Tech Week is about to consume NYC, Founders & Operators is back on Thursday, and a personal notes on Europe’s “zombie startups.”
NY Tech Week: 3 Events Worth Showing Up To
1 Mon Jun 1, 4–6pm. IRL: The New Hypergrowth Hack in the Age of AI
Hosted by Wildwood Ventures and Q Capital. Founders from Mostest, Pickle, Cake, and Dagne Dover talking about IRL experiences as a growth channel.
2 Wed Jun 3, 1:30–5pm. Anthropic Founder Salon: Inside the AI-Native Era
Probably the frontier-signal event of the week. Anthropic alongside founders from Gamma, Factory, and CodeRabbit. If you’re building AI-native products or trying to understand where the model layer is actually going, worth applying.
3 Wed Jun 3, 6–9pm. Ramp x 8VC: Founders & Builders Night
Ramp has one of the strongest operator cultures in NYC fintech, and 8VC pulls a different crowd than the usual NYC VC circuit. High builder density, likely low fluff.
A note on what I’d skip: the giant 500-person open-bar mixers. Fine for a night out, usually low signal. Better to stay at home, build, and ship.
NYC Founders & Operators: Thursday, May 28
Our NYC Founders & Operators series is back: We’re hosting a curated founders/operators gathering at The Highlight Room (Moxy LES) on Thursday. Drinks-only, no panels or pitches, intentionally small. With friends joining from Brex, Rain, TikTok, Coinbase, Alumni Ventures, and more. Approval-based, ~15 spots, first-come rolling basis. RSVP here.
Zombie Startups: Europe’s Subsidy Problem
I spent time in Europe earlier and came back thinking about something that’s increasingly hard to ignore.
US founders tend to introduce themselves with MRR, retention, CAC, customers. European founders often introduce themselves with grants awarded, accelerator programs, and innovation agency approvals. That sounds subtle, but it’s actually two entirely different worlds and mindsets.
In the US, early-stage founders are usually forced into customer discovery fast because runway is short and market pressure is real. In Austria and most of Europe, founders can often piece together years of non-dilutive funding through subsidy programs, research grants, and innovation agencies before ever seriously validating demand. The result is that a lot of very talented people end up optimizing for applications, decks, institutional and bureaucratic approval instead of customer discovery, distribution, sales, customer pain, product-market fit, and rapid iteration.
It’s an incentive problem. Systems shape founder behavior. A founder with 30 months of grant runway behaves differently than a founder with 12 months of seed capital and existential pressure to find PMF.
Veynor Market Intelligence: New Feature Alert
We shipped a new prediction markets tool: Veynor intelligence. You can now access the most interesting markets on Kalshi and Polymarket with a simple, smart text query. Type in ‘What markets are moving right now?’, or ‘What are the latest trades on Iran/China/Gold/Oil’, and we’ll show you the most relevant markets, with a to-the-point synthesis and concrete trade ideas. So you need to spend less time on finding your edge, and more time enjoying it.
So long,