setback, but for the best founders it acts as a forcing function; without early funding, the founders are forced to prioritise building, testing and customer pull instead of optimising for a flashy pitch-deck. Funding scarcity builds a level of resilience and operational hustle that a huge seed round could never teach.
I think there's a misconception from founders that VCs read decks and source all day.
The truth: VCs are busy managing their portfolio. A typical VC spends 70%+ of their time on companies they've already backed/fund admin. New deals get the rest.
Please be patient with us!
The founders who close fastest don't just know more investors. They know the right ones.
Too many skip this research and wonder why their outreach isn't landing.
šThis tool fixes that. @StephNass
New York has hundreds of VCs. But do you know 10 who actually invest in your space?
Probably not. Thatās why we built Google Maps for Venture Capital.
We call it OpenMap:
1ļøā£ Go to OpenMap (link below)
2ļøā£ Zoom into NYC
3ļøā£ Filter by fintech, SaaS, pre-seed, or growth
4ļøā£ See whoās active, where theyāre based, and what they invest in
Then go deeper: check their website, find warm intros, and understand your local ecosystem.
If youāre a founder in NYC, you should know this map.
If youāre a VC in NYC, you should be on it.
š½ Explore 700+ investors in New York City here ā openvc.app/to/recTlsUZPa9Zodā¦
PS: Not in NYC? Youāll probably find your city there too.
Partially true, and I partially disagree. On one hand, the founders I move fastest on are ones I've gotten to know over time. On the other hand, if a founder is always raising, it sends a signal of constant distraction. I'd rather them tell me what the business is focused on.
A founder told me heās not raising right now.
Thatās the wrong mindset.
Youāre always raising.
Youāre just not always pitching.
The founders who close fast spent 12 months building friendships with investors before they needed the money.
Dinners. Conferences. DMs. No ask.
By the time the round opens, investors already know you, like you, and trust you.
The raise is just paperwork.
Comment Sprint if u wanna join our June cohort to expedite your fundraise.š