🧠 TL;DR: The venture market in 2025 is split down the middle. AI giants and late-stage startups are swimming in capital, while early-stage founders face the toughest funding environment in years. Investors want traction, profitability, and proof - vision alone won’t cut it. To raise in this climate, founders must choose the right sector, show efficient growth, and build for sustainability from day one.

Build or Die : Why Profitability and Proof Are the New Pitch Deck in 2025

🔥 TL;DR: The same mindset that made you a great founder is now silently destroying your company.Traits like obsessive product focus, heroic decision-making, and vision fueled control work brilliantly. at 0-to-1 but become liabilities at scale. From hiring failures to capital misallocation, the "broken founder brain" creates blind spots that cost millions.Scaling isn't just operational - it's psychological. The founders who win long-term are the ones who evolve their thinking. Those who don't? They become the bottleneck. Or the downfall.

The Founder Brain is Broken And It's Costing You Millions

TL;DR: Claims reserves are frequently inaccurate - not because actuarial models are flawed, but because the data feeding them is. Legacy systems, unstructured information, and inconsistent coding create compounding errors that destabilise financials, increase regulatory risk, and erode strategic decision-making. To fix reserves, insurers must fix their data - modernising infrastructure, enforcing data lineage, and embracing metadata-driven intelligence.
The cost of inaction isn’t just inefficiency - it’s billions in misallocated capital and lost credibility

The Billion-Dollar Blind Spot : Bad Data Skews Claims Reserves

🔥 TL;DR Most startup growth strategies today are just expensive guessing dressed up as data-driven science. Founders rely on flawed frameworks, misleading metrics, and underpowered experiments that create a false sense of control - while burning through time and capital.
This piece breaks down seven common fallacies (from the Data Delusion to the Scalability Illusion) and argues for a more honest, adaptive, and value-driven approach to growth in a world defined by uncertainty.

Dear Founder : You are not as Data Driven as you think 160725

🤖 TL;DR: Venture capital is no longer betting on human potential - it’s betting on human replaceability. Over $100Bn was poured into AI in 2024 alone, not to augment workers, but to eliminate them.From agentic AI to workforce surveillance to Service-as-a-Software models, the new VC thesis is clear: automate entire job categories, concentrate value in the hands of the few, and reshape the global economy on the logic of efficiency over employment. This is not a distant future - it’s already happening. If you work, lead, hire, or build - you need to understand the machine that’s being built to replace you. The venture capital landscape has undergone a seismic shift in recent years, with an unprecedented concentration of investment flowing into technologies designed to automate, replace, or fundamentally transform human work.

The Venture Bet : Replacing Humanity with AI

TL;DR Founders are not therapists - and trying to be one is hurting your team, your company, and your ability to scale. The job of a great founder isn't to absorb everyone’s emotions, but to build systems, set boundaries, and lead with clarity. Empathy is essential - but without structure, it turns into enmeshment. This guide helps you care without coddling, lead without burning out, and scale without emotional chaos.

Leaders Are CEOs, Not Counsellors

🔥 TL;DR: Despite massive investments in digital tools, insurers are losing customers - and revenue - because of one overlooked problem: fragmented, poor-quality customer data.
Data silos across marketing, claims, underwriting and service prevent insurers from delivering the seamless, personalised experiences today's customers demand.
The result? Broken journeys, frustrated customers, and churn. Leading insurtechs are pulling ahead by building unified data foundations that power real-time, predictive insights.
To stay competitive, traditional insurers must act now - integrating customer data, modernising governance, and adopting AI-ready infrastructures. Exceptional customer experience starts not with better apps, but with better data.


Why Insurers Are Losing Millions on Customer Experience and how to fix it with the Data Layer

🔥 TLDR: Predictive models dominate modern decision-making - but they consistently fail when faced with emerging risks like pandemics, financial crises, or supply chain shocks.
The problem isn’t bad math, but flawed assumptions: models are built on past data and assume future stability. This blinds them to Black Swan events, systemic interdependencies, and phase transitions in complex systems. Worse, widespread use of similar models can create feedback loops that amplify the very risks they aim to mitigate. Instead of chasing perfect prediction, organisations must prioritise resilience, transparency, and humility in the face of uncertainty.

When the Models Break : The Blind Spots of Prediction

🔥 TL;DR: Insurers are securing their own systems - but overlooking the greatest threat: their vendors. Third-party breaches now lead all cyber claims, yet most contracts lack enforceable oversight, clear accountability, or AI-era safeguards. Legacy agreements built for yesterday’s outsourcing can’t manage today’s multi-tiered, cloud-native, AI-powered risk landscape.
The result? Unbounded exposure, delayed detection, regulatory vulnerability, and operational chaos - all from partners outside your direct control. To compete and comply in 2025, insurers must re-architect vendor contracts and shift from reactive trust to proactive resilience.
Why insurers face unprecedented exposure from vendor relationships they cannot fully control

Insurance's Vendor Blind Spot : Third-Party Cyber Risk

⚡ TL;DR Failure isn’t a Badge. It’s a Signal. Most startup failures aren’t heroic. They're preventable - rooted in poor market understanding, weak execution, or misaligned strategy.
Failure culture has distorted founder thinking. Not all failures are equal; only a few actually drive meaningful learning. You're not just building software. You're competing for attention and solving real problems. Many founders forget the former - and fail at the latter. VC funding can warp decision-making. Capital often pushes unsustainable growth over sustainable traction.
Smart founders develop “failure literacy.” They know how to decode what failure is really saying - and adjust fast. The real game is learning faster than the market shifts. Failure isn’t your story - it’s your feedback loop.

The Failure Trap : A Founder's Guide to Decoding Setbacks

Writing aricles on SubStack along with Podcast on learning, sharing & helping entrepreneurs, founders & leaderships teams with great ideas create, prove, launch 🚀 & scale. Hosted by Andrew J Turner

Dear Founder : You are not as Data Driven as you think 160725

The G&T Sessions