I’m observing the emergence of a new breed of entrepreneurs: AI-native founders. These founders operate from a different assumption: that AI has fundamentally changed how software is built, and by leveraging tools like Cursor, Codex, ChatGPT, and Bolt, they can iterate at incredible speeds, at a fraction of the traditional cost.
This has created a new reality for early stage investing, as AI-native founders now are able to seedstrap their companies not just to first design partners, but to meaningful commercial traction — landing more revenue and users than folks thought possible at such early stages.
This reshapes how I think about pre-seed and seed funding rounds.
Historically, seed capital was primarily used to hire a handful of engineers to start building out initial product ideas, and after 6-12 months of building, you would be able to launch your first product.
That's no longer the case, as AI has dramatically lowered the cost of building, meaning seed funding is no longer allocated towards a team of engineers, but is now more effectively allocated towards branding, distribution, go-to-market activities, and maybe $10,000 to cover the inference costs.
This means that some founders don't need venture capital at all, and for others it means they need more capital to blitzscale the competition. But what's more interesting is that it has also raised the bar for what's required to raise any capital at all.
Since anyone can now build software quickly, the differentiator isn't technical execution — its taste, distribution, sales ability, deep customer knowledge, and iteration velocity. The best AI-native founders combine rapid prototyping with genuine market understanding and the ability to actually sell what they've built. They're not just shipping faster; they're reaching meaningful traction faster than previous generations thought possible.
The new reality is that if you're trying to raise capital in 2025 without a working vibe-coded prototype, you're signaling something very clear: you're not an AI-native founder, and you're operating with outdated assumptions.
The new question investors are asking isn't What will you build? but why haven't you built something yet?
If you've spent more time perfecting your pitch deck than using AI tools to iterate on your actual product, your priorities are backwards. The era of raising money purely on the strength of an idea and polished slides is over — at least for me.
In many ways, this brings us full circle—everything new is old again. We're returning to the foundational principle of venture investing: backing builders. The difference now is that AI has democratized building to the point where not having built something is the exception that needs explaining, regardless of whether you have a technical background or not.
The winners will be founders who can build tastefully, understand their customers deeply and keep a high iteration velocity.
Moving forward, the founders worth backing aren't those who talk about what they're going to build — they're the ones who have already built something and can show the early edge of traction.
/k