Will Quist

Dec 20, 2025

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3 min read

Closing Thoughts for 2026

There’s a real shift in how early-stage capital is deployed. Seed rounds used to be about testing ideas with a little optionality. Now, they’re $10–20M “seed” rounds before anyone knows what the product is.

Will Quist

AI Missed Its Punk Rock Moment (Or Did It?)

Dec 12, 2025

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2 min read

AI Missed Its Punk Rock Moment (Or Did It?)

AI is supposed to be a paradigm shift—something that shatters assumptions and rewires the system. But right now, it feels less like punk rock and more like enterprise software on steroids.

Will Quist

Stop Chasing Hot Rounds, Earn Your Conviction First

Nov 28, 2025

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2 min read

Stop Chasing Hot Rounds, Earn Your Conviction First

There’s a lot of noise in the market right now—hot rounds, frothy multiples, “move fast” energy everywhere. But the real signal? The founders who take their time, develop deep conviction, and only then commit.

Will Quist

Oceans: The Most Fragile Layer of the Global Economy

Nov 23, 2025

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2 min read

Oceans: The Most Fragile Layer of the Global Economy

We’re living in an era where maritime infrastructure is the invisible backbone of modern economies. It’s easy to forget, but subsea communications cables now carry 99% of all internet traffic.

Angèle Sahraoui, +1

Venture’s Dirty Secret: Nobody Wants to Price Your Round

Nov 18, 2025

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2 min read

Venture’s Dirty Secret: Nobody Wants to Price Your Round

This is a signal about how risk is being managed (or avoided) at the top of the venture stack. Rather than price discovery or real diligence, we’re seeing a herd mentality: “Just show me the evidence to justify a markup, and I’m in.

Will Quist

AI Is Breaking the Cybersecurity Oligopoly

Nov 2, 2025

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3 min read

AI Is Breaking the Cybersecurity Oligopoly

We’re in the middle of an inflection point. For twenty years, cloud-based security vendors have eaten the lunch of their client-server predecessors. But AI—specifically LLMs and agentic adversarial agents—breaks the mold.

Will Quist

The IBM-ification of Venture Is In Full Swing

Oct 25, 2025

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3 min read

The IBM-ification of Venture Is In Full Swing

The big market signal is that capital is finally flowing into hard tech and deep tech. But here's the twist, it's still early. Outside of defense, most of these categories are pre-consensus, pre-signal, and most investors are still risk-off.

Will Quist

Capital Is Not a Badge, It’s a Drug. Use Only as Directed.

Oct 16, 2025

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3 min read

Capital Is Not a Badge, It’s a Drug. Use Only as Directed.

Venture capital is powerful medicine. But too many founders treat it like a default prescription—have an idea, make a deck, raise a round. That’s backwards. You don’t start with the drug; you start with the diagnosis.

Will Quist

Experienced Founders Need Slow Conviction Over Fast Momentum

Sep 18, 2025

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3 min read

Experienced Founders Need Slow Conviction Over Fast Momentum

When your alternative is a $500K+ a year in cash and RSUs, sprinting toward incorporation becomes expensive. Once you incorporate, you're working on this for three years minimum. That's at least $1.5M in opportunity cost.

Will Quist

Aug 13, 2025

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2 min read

Lets Build Robots That Eat the World

As with most hard tech, the cost of building groundbreaking robots often outweighs their ability to deliver real returns. However, there is one pricing model that already exists — and it may unlock the true economics for Robot-as-a-Service to work.

Will Quist