What I Learned From a Failed Startup

“I think most VCs, especially ones who haven’t founded companies and been successful, should stick with series A and beyond.”

After co-founding three companies including Superhuman, where he helped architect the now-famous PMF methodology, Vivek Sodera has experienced the damage that well-meaning investors inflict on zero-to-one founders.

“There is a night and day difference in interfacing with an investor who has started a company at the zero to one stage. When you have investors who haven’t built companies before, they categorically will give bad advice at that zero to one stage.”

Vivek draws a sharp line most investors blur. There’s the zero-to-one art of company building before PMF. Then there’s the science of scaling post-PMF.

“Once it becomes the science of company building and you’re post-PMF, anyone in venture will pattern match against their portfolio. As a founder, you don’t need to try to recreate employee compensation or enterprise sales ,that’s where most VCs can add value. But that inflection point between PMF and pre-PMF? When you have investors who haven’t built companies before, they categorically will give bad advice.”

His second company, Airseed, never found product-market fit. After three years, he shut it down. That painful moment became his edge. Soon after, Rahul Vohra pitched him on rebuilding email. What they built at Superhuman wasn’t just a product, but a systematic approach to diagnosing PMF that they open-sourced. The methodology came from necessity. One investor at Superhuman (someone from Wall Street who’d never founded a company) sent all-caps emails multiple times a week: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? OPEN UP. NONE OF MY PORTFOLIO COMPANIES ARE DOING THESE ONE-TO-ONE ONBOARDINGS.”

Vivek took him to lunch with the data. “I am a big believer that founders are closest to the product and the customer. It takes a particular type of investor who can say, my job isn’t to control. My job is to influence.”

Control versus influence is the distinction that matters at the zero-to-one stage. Pattern matching versus lived experience. It’s why Vivek built Supercharge the way he did.

“What I’m doing with Supercharge is being this fractional founder to help founders with three biggest pain points: product-market fit, fundraising, and recruiting. Pretty much 99.99% of investors don’t have experience with PMF and don’t have experience building out a methodology and a framework where they can surgically analyze and diagnose what PMF means.”

Supercharge Fund I is intentionally small: $15M backing 20 companies in enterprise AI, productivity, and dev tools. Fund II will be $20-25M max. “I’m not interested in playing the AUM game. I’m more interested in playing the carry game.”

His value-add tapers off by design at series B, but as a first believer, he stays connected. “I have an angel investment that will most likely be the fund returner for my angel fund. She raised a $200 million series C on a $2 billion post. The founder still calls me. My value add has tapered off. But I’m still the cheerleader, I’m still the therapist, in perpetuity.”

Vivek’s investing criteria has evolved sharply post-ChatGPT. “I now look for founders leveraging AI code gen products and tools, at least 90% of the code should be AI generated. Less than that is not as interesting to me. It signals the founder is not adapting to this new paradigm shift.”

But what really gets him animated is the current discourse around revenue growth. The AI supercycle has created unprecedented noise, and founders are getting dangerous advice from the wrong investors.

“You have founders on the GTM side who get to single-digit millions in revenue very quickly. Prosumer seats where the end user is using the product for a month. The founder multiplies that by 12 and says, ‘This is our ARR.’ What they’re not being honest about is the considerable amount of churn, the lack of retention.”

And tier-one funds are making it worse. “They’re saying what’s interesting is not getting to $2 million in three months. What’s interesting is getting to $2 million in 10 days. It’s bad advice to founders. It’s shortsighted and crappy revenue. What’s more interesting is taking the time to figure out how to sell into the enterprise and unlocking that motion, where durability gets created.”

He’s watching founders rage bait on Twitter about how fast they hit revenue milestones, but “we’re going to see a massive drop-off and implosion..”

This is precisely why Vivek’s surgical approach to PMF matters more in 2025 than ever before. The market has never been noisier. The tools to fake traction have never been more accessible. The gap between real product-market fit and manufactured metrics has never been wider.

Founders at the zero-to-one stage need someone who can tell the difference. Who can look past the vanity metrics and diagnose whether you’re actually building something durable or just riding a hype cycle that’ll crash in 18 months.

What separates great emerging managers from good ones isn’t just what they’ve built, it’s whether they can translate that experience into reproducible frameworks. Vivek can diagnose product-market fit in the first 30 seconds of a pitch because he’s lived every permutation of finding it, losing it, and systematizing it.

For founders building in enterprise AI, productivity, and developer tools at the zero-to-one stage, he’s not just an investor. He’s the fractional founder who’s been there, done that, and has the frameworks to prove it.

Special thanks to Jonathan for the intro to Vivek 🙏