IndexNow · May 2026
What's on the desk this month.
A /now page, in the original sense. Updated when something real changes — not on a schedule. Capacity is two founders a month.
On the desk
- —Series A round-out for a vertical SaaS in supply-chain. Week three of four. Partner meetings starting Monday.
- —Audit for a pre-seed consumer brand. Written read going out Friday.
- —Two free teardowns in queue — one infrastructure, one healthtech.
- —Editing a long-form essay on bridge-round language for the field notes.
Thinking about
- —Why pre-seed valuations cooled in Q1 2026 but seed didn't, and what that does to round structure for first-time founders.
- —How partner-meeting Q&A has shifted toward GTM-motion specificity since the tier-one funds tightened their bar in late 2025.
- —The right way to render usage-based revenue on a Series A deck without giving the partner three different denominators in the appendix.
- —Whether the 'one-line takeaway per slide' rule survives the move to PDF-only sends in the LP-direct era.
Recently shipped
- —Seed deck for a developer-tools company; round closed in 5 weeks at the upper end of the cap.
- —Refine for a healthtech founder; partner meeting prep replaced an internal narrative the team had been carrying for nine months.
- —Audit for a Series A applicant; read flagged the GTM slide as the failure point. Round restructured before going to market.
Reading
- —Patrick Collison on craft and on long-running institutions.
- —Old Sequoia memos — the boring ones, written when the firm was still small.
- —Dwarkesh interviews, particularly the ones with people who have run a thing for twenty years.
- —A draft of next month's essay on bridge rounds; sitting on it for a week before the second pass.
Not doing
- —Hourly engagements.
- —Cold-outbound investor intros.
- —Anything that requires a one-way NDA at the cold-deck stage.
- —Speaking gigs that aren't directly upstream of founder work.
- —Subcontracting work to a junior or a design pod. The person on the call is the person rewriting the slides.
Capacity
Two founders a month. Send your deck if it's yours.