March 2026
I’m writing this from Austin. Three days into SXSW, running on not enough sleep and too much coffee. My cofounder Theo and I are here with 8x Social — we’re mid-seed raise, EF demo day is six weeks out, and every conversation this week is either an investor conversation or practice for one.
We split every session. Never in the same room. More surface area, more signal. He covers creator economy and product intel. I cover investor events, pitch sessions, and brand marketing.
Here’s what’s stuck with me so far.
This was the session that rewired my brain.
Garry Tan — president of Y Combinator, managing a portfolio worth close to a trillion dollars — sat on stage and described his nightly routine. He finishes his day job running YC, gets home, hops on a Waymo, and fires up 10 AI coding workers. By the next morning, he’s shipped 10,000 lines of code across three different projects. He recreated his old startup Posterous — which took $10 million in VC and two years of work — in a fraction of the time.
He said something that I keep coming back to: “Less than 0.1% of the world understands this yet.”
A few things he said that hit differently when you’re a founder in the room:
He closed with something I won’t forget. He said the people building AI companies right now are trying to make Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not kill jobs. Not upend society. Cure cancer. Solve real problems. Build a post-scarcity economy. And the way to get there is through competition, open-source models, and fighting for what he called “little tech.”
Listening to Garry, I kept nodding because this is how we’ve been building 8x for a while now. We ship internal tooling for everything. Our CRM, our outreach systems, our creator ops workflows — we don’t buy off-the-shelf tools and stitch them together. We build our own stack, rolling up the best features from the tools other companies pay for, into one system we fully control. And because it’s ours, extending it is trivial.
Case in point: the night before SXSW started, I needed to figure out who at this conference was worth meeting. SXSW has a Braindate platform with 3,100+ registered attendees. So I built a quick extension — scraped the list, had Claude filter it against our ICP, enriched contacts through Apollo, generated personalised outreach, and sent it. 30 minutes. Woke up with 5 confirmed meetings before I’d even picked up my badge.
That’s not a flex. That’s the point. When your tooling is built to be extended, every new problem is just another module. Conference outreach, lead scoring, creator matching — same infrastructure, different input.
Garry’s session was the headline, but the other panels filled in the picture. Quick hits from the rest:
Dar from PitchBook and Pete Butler from Mercury Fund ($175M B2B fund, seed and Series A). The market isn’t dead — it’s normalised. $66 billion deployed in 2025 sounds like a decade low, but it’s close to the 20-year average. The 2020–21 spike was the anomaly. Pete’s “triple threat founder” framework: domain expertise + technical capability + distribution access. All three are now table stakes. His best line: “Ask for feedback and you might eventually get some money. Ask for money and you’re probably going to get advice.” His fund sees 6,000–8,000 deals a year and invests in six. Six deals.
GWI (250,000 Gen Z’s surveyed globally), Razorfish, and Google CreativeWorks. The biggest misconception: that Gen Z has short attention spans. Kevin from Google pushed back hard — they don’t hate ads, they hate bad ads. Films are getting longer, books are getting longer, people are binging longer than ever. Nissan created a four-hour pre-roll ad with Lo-Fi Girl and the average watch time was 15 minutes with a skip button present. Short form isn’t the end — it’s a gateway to long form. Also: the TV screen is now the #1 screen for YouTube, surpassing mobile. Gen Z uses seven different social platforms on average. And AI is already the 15th biggest source of brand discovery and climbing fast.
Julian from Recess Therapy, Jeremy from Descartes Productions (they produce Rockin’ New Year’s Eve and the Golden Globes), and Amanda from Doing Things. The shift: creators are no longer begging for time with celebrities. Celebrities are coming to them. Recess Therapy now requires a minimum of three hours with any celebrity guest and insists they come to Brooklyn. Julian is launching YouTube’s first late-night show in June — Outside Tonight — with weekly live free pop-up shows across New York City, working with a showrunner from SNL. The red carpet has gone creator-first: Descartes now leads their award show marketing campaigns with creator partnerships, not traditional press. And the convergence keeps accelerating — Alex Cooper was nominated for a Golden Globe this year.
John Gamm from Catalyst at Penn GSE. The US education market hit $1 trillion for the first time this year. EdTech investment crashed from $20 billion in 2021 to $3 billion in 2023, mostly because buyers got burned by products with no evidence, poor UX, and misalignment between who buys and who actually uses the product. AI is bringing the sector back — but the companies that will win are the ones with pedagogical alignment, real outcomes data, and ease of adoption. Not just an AI wrapper.
Garry said the founder of the future won’t be defined by their resume — they’ll be defined by what they can build. Pete Butler said the bar has gone up — domain expertise, technical chops, and distribution, all three. The Gen Z panel said the brands that win create content ecosystems, not campaigns. The creators panel said Hollywood’s gates didn’t open because someone was let in — creators built their own gate.
Same pattern everywhere. The people who build their own infrastructure are pulling away from everyone else. Not because they’re smarter. Because they eliminate the gap between deciding to do something and actually doing it.
Three more days to go. Back to the hallways.