Hello hello,

I hope you’ve had a solid week and are making great moves.
Just a quick one from me on Arthur — it’s been a busy stretch tightening and lighting things up.

Before we get into the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and 🤢 Ugly, a quick Arthur update.

ARTHUR – BUILD IN LIVE #5. Your startup mentor, co-founder and team.

Three intake lanes. One reality check.

This week still wasn’t really about Arthur.

It was about the founder on the other side of the screen — and the fact customers and investors already run three tests on you, usually without saying a word:

• how you pitch (video / call)

• what you claim (deck)

• how you sell (website)

So we’ve made Arthur’s intake stack dead simple:

Danger Room (video) — how you show up when it counts
Pitch Intel (deck) — whether your positioning and narrative survive investor logic
Website Intel (URL) — whether your positioning lands with customers

Pitch Intel is the second piece, and it goes into production next week.

Why this matters

It’s not complicated.
Positioning. Clarity. Execution. That’s the gap.

Founders are working hard — but too often the message is muddy, the focus is blurred, and the plan doesn’t survive contact with reality.

Customers are thinking: What is this? Is it for me? Why should I care?
Investors are thinking: What’s the wedge? What’s the proof? What’s the path?

Arthur’s job isn’t to give you a clever verdict.

It’s to surface the gap early, hand you a fix-first list, and then help you do the work.

Arthur isn’t the hero. You are.
Arthur just stops you spending six months busy… and still unclear.

👉 Early Access is now open, if you want to be part of Arthur’s early access group, the founders who get the first features, the first tools, and the ability to shape what we build, sign up here and earn more Fuel units

* F42+ members will be automatically added with your subscription automatically translated into Arthur Fuel_units for the next 3 months.

The 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and 🤢 Ugly…

😇 The Good

Watching founders move from “here’s my idea” to investor-ready proof is a leveller. It makes it obvious where the friction really is — and where the leverage is.

The Sum of the parts, Danger room + Pitch Intel + Website signal has brought us a total solution (why we built it as a microservice) that is already getting interest from several Incubators and accelerators to manage their cohort intake.
The lesson: run experiments in parallel, keep iterating, keep your eye on the prize. Stay open, keep joining dots, and you’ll find opportunities that aren’t visible from the plan.

I’ve also been eating my own cooking on GEO (Generative Search Optimisation). We rebuilt fusion-42.com with LLM discovery in mind — not just traditional SEO — as a real-world test.

Quick update: it’s working. Over 50% of our site traffic now comes via ChatGPT.

Next step is the obvious one: conversion. Being discoverable and cited is great, but right now we’re light on proper CTAs and funnels — so we’re not turning that traffic into sign-ups yet.

And working out how conversion works in a world of LLMs is a genuinely interesting problem. AEO is the first stop — and I’ve got a few other angles I’m testing too.

I love looking into the future. It is the only way I can manage to come back to today and try and understand how technology will change the world and the stepping stones that need to be built to arrive at this point. Over the last month, digging into this, I have put together a series of writings I’m calling The Vertical Economy.

It’s an attempt to connect the dots between three forces that are usually debated in isolation but are, in fact, deeply connected: the end of the debt-supercycle, the rise of planetary-scale AI, and the quiet industrialisation of space. The argument is that the horizontal world we’ve known for 500 years—one of geographic expansion, trade routes, and terrestrial industry—has hit its physical and political limits. The next frontier for growth, industry, and power is not across the map. It’s upward.

This isn’t a utopian dream. It’s a story about thermodynamics, cost curves, and the brutal logic of capitalism. When a system runs out of room, it either collapses or finds a new dimension.

I’ve broken the argument down into a six-part series:

• Part 1: The Vertical Economy. Capitalism won, so completely that it lost.
  Debt, AI and the rise of off-world industry

• Part 2: The Vertical Economy. Debt was a bridge to the future. Then it became the future.
  How the developed world replaced productivity with leverage — and why no democracy can admit the arithmetic

• Part 3: The Vertical Economy. The vertical turn isn’t ideology. It’s thermodynamics.
  Cost curves, industrial arithmetic, and why the next frontier is upward

• Part 4: The Vertical Economy. Hegemony doesn’t disappear — it migrates.
  Why great powers rise or fall on their ability to control energy, compute, and industry in orbit — and why alliances fracture in the process.

• Part 5: The Vertical Economy. WHAT HAPPENS TO HUMANS
  Life After Labour, by Design

• Part 6: The Vertical Economy. THE CHOICE THAT ISN’T OPTIONAL
  Architecture beats ideology. Every time.

It’s one of the most ambitious thing I’ve written. It’s an attempt to build a coherent framework for the next fifty years, starting today. I hope you’ll come along for the journey.

⭐️ AI for Startups this Tuesday

Super stoked to have Ahmed join us to share all the AI tools and tips in the GOOGLE stack.

Reg for the session here

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

🤝 Community update (and a quiet ask)

One honest note: community activity has been lighter than it should be.

The structure is there — Resilience, GTM, Fundraising, AI, Danger Room — but like any good builder space, it only really works when a few people help set the tone.

So here’s the ask: we’re looking for a handful of channel champions. Not moderators. Not noise-makers. Just founders who are happy to:

• kick off discussions

• share what they’re working through

• ask the questions others are thinking but not posting

No commitment, no theatre — just helping turn a good space into a genuinely useful one.

If that sounds like you, raise your hand in the channel or drop me a message.

Builders first. Everything else follows.

🤢 The Ugly

Context switching is still the tax we’re paying. Lots of moving parts, lots of experiments, and the constant work of keeping focus where it matters. Not glamorous, but unavoidable when you’re building something properly.

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.
❤️ & ✌🏼

Derek

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

If you’d like to get involved, sign up for early access or join the community.

This week was about locking the intake order

This week was about getting disciplined on sequence.
Not adding more cleverness — but deciding what comes first, what comes next, and what waits its turn.

Arthur’s intake is now explicitly ordered as three standalone engines that also snap together cleanly. That matters because it’s how we move from demos to products accelerators, investors, and founders can actually use — without burning time, people, or money.

Arthur’s world is getting sharper

Arthur is becoming a set of structured evaluation engines designed around one simple loop:

intake → diagnosis → fix-first → execution

The founder stays in control. Arthur’s role is to surface what matters, prioritise the gaps, and help close them — fast.

The front door is now clear. Three inputs. One standard.

✅ What we shipped

🎥 Danger Room — video intake now runs end-to-end on upload
The first engine in the stack is live in its initial form.

What it is
A video intake that analyses a founder’s pitch delivery and content as soon as a video is uploaded.

Current flow

• Upload a pitch video

• Analysis runs automatically

• Results return as a first structured view

Already producing

• A content analysis score (initial pass)

• Structured feedback founders can react to immediately

Founder output

• A fast, honest read on how your pitch lands before it hits real investors

Built to power

• Danger Room → Pitch Kung Fu → FUSED

• Accelerator and cohort intake screening

Next

• Add downloadable reports

• Add email delivery

• Improve the waiting experience so long runs don’t feel dead

• Finish stabilising recording (upload is the reliable path today)

📊 Pitch Intel — pitch deck engine ready for production next week
This is the second engine in the intake stack — and it’s the one that turns analysis into something founders can systematically improve.

What it is
A pitch deck intake that evaluates how an investor will perceive your deck — before you’re judged in silence.

Current flow

• Upload a pitch deck (PDF or PowerPoint)

• Arthur evaluates it across investor-facing lenses

• Results surface as a clear readiness view and fix-first list

Already producing

• An overall investor-readiness grade

• Slide-level feedback

• A prioritised set of fixes

Founder output

• Clarity on what to fix first — not generic advice, not theory

• A concrete starting point to iterate the deck with Arthur’s help

Built to power

• Founder fundraising prep

• Accelerator and incubator qualification

• Fusion42 inbound pitch evaluation

Next

• Move Pitch Intel into full production

• Begin live founder usage

• Connect deck outputs cleanly into Arthur’s execution flow

💳 Stripe checkout — early flow in place (prototype)
We now have a real purchase flow to test against, not a thought experiment.

What it is
A basic checkout path that supports subscriptions and usage-based access.

Current flow

• Product link exists

• Checkout flow runs end-to-end in a test environment

Already producing

• A usable baseline purchase journey

Founder output

• A predictable, self-serve path to access — not manual workarounds

Built to power

• Arthur membership access

• Standalone tools where pricing must be clean

Next

• Align pricing logic properly

• Introduce trials in a controlled way

• Finalise Fuel Units consent and top-up behaviour

📄 Report storage — Google Docs integration progressing
Outputs are starting to live where founders actually work.

What it is
Persistent report storage so analysis doesn’t disappear after one session.

Current flow

• Reports can be written into Google Docs (early stage)

Already producing

• A path to editable, shareable outputs

Founder output

• Deliverables that can be commented on, shared, and iterated

Built to power

• Founder execution loops

• Cohort and programme reporting

Next

• Finalise workspace onboarding steps

• Ensure clean separation between company and generated files

🚧 On the bench: Website URL engine (third and final intake)

The last piece of the intake stack is the website / URL engine — focused on sales positioning, not SEO theatre.

This engine will look at:

• What you say you are vs what your site actually communicates

• Who you’re selling to — and whether it’s specific or vague

• How value and pricing are framed (if they’re visible)

• Whether the website story matches the deck and the pitch

Same founder. Three narratives.
Misalignment here is where deals quietly die.

This is the final intake engine to come online.

🔧 What we fixed / learnt

• Upload-first flows are more reliable than record-first at this stage.

• Long-running analysis needs visible progress to keep founders engaged.

• Saving interaction data without slowing the experience is non-trivial — but non-negotiable.

• Billing discipline has to be designed early or it becomes painful later.

• Clear sequencing beats clever features every time.

🚧 What’s next

Near-term track

• Finish Danger Room refinements (export, email delivery, progress feedback)

• Put Pitch Intel fully into production

• Tighten Stripe checkout and consent flows

• Lock down Google Workspace onboarding

In parallel

• Design and scope the Website URL engine

• Align research integration timelines

• Define how Arthur consistently turns analysis into fix-first execution plans

We’re holding the build to one line: trustworthy, reusable, investor-grade outputs.
If it doesn’t survive real founders, real cohorts, and real scrutiny, it doesn’t ship.

FOR THE ❤️ OF STARTUPS

Help steer what we build next

I’m not building Arthur in a vacuum.
If there’s a workflow, bottleneck or ugly bit of founder work you want Arthur to take off your plate, tell me.

• What you’re trying to do

• What slows you down

• What “done” would look like if Arthur nailed it

These go straight into the build plan for the next sprints.

Leave a comment

Hello hello,

I hope you’ve had a solid week and are making great moves.
Just a quick one from me on Arthur — it’s been a busy stretch tightening and lighting things up.

Before we get into the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and 🤢 Ugly, a quick Arthur update.

ARTHUR – BUILD IN LIVE #4. Your startup mentor, co-founder and team.

This week wasn’t really about Arthur. It was about the founder on the other side of the screen.

Last week we wired in the basics — identity, payments, uploads and the early microservices. This week was the moment that plumbing turned into engines that move a founder forward: your 2-minute pitch on video, your deck, and reports you can edit, share and iterate with your team.

The shift was simple: stop building “cool AI demos” and start building your improvement loop.
Everything now follows one line:

Intake → Diagnosis → Founder Fix-First Value → Execution

Centred on a single question:
“How do we make this founder more market and investment ready, fast?”

🎯 The insight

Danger Room isn’t a feature — it’s your intake lane.

Once we treated the 2-minute pitch as structured signal, not “a video”, it unlocked the four things founders actually need:

• clear, reusable scoring across every founder

• investor-relevant signals, not emotional guesswork

• a ruthless, practical fix-first list

• a clean hand-off into Arthur to do the work with you

And now every run becomes part of your history — your pitches, scores and fixes over time — so you can literally see yourself getting sharper, not just collect another verdict.

It’s the first time a founder can measure how they show up, not just what they say — and then improve with an AI co-founder sitting next to them.

That’s the moment Arthur stopped being a demo, and started being a reusable engine for becoming investable.

Next week we have Pitch Deck and Website Intel being added, and these give a deep understanding of the business, turning hours of analysis into a 10 minute deepdive with actionable execution plans that change the game for founders.

⚙️ Why this matters

Arthur isn’t the story — you are.

Arthur is the invisible infrastructure that turns raw effort into investor-ready signal, on repeat.

👉 Early Access is now open, if you want to be part of Arthur’s early access group, the founders who get the first features, the first tools, and the ability to shape what we build, sign up here and earn more Fuel units

* F42+ members will be automatically added with your subscription automatically translated into Arthur Fuel_units for the next 3 months.

The 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and 🤢 Ugly…

😇 The Good

⭐️ Obviously Arthur and here comes the 🚨 Danger Room

In two minutes, Arthur now pulls out the signals a real investor actually watches for: presence and framing, narrative beats, delivery patterns and, most importantly, whether your story would earn you a meeting. Under the hood it’s running Rekognition + Transcribe through our agent stack so it can read how you show up, not just what you say.

You get an overall grade, scores for content / delivery / presence, a ruthless fix-first list and the top investor questions your pitch will trigger — plus a history of every run so you can see yourself getting sharper, not just getting another verdict.

I had a great call with our friends over at Google this week, and we’re lining up a deep dive on how to use their AI + data stack to actually compound growth, not just burn free credits. We’ll cover the practical bits founders care about – infra choices, AI services, data pipelines, with a light touch on Ads so you can see the whole stack, not just one product. Once dates are locked, Fusion founders will get first access, and we’ll turn the session into concrete playbooks you can plug straight into your own build.

Watch out for your invite to this session.

⭐️ AI for Startups this Tuesday

Missed it way too much, and there is just so much going on in the AI space not to keep informed.

Reg for AI for Startups

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

A few thoughts I’ve had as a builder, operator and investor in this new AI era.

1. Compound systems beat big swings

The mistake I see everywhere right now is founders chasing the next model release like it’s a strategy. There’s no strategy in “what’s the newest thing OpenAI or a Chinese Open source model can do this week?”
The real compounding comes from building a repeatable loop:
intake → diagnosis → fix → execution → data → better intake.
Do that 30 times and you’re unrecognisable.
Arthur is being built around that loop — not demos, not hype.

2. Founder-CEOs have never mattered more

A startup today isn’t product + distribution + capital; it’s context + conviction + community.
That mix doesn’t live in a playbook or a hired CEO.
It lives in the founder who can:

• see the customer clearly

• hold a non-consensus view long enough to win

• design a system around a real pain
  Most of the value in the earliest phase is belief paired with evidence.
  You can’t outsource that.

3. AI is leverage, the most powerful we’ve seen

The quiet revolution isn’t “AI replacing jobs” right now.
It’s AI deleting the administrative drag that kills momentum:

• reconciling data

• documenting decisions

• moving work between teams

• rewriting the same narrative 20 times
  The teams that win use agents to buy back their own attention and redeploy it into sales, product and story, not to run leaner and louder.

4. The builder has changed and that’s a massive deal

The next wave of products won’t be built by a single technical founder in a dark room.
They’ll be assembled by operators who know the customer, stitching:

• workflows

• agents

• micro-apps
  into something that solves one painful, expensive problem.
  This is the first generation where you don’t need a codebase to have a product — you need taste, empathy and clarity.

Arthur exists for these people — the ones who aren’t “AI engineers”, but design better answers.

5. Narrow beats loud

It’s never been easier to launch something that looks impressive.
The irony is that distribution now rewards the opposite of noise.

The winners will choose a very narrow slice of reality —
“fix this thing, for these people, in this moment” —
and become the default agent for that job.

If Danger Room taught me anything, it’s that a two-minute pitch can be a better intake tool than any “unified platform”. It is so powerful even as just a video in our telegram channel.
Solve one sharp pain → extend from there, don’t build feature build products.

6. The interface is becoming conversation-first (voice will follow)

We’re not a “voice product” today, but it’s obvious where things are heading. The real shift isn’t text vs audio, it’s forms and clicks vs conversation and context.

Founders won’t want to learn yet another tool – they’ll want to talk through a fundraise, a deck, a hiring plan and have the system keep up. As voice, video and agents converge, creators won’t just own content, they’ll own small pieces of software and tuned workflows that sit directly in that conversation with the user.

The leverage flows to whoever owns that relationship; AI quietly does the rest in the background. Arthur is being built for that world, even if today most of it still looks like “chat on a screen”.

If you have not checked out the new fusion website, take a visit and check it out, you can literally ask it anything, about the arthur build, latest content, event calendar, even what size shoe I wear.

🤢 The Ugly

Investors don’t know how to read agentic products

The strangest thing I’m seeing right now is this: founders are building real agentic systems… and then having to pitch them like it’s a 2020 SaaS product.

The positioning gets flattened into feature lists, screenshots and a token “copilot” slide. On the surface it looks like another platform with an AI add-on. Under the hood, it’s a living system.

The real value in agentic work sits in places most investors can’t pattern-match to (yet). They still want to “see the platform” — a big shiny UI — when in reality that layer doesn’t need to be flashy anymore, so they quietly downgrade it and don’t invest.

The real questions to ask are:

• How good is the loop?
  Intake → signal → decision → action → data → better next run.

• How much drudge work actually disappears?
  Not demo theatre, but hours and hand-offs removed from the workflow.

• How fast does the system learn?
  Does each run make the agent sharper, or is it just re-prompting the same model?

• What does “good” look like in this agent’s world?
  Clear before/after states, not vanity dashboards.

Because none of that is standard in decks or conversations yet, a lot of serious work looks “unclear”, while shallow wrappers look “fundable” simply because they fit the old pattern.

And yet you’re still seeing eight-figure cheques go into thin products with a bit of AI on top — or essentially an old SaaS product stitched together with a few automations calling LLM APIs. It feels like the electric scooter wave all over again: plenty of capital, not much systems thinking.

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.
❤️ & ✌🏼

Derek

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

If you’d like to get involved, sign up for early access or join the community.

This week was about something simple but hard:
taking all the “cool AI demos” and turning them into opinionated, reusable engines that investors would actually use.

Video pitches, pitch decks, admin controls, and Google Docs output all moved forward — and the architecture to sell this as a white-label product started to take shape.

Arthur’s world is getting sharper

Arthur is now moving beyond “smart chat” and into structured evaluation engines that can:

• watch your pitch

• read your deck

• score what matters

• surface the top things you must fix

• then hand you straight into Arthur to actually do the work
  
  

Think: intake → diagnosis → “fix these now” → execution with Arthur.

✅ What we shipped

🎥 Danger Room video engine — first slice live

The first version of the 2-minute pitch analysis engine is now live as its own microservice.

Current flow

• upload (or record) a pitch

• store securely in S3

• analyse via AWS Rekognition + Transcribe

• pass signals into our agent stack mapped to the Fusion42 pitch framework

• return a structured JSON dataset Arthur can use everywhere
  
  

Already extracting

• who’s on screen and when

• presence & framing consistency

• movement & scene changes

• full transcript with timestamps

• delivery patterns (pace, pauses, fillers)

• narrative beats mapped to investor logic
  
  

The transcript + delivery data now feed the content engine, so Arthur can connect how you pitch with what you said.
From this, Arthur gives structured pointers and the top 5 investor questions your pitch will trigger — a direct stress-test of your investor readiness.

Built to power
Danger Room → Pitch Kung Fu → FUSED
accelerators & incubators, VCs & CVCs
government programmes
external pitch competitions

Next
Turn these signals into an investor-grade pitch brief with a brutal fix-first list founders can iterate on session after session.

📊 Pitch deck engine — from prototype → product

The pitch deck analysis engine has moved from a cool prototype to a real product surface.
Arthur can now read a full deck and evaluate it like an early-stage investor — across four lenses and eleven signals.

Current flow

• upload a deck (PDF/PPT)

• extract structure and slide intent

• map content to the Fusion42 pitch framework

• score each signal

• return a structured report with grades, fixes and next steps
  
  

Founders get

• overall grade

• signal-by-signal score

• top three fixes

• an explicit fix-first list

• eight questions your deck will trigger in a meeting

• and then we go through them with Arthur and fix them
  
  

Why it matters
Founders rarely know what investors are actually scoring when they look at a deck. PitchDeck Intel makes the scoring explicit — and gives a path to close the gaps fast.

Built to power
Danger Room → Pitch Kung Fu → FUSED
accelerator intake
cohort prep
investor readiness flows

Next
Link deck + video into one readiness score — content + delivery + presence.

📄 Google Docs report generation — from static → living docs

The report generation flow is now wired end-to-end in the prototype.

Today:

• one-page documents generated from a request

• returned as editable docs
  
  

OAuth integration into Google Docs is in progress so that founders get live, editable documents in their own workspace, ready for comments and track-changes.

Once stable, the same pattern applies to:

• Google Sheets → KPIs, funnels, financials

• Google Slides → pitch revisions, investor updates
  
  

The bridge between Arthur’s structured analysis and where founders actually work.

🌐 Website analysis — engine in progress

The next microservice on the bench is the website engine.

Flow

• founder drops in a URL

• engine runs deep research on the business behind it for sales signals + customer intel

• pulls this into the same pipeline as video + deck

• optional SEO + Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) checks
  
  

Output is written for founders — “fix your positioning”, not a dry technical SEO audit.

Longer-term: a simple “Is your GEO working?” check-up any startup or agency can plug into.

🧩 Jiva integration — wiring in the SDK

Alongside the microservices we’ve been wiring Arthur into the Jiva SDK — and it’s worth saying why.

Jiva’s core IP is a “fusion” model architecture — originally built for fusing multiple medical models into a single agent that can reason over messy, multi-source data and still give one clean answer.

We’re using the same idea for founders.
Arthur is fusing:

• video signals (delivery, presence, narrative)

• pitch deck logic
  website + GEO + sales signals

• later: product, financial and traction data
  
  

Instead of bolting together 20 brittle prompts, Jiva gives us:

• a structured agent stack

• consistent schemas for plans, briefs and reports

• routing + cost control so Fuel Units map to real inference usage
  
  

We are using Jiva.ai’s Fusion technology to combine multiple domain-specific models into a single fusion agent capable of multi-source inputs and a unified prediction for startup readiness — aligning with US20240071062 (Model Fusion System).

In short
Arthur isn’t a string of oversized prompts taped together — it’s a fused network of specialist agents.
A small workforce of agents, each running the best model for its job, all cross-communicating to decide what matters most.

🚧 What’s next

Next sprint is about tightening the loop between founder → signal → asset.

Near-term track:

• plug Transcribe into the Danger Room engine

• extend the Website engine so one URL feeds positioning + GEO into the same stack

• finish OAuth + dynamic Google Docs storage

• wire the founder account area into these microservices

• move Stripe from “planning” to live billing

• design the dual admin model:
   • Fusion42 control plane (rules, prompts, cohorts, global data)
   • Partner / cohort admin for white-label customers
  
  

In parallel, we’ll start mapping how these engines roll up into one investor-grade view of a startup: pitch video, deck, website and traction all feeding the same agent stack.

We’ve gone from skateboards to Ferraris in how fast you can build with AI.
The hard part now is making sure Arthur isn’t just fast, but trustworthy, reusable and investor-grade — and that’s the line we’re holding the build to.

FOR THE ❤️ OF STARTUPS

Help steer what we build next

I’m not building Arthur in a vacuum.
If there’s a workflow, bottleneck or ugly bit of founder work you want Arthur to take off your plate, tell me.

• What you’re trying to do

• What slows you down

• What “done” would look like if Arthur nailed it

These go straight into the build plan for the next sprints.

Leave a comment

Hello hello,

I hope you’ve had a solid week and are making great moves. Just a quick one from me on Arthur — it’s been a busy stretch tightening things up.

Big shifts this week — progress on Arthur, momentum on FUSED, and a few cracks appearing in the ecosystem worth paying attention to.
Before we get into the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and 🤢 Ugly, a quick Arthur update.

ARTHUR – BUILD IN LIVE #3. Your startup mentor, co-founder and team.

This is the week where Arthur’s edges really start to connect — identity, payments, uploads, and the early architecture for reusable micro-services.

The big learning: we needed a full end-to-end map of the system before we could see which parts are genuinely reusable across different founder “stories” and use cases. 💡 Danger room videos being the specific one that jumped out.

👉 Early Access is now open, if you want to be part of Arthur’s early access group, the founders who get the first features, the first tools, and the ability to shape what we build, sign up here and earn more Fuel units

* F42+ members will be automatically added with your subscription automatically translated into Arthur Fuel_units for the next 3 months.

Now, onto this week’s 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and 🤢 Ugly…

😇 The Good

⭐️ Obviously the Arthur early access site

Website & SEO/GEO Update

Well well, first check in and already 30% of search results are coming through CHAT GPT.
Amazing what a bit of GEO can do as we go toward a two tier web.

If you’re not GEO-optimised, you’re invisible to the machine web. This is exactly why we’re doubling down on structured /facts, deep pages, and LLM-readable content.

If you have not checked out the new fusion website, take a visit and check it out.

AI for Startups is back.

Missed it way too much, and there is just so much going on in the space to not be informed.

Reg for AI for Startups

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

The global Pitch Kung Fu and FUSED league is moving forward. Two of the six core partners are now confirmed; we need all six in place to make the 2026 season worth running. That side is moving, one conversation at a time.

In parallel, I now need to lock in regional hosts – the people on the ground who actually make this work.

I’m looking for serious operators in:

• Africa

• Asia

• Europe

• LatAm

• United States

By “host”, I mean teams that already run real founder communities – accelerators, hubs, programmes or strong meetups – and can:

• Bring high-quality local founders into the league

• Help shape and promote their region’s Pitch Kung Fu sessions

• Feed the best teams into their regional final and, ultimately, Dubai

If someone comes to mind in any of these regions, a warm intro would be massively helpful. Even one strong operator per region is enough to give the league real teeth on the ground.

Each regional host gets early visibility on the strongest founders in their region — and a direct pathway into Dubai.

Touched on this last week, AI unit economics are shifting under our feet.
Have been trying to dedicate time to build out the financial model to run this new shift, the new new input and costs versus understanding what the new unit economics are for AI native startups, very different then SAAS thats for sure.

🤢 The Ugly

The biggest blind spot in the ecosystem — and for me, building Arthur — is overestimating how AI-native we actually are. If humans still carry the operations, it’s SaaS with AI sauce, not an AI operator. The hard bit is fixing that without turning the whole thing into a massive science project.

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.
❤️ & ✌🏼

Derek

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

Edition #3 is the week where Arthur’s edges start to connect — identity, payments, uploads, and the early architecture for reusable microservices.

We’re still integrating the Jiva SDK, which takes a little time, but the rest of the system is moving forward fast.

If you’d like to get involved, sign up for early access or join the community.

Arthur’s world is getting bigger

This week was about stitching the foundations together so real founders can actually use the system — real accounts, real uploads, real usage.

Arthur is now moving from “smart chat” into a proper product surface:

• identity

• billing

• document flows

• uploads

• and soon: multi-agent research + structured outputs

Here’s what we shipped.

✅ What we shipped

🔐 Authentication is now live

The identity layer is wired in through Cognito.

What works today:

• Email + password

• Google Sign-In

• LinkedIn Sign-In

• Persistent sessions

There are a few UX edges still to polish, but the foundation is correct: real accounts, real users, real identity.

Optional later: Microsoft + GitHub if we see demand from builders.

This unlocks personalised workspaces, saved documents, usage tracking and Fuel Unit billing.

💳 Stripe integration — subscriptions + Fuel Units

Stripe is now wired into the app in development mode.

This unlocks:

• subscription tiers

• Fuel Unit top-ups

• card payments

• usage tracking

The final layer — inference-based usage — will come as we integrate into Jiva’s SDK, so Arthur can meter real model calls and price them accurately.

Jiva isn’t the starting gun; it’s the next accelerator on top of a surface that already works.

📥 Uploads: pitch decks, websites & video

The upload pipeline is now in motion — the first part of Arthur’s input layer.

Arthur supports:

• pitch deck uploads

• website crawling + analysis

• video pitch uploads or in-browser recording

Simplified flow:
Upload → S3 → processed by the right engine → structured feedback + next steps.

🎥 Video analysis — far beyond transcription

Arthur won’t just read your pitch — it will understand how you deliver it.

Each video is analysed across three signals:

1️⃣ Speech
Transcript + timestamps + clarity → used for story and structure feedback.

2️⃣ Delivery
Pace, pauses, filler words, tone → capturing confidence and energy.

3️⃣ Visuals
Framing, eye contact, lighting, slide clarity, movement.

All three are fused into a structured coaching-style report — as close as we can get to a real pitch coach sitting alongside you.

This analysis pipeline is being built as a standalone system so it can power:

• FUSED

• accelerators and incubators

• government programmes

• external pitch competitions

🏗️ User Account Panel — coming next

The founder dashboard is now scoped and will include:

• subscription & billing

• Fuel Unit balance + usage

• document library

• integrations (Google Workspace, LinkedIn…)

• preferred login provider

This becomes each founder’s main control centre inside Arthur.

📄 Reports, plans & documents

Arthur’s document layer has two types — by design.

1️⃣ Interactive (conversation-driven)

The living parts of a startup:

• GTM

• sprints

• ICPs

• messaging

• fundraising prep

• hiring strategy

These need back-and-forth, context and iteration — not one-shot templates.
They rely on memory, tagging and conversation history.

2️⃣ Secondary (template-driven)

Once information is confirmed, Arthur can auto-generate:

• investor briefs

• governance docs

• onboarding packs

• policy docs

• technical notes

• research summaries

These are delivered first through Google Docs so founders can edit, collaborate and refine.

🔗 Your evolving data room

Every document Arthur creates feeds into one thing:

A live, always-updated, machine-readable data room.

Not a static folder.
Not a quarterly rewrite.
A continuously refreshed backbone of:

• plans

• metrics

• decisions

• narrative

• investor-ready artefacts

Updated automatically as Arthur learns more about you and your company.

⏳ What we’re working on

🧩 Integrating into Jiva’s agentic stack

Arthur’s surface — auth, payments, uploads, docs, memory — is already in motion.
Integrating into Jiva’s SDK is the next accelerant.

From Jiva, we plug in:

• the research API

• consistent response schemas

• stable routing between Jiva’s agentic stack → model layer → Arthur’s middleware

This unlocks:

• deep, multi-agent research

• structured plans & briefs

• inference-based costing + Fuel Unit accounting

• department-level document generation at scale

It’s the layer that switches Arthur’s internal organisation from “defined” to “fully active”.

🛠️ Modular system design

Under the hood we’re building reusable engines — not one-off features:

• pitch deck engine

• website engine

• video engine

• research wrapper

• structured output formatter

These power Arthur for founders, and also:

• FUSED global events

• accelerators and incubators

• government programmes

• enterprise / partner integrations

Arthur is not a silo — it’s modular from day one.

🚧 What’s next

• Stripe → live mode

• Full upload pipeline (end-to-end)

• Founder account dashboard in the UI

• Templates for secondary documents

• Mapping agent → workflow → output chains for the first GTM / finance / legal journeys

Arthur is becoming a real StartupOS

Arthur is an organisation that runs behind a conversation — one that thinks with you and builds with you.

This week wasn’t glamorous, but it laid the rails: identity, payments, uploads, accounts, and the first microservices.

Once Jiva lands, we stop sketching and start stress-testing the real machine.

FOR THE ❤️ OF STARTUPS

Help steer what we build next

I’m not building Arthur in a vacuum.
If there’s a workflow, bottleneck or ugly bit of founder work you want Arthur to take off your plate, tell me.

• What you’re trying to do

• What slows you down

• What “done” would look like if Arthur nailed it

These go straight into the build plan for the next sprints.

Leave a comment

Hello hello,

I hope you’ve had a solid week and are making great moves. Just a quick one from me on Arthur — it’s been a busy stretch tightening things up.

Arthur is getting his organisation online now: memory, documents, access control, orchestration… it’s all starting to feel real. You can dive into the details in this week’s Build in Live update.

👉 If you want to be part of Arthur’s early access group, the founders who get the first features, the first tools, and the ability to shape what we build… just drop your email in the Build-in-Live thread on Telegram:
* F42+ members will be automatically added with your subscription automatically translated into Arthur Fuel_units for the next 3 months.

👉 Early Access — drop your email in the Arthur group

I’ll add you to the list personally.
This is the easiest way to help shape what Arthur becomes.

Now, onto this week’s 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and 🤢 Ugly…

😇 The Good

The middle east region is on fire.

UAE, Qatar and Saudi have now invested $3.6T into US AI — all for one thing: GPU access. With the export ban lifted, the Gulf has already ordered around 2.5 million NVIDIA Blackwells, including 500,000 just for Abu Dhabi.

At the same time, the region is building one of the fastest data-centre expansions on the planet — 250 MW live, 5.5 GW under construction, and the world’s biggest project (G42’s 5 GW Stargate) on the way.

Petrodollars are now buying global AI infrastructure. It’s a mad time to be in venture.

Website & SEO/GEO Update

We finished the full rebuild of the Fusion42 site for the new two-tier internet — one layer for humans, one layer for machines.

All the SEO pages, structured data, schema, canonical fixes, metadata, performance patches, and the full GEO layer (/facts, llms.txt, machine-readable pages) are now live.

From our side, the basic work is done.

Now it’s the waiting game while:

• Google starts indexing the new structure

• Search Console catches up

• Google Analytics settles and gives us clean tracking

• LLMs (GPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc.) rediscover the site and rebuild their internal snapshots

It takes a bit of time for the ecosystem to refresh — there’s no shortcut there. But the foundation is now correct, clean, and positioned for the next decade of search.

I’ll share more once the indexing starts flowing and the numbers stabilise, and we will be busy optimising as we see whats going on.

Take a visit and check it out.

A global pitch league is taking shape (early days, but promising).

I had strong conversations this week with a few of our ecosystem partners about stitching together a proper global startup pitch league.

The idea is a six-region season — MENA, Africa, Europe, Asia, LatAm and North America — all feeding into a final in Dubai.
From Danger Room → Pitch Kung Fu → FUSED → a global final in Dubai.

Still very early and nothing committed yet, but the structure makes sense — a clean pathway with real segments, real partners, and a serious stage at the end.

If this moves forward, it could give the best early-stage founders a clear global track to run on. I’ll share more once it firms up.

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

1️⃣ The F42 Telegram has gone a bit quiet.
The community has definitely slowed down over the last months. Partly life, partly platform fatigue, partly everyone lurking instead of sharing.
I’d love to see a few more channel champs step up again — post what you’re working on, share wins, ask questions, drop problems you’re stuck on.

Fusion42 isn’t meant to be a broadcast channel, it’s meant to be a live room of founders helping each other sharpen up.

If you want to take point on a channel (AI, GTM, fundraising, resilience), reply to this and leys have a chat

2️⃣ The AI unit economics are shifting under our feet.
On one side, you’ve got trillions pouring into GPUs and data centres. On the other, prices for AI products are getting dragged down fast as everyone races to the bottom. Revenue is still “SaaS deck”, but costs and depreciation look more like heavy infrastructure.

The old SaaS metrics don’t really fit this world. Payback periods, gross margins and CAC/LTV all need new assumptions when your core dependency is inference cost, not headcount. The things that matter now are simple:

• Cost per successful task – what it really costs you in inference to deliver one useful outcome.

• Margin after inference – what’s left once you’ve paid the model bill.

• Workflow economics – revenue vs inference cost per workflow, not per user.

This is exactly where Arthur needs to help founders build models grounded in reality, not fantasy.

🤢 The Ugly

Weird one this week — first time in ten years I’ve held zero Tesla stock. I’ve ridden all the madness, finally sold out over the last month, and now I keep checking the price with no skin in the game. How can I be this emotionally attached 🤷🏼‍♂️
Still incredibly bullish, mind you — Optimus is going to be a banger and Tesla at $8T wouldn’t surprise me. Now it’s just about timing the re-entry.

Keeping a close eye on the Magnificent 7 as well — and honestly, whether they’re up 25% or down 25% today will look like a rounding error in ten years.

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.
❤️ & ✌🏼

Derek

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

Edition #2 is where the system starts to feel real. The foundations have moved from theory into working parts you can actually touch.

Arthur is your mentor, co-founder and team. One conversation on the front. A full organisation working behind it — quietly, instantly, just for you..

If you wish to get involved, find out more, sign up for early access, simply join the community

Join the F42 community here

Arthur is getting his organisation online

The focus this week was simple:
make the experience stable, predictable, and ready for real founders.

Arthur is now moving from “smart chat” into an organised, multi-agent workspace that understands you, remembers you, and produces work you can actually ship.

Here’s what we built.

✅ What we shipped

🔐 Authentication & access control

The app now has a proper identity layer powered by Amazon Cognito.

Clean login, predictable permissions, and the right walls in the right places. The boring but essential plumbing that keeps the whole system steady as we move into beta.

🪄 Early access sign-up (with built-in virality)

The new early access sign-up flow is complete and will roll out early next week.

This version has light virality baked in from day one:

• share on social → earn Fuel Units

• refer a founder → earn Fuel Units

• join the community → earn Fuel Units

Simple actions. Clear rewards.
A clean way for founders to get earlier access — and for us to grow the waiting list without shouting.

📄 Document generation → S3 (and Google Workspace)

Arthur can now generate documents on demand
(product specs, investor notes, briefs, updates…)
and store them straight into Amazon S3.

This means:

• repeatability

• consistency

• versioning

• no more “lost in chat history”

The system can finally produce work the same way a real team would.

For the MVP, Arthur will also plug directly into Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, using your existing Google Workspace as the backbone for sharing, versioning and live editability.

Your documents stay where your team already works; Arthur handles the heavy lifting in the background.

🧠 Message history (Memory Layer v0)

You can now reopen any past conversation — just like using ChatGPT or Claude.

Under the hood, this is the first layer of Arthur’s long-term memory system, which will later plug into The Source, RAG, and structured start-up profiles.

Right now this gives you:

• continuity

• fewer repeated questions

• the sense of a system that actually remembers you

It’s the start of a workspace that grows with you instead of resetting every time.

🧩 Tuning the brain: system prompts & orchestration

In parallel, we’re continually tuning all system prompts and the orchestration logic behind Arthur.

We’re feeding in fresh context files all the time — founder history, start-up facts, decisions, recent outputs — so Arthur never answers in a vacuum.

Every reply runs against a living source of truth to keep it:

• relevant

• correct

• up to date

• consistent with what you’ve already told us

This is the gap between “a smart chatbot” and “a real co-founder”.
Arthur doesn’t just talk — he updates.

🧪 Jiva testing continues

We’re still pushing on the agentic backbone.

Jiva is successfully spinning up agents from our blueprint, but the response flow through the model layer isn’t yet as stable or predictable as we want — exactly the kind of friction we expect (and want) at this stage.

Better to expose and fix these failure modes in Week 2 than discover them in Week 9.

This is why Build in Live exists:
less theatre, more truth about what it takes to get a serious multi-agent system production-ready.

Subscribe now

🧵 Behind the scenes: a full workforce coming online

Underneath all of this, we’ve now defined and begun wiring in the full blueprint of Arthur’s agentic workforce — an organisation of specialist departments doing the deep work founders normally drown in.

Not one big model.
A team, with hierarchy and responsibilities.

At a high level:

• The Orchestrator – the supervisor that routes jobs, checks quality, and enforces schemas, citations and freshness.

• Facts & Changefeed – the source of truth that maintains the /facts spine, timestamps everything, and pushes updates downstream.

• Legal, Governance, People, Finance, Security – the backbone agents producing the documents, policies and controls every start-up needs.

• GTM, Content, Sales, Retention – the growth engine doing research, positioning, messaging, campaigns and pipelines.

• Fundraising & IR – the capital-readiness team building decks, KPI tear sheets, investor maps and due-diligence packs.

• Tech & Delivery – the internal CTO office: architecture, reliability, security, observability, and the operational scaffolding around it.

Each department has its own outputs, templates and quality gates.

Jiva’s job is to coordinate the entire organisation, so Arthur can quietly run a real company behind your conversation.

We’re not building a chatbot.
We’re bringing an entire workforce online — piece by piece.

Share Insights by Fusion42

🚧 What’s next

• Connecting the new authentication layer to founder profiles and start-up data

• Wiring document generation into the Operator so departments can produce structured work, not just text

• Stress-testing message history with multi-step workflows and deeper context

• Hardening the Jiva → model-layer routing so agent responses are stable, predictable, and consistent across providers

• More orchestration tuning so the right “departments” wake up at the right moment with the right brief

• Rolling out early access sign-up + Fuel Unit mechanics next week
  
  

FOR THE ❤️ OF STARTUPS

Help steer what we build next

I’m not building Arthur in a vacuum.
If there’s a workflow, bottleneck or ugly bit of founder work you want Arthur to take off your plate, tell me.

• What you’re trying to do

• What slows you down

• What “done” would look like if Arthur nailed it

These go straight into the build plan for the next sprints.

Leave a comment

Hello Hello,
I hope you all had a fantastic week and are making great moves. Here’s the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and the 🤢 Ugly at Fusion-42.

But, before we get into the 😇 😈 🤢 let’s talk about Arthur, my new BFF and soon to be yours.

Arthur is your mentor, co-founder and team

One conversation on the front. A full organisation working behind , quietly, instantly, just for you..

This isn’t a weekend experiment, it sits on thousands of hours of content, interviews, masterclasses, workshops, a brutal problem-fit challenge, and the frameworks and founder knowledge we’ve already baked into Fusion42.

Arthur builds your foundations and keeps them tight in the background, while sharpening the tactics you need to win in the weeks and months ahead.

✅ What Arthur Does for You

🚀 One conversation to run your startup
Tell Arthur what you need. Get back clear plans, assets, updates and decisions you can act on.

🏛️ Builds your foundations
Keeps the core functions tight — governance, legal, finance, people, ops and reporting — so you’re not duct-taping later.

🧪 Tests and validates your thinking
Checks assumptions, pressure-tests ideas and flags risks early, before you burn time or money.

📈 Plans your growth
Generates GTM strategies, campaigns, sales scripts, outreach and retention plays that actually ship.

💸 Prepares your raise
Turns traction and numbers into investor updates, decks, and a live, always-ready data room built for diligence.

📂 Keeps your data room alive
Every update, metric, file and artefact is versioned, structured and synced — so your data room is always investor-ready.

📝 Drafts your documents
Produces investor updates, one-pagers, hiring briefs and product specs — clear, fast and on point.

📊 Scores your progress
Shows where you’re strong, where you’re stuck and what to fix next — no guessing, no self-delusion.

🧠 Remembers everything
Stores files, facts, feedback and experiments — linked, versioned, and instantly retrievable.

🤝 Works with you and for you
You set direction. Arthur handles the heavy lifting — giving you back time, clarity and work that moves the needle.

👉 If you want to be part of Arthur’s early access group, the founders who get the first features, the first tools, and the ability to shape what we build… just drop your email in the Build-in-Live thread on Telegram:
* F42+ members will be automatically added with your subscription automatically translated into Arthur Fuel_units for the next 3 months.

👉 Early Access — drop your email in the Arthur group

I’ll add you to the list personally.
This is the easiest way to help shape what Arthur becomes.

😇 The Good

➡️ Shifting Fusion into a true PLG business means one thing: the product has to carry the weight. That’s been my obsession this month – getting Arthur to a point where founders feel the value instantly, without a single sales call or explainer deck.

The community still matters a lot, the masterclasses, the workshops, the late-night DMs where founders compare scars, but the centre of gravity is moving. The product needs to do the heavy lifting.

The standout moment this week was a coffee with an investor. I told him we were now in full build mode, walked him through the MVP scope for Arthur, and, in classic fashion I might have slipped a bit of the longer-term vision in there, what we have lined up for investors.

Not “might have”. I absolutely did shove it in there.

His response? “Let’s start DD now.”

That’s a signal. The direction is right. And the work we’re doing is also starting to resonate with investors.
That’s my sample size of one. I’ll tell you what the other five said next week. 😄


➡️ We updated our website, in the spirit of eating our own medicine and the overwhelming evidence that the web is splitting in two, one for us humans and one for the machines. We want to make sure we had SEO and LLM.txt available for the google spiders and GPT scapers.

The result is a chat interface where you can ask anything, the backend, simple, we just need to upload the latest info into the knowledge base so it knows what to talk about.

*Servers take a few days to move it over and the old site might be stuck in your cookies.

Captable Clarity session.

Thanks for joining the Cap Table Masterclass Last Thursday. Solid turnout, great questions, and a reminder of how messy this stuff gets when you let it drift.

Quick recap of the big points:

• 1× liquidity preference is standard ; anything above that moves into “predatory” territory.

• Broad-based weighted average is the only anti-dilution formula you should accept at early stage.

• Pools dilute you, not investors; set them before the round, not after.

• Advisory shares are almost always over-given and under-earned. Phantom shares > cap table clutter.

• SAFE stacking without modelling = founders waking up at Series A with half the ownership they thought they had.

Antoine and Marco walked through the CapQuest platform at the end — honestly, it’s the first tool I’ve seen that handles SAFE conversion, ESOPs, termination logic, and waterfall analysis without making you cry into an Excel sheet.

If you want to sort your own cap table properly:

👉 Start here: https://capquest.io
👉 Use code: F42START for:

• 20% off any plan

• Free $500 cap table audit

• Free ESOP consultation

• A call with their team to run your scenario modelling (worth it)

If you missed the session, the recording is going out tomorrow.
If you have a messy investor, outdated SAFE, or an advisor you need to “cleanly exit”jump into the community and ask, happy to jump on a call as well.

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

What is going on with Linkedin? Reach is atrocious and my ego severely deflated with my lack of popularity.
I used to get 20k views per post, had a certain degree of virality and then AI came along and shafted me.

Some key takeaways:

1. Verification: I could not verify myself with my passport because I’m an Englishman in Dubai (there’s a song in that) and linkedin took a year to figure it out.

Get yourself verified.

2. Because of this I posted way less and that really does not help.

Got to be regular and give feedback on others post, Yawn, we all know this.

3. They changed their model in three key ways, or so I have been told.

• Favour paying subscribers

• Pay for Ads

• Have the permission to use your content for their AI set to on.

Do as you wish with that one

And for those that missed out on my latest (and by far the funniest thing on linkedin) here it is.

Founders fall in love with the solution, then go searching for a problem. Kitten stomper, case in point.

This is why we built the 💯 Challenge — Get PROBLEM FIT before you build a damn thing.

We tested it on ourselves and got a much clearer picture of what founders think is blocking them vs what’s actually slowing them down.
For the ❤️ of startups

You are one click away from sharing some love and inflating my popularity

🤢 The Ugly

This is shocking at so many levels. My wife is going away on business for 2 weeks, lands for a night and then goes away for another 3 days.

Just me and my son home alone, there is going to be a lot of pizza, popcorn and movies.

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.
❤️ & ✌🏼

Derek

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

Every week, I’m opening up the build of Arthur — what we’ve shipped, what we’ve learned, and what’s coming next.

Edition #1 covers the foundations and the roadmap we’ve now locked in.

Arthur is your mentor, co-founder and team

One conversation on the front. A full organisation working behind it — quietly, instantly, just for you..

This isn’t a weekend experiment — it sits on thousands of hours of content, interviews, masterclasses, workshops, a brutal problem-fit challenge, and the frameworks and founder knowledge we’ve already baked into Fusion42.

Arthur builds your foundations and keeps them tight in the background, while sharpening the tactics you need to win in the weeks and months ahead.

If you wish to get involved, find out more, sign up for early access, simply join the community

Join the F42 community here

✅ What Arthur Does for You

🚀 One conversation to run your startup
Tell Arthur what you need. Get back clear plans, assets, updates and decisions you can act on.

🏛️ Builds your foundations
Keeps the core functions tight — governance, legal, finance, people, ops and reporting — so you’re not duct-taping later.

🧪 Tests and validates your thinking
Checks assumptions, pressure-tests ideas and flags risks early, before you burn time or money.

📈 Plans your growth
Generates GTM strategies, campaigns, sales scripts, outreach and retention plays that actually ship.

💸 Prepares your raise
Turns traction and numbers into investor updates, decks, and a live, always-ready data room built for diligence.

📂 Keeps your data room alive
Every update, metric, file and artefact is versioned, structured and synced — so your data room is always investor-ready.

📝 Drafts your documents
Produces investor updates, one-pagers, hiring briefs and product specs — clear, fast and on point.

📊 Scores your progress
Shows where you’re strong, where you’re stuck and what to fix next — no guessing, no self-delusion.

🧠 Remembers everything
Stores files, facts, feedback and experiments — linked, versioned, and instantly retrievable.

🤝 Works with you and for you
You set direction. Arthur handles the heavy lifting — giving you back time, clarity and work that moves the needle.

✅ Inside that organisation

Arthur — The Architect
Understands what you’re trying to achieve and works out the job behind the words.

Orchestrator — The Operator
Sends the right tasks to the right teams so nothing gets stuck.

Facts & Changefeed — The Source
Keeps everything grounded in truth — citations, timestamps, version control — not wishful thinking.

17 Specialist Leads — The Departments
GTM, content, sales, retention, fundraising, tech, people, finance, legal, governance — the functions every startup depends on.

Hundreds of Sub-Agents — The Teams
Spun up dynamically through Jiva.ai to research, analyse, draft and refine in seconds.

And the founder experience stays simple:

“I tell Arthur what I need. I get back clarity, time, and work I can move with.”

Subscribe now

Here’s the build plan that brings that experience to life.

✅Arthur Build Roadmap — Beta at Week 10

Weeks 0–1 — Foundations: Give the Founder a Stable Base

Goal: Build the environment Arthur and the agent team will operate in.

New Fusion42 site and platform infrastructure ✅

Fusion42 website — rebuilt for humans and LLMs.
We’ve given the Fusion42 site a proper rebuild so it talks to both people and machines. The new shell is live with clean URLs, an internal /facts spine, and structured data (schema, JSON-LD, etc.) so AI tools can actually understand, trust and cite us instead of guessing from loose pages.

Internal knowledge base where The Source will hold truth ✅

Arthur project initialised — a clean, predictable foundation ✅
Core backend wiring is now live on AWS — structured data, file storage and vector search, all provisioned as code and ready for The Source to keep a clean, reliable record of truth.

Arthurs agentic blueprint built in Jiva.ai

Agent impact: The agentic team is already being developed on Jiva.ai — this phase builds the house they’ll work inside. ✅

Coming up

➡️ Weeks 1–2 — Core App: Shape the Space Around the Founder

Goal: Build the core application where conversations and decisions will happen.

Core app shell: navigation, screens, layouts
Authentication and access control
Initial flows The Operator will later route tasks through

Agent impact: Agents keep evolving in parallel; we’re constructing the “workspace” they’ll use to deliver value to the founder.

➡️ Weeks 3–4 — Conversation Layer: Give the Founder a Clear Voice Back

Goal: Let Arthur listen properly, interpret intent, and respond with clarity.

Primary chat interface
Fusion42-tone responses — direct, useful, no theatre
Logic for The Architect to understand meaning, not just messages

Agent impact: Arthur starts responding in a way that saves the founder time; the Operator and early departments begin handling small internal routing tests.

➡️ Weeks 5–6 — Memory & Agents: The Organisation Comes Online for the Founder

Goal: Switch on the internal teams that turn intent into work.

Document upload and storage so The Source can maintain truth
Data model for startups, assets and updates
Jiva.ai integration so:
The Operator can coordinate real work
17 Departments activate
Teams spin up instantly for research, drafting, analysis and checks

Agent impact: The loop comes alive: Architect interprets → Operator routes → Departments brief Teams → Source validates. The founder gets clarity without the heavy lifting.

Share Insights by Fusion42

➡️ Weeks 7–8 — Product & Templates: Free the Founder’s Time

Goal: Remove as much founder busywork as possible.

Plans, billing and accounts
Usage analytics
Turn the usual founder time-sinks — GTM plans, board packs, investor updates, basic tech docs — into clear first drafts, so time goes into decisions, not formatting

Agent impact: The stack now outputs shippable work, not just answers — saving the founder hours they normally lose to admin and document building.

➡️ Weeks 9–10 — Hardening & Beta: Make Sure the Founder Can Trust It

Goal: Run full end-to-end journeys under pressure.

We simulate real founder jobs:
Founder → Architect
Architect → Operator
Operator → Departments
Departments → Teams
Teams → Source
Source → clean output the founder can use

We:
Fix speed, stability and cost
Tighten handovers across the chain
Add monitoring, onboarding and support loops

Outcome at Week 10: Founders meet Arthur as intended:
The founder stays the hero. Arthur handles the heavy lifting. Time and clarity come back into the founder’s life.

Agent impact: The whole chain is stress-tested; behaviours and fallbacks are tuned for a confident, controlled beta.

PS: Tech Notes for Builders

Under the hood, Arthur runs on a Jiva.ai multi-agent stack, supported by a bespoke middleware layer that handles the real intelligence:

Architect layer for intent interpretation, contextual reasoning and job decomposition

Middle Layer (Arthur Intelligence Engine):
maps intent → required departments
evaluates confidence and ambiguity
enforces schema requirements, field definitions and controlled vocabularies
handles fallbacks, retries and escalation
decides when to create new sub-agents and how deep the chain should go
manages routing rules, workflows, memory access and tool-calling
ensures every output is grounded in The Source

Operator (router) for coordinating departmental tasks and maintaining flow
The Source for strict truth management — citations, timestamps, RAG over structured stores
17 departmental schemas with deterministic prompt patterns and quality gates
Sub-agents spun up dynamically for research, drafting, analysis and comparison
Continuous evals to keep behaviour stable as the system scales

This isn’t free-form “agent chaos”. It’s a structured, schema-led, middleware-managed organisation designed for reliability, traceability and speed — with Arthur’s middle layer acting as the intelligence that decides what should happen, in what order, and why.

FOR THE ❤️ OF STARTUPS

Help steer what we build next

I’m not building Arthur in a vacuum.
If there’s a workflow, bottleneck or ugly bit of founder work you want Arthur to take off your plate, tell me.

• What you’re trying to do

• What slows you down

• What “done” would look like if Arthur nailed it

These go straight into the build plan for the next sprints.

Leave a comment

Hello,
I hope you all had a fantastic week and are making great moves. Here’s the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and the 🤢 Ugly at Fusion-42.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been tightening Fusion42 around a single focus — building Arthur, your mentor, co-founder, and team.
This marks a deeper move toward becoming a truly product-led company — one that helps founders move faster, bring clarity, stay organised, and build with precision.

As part of the company’s realignment, Kurt’s role at Fusion42 has concluded. I’m grateful for the early energy and momentum he helped create and wish him every success. We remain open to collaborating again in future where it makes sense.

Henrik has joined a flagship AI initiative in Riyadh, KSA, where he’s leading new partnerships. He continues to support Fusion42 as a board member and investor.

The focus now is execution:

• Launching Arthur’s public roadmap and founder feedback loop

• Preparing for upcoming founder sessions and partner pilots

We’re building something that lasts — a platform that truly scales founders

😇 The Good

The build is underway. With Jiva.ai powering the agentic stack for deep research and logic, and Cloud202 (AWS Advanced Tier) standing up the foundations and AI middleware that bring it to you, we’ve assembled an A-team to bring Arthur to life.

This isn’t about working faster; it’s about shortening the path to proof. Everything we ship helps you do three things better:

• Get market-ready. End-to-end GTM: prove pull, spend where it converts, shorten the sales cycle, and lift retention with product-led value.

• Get fundraise-ready. Build the clarity, docs, and proof points that create conviction — then match with the right investors.

• Build a resilient business. The kind customers stay with and investors want to back — with strength across HR, IP, finance, legal, and ops.

You get the clarity, the plan, and the receipts — less talk, more traction.

⭐️ We’re lining up new live calls on specialist topics to keep bringing you value — check your inbox

💡 Workshop: Cap Table Clarity — Build, Manage, and Protect Your Equity

📅 Thursday 13 November | 🕗 8 PM GST / 5 PM CET / 8 AM PST

Your cap table is your leverage. In this practical session, we’ll cover:

• How to structure a clean, investor-ready cap table (and fix messy ones)

• Understanding vesting, option pools, and founder dilution — in plain English

• Modelling waterfall scenarios so you know who gets what at every stage

• Common founder mistakes that destroy leverage — and how to avoid them

• How Capquest automates tracking, vesting, and round planning so you’re always due-diligence ready

More details coming soon in your event invite— I’ll see you in the session.

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

After months of prep and partner conversations, I made the call to pause this year’s Global Super Accelerator (GSA).

It wasn’t easy — but it was right. Fusion42 has always been about execution over optics, and delivering GSA to the standard founders deserve would have meant compromises I wasn’t willing to make.

Time is the scarce resource. Focusing on the right things — the ones that join the dots along the journey — matters more than doing more.

This isn’t the end of GSA; it’s a reset. We’re rebuilding it the way it should be — product-led, integrated with Arthur, and designed to deliver continuous value, not just a nine-week sprint.

Pivoting and iterating are never easy, but they’re essential. Change is uncomfortable — and that’s usually the sign you’re moving forward.

🤢 The Ugly

Some of the internals are still rough around the edges — scattered docs, manual steps, and a few too many moving parts. We’re cleaning as we go, consolidating everything into one source of truth and tightening the weekly build rhythm.

⭐️ Doing a Marie Kondo on a startup is oddly satisfying — and slightly masochistic. But the clutter has to go before the real build begins.

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.

Derek

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

Hello Hello,
I hope you all had a fantastic week and are making great moves. It was an up and down week here at Fusion-42. Here’s the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and the 🤢 Ugly »> Why today vs tomorrow haunts every founder.

😇 The Good

When you’re deep in execution mode as a founder, it’s all too easy to forget to come up for air and feed the very obsession you set out to solve—especially with the landscape shifting so rapidly.

⭐️ This week, Kurt, Henrik and I paused for a deep dive into Fusion-42: what it stands for today, how the startup–investor ecosystem is evolving and what the future might hold.

Alignment is crucial, but even more so is asking yourself:
Is what we believed yesterday still true today? Is our plan sound? Are we just building for today—or really building for tomorrow?

Over this one-month founder alignment sprint—which sets the blueprint for the entire Fusion-42 build—we will:

• Challenge our assumptions by asking, “What important truths did we hold yesterday, and do they still hold true today?” This uncovers hidden beliefs about our market and compels us to validate them as conditions evolve.

• Practise definite optimism by setting clear, measurable goals for each accelerator phase. We’ll define precise outcomes, track progress against them and adjust our plans whenever reality diverges from our expectations.

• Iterate our thesis across the entire Fusion-42 build using real data—participant feedback, engagement metrics and performance benchmarks will guide every pivot.

• Avoid echo chambers by actively inviting critique from our diverse network of founders, mentors and investors. If everyone agrees with us, we’ll know we’re doing a crap job, not stress-testing our convictions—and that’s exactly what we intend to prevent.
  

Looking forward to these mind bending sessions and stress testing everything.


🚀 Our lead gen has taken a massive step forward as we have implemented more tools to gather data and automate processes. I’ll talk about this in an upcoming huddle so watch out for the invite in our cal and community.

🎙 Our new Investor-X podcast starts recording in the next few weeks, super excited by the response and bookings already, and be assured I won’t be asking the normal run of the mill questions, we provide that data already.

𝌞 More amazing content will be coming your way on Insights.fusion-42.com. We will be turning all of our newsletters, masterclasses, articles and series into deepdive podcasts. After writing a mini series about AI's Cambrian Explosion and releasing a deepdive podcast for each chapter it is a really great way to get a solid and grounded reflection on the content.

If you have not seen it, check it out here:

Deepdive pod:

The intro article to the 11 part series:

🚀 FOR THOSE WHO STILL WANT TO HAVE A JOB OR A BUSINESS NEXT YEAR

🎬 AI Launchpad
When: 16th August 2025, 19:00–20:45 GMT+4
Who: Executives & founders
What: Masterclass Panel and workshops-over 4 weeks .

Why attend?

• Go from AI novice to AI native

• Master GenAI & LLM essentials: prompts, context & best practices

• Automate processes, build intelligent agents and enterprise-level agentic solutions

• Walk away with practical blueprints & real-world takeaways — upskilling on steroids

Bonus: Register for the full programme and get our ChatGPT: The Starter Playbook.

It’s a deal, it’s a steal, it’s the sale of the century at just $400.

Register now

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

There is not really any bad to talk about, but I would like to highlight something that grabbed my attention.

“All the best startups I have invested in are working 7 days per week, 12 hours per day in the office—everyone’s on the 7/12 grind and ‘it’s a vibe’.”

🥊 Hustle Culture Clash: Vibe, Value or Vice?

🔥 The Hustle Evangelists:
They hail 7 × 12 as proof of passion—relentless hours forge momentum, create a “moat” and woo investors.

🌱 The Balance Advocates:
They counter that an 84-hour week is toxic. True endurance comes from efficiency, rest and mental clarity—working smarter, not just longer.

🃏 The Banter Brigade:
Satirists liken this grind to 19th-century plantation labour or mock “LinkedInner” culture—exposing the absurdity of worshipping hours over tangible outcomes.

🔥 Top Backlash Comments

• Mikael Dia: “This is pretty ridiculous… ‘Grow at all costs’ is bullshit.”

• Peter Mackness: “Working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week? Reevaluate your life choices.”

• Aaron S.: “This is insanely toxic… F**k that noise.”

• Colin Godby: “Indentured servants, 1832—and apparently VCs, 2025.”

• Olya Grovel: “Best ideas come from mental clarity and white space, not sprinting through chaos.”

Why It Matters

Burnout kills momentum, morale and retention. These rebuttals remind us that sustainable growth hinges on results, not rubber-stamped hours.

Blah, blah blah ……I regurgitated the above tribal noise through the consensus spewing ChatGPT, trained on so many stupid soundbites —now let’s stop. Rather than churning out polarised camps and low-level pattern-matching, let’s think.

That dust-up could just as easily have read:

“All the worst startups I have invested in work 7 days per week, 12 hours per day in the office—everyone’s on the 7/12 grind and ‘it’s a vibe’.”

Zero value added—just click-bait fodder.

➡️ How many founders do you know who pull crazy hours?
➡️ How many founders do you know who still don’t succeed?

If you think the 7/12 grind is insight, you’re still in amateur hour.


Here’s a Micro-Action

👉This week: Log some hours in 40-minute blocks. Tag High/Low-value and see how easily you can eliminate 50 % of your low-value time.

🚀 The above is why I am obsessed with building Fusion42 so founders can get out of the soundbite trap and move beyond the consensus blah that adds zero value but steals our time.

PS. I am a little pissed off with myself for having being trapped by this, but i feel it has to be said 😂

🤢 The Ugly

There be no ugly 🚀

Well that’s it from me, I am so excited and pumped for what’s to come over the next days, weeks, months. Thanks to all for being part of this journey.

For the ❤️ of startups

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.

Derek, Henrik and Kurt

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

Hello Hello,
I hope you all had a fantastic week and are making great moves. It was an up and down week here at Fusion-42. Here’s the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and the 🤢 Ugly »> Why today vs tomorrow haunts every founder.

😇 The Good

Now that was a week that was.
Despite the buzz, the day-to-day still demands massive focus. With a week off calls, I’ve been deep in management mode—building our Mission Control Centre: a real-time command hub that ties together projects, milestones, OKRs, KPIs, SOPs, team workloads, key metrics and automated alerts. EXECUTION BABY!…With so many moving parts and only so many hours (and brain cells) in the day, it ensures we spot issues, reallocate resources and pivot instantly—so nothing ever slips through the cracks.

These are like the most exciting times ever….

🚀 Fusion42 Founder Co-Pilot: Phase 1 Agent Set is under way 🚀

🎯 Goal

Deliver core AI agents aligned to founder needs across the startup journey, as shaped by the Fusion42 knowledge and structure.
Here is a brief overview of them and their main goals.

🧠 1. Clarity Agent meet Trillian

User Need:
"I need help figuring out where I am, what’s holding me back, and what to focus on next."

Outcomes:

• Diagnostic snapshot of founder stage, status and blockers

• Problem clarity using structured thinking

• Personalised roadmap to the next actionable milestone

🧪 2. Validation Agent meet Ford Prefect

User Need:
"I want to know if my startup idea actually solves a real problem for real people."

Primary Outcomes:

• Clear ICP and customer problem definition

• Validated (or invalidated) assumptions with supporting evidence

• Decision guidance: proceed, pivot, or test further
  

📢 3. GTM Agent meet Zaphod Beeblebrox

User Need:
"I need to get my first customers and generate real traction without wasting time."

Primary Outcomes:

• Defined GTM plan aligned to the ICP

• First campaign assets (e.g. cold outreach, landing page, posts)

• Basic traction goals and metrics to track progress
  

💸 4. Fundraising Agent meet Slartibartfast

User Need:
“I need to know if I’m investor-ready and get the pitch materials to prove it.”

Outcomes:

• Readiness Score: Automated rating (0–100) on traction, clarity & model, with top-3 gap analysis.

• Pitch Assets: AI-crafted elevator pitch, one-page tear sheet & FAQ prep.

• Deck Review: Slide-by-slide scoring & targeted feedback per Fusion42 criteria.
  

Your AI advantage starts 2 July—Join free intro session

🎬 Free AI Launchpad Intro
When: 2 July 2025, 19:00–20:45 GMT+4
Who: Executives & founders
What: 45-minute live kick-off to our four-week AI sprint

Why attend?

• Leverage insights from our AI experts

• See the full week-by-week roadmap

• Walk away with real takeaways—no strings attached

Bonus: Register for the full programme and get ChatGPT: The Starter Playbook.

Register for free intro session

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

Your internal tools and tech stack

Way too many SaaS subscriptions and tiers slow you down—learning interfaces, hunting data, then wondering where it lives. Keep it stupid simple: build a flat, lean tech stack (especially early on, when you need to know your business inside out). Resist shoe-horning every “all-in-one” platform into your workflow. Choose only the handful of tools you genuinely need, centralise all data in one golden source of truth (your database or CMS), and minimise integrations. Refine only when you’ve truly outgrown a tool—and you’ll slash maintenance, avoid lock-in and stay focused on your customers, not wrestling with one-size-fits-all solutions. Don’t get trapped in walled gardens.

🤢 The Ugly

Just scroll through the BS headlines—nothing highlights the ugly quite like the current sensationalist news. I’m tuning it out and retreating to my happy place.

Oh yes—I do have something. I’ve always loved writing and vowed to one day pen a non-fiction, slightly philosophical manifesto on humankind: the good, the bad and the ugly. On a recent eight-hour flight, I sketched a rough outline and since then I’ve dedicated 30 minutes each day to journalling my thoughts, lessons and discoveries.

But here’s the ugly: I’ve never written a full-length book—no formal training, precious little time—and now I realise I need to dive into “How to Write a Book for Dummies “ (me being the dummy) just to learn the basics. The one bright spot? True to founder form, I’ve already nailed a killer title. 😂

Well that’s it from me, I am so excited and pumped for what’s to come over the next days, weeks, months. Thanks to all for being part of this journey.

For the ❤️ of startups

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.

Derek, Henrik and Kurt

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

Hello Hello,
I hope you all had a fantastic week and are making great moves. It was an up and down week here at Fusion-42. Here’s the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and the 🤢 Ugly »> Why today vs tomorrow haunts every founder.

😇 The Good

Now that was a week that was.
Global super accelerator wrapped on Thursday and what an amazing 10 weeks it has been.

Cohort Registrations: 293

Unique GSA Attendees: 735

Total People on Calls: 3127

Averages Unique per call: 104

Total per call: 148

Average attendee session time 57:01 mins

Average session score 4.64 / 5

The GSA “You gotta show up” leaderboard 👏🏼

and here is everybody else that showed up, a bit 👏🏼

and a massive thank you to all our experts that shared so many nuggets of wisdom from the trenches

Watch the Raise panels here:

What’s Next

• 🛬 Landing in Dubai - In partnership with Dtec, get a straight-from-the-source playbook on landing, launching and scaling your startup in Dubai and the wider GCC— incentives, setup routes and investor access, all in one punchy session.

• We’re launching a 4-week AI camp (2 hrs/week: 1 hr masterclass + 1 hr workshop) for founders and execs—covering how to get the most out of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Manus and DeepSeek, plus make.com automations, AI agents on n8n and full enterprise level systems on Jiva.ai for scaling.

  It kicks off 16 July—could you spare 2 mins to help shape it?

  Everyone who completes the survey gets first dibs on a free 45-minute test session.

  Thanks so much

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

• We are taking a week off calls after this crazy intensive period, gonna miss you all.

• GSA II is almost 4 months away, and there is a lot of work to do to lift the bar to a much higher level.

• After all that we learnt on GSA, it is important to keep the momentum going, check in on telegram and see all the reruns here!
  

🤢 The Ugly

I’ve come to realise that the true ugliness of founding isn’t the all-nighters or the failed launches, but the relentless tug-of-war between what demands my attention today and the vision I’ve promised myself for tomorrow. Every urgent email, every last-minute tweak, feels like sand in the gears of my long-term mission—yet without that north star, the daily grind quickly loses all meaning.

It’s a curious paradox: part of me knows I must be utterly present—immersed in the problem at hand—while another part insists I keep one eye firmly on the horizon. Neither stance alone will do. Time is both our fiercest adversary and our most precious ally, and navigating that contradiction requires more than good intentions.

The ugly truth is that clarity isn’t delivered in a single lightning bolt of insight but forged in habit: pausing each morning to ask, “What must I win today to honour tomorrow’s ambition?” It’s in those small rituals—jotting down today’s must-wins alongside tomorrow’s bold aims—that I find the discipline to bridge the gap between now and next. Only by facing that tension head-on can I keep my purpose sharp and my progress real.

My advice to every founder is simple: join the dots by turning “what’s winning” into a steady, repeatable process that shows up reliably each day, guiding you from one milestone to the next and, ultimately, to mission success. And remember: trading hours for dosh is no scalable business model.

Well that’s it from me, I am so excited and pumped for what’s to come over the next days, weeks, months. Thanks to all for being part of this journey.

For the ❤️ of startups

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.

Derek, Henrik and Kurt

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

Hello Hello,
I hope you all had a fantastic week and are making great moves. It was an up and down week here at Fusion-42. Here’s the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and the 🤢 Ugly so we can all learn together.

😇 The Good

Now that was a week that was.
The raise summit was an absolute blast and first and foremost a massive thank you to all our amazing speakers.

Raise Summit — Day 1 & Day 2 in a Nutshell

Early-Bird Buzz

• ⚡ Almost 500 founders joined over the two days—proof the community is hungry for a no-fluff actionable voice.

• 🤝 Chat threads lit up with gratitude: “Fusion42 got me back on track when I hit bottom.”

A massive thanks to all of you for showing up and making this happen and the amazing 4.7 / 5 score we received.

Content That Hit Home

1. Capital Deep-Dive

   • Day 1: Funding landscape, capital stack sequencing, “math of venture”.

   • Day 2: Grants, sponsorships, and sponsor-capital playbook—non-dilutive cash if you earn trust.

2. Real-World GTM “Shredding”

   • Live teardown sessions delivered instant, actionable tweaks to founders’ go-to-market plans.

   • Feedback request: more of these hot-seat critiques next summit.

3. Founder ↔ Investor Dynamics

   • Trust is the primary currency; decks are secondary.

   • Build investor pipelines months before you need a cheque; warm intros beat cold mail every time.

The summit proved again that relationships, rapid execution and data-backed storytelling beat big decks and bigger egos—every time.

It could not have happened without our amazing partners ❤️

Alicia Mejia - Vegas - Eco building
Philip Peredo - Vegas - Millenia Ventures
Brian Bourgerie - Puerto Rico - Uncommon Entrepreneurs
Joshua Leavitt - Vegas - Tech Alley
Ashtan Moore - DC - Quoth Capital
Danielle Patterson - South Carolina - Family Office Access
Melissa Chalfant - San Antonio TX - InVentures
Mollie Jahner - Montana - Way Forward
Eric Perez - LA - Ai Mafia
DeMond Mickens - Atlanta - Entertainment
Ray Gibson - Amsterdam - Funded.club
Mack DeWitt - Vegas - Kingston Automation
Derek Bonner - Vegas - Key2
Avishay AJ Segal - Tel Aviv- Ai Mafia
Sebastian Celestine - Caribbean - EOG
JT Benton - Montana - Venture Studio Forum
Nastja Preradovic Visic - Serbia - Gem-Seed
Abdelrhman Soliman, Egypt
Hamed Saleh, Egypt
Rym Bachouche, Dubai, CNTX AI
Dr. Manish Patel - London - Ai Mafia / Jiva.ai
Oz Hutton - Utah - Sponsorships
Marco Banfi - Dubai - Capquest
Matt Ambrose - CDMX - Business Development
Eric Harris - Orange County - Pitch Coaching
Lorraine Yarde - Vegas - Tech Alley
Michelle Valentine - Vegas - Women in Web3 / Valentine Communications
Ricardo Aguilar - Central Am - Business development
Dock Walls - Vegas - Legal
John Jeffrey Lindell - Vegas - Funded.club

And last but not least, a big shout out to Kurt and Henrik for getting **it done 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Watch the Raise and GSA reruns here. F42+ members

What’s Next

• 🛬 Landing in Dubai - In partnership with Dtec, get a straight-from-the-source playbook on landing, launching and scaling your startup in Dubai and the wider GCC— incentives, setup routes and investor access, all in one punchy session.

• 🎓 Summer AI Camp details landing in inboxes this week; early-bird slots already 30 % filled.

• 🔥 Global Super Accelerator 2.0 drops this autumn—AI-heavy, sector-specific tracks, gov & corporate partners.

• ✋ Ask: Refer a corporate, gov agency or sector expert who should partner with GSA 2.0.

  ---

  
  😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

We have reached that time of year in Dubai, and our invite only social meet up tonight is going indoors 😂

We’d Love Your Feedback!

• Your experience matters — help us make the Fusion42 GSA even better!
  Please take 2 minutes to fill out the feeback suvey here:

• Thank you for helping us grow and improve!

🤢 The Ugly

Henrik’s abandoning us next week to tie the knot— clearly punching well above his weight with his amazing bride. Send your congratulations

Well that’s it from me, I am so excited and pumped for what’s to come over the next days, weeks, months. Thanks to all for being part of this journey.

For the ❤️ of startups
Cheers,

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.

Derek, Henrik and Kurt

Insights by Fusion42

We cut through the noise of the startup and investor ecosystem by delivering actionable knowledge, data-driven insights, and connections to make the startup world transparent and accessible. No fluff, no BS—just the insights you need to get **it done.

By DeReK WaTSoN

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

Hello Hello,
I hope you all had a fantastic week and are making great moves. It was an up and down week here at Fusion-42. Here’s the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and the 🤢 Ugly so we can all learn together.

😇 The Good

I’m back in Europe for a quick breather, family time and a celebration of life. True to form, the weather can’t decide—sunshine one minute, a torrential down-pour the next. It’s a neat mirror of startup life: apparently random swings, all serving a bigger purpose if you pause to read them.

Here’s a three part pit-stop. Lens, Focus, What to do »> for that top-down view:

Macro – Is what I believed yesterday still true today?

Vision and core thesis

Grab a notebook. Write your vision in one crisp sentence, then work backwards to where you are today. If the joins feel strained, something’s not right and you have probably pivoted or started to focus on different things, dig in and realign.

Meso – Where’s the leak?

Systems and processes

Block half a day for a ruthless metrics rinse. Ditch vanity numbers, spot blockages, and embed the processes that keep the engine purring. Solid ops mean users get a smoother ride and you get the data to keep improving.

Micro – What tripped us up today?

Daily execution

Run a no-blame post-mortem on the last sprint. Isolate one root cause, fix it everywhere it bites, and only then hit the accelerator again.

GSA Week 6: Pitch Perfect + AI Power-Ups

Week 6 of the Fusion42 GSA was a blur of high-impact practise:

• Pitch Deck Mastery – Kurt Walker & Nick Hughes drilled the art of telling the problem story, tuning to funding types, and baking in feedback loops.

• AI Live Build – Ryan Kohler showed how to turn ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Gamma.app, and Make.com into GTM, hiring, and content machines. Key mantra: quality first, then automate.
  

Watch the GSA reruns here. F42+ members

We’d Love Your Feedback!

Your experience matters — help us make the Fusion42 GSA even better!
Please take 2 minutes to fill out the feeback suvey here:

Thank you for helping us grow and improve!

Here are a few other thing you can join:

Welcome to the Fusion42 Services Database, where we compile a list of the best advisory/consulting services for our global startups community (>7k founders)! Please complete this quick survey to help us understand your offerings and get you onboarded into our Database (approval needed).

🛠️ 🚀 Fusion42 GSA: Share Your Tools & Resources

Help us build the ultimate toolbox for founders, framers, and funders. Please share your favorite tools and resources in the categories below! (you will have to do this process for each submission, but don't worry only takes 1 min).

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

Managing 8,000+ members across Stripe, Telegram, Substack and Lu.ma has turned into a right old click-fest. So we’re wiring in a middleware “backbone” that lets every tool talk to the others—no more copy-and-paste firefighting.

What you’ll see: your own Admin Page.
One login shows:

• current plan & payment status

• live event links and replays

• Insights content store

• quick tier-switch button

Grab tonight’s call or tweak your plan in seconds—no email hunts, no “Resend the invite?” DMs.

We’re not at full autopilot yet, but each release scrapes off another layer of friction. Less admin, more action—just what busy founders need.

🤢 The Ugly

Keep this front and centre: Trust Erodes Quicker Than Traction.
Everything ‘we” (all of us) do must be a customer benefits first philosophy.

Well that’s it from me, I am so excited and pumped for what’s to come over the next days, weeks, months. Thanks to all for being part of this journey.

For the ❤️ of startups
Cheers,

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.

Derek, Henrik and Kurt

Insights by Fusion42

We cut through the noise of the startup and investor ecosystem by delivering actionable knowledge, data-driven insights, and connections to make the startup world transparent and accessible. No fluff, no BS—just the insights you need to get **it done.

By DeReK WaTSoN

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

Hello Hello,
I hope you all had a fantastic week and are making great moves. It was an up and down week here at Fusion-42. Here’s the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and the 🤢 Ugly so we can all learn together.

😇 The Good

Purple Cow theory

If you drive past a field of black‑and‑white cows you barely glance. If one of them is bright purple, you nearly crash the car. That’s Seth Godin’s Purple Cow in a nutshell—remarkable or invisible.

Why the startup ecosystem still looks like black‑and‑white cows

1. Incubators selling fairy dust
   Demo‑day theatrics, zero substance. Most programmes are glorified TED talks wrapped in free coffee. Founders leave with selfies, not skills.

2. Mentors recycling clichés
   “Fail fast, pivot faster.” Cheers, mate—tell me something I can’t google, chatgpt or get from a £9.99 paperback.

3. Investors tweeting hustle porn
   They preach “founder‑first” yet still bankroll pitch‑deck acrobatics over shipped product. Hypocrisy in 280 characters.

4. Media amplifying noise
   Funding rounds are press‑released like Nobel prizes while real traction goes unnoticed. Vanity metrics rule the headline economy.

5. Line up, line up, get your free credits here…while useful it is not a USP it’s a honeytrap.

LET’S GO PURPLE

Since last September we’ve gone 100% all in on execution first for founders —Problem fit, Market ready, AI first or die, Fundraise fluent. Hit these and capital chases you.

The black and white cows are waking up 😂

In the last month we’ve heard many whisperings—other accelerators and incubators inquiring about what we are up to and suddenly preaching execution, dropping the fluff (well not really, that’s more my hope than reality) Good, Let them follow. We’ll keep raising the bar because we want founders to succeed.
For the ❤️ of startups

Next move

We’re just going to be doubling up on the execution‑only workshop stack, again and again and again.

LFG! As Harry Stebbings confirmed

Watch the GSA reruns here. F42+ members

We’d Love Your Feedback!

Your experience matters — help us make the Fusion42 GSA even better!
Please take 2 minutes to fill out the feeback suvey here:

Thank you for helping us grow and improve!

Here are a few other thing you can join:

Welcome to the Fusion42 Services Database, where we compile a list of the best advisory/consulting services for our global startups community (>7k founders)! Please complete this quick survey to help us understand your offerings and get you onboarded into our Database (approval needed).

🛠️ 🚀 Fusion42 GSA: Share Your Tools & Resources

Help us build the ultimate toolbox for founders, framers, and funders. Please share your favorite tools and resources in the categories below! (you will have to do this process for each submission, but don't worry only takes 1 min).

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

Speed of execution, always will be an issue but I only deal in velocity grounded in reality and well thought out organic plans.

🤢 The Ugly

Nothing to report this week 🚀🔥

Well that’s it from me, I am so excited and pumped for what’s to come over the next days, weeks, months. Thanks to all for being part of this journey.

For the ❤️ of startups
Cheers,

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.

Derek, Henrik and Kurt

📅 Upcoming Online Masterclasses, Panels and Workshops.
Get the calendar here.

Insights by Fusion42

We cut through the noise of the startup and investor ecosystem by delivering actionable knowledge, data-driven insights, and connections to make the startup world transparent and accessible. No fluff, no BS—just the insights you need to get **it done.

By DeReK WaTSoN

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

Hello Hello,
I hope you all had a fantastic week and are making great moves. It was an up and down week here at Fusion-42. Here’s the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and the 🤢 Ugly so we can all learn together.

😇 The Good

It’s long, it’s hard, but ever so rewarding.
Some of the most exciting things this week were not all around GSA, but the POC when not being afraid to do things in public. We are receiving inbound from eternal parties wanting to get involved and opening up discussions about setting up and running incubators / accelerators for them. I feel our unique value add of actually listening to founders and getting shit done is resonating. Active over Passive wins everyday

GSA was a stonker of a week.

Masterclasses and panels are getting an average of 125 people show up over the sessions. Reviews are outstanding and people even posting off their own back (appreciate you so so much)

Last week had some great guests and sessions and next week is set to be outstanding.
Some key takeaways from last week.

Tuesday – Founder Fireside
Sophie Smith and Kristina Moore reminded us that investors decide early — look for genuine buy-in. Obsession trumps polish, SPVs keep your cap table clean, and 300+ rejections usually mean a targeting issue, not a bad idea.

Wednesday – AI Masterclass
We unpacked the truth behind LLMs — they remix, not create. AI adds value when you stay in control. Founders built custom GPTs, tested Perplexity Spaces, and ran AI sprints to streamline insight, not replace it.

Thursday – Pitch Kung Fu
This session cut through the fluff. Warm intros beat cold decks. $1 in sales > big promises. Know your CAC, LTV, and GTM story — then pitch with precision, not hope.

Watch the reruns here

We’d Love Your Feedback!

Your experience matters — help us make the Fusion42 GSA even better!
Please take 2 minutes to fill out the feeback suvey here:

Thank you for helping us grow and improve!

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

Speed of execution can never be fast enough as far as I am concerned, but we can only do what we can do. Priority management and acceptance of less than perfect are the key.

After a flat period, growth has resumed with GSA kicking in, new hubs coming onboard and really positive support. LFG

🤢 The Ugly

STARTUP ECOSYSTEM: The Overused Illusion

I’m over the “ecosystem” hype. Before people mouth that word, they should flip open a child’s encyclopedia and learn its meaning. When push comes to shove the majority spout the term and it turns out to be 99 % BS—closed doors, gate‑keeping and self‑interest posing as collaboration. Pure social signalling, zero substance.

Our response

• Radical transparency: We publish metrics, mistakes and learnings.

• Community first: Knowledge and connections flow freely.

• Accountability: We expose protectionism and demand genuine change.

• No gate‑keeping: Everyone has a seat and a voice, pedigree irrelevant.

• This is a movement for the betterment of innovation.

This isn’t about preserving a broken status quo—repeating the same tactics only delivers the same failures and stagnant returns. We’re building a movement that actually works—for founders, framers and funders alike.

“You can’t build an ecosystem on fluff from takers—without substance, it’s a non‑starter.”

Well that’s it from me, I am so excited and pumped for what’s to come over the next days, weeks, months. Thanks to all for being part of this journey.

For the ❤️ of startups
Cheers,

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.

Derek, Henrik and Kurt

📅 Upcoming Online Masterclasses, Panels and Workshops.
Get the calendar here.

THIS THURSDAY Don’t miss it

Insights by Fusion42

We cut through the noise of the startup and investor ecosystem by delivering actionable knowledge, data-driven insights, and connections to make the startup world transparent and accessible. No fluff, no BS—just the insights you need to get **it done.

By DeReK WaTSoN

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

Hello Hello,
I hope you all had a fantastic week and are making great moves. It was an up and down week here at Fusion-42. Here’s the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and the 🤢 Ugly so we can all learn together.

😇 The Good

It’s all good.

WOW — what an incredible first week!

We’re beyond excited about how the Fusion42 Global Super Accelerator has kicked off. The energy, engagement, and community spirit have been amazing — and it’s only just the beginning!

Here’s a quick recap of everything we covered:

Key Highlights:

• Incredible MasterClasses and Workshops with Peter N. Townshend, Dan Bowyer, Anvita Varshney, and Rym Bachouche — thank you for sharing your expertise!
  

• If you missed them you can catch them here.

• Startups from around the world connecting, collaborating, and sharing ideas.

• Amazing discussions, great input, and serious energy — this is exactly what Fusion42 is about: sharing, learning, making new connections, and having fun!

• Week 1: Recap Post

Key Takeaways:

• Investors Invest in People: Strong, cohesive teams are more likely to secure investment and succeed.

• Execution is Everything: Be an operator, not just a dreamer.

• Lay a Solid Foundation: Get your basics right before scaling.

• GTM Before GTF: Validate your Go-To-Market strategy before raising funds.

• Start with Problem Fit: Solve a real, urgent problem first.

• Think Simpler, Start Sooner: Build a Minimum Viable Experiment (MVE).

• Core Identity Matters: Authentic leadership wins.

• Seek Early Customer Feedback: Shape your product with real insights.

• Define Your ICP and Personas: Know exactly who you're serving.

• Choose the Right Channels: Meet customers where they are.

• Measure Everything: Track key metrics and optimize.

We’d Love Your Feedback!

Your experience matters — help us make the Fusion42 GSA even better!
Please take 2 minutes to fill out the Week 1 Feedback Survey here:

Thank you for helping us grow and improve!

This week at GSA we rolled out two new ways for F42+ members to stay accountable and make real progress: the Lean Business Canvas and The 100 Challenge.

They’re both built to help you take action, share your journey, and stay on track with the community behind you.

As we get into the hardwork and the practicalities of building a startup I certainly hope we have provoked a shift in consciousness about the sheer scale of the startup undertaking.

The Lean Business Canvas, guided by the Startup Checklist, marks the start of our journey towards building a successful startup. The insights in the first report serve as early indicators, laying a foundational view of your business that will evolve with deeper exploration and structured refinement over the course of GSA, and support you through your entire journey.

F42+ members will be receiving their first Lean Canvas report in the coming days.

The 100 Challenge is to nail your problem fit.

We will be holding a Monday huddle check-in … watch out for the time in the 100 challenge channel.

We heard a lot of suggestions for the Mom Test for Startup Problem Fit, but is it Enough ?

Short answer: It’s a solid start—but not enough on its own.

Rob Fitzpatrick’s *The Mom Test* is great for teaching founders how to avoid leading questions and get honest feedback. It helps them stop pitching and start listening. But for real problem fit, especially when insisting on 100 conversations, you need more structure.

Here’s why *The Mom Test* is useful:

• - Teaches how to ask better, non-biased questions

• - Helps founders avoid false positives from polite feedback

• - Encourages discovery over validation

But here’s what it misses:

• - No framework for mapping patterns across conversations

• - Doesn’t push for quantifying the pain or urgency of the problem

• - Lacks segmentation logic to refine the ICP as conversations evolve

• - Doesn’t guide how to filter noise from signal when talking to 100+ people

What we suggest instead:

Pair *The Mom Test* principles with a structured customer discovery scorecard, covering:

• - Problem severity (1–5 scale)

• - Current workaround (and its cost)

• - Buying intent (would they pay for a solution today?)

• - ICP alignment (do they fit the target profile?)
  
  Bottom line: *The Mom Test* is a tool, not a system. Use it to sharpen the questions, but build a repeatable process to nail the problem fit.

  ⭐️ Let us know if you want a plug-and-play scorecard template—we can build one for exactly this use case.
  
  

🔥 One of the strongest qualifiers? Ask what they'd actually pay to fix it.
It’s a forcing function. If there’s no willingness to pay—even in principle—it’s a red flag. Payment intent signals real pain, not polite interest.

It’s still not too late to join GSA

Full Registration is now open

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

➡️ We want to do so much more, but the day is still only 24 hours long, so we are busy working on getting more partners involved in creative ways.

➡️ We're looking to bring more sponsors into Fusion and the GSA—where we’re actually helping founders get **it done. The outcome-led workshops are already producing the right feedback which will make for stronger startups and laying the foundations for a real ecosystem.

Gone are the days of talking AT founders or building ecosystems around bright lights, vanity metrics, and fluffy photo ops. (Bit of a rant, I know 😄)

But here's the thing—we’re seeing a shift. As the community grows, and more people see the value (and are talking about it) of flipping the script, new opportunities are landing on our doorstep. One deal already signed—and in true F42 fashion, we made sure it includes something meaningful for founders too.

If you want to get involved please be sure to JOIN OUR PARTNER PROGRAM or reach out for a chat.

➡️ We were so busy we didn’t even manage to activate two new community hubs … but the priority is what we already have, you.

🤢 The Ugly

Apparently, some people expect the Raise Report—packed with new fund names, insights, and investor data—to be free.

So let’s take a moment to remind ourselves what a business actually is:

• Buys stuff (time, skills, materials, data, attention)

• Turns it into value (a product, service, experience, result)

• Sells that value to someone who needs it enough to pay

I’m not here to justify whether it’s worth $42/month. That’s your decision.

But if you honestly think you’ve got the time, skill, and systems to source, vet, and organise this level of intel faster and better than we have—then by all means, crack on.

Let’s be real:

• Are you going to track hundreds of investor updates every week?

• Map them to stage, sector, and geography?

• Package it all in a format you can act on—quickly?

• And do it all for under $42/month?

(Spoiler: impossible. I pay the bills. I know what it costs.)

If you can—genuinely, best of luck. But most founders won’t. Because they value their time, know this isn’t their area of expertise, and have more important things to build.

That’s why the Raise Report exists. We do the unglamorous, behind-the-scenes work—so you don’t have to.

No, it’s not free. And it shouldn’t be. Just like your startup isn’t either.

FREE

• Access to the 24/7 Telegram community with expert-led channels

• Access to Masterclasses on Startup Resilience, GTM, Fundraising and AI

• Newsletters. Mon. The Brief. 📈 Trending, 💡Innovator Spotlight, 🛠️ Tools

• Wednesday The Raise Report. 💸 New Funds looking to give you cash.

• Friday: Everything42 😇 The Good, 😈 The Bad, 🤢 The Ugly

Fusion42+ GSA | US$42 per month

Everything in Free. Community | Masterclasses | Newsletters Plus

This includes:

Access to Fusion42+ Members only Private group

Access GSA BUILD IN LIVE WORKSHOP

Opportunity to Pitch at Pitch Kung Fu, FUSE and RAISE Events

Weekly Cohort/AUA Huddles

Full Content Store –All Masterclasses Recordings, Podcast, Interviews & ebooks

Please drop any comments below or ask the team directly in telegram / whatsapp.

Well that’s it from me, I am so excited and pumped for what’s to come over the next days, weeks, months. Thanks to all for being part of this journey.

For the ❤️ of startups
Cheers,

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.

Derek, Henrik and Kurt

📅 Upcoming Online Masterclasses, Panels and Workshops.
Get the calendar here.

Insights by Fusion42

We cut through the noise of the startup and investor ecosystem by delivering actionable knowledge, data-driven insights, and connections to make the startup world transparent and accessible. No fluff, no BS—just the insights you need to get **it done.

By DeReK WaTSoN

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update. 

Hello Hello,
I hope you all had a fantastic week and are making great moves. It was an up and down week here at Fusion-42. Here’s the 😇 Good, 😈 Bad and the 🤢 Ugly so we can all learn together.

😇 The Good

We’ve been victims of our own enthusiasm this week — so much so that I’m only just getting around to writing this!

Here’s what’s brewing behind the scenes:

• We’ve partnered with a university in Dubai to run a student founder cohort.

• We’ve launched an F42 Hub in Egypt, headed by a local micro VC.

• And we’re welcoming a new cohort of founders from Palestine.

There’s more, but I’ll hold back the full details until the official announcements next week.

Now for what’s been keeping us up at night... pulling the Global Super Accelerator (GSA) together has been a mix of 😇 Good, 😈 Bad, and 🤢 Ugly — on an hourly basis — but we’re finally here, and we’re ready to go.

Monday’s kickoff is going to be 🔥. We’re starting strong with a 30-minute welcoming and onboarding session, giving you the deets of what lies ahead.

Then we have Three great investors joining us for our panel discussion “What Investors Really Look For”

Peter on Linkedin
Anvita on Linkedin
Dan on Linkedin

Plus they will also join us for ⚡️ FUSED ⚡️ where we have 5 great founders pitching.

​Balentic

💼 Private Markets SaaS | Orca Platform | Revenue | 🇩🇰 DK Based | Raising A-Round H2 2025
Digitising the €11T private markets space with verified data and AI-powered workflows for GPs and LPs.

​Ree Fashion

♻️ FashionTech | Preloved & Off-Price | 🇵🇱 CEE Focus | Raising €1.1M Bridge Round
Poland’s first C2C + B2C fashion resale marketplace, powering brand-integrated circular commerce across the CEE.

​Urent

🚗 Mobility Marketplace | Multi-Category P2P | 🇦🇪 UAE Based | Raising 5M AED (Pre-Series A)
Airbnb for mobility—rent anything on wheels (cars, yachts, bikes, jets) via a peer-to-peer platform and digital fleet tools.

​Crush Capital (Going Public)

🎬 Interactive Finance Media | Click-to-Invest® Streaming | 🇺🇸 US Based | Raising $5M Priced Round
Reality TV meets investing—streamed exclusively on X, letting viewers invest in featured startups while they watch.

​estaie

🏨💻 Hospitality Tech | AI-Native | 170+ Hotels, 20K Rooms | 🇦🇪 UAE | $1M SAFE 35% committed (Pre-Seed)
AI-native platform for long stays with dynamic pricing and a global booking API.

Plus we have many other great things in store for the weeks ahead. Don’t forget to subscribe for the full calendar here to see what’s going on.

Let’s introduce you to Rym Bachouche, who will be running a 1 hour MasterClass – Strategy Fundamentals: Delve into core market entry strategies to master your positioning and confidently navigate competitive landscapes.
Rym not only is a GTM expert, but has deep deep knowledge in startup world.

And if you haven’t joined the 200+ founders already registered, there’s still time. You can learn more and sign up at the link below.

Full Registration is now open

😈 The Bad (and how we deal with it)

There literally hasn’t been time for “bad.”

If I had to pick something — it’s the lack of community support in inviting other founders to GSA. But hey, maybe I just expect too much 🤷🏼‍♂️

🤢 The Ugly

B2C and B2G conversion cycles are so F-in long and painful.

Honestly, it just reinforces how badly we need AI to take over half these tasks — because it literally couldn’t be worse than what I’ve dealt with lately.

Well that’s it from me, I am so excited and pumped for what’s to come over the next days, weeks, months. Thanks to all for being part of this journey.

For the ❤️ of startups
Cheers,

Enjoy and hope to see you soon.

Derek, Henrik and Kurt

For the ❤️ of startups

✌🏼 & 💙
Derek

Insights by Fusion42

We cut through the noise of the startup and investor ecosystem by delivering actionable knowledge, data-driven insights, and connections to make the startup world transparent and accessible. No fluff, no BS—just the insights you need to get **it done.

By DeReK WaTSoN

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, share it with your friends, colleagues and everyone interested in the startup Investor ecosystem.

If you've got suggestions, an article, research, your tech stack, or a job listing you want featured, just let me know! I'm keen to include it in the upcoming edition.

Please let me know what you think of it, love a feedback loop 🙏🏼

• ❤️ Love it, keep them coming!

• 👍 Great, always a good read.

• 😊 Enjoyable, but let’s see some variety.

• 👎 Okay, seen better.

• 🛑 Get a different job.
  
  Subscribe below and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter to never miss an update.