I help founders get ready and connect with investors • Seasoned entrepreneur • Building tech startups for 25yrs (zero→£mil ARR, twice)

With 29 years in startups, I now run the Gipity AI Dev Studio: Expert help to launch your MVP in 30 days. www.gipity.com

𝐌𝐲 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲... 👇

1968 BC (Before Computers): Born into analogue world

1982-86: Discovered computers! Vic 20, BBC micro, ICL 2900 mainframe & more

1986-89: Computation degree, UMIST (University of Manchester, Institute of Science & Technology)

1989-99: IT consultant/project manager: Logica, IBM, Reuters, Bankers Trust & Deutsche Bank

1994-97: first side hustle: scuba diving instructor & own London dive school

1996: published first website & first ever disk-mounted website on a UK magazine cover

1999: developer/project manager at 2 early London digital agencies

1999: vision/architect/investor. created first UK under-a-tenner domain name business, Easily

1999: built+launched early/successful dot-com: domain/email/web hosting ISP

1999-2001: ceo. managed growth from 0 to 2,000 daily domain sales & 30+ staff in under 2yrs

2000: invented the web-based DNS dashboard for domains

2000: created early no-code solution for one-page websites: £100k ARR

2000: highly commended "Entrepreneur of the Year": European E-commerce Association E-business 2000 awards

2001: 64th in Sunday Times "Top 100 pre-IPO e-businesses in Europe" E-League

2001: ran one of the first successful web affiliate schemes, generating 40% of rev

2004: hit 400,000+ domain registrations, 30,000+ websites & 40,000+ email accounts

2004: 3,500 commission earning affiliates & word of mouth to 100,000+ customers

2004: negotiated successful multi-million pound dot-com exit/sale of Easily

2002: vision/investor. launched one of the first ever B2B mobile text marketing services: SMS Expert

2007-11: early digital nomad: B2B Saas startup from beach/desert

2007-19: ceo. ran leading text marketing B2B Saas: zero to multi-million turnover

2007-19: cto/architect. developed 850k lines of code & supported 1mil daily transactions/API calls

2020... consultancy/advice/support for early-stage tech startup founders

2022... helping hand-picked founders find the right investors

• 2018: vision/architect/investor/cto...
Clickacall: instant video calls from anywhere with single click
Nearevo: proximity discovery for internet of things
Scan+Click: contactless business cards
Secly: personal online security

• 2021 l2o: supporting next generation of startups
• 2022 Venture Cards: all startups, in one place • connecting the right founders and investors

• 2024 The Gipity AI Dev Studio: Expert help to launch your MVP in 30 days

Steve Procter

CONTROVERSIAL: If you're ready to create an internet/mobile based startup in 2026, you do not need investment. What's that I hear: "but there are a few setup and running costs". Well, no shit Sherlock! That's how business works.

If you expect it to be a free ride and for someone else to take the risk before you've even started, this game aint for you. Your idea, your risk.

Five years ago, sure, it was tough back then. You needed the app ready just to discover if there was even a market. And the developers who would build it saw you coming and demanded £150k just to get out of bed.

But those days are over. Building your MVP is cheap. Signing up to a handful of AI-driven marketing/growth platforms is even cheaper. Your costs for getting from day 0 to day 1 are minimal, and should come out of your pocket.

If your savings account can't cover it, then give up Netflix, or your 2nd annual holiday, or a meal out and bottle of wine each week.

Take your own risks if you are so convinced the idea is that great. And, according to page 17 of your pitchdeck, it is going to be massive and hit a $1bn market within 5 years!

So what's a year without Netflix or dining out when that's the goal? You will be too busy building and making sales for a social life anyway.

Investment is for scaling. Not for creating the damn thing on day 1.

---

* smallprint: yes, sure, we know that if you're in quantum something or other, or deeptech, or need a van to deliver your mince pies to factories, or to buy stock, or do medical research, [or insert 1,000 other ideas], then you are special and this post does not apply to you. So please, walk on by, nothing for you to see here. This is for people building apps, websites and stuff like that.

Launch your MVP in 30 days | 30yrs in startups (exited. 0→£mil * 2)

I just read an expert's idea of a "5 yr plan for startups". More theoretical tosh! As a founder you need to be out in much less than 5 yrs, sat on the beach with a piña colada, and planning your next startup.

Let's be honest, for most founders, if you are still in at the 5 year mark, you've probably missed the exit ramp and are a zombie startup, kidding yourself you're still capable of "scaling" and reaching mythical unicorn status.

The speed of startups in this mad new AI-backed world means, if the business is doing well at 2-3 years, you should find someone bigger who knows how to launch it into the next orbit. For most founders, this is not you.

Exit at 2-3 years. Low £millions. Go again. Repeat until the care home calls.

Oh, and by the way, that exit money needs to be hard cash. And it goes to founders only - no investors to take any cream off the top.

If you spent 6-12 months of those 2-3 years faffing about finding an investor, then you've wasted the most critical period of a startup's early life.

You can disagree all you like, and spend half your days on here, talking the talk and arguing with AI-written posts.

The startup process is simple: Build, sell, sell-out.

If any part fails, then pivot or find a new idea, and go again.

JFDI !

Hey Linkedin algorithm, send this to everyone subscribed to my newsletter. Ask them to let me know if I should start writing it again.

Hey all, I've just remembered I have this newsletter. It was set up about 300 years ago, and somehow it has collected 6,720 of you 😊 So my big questi

Open article: Hello, is anybody seeing this? by Steve Procter • 1 min read

Startup circus 'experts' say "build it and they will come" is wrong. Really? Post daily on social, grow your followers & fans, then give them a little nudge when you launch something new. Watch them come. Selling has never been easier.

Someone asked me if they should create a business plan, pitchdeck, and financial projection for their brand new startup and app idea? My answer is simple: Hell no! Real founders fly by the seat of their pants.

Sure, write down a few pages of ideas and notes. But otherwise, just focus on building, making sales, and pivoting.

That last one, pivoting, is what makes too much planning a complete waste of time. Don't kid yourselves your idea is so solid you won't need to. You will be pivoting so much, you'll feel like a ballerina practicing her pirouettes.

So stop talking the talk. That's what Linkedin armchair experts do.

It's time to build fast and make sales. Which is what real founders do.

I saw this post recently: "has anyone managed to create a profitable startup yet from vibe coding?" Such a stupid question. AI-assisted dev doesn't make sales, that's your job. But it does help you start selling much sooner.

Oh good grief! Can we stop blaming AI dev tools whenever we see a crappy vibe coded app. Platforms like Replit are fantastic and work great when you know how to control them and feed them the right information. But if you don't, then, as us old-schoolers like to say: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Six Point Ventures

New VC fund focused on Vertical Ai at pre seed and seed across 🇺🇸🇮🇱

Vertical AI is where the real money is at the earliest stages 

Enterprise AI adoption is slow—silos, messy data, no budget flexibility. But Vertical AI startups solve specific industry problems with better data & faster ROI.

The next AI unicorns won’t be general. They’ll be deeply specialized.

Co-founder & General Partner

PEF Community

Member of the global post-exit founder community.

Member

American Express

SE&D drives scale for AMEX's digital products and provides a seamless enablement-enabled experience through collaboration and iteration to save time and increase revenue.

Senior Manager - Solutions Enablement and Distribution (SE&D)

Kidas 

Board Observer

New York Venture Partners (NYVP)

30 investments currently at pre/seed <$10M valuations to start with $150M+ in follow on

*Fi - Smart dog collar raised $30M Series B (invested in seed)
*Turing - CPG formulation in the cloud raised $16.5M Series A (invested in seed)
*Uizard (acquired by Miro) - No code design raised $15M Series A (invested in pre + seed)
*Upstream - DAO in a box raised $12M Series A (invested in pre + seed)
*Marqii - Digital hospitality simplified raised $10M Series A (invested in seed)
*Tattle - Customer experience improvement platform raised $5.5M Series A (invested in seed)
*Superhi - Decentralized education raised $5M Seed (invested in pre seed)
*Character, Popchew, Accelpay, Otherside AI

Investor

Columbia Business School

Pursed my Executive MBA in 20 straight months, while working full-time as well.

EMBA Americas 20 is a unique program made up of 40 students mostly from around the world that fly in every month for a week of classes https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/programs/executive-mba/options-locations/emba-americas

Key Features
-Program length: Five semesters over 20 months, beginning in January.
-Class meets approximately once a month during the core, in a weeklong format, primarily in New York City.
-You will be provided full accommodations while completing the first three semesters of core courses and cohort electives.
-During your first year, there will be three weeklong meetings, one each in: Seattle, Toronto, and Latin America.
-After completing the core curriculum, you will have access to the pool of global electives (weeklong format), as well as weekend electives and international seminars.

MBA 2020

CTA Communications Committee

We discuss CTA policy priorities, review previous CES activities and provide an overview of upcoming promotional and media engagement activities in support of the coming CES next year.

Committee Member

SPOT

I’m obsessed with trying to find the newest and coolest gadgets - having attended CES for 10 years and reading every publications I can daily to find them all, I knew there had to be a better way. In order to keep up to date on them the rest of the year (CES is in January), I wanted to build an app that would have all of them in one place.

I began specing out the design, functionality and back-end of SPOT, while vetting dev shops to build it. I then worked with an amazing team virtually from around the world, to build the app in a course of three months to simultaneously launch on iOS and Android. I ran bi-weekly meetings based on the agile development model, to launch the app right on time.

SPOT, a new tinder like app for cool, geeky products just launched publicly for iOS and Android at the same time using the cutting-edge Famo.us framework. SPOT is the best way to discover the newest and coolest products! Easily swipe through product cards that we curate and that your friends spot to let everyone know how you feel about each one

We achieved over 250,000 product swipes in first three months and grew out weekly newsletter to over 5000 consumers.

Founder and Head of Product

Launch.it

After working in PR for a few years, I wanted to scale the business by building a digital platform that would be the central source for all things new. In the PR industry there are “wire services” that haven’t changed in decades that are glorified email lists and I wanted to bring that into the present times with a robust, social and analytics driven platform.

Over the course of a year, I speced out and built, with the help of a dev shop, the publishing platform. I ran multiple alpha/beta testing groups with designs, wireframes and mockups, while giving numerous presentations to PR professionals and agencies to get direct feedback and incorporate into the final product. We launched on stage at the NYTM (NYCs largest meetup) in front of 1000 people, with the vision to create the largest searchable database for all new products, services and ideas to make sure they can be found, discovered and shared.

We ended up pivoting a few months later when we stumbled upon a much larger opportunity in the event space, to help them digitize all of their efforts.

Our "Event News and Information Management Platform" was being used by a handful of conferences/events to create a central location for all their exhibitor and partner news. Essentially we replaced the press kits and flash drives that they would normally have to spend a lot of time preparing and distributing with an online social environment that had analytics and directly engaged the attendees and media through our customer facing site with search capabilities. The best part was that the exhibitors do this all themselves and pay to be apart of it, so for less effort, events make more money because we do a revenue share with them.

Our first show partner was the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that was the biggest in the entire industry and #1 on our list. We then proceeded to sign up the #2 show CONEXPO and a dozen others in every vertical from Sweets and Snacks, Telecommunications to Travel.

Co-Founder and Head of Product

iFluence PR

"Creating understanding for a complex world" was our slogan as this is the problem that Public Relations tries to solve.

I ran strategic PR for numerous NYC funded tech startups across multiple verticals. ComiXology, the leading distributor of digital comics, was my flagship client who I ran all PR for from when they were 5 employees, working directly with their CEO, to 50+, a year before they were acquired by Amazon.

I ran bi-weekly meetings with their team that involved story generation and placements, securing speaking engagements, managing partnerships relationships (Marvel/DC) around announcements and built the foundation of their social media presence.

I was able to get them press in every major publication, through pitching and embargoes like the NYT, WSJ, TechCrunch, Verge, VentureBeat, Wired (3 page print spread!) to their trade comic press that helped make them the leader in their space.

SVP and Co-founder

VERTICAL_AI_INVESTOR :: STAGE=PreSeed/Seed :: REGIONS=US&Israel :: SECTORS=Defense+Automation+Compliance+EnterpriseAI :: CONTACT=dealflow@sixpoint.vc :: ACTION=Send pitch+deck

Serial exited founder/operator, 30+ pre/seed angel investments with top decile markups and real DPI. Now focused on the future of Vertical Ai and Deep Tech across the US and Israel, seeking the most ambitious founders to change the world.

MBA from Columbia Business School and previously served as Managing Director of New York Venture Partners (NYVP), one of the most active NY family offices directly investing in early-stage startups. They were the first checks into Pinterest, Tommy Johns, comiXology and dozen mores.

Trace Cohen

Watching startups and corporates a like fixing their technical debt and launching new products 🤕🩹

Vertical Ai VC / 36k followers / Memes / Family Office / Tech Startups

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