Three pitches I saw this week had similar themes and I got to thinking why. When every founder is reading the same feed, seeing the same raises, and using the same AI tools to research the same markets, where does original thinking come from?
I started unpacking this with some colleagues over drinks, and we concluded that social media is playing a bigger role in what gets built, what gets funded, and how we all think than anyone wants to admit.
Here’s the loop. A founder raises a big round. It gets posted on LinkedIn or X. Other founders see it, often subconsciously, and it shapes what feels fundable. They build something adjacent, pitch it in similar language, reference similar markets. A VC sees the pitch and it pattern-matches to the last successful raise they heard about. The deal gets done. It gets posted. And the cycle repeats.
Everyone in the loop thinks they’re making independent decisions. The founder thinks they discovered the idea. The VC thinks they evaluated it on the merits. LPs see the same trends and start asking why you’re not in AI or defense or whatever the feed says is working. The timeline is quietly shaping what feels obvious, what feels timely, and what feels safe at every level of the stack.
The result? Waves of startups that look alike, talk alike, and pitch alike.
Add AI and it gets more interesting. We’re all ingesting more data points than ever, faster than ever. AI tools summarize markets, generate competitive analyses, surface patterns. That’s powerful, but it also means everyone is drawing from the same well. When every founder uses the same tools to research the same markets, the outputs converge too.
The irony is the very notion of building and investing is supposed to be contrarian. The best founders see something others don’t. The best investors back things that feel wrong to most people. But the information environment is pushing everyone toward the same conclusions at the same time.
I notice VCs doing it too. A deal gets buzz on Twitter and suddenly you’re more interested in that category. The social signal becomes a proxy for conviction. I’ve caught myself doing it.
When we built Brontes Technologies, we quite literally built it in a basement. I had no idea what other startups were doing, even though there were two companies on the floors above me. We just built the thing we were focused on.
That tunnel vision was an asset. It meant we couldn’t accidentally converge toward what everyone else was building.
Some of our best investments were in founders who seemed almost oblivious to what the market was telling them was “hot.” Part of me thinks the next generation of outliers will be the founders who are least online.
