Walking Through the Earthquake
Gil Dibner

This week got the better of me. Not because of startup chaos — the usual drumbeat of early-stage life — but because of the overwhelming scale of the geopolitical uncertainty surrounding us.

The headlines don’t just feel louder; they feel existential. It's hard to switch context between pundits debating whether the U.S. is still a democracy and the immediate demands of building a company. It’s hard to watch the market freefall and the dollar spiral — then refocus on decisions about real people, real products, real customers. When the CEOs of Apple and Nvidia have no clue what the next few weeks hold for them, how can we?

These past weeks have felt like walking through an earthquake — trying to assemble furniture mid-tremor. If you’re feeling this too, you’re not alone.

The best advice I have — and the advice I’m trying to follow myself — is this: give yourself grace, compartmentalize where you can, and focus on what’s within your control. Create boundaries between the macro and the micro, between what you can’t control and what you can. This isn’t avoidance — it’s triage. It’s discipline. It’s how we stay sane and useful. Read the news, protest in the street if you wish, but return to the office and the laptop and do what your team and your customers require you to do.

Focus on your physical and mental health. Eat well. Sleep. Go to the gym. Go for a walk.

Focus on your family. Smile at them. Hug them. Play with your kids.

Focus on what you can control. Accept the moment we’re in — volatile, uncertain, fragile — and still show up for the work. Still serve your team. Still build. Celebrate successes, no matter how small they may seem in comparison to the tumult outside.

We will get through this. And next week — maybe — will be better.

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ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

Google’s antitrust loss. Last week, a federal judge declared that Google had acted illegally to build a monopoly. Last year, another federal judge found that Google engaged in anticompetitive behavior to protect its monopoly in online search. What’s next for Google? “The Justice Department has asked the court to order Google to sell Chrome, its popular web browser, and either spin off Android, its smartphone operating system, or be barred from making its services mandatory on its phones. Google has described the government’s request as a “wildly overboard proposal” that “goes miles beyond the court’s decision.” The company suggested that it should change very little.”

Safe Superintelligence. ​Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, has raised $2B at a $32B valuation — without a product, logo, or roadmap. Operating in complete stealth, SSI has attracted top investors from Greenoaks, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, DST Global, Alphabet, to Nvidia. “You could make the case that this entire operation is a $2 billion wager on one man: Ilya Sutskever. He’s the co-founder of OpenAI, helped birth GPT-2 and GPT-3, and was one of the few people on Earth who could say they were in the room where it happened when generative AI went mainstream. And then he left — or rather, launched a failed coup against Sam Altman, vanished for a few months, and returned with a new lab whose very name is a shot across the bow: “Safe Superintelligence.”

HOW TO STARTUP

Timing rounds. It used to be the norm that startups would raise, or plan to raise, capital every 18 months. However, Head of Insights at Carta, Peter Walker, shares that this vastly underestimates the current duration between rounds — and that “if you’re planning to raise a VC round every 18 months, you’re planning to fail these days.” According to Carta data, the median time between rounds was between 2.2 and 2.5 years for companies from Seed to Series C in 2024. Some of this is due to companies trying to avoid raising any additional capital following a round, and instead working towards being break-even or profitable. This is, of course, also due to it being so much harder now to raise capital — outside of AI hotspots. “The overall message for founders is clear: preserve optionality. Paradoxically, the less you need venture capital the more attractive you may become to VCs.“

Allocating pre-seed funding. Sergei Bogdanov of Yellow Rocks shares guidance on effectively utilizing pre-seed funding. He emphasizes that startup founders should prioritize sales to validate market demand, develop a lean MVP to conserve resources, and avoid common financial pitfalls like overhiring, premature relocations, and a broken cap table.

HOW TO VENTURE

Selling secondaries. Hunter Walk makes a compelling argument for why selling secondaries has become essential for early-stage VCs. With startup exits now taking over a decade, early investors face delayed returns, prompting a shift from the traditional "buy and hold" approach to a more flexible "buy and maybe sell" strategy. Hunter states that obtaining liquidity through secondary sales has become practically a necessity for managing fund performance and LP expectations. And according to Tomasz Tunguz “[secondary sales are] not just a temporary anomaly, but a structural evolution in how venture capital will function.”

Q1 2025 venture snapshot. After a rocky 2024, the global venture market seemed to rebound in Q1 2025 as venture funding hit $113B, the best quarter since Q2 2022. However, this is in large part due to a single massive round, OpenAI’s $40B raise. Q1 was also the strongest quarter for startup M&A since 2021, with $71B in reported exit value globally and 550 M&A deals involving venture-backed startups.

Investing in competitive companies. At least when it comes to AI, it seems that backing competitive companies is now allowed.

Reco’s Ofer Klein has been named one of the Top 50 Generative AI Entrepreneurs of 2025.

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