Please Be Different
One of my favourite mental models is from James Dyson (his autobiographies are amongst my top recs for a reason):
"Difference for the sake of it in everything".
I'm lucky to be part of a team that reviews around 2,500 pitch decks per year. I love my job - it's the best job I've ever done, and I hope to do it for the next 50 years.
But even my eyes glaze over when I start reading a deck and quickly realise that it's the same idea I've seen 500 times over - and probably 5-10 times in the last two weeks.
Please be different. I cannot overstate how important it is.
If you are looking for venture funding, minor tweaks here and there just aren't good enough - they don't underpin the explosive growth you need to make the maths work. You have to dig deeper.
You need to have a fundamentally unique insight on (i) the problem; and/or (ii) the solution. Part of that means being willing to be divisive - to embrace the reality that some people will think your idea is terrible. Don't take that as a bad thing - it's a great thing! I can promise you: 95% of people hating the idea and 5% of people loving it will make for a much more efficient fundraise, and lead to a much better chance of hitting a home run. Outliers are outliers because they're outliers.
I think the benefit of being different generalises to life as well, but that's another blog post altogether.
For now: challenge yourself, your co-founders, your team, your existing investors, your family, your friends, your AI app of choice - how can we make this more different? I am certainly not saying I can do it - in fact, there's a good chance I can't. But I don't need to be able to cook to tell you what tastes great.