Unlearn Everything Now!
I've spent 15+ years building pattern recognition. As a VC, that's supposedly the job - spot patterns, build mental frameworks, deploy them, edit the frameworks as the world changes, repeat. But especially since the start of this year, as conversations have played out for us internally + with our portfolio founders, I feel increasingly convinced: I need to unlearn almost everything I know... NOW!
Not because the lessons I accumulated over the years were wrong. They were likely great. But for a world that no longer exists.
As a VC, think about the benchmarks we've all internalized: What "great" growth looks like at Series A? Which categories are good vs. not? How much capital a company needs to get to product-market fit? How big a team should be at each stage? Almost all of the prevailing wisdom on these questions has been obliterated in the last 12 months. The muscle memory that may have made some of us good investors might be the very thing that makes us miss the next outlier.
But it's not just VCs. As an early stage founder, the playbooks you absorbed - how many engineers you need to ship your first product out? How long it takes to get to product-market fit? How fast you need to grow to be Series A viable? What kind of talent to hire and how? These playbooks were written for a different speed and way of building, a different competitive landscape, basically a different world altogether. A team of 5 using AI natively might now outpace what used to require 20. The founder who clings to the old way of building and the old timelines is going to get lapped by the one who's building like it's a new game. Because it is. I
f you're an engineer who's been building for a decade plus, you have to unlearn how you build. What used to take a sprint now takes a day, and the question isn't whether you can code - it's whether you can leverage AI tools to build at a pace that would've seemed absurd two years ago.
As a CEO especially, how your org should function is an open question again. How many people do you actually need? What roles are essential vs. relics of the old way? How do you structure teams when AI is a force multiplier on every seat? The org chart that worked in 2022 might be a liability in 2026.
Acquired wisdom, the thing we've always prized, might be the biggest obstacle right now. The pattern-matching that comes with experience is anchored to a world that's shifting under our feet. The person with 15 years of reps is carrying 15 years of assumptions. The person with a blank slate and the right instincts might actually see the field more clearly.
I'm not saying throw everything out. But I am saying: hold your wisdom loosely, re-assess whether it holds true in this new world, and very likely, more than half of it doesn't. It's better to acknowledge to yourself today: I don't know anything. And start from there.
