The University Is Your First Investor
Before a faculty founder ever meets a VC, the university has already set the terms. For a long time, those terms were the problem.
OCT 1 · James Wang
OCTOBER 2026
SEPTEMBER 2026
Competition Is for Losers
Every AI-powered pitch has a competitor it forgets to list, which is the customer typing the prompt themselves. Here's how I think about which startups survive the chat window.
SEP 24 · James Wang
Nobody Wants To Be First
DFW has no shortage of angel groups and accelerators. The trouble starts when a pre-seed founder asks who writes the first check.
SEP 17 · James Wang
Headcount Is The Moat
When redoing a workflow is a week of work instead of a quarter, you stop repairing things and start throwing them out.
SEP 10 · James Wang
OpenAI and Epic Just Killed a Thousand Healthtech Startups
When the model vendor and the system of record shake hands, the companies sitting between them stop having a reason to exist.
SEP 2 · James Wang
AUGUST 2026
Call Me Professor James
I encourage my students to use AI, but that just means the expectations all around are higher.
AUG 27 · James Wang
How To Talk To VCs
Five conversations after a VC panel, all with the same problem. Nobody coaches founders on the human part of raising money.
AUG 19 · James Wang
Advisor Equity Is Mispriced
Equity is (sort of) forever, but advisor value is not.
AUG 11 · James Wang
DFW Startup Week 2026
AI has made work cheaper and easier. Nothing beats being in a room with people anyway.
AUG 6 · James Wang
JULY 2026
The Hybrid AI Trade
In 1958, hybrids were the future of computing. That held for about a decade, and AI is running the same architecture bet now.
JUL 28 · James Wang
VC 101: When to Say No
Venture capital funds the exceptions, which makes it the wrong instrument for many companies.
JUL 22 · James Wang
What Google Actually Bought From A24
A24 charged Google $75 million for the kind of access most companies pay to hand over, one API call at a time.
JUL 15 · James Wang
SaaS Is Dead, Long Live SaaS
AI collapsed the cost of writing software. It never collapsed the cost of owning it.
JUL 7 · James Wang
What exactly is your AI moat?
A founder building on the frontier models had the team, the product, and the design partners. He still couldn't answer the only question that matters.
JUL 2 · James Wang
JUNE 2026
RAPID and the FDA Device Pathway Maze
FDA clearance lets you sell the device. It doesn't make anyone pay for it. A field guide to the routes to market, and the wall right after.
JUN 23 · James Wang
Your Runway Has a Whistle
Soccer has a clock, tennis has none, and your startup has one too. The only thing that pushes the whistle back is real revenue.
JUN 16 · James Wang
The Sale Nobody Warns You About
A working product gets you in the room. Closing the deal means making a nervous institution feel safe choosing you.
JUN 9 · James Wang
Dallas Is Early
Two weeks in Dallas startup rooms. The founders are here in force, the scaffolding's going up, and the capital still commutes in from somewhere else.
JUN 2 · James Wang
MAY 2026
The Questions You're Not Asking
Customer discovery doesn't fail because founders skip it. It fails because they ask the wrong questions to the wrong people.
MAY 26 · James Wang
Dallas Cracked the Top 10. Now What?
We're on the venture map for the first time. The interesting question isn't whether we made it. It's what lane Dallas actually owns.
MAY 19 · James Wang
Watching the Wrong Race
Claude and Codex trade blows. DeepSeek ships at a tenth the price. None of it matters as much as who deploys it inside the business.
MAY 12 · James Wang
The Calculator Question
Every generation's new tools look like cheating to the previous one. Calculators didn't make kids innumerate. AI probably won't either.
MAY 5 · James Wang
APRIL 2026
The Win Condition
Five events in four days, and what an ecosystem looks like when it's real but still figuring out its standards.
APR 28 · James Wang
Building on Borrowed Ground
Your moat isn't your product. It's whatever the platform underneath you can't copy at cost.
APR 21 · James Wang
Cheap Deals, Dead Companies
Inflation doesn't just compress valuations. It makes entire categories of startups structurally unfundable at any price.
APR 14 · James Wang
Every Seed Looks Like a Series A Now
AI compressed the startup maturity curve. Seed companies look more polished than ever. That's not a compliment.
APR 7 · James Wang
MARCH 2026
The Proof Gap
Healthcare isn't short on good science. It's short on affordable ways to prove the science works.
MAR 31 · James Wang
Rig the Scoreboard
Why the companies who define how customers measure success are the hardest to replace.
MAR 24 · James Wang
The Efficiency Frontier
I'm lazy. Genuinely lazy. I've also spent real energy figuring out how to be lazy more effectively.
MAR 17 · James Wang
Superheroes Don't Scale
The thing that makes a founder great at five employees is the same thing that breaks them at fifty.
MAR 10 · James Wang
Healthy on Paper
Many startups don't die from obvious failure. They die from looking busy while nothing compounds.
MAR 3 · James Wang
FEBRUARY 2026
Who's Holding the Bag?
The engineer who joined after your round didn't see the term sheet. They just inherited the strike price.
FEB 24 · James Wang
The High-Valuation Trap
A high early valuation feels validating. It also quietly reduces every option you have later.
FEB 16 · James Wang
Boring Infrastructure
Boring is a feature, not a bug. Every platform that matters started as plumbing.
FEB 1 · James Wang
JANUARY 2026
Why I Write
Writing forces clarity. If an idea doesn’t survive being written down, it probably shouldn’t survive capital allocation either.
JAN 15 · James Wang
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