The Best Founders Have Something AI Can’t Tell Them

Nearly every startup pivots eventually, says Matt Hartman, founder of Factorial Capital, so he backs founders with a technical edge and hard-earned insights who are best equipped to navigate a change in markets. On this week’s episode of The Every Podcast, he tells Natalia Quintero how he finds those founders and why vibe coding his own app gave him new respect for paying for software. Plus: a field report from a 28-person agricultural technology startup that runs on agents in Slack, Becky Isjwara on using the Every Agent as her onboarding buddy, and seven new Thesis Statements.

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‘The Every Podcast’

Why technical founders win when startups pivot

In 2016, Hugging Face started as a chatbot app for teenagers. Today, it’s the largest community for open-source AI and is set to be acquired by Nvidia for about $13 billion. Matt Hartman, who was part of the Betaworks team that wrote its first check, sees a lesson in that transformation: Back technical founders who can “move with where the world goes.”