Founder's take on VC in 2026: pre-seed easy, everything else needs frontier-lab vibes

anselm · x · 2026-10-07

An experienced founder (aliasaria) summarizes what raising VC capital actually feels like right now:

• Pre-seed is doable on a good team and idea — lots of hungry $60–200M funds eager to write $1–2M cheques.
• The next cheque is confusing: seasoned founders keep calling asking "help me figure out what is going on" (plus "should I just move to SF?").
• $100M-on-$1B deals occasionally close before famous teams write any code — a VC friend admits "it's all based on vibes."
• Extreme polarization: unless you're a frontier AI lab or went 0→$100M revenue in under a year, nobody invests; if you ARE a frontier lab, VCs can't validate frontier claims but fear big labs will do it themselves — they always have "a friend at Anthropic."

A vivid on-the-ground account of the bifurcated AI funding market.

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