Naturally Artificial by Sergey Osipov

Boot-strapping vs Seed-strapping? $50K + vibecoding instead of $500K. What happens to investor's math now? "Vibe revenue" in late-stage rounds. The founder is a future investor… Played golf with Oleg Khusaenov, Zubr Capital. 18 holes at Minthis, Paphos ⛳ Episode in November on Naturally Artificial #PrivateEquity #ZubrCapital

Next Thursday I'm talking AI in a UNESCO amphitheatre. Free entry. Which means academics, founders and corporates all show up ECT Forum (European Competencies & Technologies). One day on what AI is doing to skills, education and jobs. Spoiler: a lot • AI • VR and AR • Robotics and automation • Big data • IoT • 3D printing My panel is AI and industry trends in business and innovation. Around 2pm. Post-lunch slot. I'll do my best to keep you awake ;) 📅 Thursday, 8 October 📍 University of Nicosia 🎟️ Free, limited seats 🗣️ English Agenda & registration 👈 Join! #ECTForum #FutureOfWork #Cyprus #Nicosia #AI

No Fuckups, No Unicorns 🤷 Thanks to everyone who came to my Fuckup Nights stand-up yesterday!

Ursula von der Leyen's performance metric [Related post: Is Ursula bullshitting?]

3rd AI Hackathon is done. 16 teams. 120 people. 4 minutes per pitch at the end of the day Winner: Last Bite. Surplus food from restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, sold to customers at a fraction of the price. Food waste, solved by a marketplace The difference from previous hackathons is prototype quality. Hello, vibecoding • Half the teams ran out of time on the pitch • A third couldn't say what they actually want from investors But that's nothing new :) Fantastic day in tech! Real networking, live education. Next stop: Limassol, in a couple of months I didn’t film yesterday. But you can watch my video from our previous hackathon in Warsaw 👈 It includes the lectures of Zubr Capital invest directors #AIHackathon #Vibecoding #VC #FoodWaste #Startup

Almost late for the photo shoot. Caught this on video through the glass wall of the elevator. Love our Zubr Capital portfolio get-togethers. Executives seminar, run by Pavel Motyl. Great session, awesome trainer. Love you all 🧡 Tomorrow: AI Hackathon, also here in Almaty

In the 90s I borrowed money from criminals to pay salaries Financial crisis. Revenue dropped by half. My first company, Red Graphic, ran out of cash. 30 people needed their salaries. Account empty. So I found lenders who don't ask for a biz-plan. I was 25 On September 29 I'm on stage at Fuckup Nights Limassol to tell how it ended ;) 🎟 Grab your tickets here 👈 10% promo code: fuckupper10 #FuckupNights #sharingfuckups #Limassol #Founders

My Telegram channel feels dead some weeks. Few likes, no comments But look at the polls. Healthy 10% engagement, active audience 💡English-speaking readers just don't hit the like button. Russian-speaking audience does it on autopilot. Same attention, different habit Good. But still, you could leave more likes on my posts ☺️👇 #buildinpublic #creatoreconomy #contentcreation

Folks, I'm filming a podcast episode right on the stage. All 500 people in the room participate. Full audience format, first time trying this :) From Co-pilot to Co-founder. The 2026 Startup Playbook With two gurus: Yury Melnichek and Alexander Chekan AI is breaking the logic of company building, so [agenda]: • Do you still need a CTO on day one if AI writes the code? • Headcount vs agentcount • What's defensible when everyone has GPT-class models? • Seat-based SaaS is dying. What replaces the pricing model? • When a startup needs $50k instead of $500k — what happens to VC math? No consensus on any of it, right? That's the episode :) 📍 Warsaw, September 25 🇺🇸 English-language event 🎟 https://luma.com/BelTech * BelTech is the largest international conference for the Belarusian tech community. But you don't have to be Belarusian. Just curious about tech. Come be a guest! Literally — if you're in the room, you're in the episode on Naturally Artificial YouTube Forward to Polish AI startupers plz #Startups #AIagents #Copilot #VentureCapital #Cofounder

One of his clients bans all AI use in the contract. That same client invests in AI companies. Weird or ok? Jonathan Hill has run 1minus1 marketing agency for 22 years. His team built one of Riot Games' biggest tournament platforms in the world, plus work for Xbox and Tencent. So when he answers the ban-or-invest question, he's answering it with 20 people's salaries on the line, not from a keynote stage Meanwhile: 59% of the TikTok videos come from brand-new accounts. 97 out of 100 YouTube videos for kids is a strait AI slop. Nearly half of the music uploaded to streaming every day is fully machine-generated. >80% is AI-assisted • Why every gaming studio uses AI and pretends it doesn’t? • No jobs for juniors. No layoffs, no announcement. AI removed the need • Anyone can vibecode a platform, nobody can maintain • The games we'll love in 3 years that are 90% generated • Players hate AI. Studios use it anyway. Everyone keeps a straight face Watch on YouTube 👈 Listen on Spotify 👈 Is it okay to hide the fact that your marketing uses gen-AI? Comment👇 #AISlop #GameIndustry #GameDev #AI

Playsense picked up more awards 🏆 • Best Bespoke Cinematography — World of Tanks: HEAT trailer • Best Fan Engagement — the PLAY BIG campaign The shelf is running out of room :) Kudos to the team! Playsense.agency creates top gaming video trailers and other marketing stuff. Ninety seconds to sell a world that doesn't exist yet, to an audience that has seen everything (this is one of my portfolio companies, backed in 2022) #GameMarketing #GameTrailers #GameDev #Playsense

~1/3 of vibecoders get money from their experiments👆My own takeaway: AI taught everyone to build fast. On the individual level. Almost nobody started earning more on the corp level. Same revenue. Some with a bigger tokens bill Distribution, trust, someone willing to pay… The hard stuff didn't really move [Related post: Vibecoding Day 1] #AI #vibecoding #AIROI #founders

Students & founders in Almaty 🚀🇰🇿 One day. No code. Walk out with a working AI prototype and a pitch to real investors by evening Zubr Capital and I are hosting. Two ways in: • Have an idea? Apply as founder. Grab a team. Build it • No idea? Apply as participant. Get matched. Build it anyway Mentors are investors/directors from Zubr's portfolio companies. They're there the whole day, not for a keynote and a photo. We ran this in Warsaw already — watch my film to feel how it went 🕐 Sept 19, 9:30–20:00 📍 Almaty 🗣 In Russian Apply by Sept 12: https://league.zubrcapital.com/hackathon Free, but spots limited. One day. Real investors. No excuses #AIHackathon #Almaty #Startup #BuildInPublic

🎬 THE GAME OUTSIDERS — a documentary in progress Mass layoffs, cautious investors, players that hate AI. I'm not talking to the studios this time. I'm talking to the outsiders — marketing, creative, music, influencer agencies. The ones who carry a game to its audience. And the first ones cut when budgets tighten. Seven voices recorded so far 👆 swipe the quotes Some are already out as podcast episodes — save for the flight back from Gamescom ;) • AI is an excuse to fire people in gaming. Ex-Riot/Epic creative director, founder of Summoner, Matt Manarino: YouTube https://youtu.be/XkeSYSFn3Hc Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0iJM1XUmFVUnzhhSLU56dW • Creative agency in gaming — easiest biz to start. Alex Brodsky, Playsense CEO: YouTube https://youtu.be/fNa5AA96PeE Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2chS0rvXvh9dYrAWwpMmlU • GameDev done? AI backlash & post-pandemic hangover. xActivision xWargaming veteran Thaine Lyman: YouTube https://youtu.be/UvuwpvJGiWs Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Jx01mDye95fbC2ePO0OTw What's your read on where games are headed?👇 #GameDev #GamingIndustry #AIinGaming #GameOutsiders

EU fined X €120M for not being transparent enough. Musk's answer: okey, you want transparency, take all of it! He put X's actual algorithm on GitHub. The real filtering code. Exactly where X limits accounts on government request. Brazil's first up. There's an election filter that pulls ~600 accounts out of For You feed Governments used to fuck us quietly. Now we see who is a real motherfucker. Well played, Elon! #XAlgorithm #ElonMusk #XTransparency #SocialMediaAlgorithm

This is an iconic photo. “The early days of Amazon”. Bezos sits at the desk made from a door. Startup life as it is But what I just found. It’s 1999. Not the beginning (IPO was in 1997). Valuation ~$25bn. The man at the desk is worth at least $5bn And the office still looks like that! Most founders close a round and upgrade the furniture first #Startup #Founder #Amazon #Bezos #BuildInPublic

You know, what was the weirdest question that investors asked me?

— Sergey, will you take my daughter to work for your startup?

Founders, what was the strangest question investors asked you?

A space for honest conversations about business and investment. And no agenda. That's the point Yellow Rocks runs Open Space in Barcelona. Participants build the program on the spot. Whatever you walked in with—scaling, fundraising, AI, a new market, a team that isn't working—that becomes the agenda • real cases, with real numbers, from the people who own them • the decisions nobody wants to make alone • feedback from founders and investors with different expertise 📆 September 11–13 🔗 https://yrl.ink/dza 🎟 Code ARTIFICIAL — 5% off Conversations turn into contacts, projects, partnerships. Come with questions, not a pitch deck! #startups #founders #investors #venturecapital #Barcelona

— Sergey, I bought bitcoin in 2023 at $22K! — Wow! How much? — 0.0001 BTC