The checklist we threw away.

Last month VSI went live and we told you the same thing we keep telling ourselves: going live is not the finish line, it's the first real test.

July was the test. And the first thing that broke wasn't the product. It was our idea of who we build with.

Sharon opened an old Notion page: our founder scorecard from a few years back. A neat list of everything we believed a founding partner needed. Business profile. Enterprise sales experience. A view on the problem. Enough product feeling to hold their own in a roadmap discussion.

We scored people against it. We recruited against it. We built companies against it.

Reading it back, almost nothing on that list predicts who wins today. Worse: the person who does win probably wouldn't have passed it.

So we threw it away.

First things first: What actually changed underneath us.

Building got cheap. Not a little cheaper. Radically cheaper. One person with the right tools ships in a week what used to take a funded team a quarter. Which means the scarce thing moved. It's not building anymore. It's distribution.

And that breaks the old checklist in a way that took us a while to admit. We asked for years of enterprise sales experience because experience was the proxy for future results. But proxies only matter when you can't measure the real thing. Now you can. A founder who shows up with an audience, a waitlist, or twenty warm buyer conversations has already proven distribution. What does "8 years of enterprise sales" add on top of that? Nothing.

The pairing broke too. We always assumed the skill set lived in two people: one who sells, one who builds. The founder winning right now is increasingly one person with a round profile. Pull an audience toward a problem, shape the first version with their own hands, figure out a thousand things alone without waiting for someone to complete them.

To be clear: the technical co-founder is not dead. What changed is the sequence. You no longer need the full pairing on day one to earn the right to start. The round profile starts, proves, pulls, and the team gets completed around what's actually working.

There's a softer side to this too. When companies buy AI now, they're not buying a finished product. Whatever you sell them looks different in six months. So they're really buying you. Your judgment. Whether you pick up the phone at 9pm when something breaks. Character became a growth metric. We never thought we'd write that sentence either.

So what do we look for now? Not a persona. Evidence.

• Pull. Can you get people to move toward you, and have you already done it, even at small scale?

• Depth. Are you a crazy knowledge holder of your space, so deep in your domain that you see where it's heading before it does?

• Hands. When something breaks, do you fix it yourself or schedule a meeting about it?

And here's the part that changed how we operate day to day: this founder will not find us the old way. They don't scroll job boards. They're already building. So we stopped posting and waiting. We watch where builders actually are.

Then we put a date on it.

In the loop: a new batch, a new believer, and one honest room

A few moments that shaped the month:

• Batch 1 kicks off 7 September in Rotterdam. Small on purpose. A handful of founders in the same room, our team next to them, 10 weeks from start to incorporation. You're out talking to real companies from week one, aiming for 3 to 5 signed design partners in your target market. Every Friday we sit down and make one honest call on the evidence: keep, change, or stop. No demo day theatre. When the signal is strong, we co-found. Applications are open. 🔗

• GoldRepublic is rebuilding around VSI, and took a stake in Builders. Fifteen years old. 150,000+ investors. Nearly €1.5 billion in gold, silver and platinum in vaults around the world. Every reason to protect what works and change nothing. Instead, Marleen Evertsz and Alex Butter decided not to bolt AI on the side, but to rebuild the company from the ground up around it. Then they backed us while doing it. We back founders for a living. This time a founder backed us. The rollout started on-site in July. 🔗

• Ten investors, one uncomfortable sentence. At our half-year gathering we walked our investors through our strongest six months yet. Every venture now has real proof: paying customers, signed partnerships, products live in production. Then we told them it still isn't scale. Saying that out loud to the people who wrote the checks is not comfortable. It's also the whole reason we get everyone in one room. They pushed on every pivot, asked if we're aiming high enough, and backed the next move anyway. 🔗

• "Not a line of code in two months. Production is up 5x." De Ondernemer ran that headline about us. True quote, wrong takeaway. Six agents per developer, releases in days, and six hires we never had to make. But the tooling part is solved, and everyone gets there within a year. What you can't install: taste, memory, and proximity to your customer.

• Opportunity domain: agent harnessing. Your company's context is leaking into chat windows. Slack threads, meeting notes, briefs, all pasted into individual accounts and never seen by the organisation again. We're looking for founders to build the flow memory layer that fixes it at enterprise level. Check it out. 🔗

• CTO Network summer. Summer drinks in Amsterdam on 2 July 🔗, and partners on a boat on the Amstel with zero agenda. We spend most of the year building. Sometimes the most valuable thing on the calendar is nothing at all.

Up next →

• Batch 1 applications. Rotterdam, from 7 September. Your own idea or one of ours. Evidence first, incorporation after. Applications are open. 🔗

• Builders Investor House #15. Landing in September. Details soon.

• AI Summit Barcelona (22 to 23 September). Michael on the architecture behind a production-ready AI venture. Sharon on why most AI GTM fails, and what's converting instead.

• CTO Network goes to Belgium. Our first Belgian edition, together with imec.istart and Snowflake.

Ventures in motion: commercial proof, one layer deeper

• Everday - agents running the daily work. Screening and matching agents are live in production at Springplank, the national work-to-work programme with the Maatschappelijke Alliantie, processing real candidates. The first distribution partnership with ECHT is signed: they sell and deliver, Everday powers everything behind it. 🔗

• Avery - new site, new scale. The new website is live, and it shows what a company built this way actually looks like: 125 million vetted European professionals, a shortlist in 34 seconds, and a system that knows your business better every month. Growth is still 100% inbound and referral. Go look. 🔗

• Cortena - graduating. Partnerships signed with torq.partners and Embat, payables automation getting stronger with every client, and receivables now in co-development with a new e-commerce customer. Cortena completes its move out of the studio structure this summer, and moved into their new Amsterdam office. Did you check their new website already? 🔗

• Trigger - the paywall answered back. First paying customers came through self-serve, hitting the paywall without a single founder-led sales call. Small numbers, right shape. Q2 went into product depth. Q3 flips to demand, and lets real customers force the product forward. Try it yourself for free today 🔗

👀 What we’re reading (and seeing):

• Everyone can build now. So what's left? Michael's full piece behind the De Ondernemer headline. When everyone can build, building stops being the edge. The winners delegate execution and spend the hours they win with their customers. Read here. 📃

• The founder checklist we spent years perfecting (and why we threw it away). Sharon on the scorecard that stopped predicting anything, the combined founder, and why proof beats pedigree. Read here. 📃

• GoldRepublic rebuilds, and takes a stake in an AI venture studio. Marleen Evertsz wrote the honest version of why a regulated fintech with everything to lose decided to start over. Read here. 📃

• What if every objection you've ever heard became an advantage? Julia, after five ventures, on why the best founders today aren't the ones who know everything. They're the ones who build systems around themselves that know more than they do. Watch here. 🎥

Final word: show us what you built

We spent years perfecting a profile. The market spent one year making it irrelevant.

That's not a complaint. It's the best news we've had in a while, because it moves the bar from who you look like to what you can show. Proof is harder to fake than a CV. It's also faster to check.

So the studio is built around it now. Batch 1 starts 7 September. Ten weeks. Real design partners. One honest call every Friday on what the evidence says.

If that's you, you already know. Don't send us a CV.

Show us what you've built, and who's already following you there. 🫶

Forward, always,

Michael van Lier
Managing Director at Builders