True North: The AI-sniffing-AI loop
Signal
True AI: Office Hours. Our partner Mike Montano built True AI: Office Hours on Polsia, a True portfolio company. Pick one or multiple True team members, select a topic, and get structured feedback on your pitch or business strategy in minutes. Mike built this over a weekend and trained it on decades of our collective investing experience. We're experimenting. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
Stop pricing on tokens. OpenAI and Anthropic are subsidizing usage at 10–20x below actual cost. If you're a startup passing through API costs at margin, your product is going to look expensive next to free. Stop pricing on tokens and price on the value your product actually creates. Charge a cut of the outcome and let users bring their own API key. Bundle credits instead of seats. Seat count may shrink but usage should explode if you're building something that creates real impact.
The AI-sniffing-AI loop. Shared at a recent True portfolio conversation: One founder sends every draft of brand content through GPTZero, gets a human/AI score, feeds the critique back into his agent, and iterates until the draft hits 97% in human quality. We're using AI to detect AI, to train AI, to not sound like AI.
True Founders Building
Iceye. Sovereign intelligence from space. €250M+ revenue, €100M+ EBITDA, €1.5B backlog — doubled in 2025. Targeting €1B revenue next year. More here.
Basecamp Research. Announced a new partnership with NVIDIA and Anthropic along with Ultima Genomics and PacBio, bringing together large-scale biological discovery and AI. More here.
Sandbar. Raised their $23M Series A. First product: Stream, a voice ring with a conversational interface. Batch 1 sold out and Batch 2 ships this summer. More here.
Open Tabs
Tab 1 45 Thoughts About Agents →
Tab 2 Pick Your One Thing, Go All the Way In →
Tab 3 SaaS Is Losing Its Head →
Loose Threads
Calling future electricians. The AI bottleneck isn't chips. It's the trades. →