Archive | Startup Pulse

The Only Moat AI Can't Copy

Product moats have a shelf life measured in quarters. Technology moats decay in weeks. Data moats aren't real if the data doesn't compound. What survives in an AI-native market is the one thing money and models can't parallelise - the distribution you spent years earning. Here's what US investors are actually underwriting now, and why the European founder gap on this is bigger than most people realise.

Vasily Alekseenko

Scaling

The Company Shape That's About to Disappear

Jul 9, 2026

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8 min read

The Company Shape That's About to Disappear

I've been in San Francisco for two weeks and I'm leaving with an uncomfortable question about the shape of the company I'm building. YC is reporting numbers from inside the ecosystem that suggest the whole 200-to-500 person startup - the one every European founder is still optimising to become - is about to become the worst place to be. Here's what I'm seeing on the ground, why the middle is breaking, and what it means for founders reading this from London.

Vasily Alekseenko

Fundraising

Jul 1, 2026

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8 min read

SF Will Chew You Up

I've spent the last week in San Francisco, and it's changed how I think about running a business in London. Most European founders don't know how to work hard, and the data backs it up - the funding gap, the hours gap, the cultural gap, all of it points the same way. Here's what SF showed me up close, and why I'm coming home with less guilt about the grind.

Vasily Alekseenko

Founder stories

The AI Bill Is About to Land on Your Desk

Jun 24, 2026

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7 min read

The AI Bill Is About to Land on Your Desk

Most founders are running their entire businesses on AI subscriptions that look like the bargain of the century. They aren't. Between a class action against Anthropic, Tim Cook's "hundred-year flood" warning, and trillion-dollar AI IPOs landing this year, the real cost of AI is about to surface - and the founders tokenmaxxing on borrowed runway are the ones who'll feel it first.

Vasily Alekseenko

Trends

Join Us in Leeds: We're Bringing the Open Mic Up North

Jun 21, 2026

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2 min read

Join Us in Leeds: We're Bringing the Open Mic Up North

On 1-2 July we're heading to Leeds for Climb26 - the UK's festival of business growth - and we'd love you there with us. We're hosting our London Meets Leeds Open Mic on the Wednesday evening, alongside 60+ sessions, 2,000 founders and investors, and partners including Meta, Google, NatWest and the British Business Bank. Grab £100 off your ticket through us before prices increase on 30 June.

Vasily Alekseenko

Intelligence Just Got Borders (And Other AI News)

Jun 17, 2026

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10 min read

Intelligence Just Got Borders (And Other AI News)

You might have missed it last week, but on June 13th the US government ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its two most advanced AI models for every foreign national on earth - forcing the company to switch them off globally within hours. It's the moment intelligence officially got borders, and it changes a lot of assumptions founders and investors haven't questioned in a while. Plus three other stories from the same news cycle (SpaceX's $2 trillion IPO, Google losing a German hallucination case, and Meta's "gulag" engineer revolt) that together tell you exactly where this industry is heading.

Vasily Alekseenko

Trends

Save Money, Lose Time: My Mid-Raise Mistake

Jun 10, 2026

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6 min read

Save Money, Lose Time: My Mid-Raise Mistake

Every founder I know is in cost-cutting mode right now, going through their subscriptions line by line. But there's a category of admin you can't really cut, only do badly - your cap table, your ASAs, your fundraising paperwork - and the cheap DIY way ends up costing more time than money. Here's the mid-raise mistake I made, and the free tool I wish I'd tested a week earlier.

Vasily Alekseenko

Behind the scenes

Jun 3, 2026

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7 min read

Is AI a Golden Shovel?

Last Friday a founder accused me of stealing his business. I didn't - but the accusation kicked off a week of conversations that left me genuinely scared about where AI is taking us. Here are the three things I think are about to get materially worse, and the one question every founder needs to start asking before they ship anything new.

Vasily Alekseenko

Behind the scenes

You Left That Event With 5 Contacts. There Were 200 People In The Room.

May 28, 2026

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2 min read

You Left That Event With 5 Contacts. There Were 200 People In The Room.

We built SoPhy because we watched thousands of founders, investors and operators leave our events having lost every contact, note and follow-up that mattered. It's a networking app that keeps everyone you meet in one place - searchable, with notes and reminders attached. Join the waitlist, refer your network, and win from a £350,000 prize pool drawn on 18 June.

Vasily Alekseenko

The One Thing Everyone Stopped Caring About

May 27, 2026

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6 min read

The One Thing Everyone Stopped Caring About

Everything in tech is getting faster and smarter - except customer support, which has quietly fallen off a cliff. At the same time, our patience as customers has collapsed, which means people are now cancelling good products simply because the experience around them made them feel ignored. For founders, that's a huge opening: you can't out-feature a competitor with ten times your funding, but you can absolutely out-care them.

Vasily Alekseenko

Behind the scenes

The Only Moat AI Can't Copy

The Company Shape That's About to Disappear

SF Will Chew You Up

The AI Bill Is About to Land on Your Desk

Join Us in Leeds: We're Bringing the Open Mic Up North

Intelligence Just Got Borders (And Other AI News)

Save Money, Lose Time: My Mid-Raise Mistake

Is AI a Golden Shovel?

You Left That Event With 5 Contacts. There Were 200 People In The Room.

The One Thing Everyone Stopped Caring About

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