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Friday · 6 min read · Lightly edited by a human who definitely didn't listen at 2.5x speed (lie)

Good morning, capo. This week was about proof of life. On 20VC, the panel collapsed the market into one sentence: the only way you prove that you're not dying is by growing. Canva cut 2026 growth by a third. A cooking-robot founder walked onto My First Million with 1,000 real kitchens, and a host who currently lives on three pounds of man kibble. David Senra, six weeks running, told the story of Bob Dylan constructing a self until the door could not be closed. Also, Scott Galloway called SpaceX a $10 stock, and the Treasury secretary doodled "buy yen, $5 to $10 billion" on a to-do list. Let's go count someone else's money, especially the money that only exists if you can prove you're alive.

20VC — "Canva Slashes Growth" (listen)

1h+ → 90 seconds

The panel's working theory of 2026 is not a valuation model. It is a vital sign. "The only way you prove that you're not dying is by growing." Then the case study, as they recapped it: Canva, still private, about $3 billion in revenue last year, running at 30% growth, with the CEO signaling 20% by year-end. A one-third slowdown, still a healthy 20%, and still a deceleration. The panel's explanation: the new AI features cost real money.

The scarier beat was not the percentage. It was the distribution. Jason, on the panel, had already churned, and not because the apps got worse. "Canva and Notion did nothing wrong at all. Nothing. And we didn't need them." Then the whiteboard line: "Our agents never even suggest these products. That's the danger." They had built their own ads-and-collateral pipeline on an agent. "It never occurred to the agent to use Canva for this. It never once occurred to it."

And on who is still breathing when this is over, one panelist did not hedge: "Any investment I've made that is not run by a founder. It's going to be a zero in this. Ready to go."

Takeaway for operators: doing nothing wrong is not a strategy. If an agent never suggests your product, you are already dying, even while revenue is still printing. Pull the last 50 jobs your customers actually run and ask whether an agent would ever route through you. If the answer is no, stop polishing the feature list and get into the workflow the agent already owns.

My First Million — "Super niche businesses making millions in 2026" (listen)

1h+ → one idea you can steal

Not last week's zero-competition niche. A cooking robot, actually shipping. Ragav, founder of Posha, opened with the least robotic sentence in robotics: "We're amongst the 1% of robotics companies you have ever met that are actually shipping a real product in real homes in real kitchens with 1,000 real world deployments." The machine is a one-pot cooking robot. $1,500, less than a month of takeout. A thousand customers, three times a week, more than the oven, he said. "Last month alone we clocked $2 million in bookings. We did that again this week."

One of the hosts did not need the TAM slide. He needed lunch. "My diet right now is man kibble. You know what man kibble is? It's three lbs of ground beef with rice that will last me for three or four days and soy sauce." That is the customer. Not a keynote. A person who has already given up on cooking and is waiting for the appliance to exist.

The founder's ten-year claim points the self-driving pitch at the stove: "10 years from now, nobody's going to be cooking because they have to. They'll only be going to cook because they want to. Same way nobody's going to be driving because they have to." Believe the timeline or don't. The object on the table was not a timeline. It was a pan that had just made dinner.

Takeaway for operators: stop using "robotics company" as a substitute for shipping. The proof of life is 1,000 real kitchens, a $1,500 price, and a booking number you can say out loud without flinching. If your hardware still lives in a demo video, you are not in the 1%. Go find the man-kibble customer and put a machine in their house.

Founders — "How Bob Dylan Studied His Way to Greatness" (listen)

1h+ → three quotes and a vibe

Senra's sixth week running, and the subject is a man who refused to be found. The line Senra hangs the hour on is Dylan, later in life: "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." Bobby Zimmerman assembled Bob Dylan in public until the new name was the only one that worked.

The method was study as a form of becoming. Bill Gurley, via Senra: over eight or nine months before New York, "Bob studied every folk album he possibly could." Broke, he sat in record-store booths for hours. When the work later went thin, he went to the New York Public Library and read Civil War newspapers on microfilm, hunting the language of the time. His own diagnosis: "I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to become a composer with anything to say." He did everything fast, even sang fast. Speed was the thing in the way.

The sentence Senra says he loves most in the book is Dylan on John Hammond, the Columbia scout who signed him when folk was still considered junk: "No one could block his way, and he didn't have any time to waste." Dylan wrote that about Hammond. Then he spent a career becoming the kind of person you would write that about. The vibe is not inspiration. It is construction. You do not discover the artist. You build him in a listening booth until the label has no choice.

Invest Like the Best — What Happens When the AI Boom Runs Out of Money (listen): Patrick's guest opened with a cold thought experiment. "I think it would be very problematic for the US to win. Let's say we take the most sort of fantastical scenario where if you control AI, your military is better than anyone else in this world. What is the game theory optimal response of China to blow up TSMC?" If the boom still blows up anyway, the leftover prize is not the GPU. "If we're in a world where this all blows up and we have way too much power, that is an amazing world to be." Proof of life, for a bubble, is whatever still works after the money leaves.

Prof G — "SpaceX Is a $10 Stock" (listen): Galloway's version of the IPO is financial engineering first, rockets second. In his recap: $135 a share, about $1.8 trillion, roughly 94 times $18.7 billion in sales. The line he wants on the tape: "I think this is a 10 to $30 stock... this makes Henry Blodget in 1999 look responsible." The punch, which is his, not ours: "The whole thing now rides on not rockets or being an interplanetary species or even Starlink. It's basically going to work or not work based on his AI CapEx bet." Greatest engineer of the era, in Galloway's telling. The stock is the other invention.

Odd Lots — Brad Setser on the US's Unusual Japanese Yen Intervention (listen): The most Pod Capo document in the US government this week was a to-do list. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was photographed with one item on it: buy Japanese yen, JPY, $5 to $10 billion. Setser's translation of why anyone would bother: "160 is an insanely weak yen on any Big Mac index. It pushes the yen below, in inflation-adjusted terms, where it was in the 1970s. We're back to the 1960s." When a G7 currency is so broken that the Treasury secretary doodles the trade like a hedge-fund sticky note, that is also a vital sign. Just not a healthy one.

What got airtime this week, by proof of life:

The pulse was the point. Canva has to grow or the market writes the obituary. A kitchen robot has to be in a thousand houses or it is another deck. We remain long the appliance that cooks dinner and the three pounds of beef that prove somebody still needs it to.

If you only listen to one episode this week, make it the 20VC Canva recap. Investors watching a beloved product do nothing wrong and still fall off the agent's list. More useful than another lecture about TAM.

If you only have 20 minutes, the Posha pitch on My First Million. You will walk away knowing what 1,000 real deployments sounds like, and what man kibble is.

Senra has now surfaced six weeks in a row. Thiel, the merchant bankers, Nolan, Plank, Shannon, and now Dylan. He is no longer a guest on the calendar. He is a cryptid, and we would not have it any other way.

Forward this to a founder whose growth chart went quiet. Or don't. We're a newsletter, not a guilt trip. (Okay, a little guilt trip.)

— The Capo 🎙️🤌

Made with coffee, too many podcast apps, and the firm belief that nobody has time to listen to 15 hours of content per week. That's our job now.