Two Minutes on Tech | Issue #77
There’s a version of your idea that exists somewhere nobody else has seen yet. In a notes app, a private doc, a voice memo from a car ride.
The version you’d describe if someone asked at midnight rather than in a formal meeting. Rougher than the pitch. More honest than the deck.
And it’s almost certainly more valuable to test than the polished version you’ve been working up to showing.
Why Founders Sit on It
Showing something early is risky.
What if the reaction confirms the doubt you’ve been carrying? What if it’s not as good as it feels from the inside?
So the idea gets refined. The slides get another pass.
The prototype gets a better coat of paint. And somewhere in that process, the original instinct gets buried under enough polish that the real feedback never comes.
The problem is that polish doesn’t just improve an idea. It protects it from honest reaction, and honest reaction is the only thing that tells you whether you’re building something real or something you’ve gotten very good at convincing yourself about.
You Know You’re Hiding It When…
At some point, “I’m still refining it” stops being preparation and starts being fear with better branding.
- You’ve described it to one person and called it “just thinking out loud”
- You’re waiting until it’s “more developed” before sharing it properly
- You’ve rehearsed the pitch but haven’t had an unscripted conversation about it yet
- You know exactly which objections it has, and you’re still working on answers to them before showing it
- The deck exists. The conversation hasn’t happened.
Let Someone Challenge It
Venture Forge is where that version gets shown first. Not to investors. Not to customers. To a team that has been building software since 1991 and knows what early ideas need to survive contact with reality.
Three founders per cohort. Eight weeks. The whole point is that the version you’ve been sitting on gets the honest reaction it needs while there’s still room to act on it.
Talk to us: no sales pitch, no pressure →
What’s New in Tech
- OpenAI began testing visual ads inside ChatGPT’s image generation feature, with select U.S. advertisers set to appear later this month. The move comes as ChatGPT’s weekly user count hit 1.2 billion, a threshold that makes advertising a credible revenue stream alongside the subscription model.
- Google froze its open-source bug bounty program after being overwhelmed by a flood of AI-generated security reports, many containing hallucinations about how vulnerabilities could be triggered or flagging bugs with little real-world impact.
- Anthropic’s first public compensation disclosure revealed that CEO Dario Amodei earned $18 million in total pay last year, placing him in the middle of the AI CEO pack rather than at the top.
- Google signed a 36 GW power deal with Constellation Energy, the largest energy agreement the company has ever entered, as AI data centre power demand continues to outpace what renewable sources alone can supply.
Venture Forge by Art+Logic: we help founders build with direction, not just speed.