VSI Live.

For the past months, we’ve been talking about the same thing from different angles. Building blocks. Time to value. Agentic teams. 10x with AI. Building in public. This month, it became a product.

VSI is live.

Not as a nice internal tool. Not as a polished demo. As the first public version of the system we’ve been building underneath Builders: a way to turn scattered founder signal into something you can actually use.

Because no founder can hold all the signal about their own company in their head. It sits across calls, notes, Notion, emails, the market, the team, the things customers say once and never repeat. Most of it never gets read end-to-end by anyone. And still, founders are expected to make the right call from memory, instinct, and a feeling that something is moving.

That doesn’t fly anymore. So we built VSI. To read the signal. Find the patterns. Turn evidence into a company brain that gets sharper every time you add to it.

First things first: going live is not the finish line.

Everyone treats launch like the big moment. The website is up. The link is public. People can click the thing. Nice. But going live is not the finish line. It’s the first real test.

Before launch, you can still believe your own story. After launch, the market starts answering back. Who understands it. Who ignores it. Who signs up. Who says “this is exactly what I need.” Who disappears after the first click. That’s where the actual work starts.

And honestly, that’s the point of VSI too. It’s not built to make founders feel good about the story they’re telling. It’s built to show what’s actually there. The evidence behind the claim. The pattern behind the call. The gap between what you think the market said and what it actually said.

The best founders don’t run on the story. They run on what’s real.

What this unlocks (and how we’ll prove it):

• More signal → better decisions. Every customer call, note, and market move should make the company smarter, not just more informed.

• Faster loops → less guessing. The goal isn’t more data. It’s getting from signal to decision faster, without losing the truth in between.

• Better founders → stronger ventures. Batch 0 is now open. We’re looking for founders who already move in days, know their buyer, and want to build enterprise AI from the ground up.

In the loop: live systems, real rooms, and no more guessing

A few moments that shaped the month:

• VSI is live. We opened up the first public version of Venture Studio Intelligence. It reads scattered signal across calls, docs, and market context, and turns it into a company brain that gets sharper over time. First version. Real users. Go break it.

• Batch 0 is open. Builders co-founds enterprise AI companies, and we’re looking for founders to build them with us. Not an accelerator. Not advisory. A co-founding path: remote validation first, evidence before incorporation, then Rotterdam when the signal earns it.

• Bootcamp & Breakfast during Amsterdam Tech Week. The best conversations at tech week didn’t happen at the panels. They happened after the burpees. Together with No Such Ventures, we traded keynote bingo for sweat, coffee, breakfast, and actual conversations.

• CTO Network Field Trip: NorthC x Tilaa. Everyone builds on top of the cloud. Almost no one has stood inside it. So we took the CTO Network to the physical layer: power, cooling, racks, and the people keeping it all online.

• The future of company building. The cost of building features is approaching zero. Which means the feature itself stops being the advantage. The moat is moving to market knowledge, captured signal, and the learning loops no one can copy overnight.

Up next →

• Batch 0 founder intake. Building enterprise AI from the ground up? The door is open. Start remote, validate with real buyers, and if there’s mutual fit, build with us in Rotterdam.

• CTO Network Summer Drinks (July 2nd, Amsterdam). Before everyone disappears for summer, we're bringing the CTO Network together one more time. No presentations, no agenda, just good conversations with founders, CTOs and engineering leaders who have spent the last year navigating AI in production. Sometimes the best insights come without a stage. Sign up here.

Ventures in motion: signal getting sharper

• Everday - new website, clearer story. Everday has a new face. The positioning is sharper, the product story is clearer, and the direction is easier to understand: people data working together, without turning HR into another dashboard exercise. Worth a look. 🔗

• Avery - conversations that keep compounding. The latest A Very Good TA Convo is live, this time with Curry Chern. The format keeps doing what good distribution should do: learn from the people shaping the market, then share the signal back. Read/watch here. 🔗

• Cortena - finance pain, turned into a series. The video series is doing what most finance content doesn’t: making the messy, operational side of finance feel recognizable. If you haven’t seen the episodes yet, this is the moment to catch up. Episode 1, episode 2, episode 3. 🔗

• Trigger - quiet, but not gone. Trigger has been quieter for a reason. Product is moving, the system is sharpening, and we’re getting closer to opening it up properly. More soon.

• Future ventures - ready to build? We started sharing opportunity domains: spaces where we see something real and are looking for founders to build with us. The first one goes straight at the agent question. Everyone is racing to build agents. Almost no one has solved what to automate first. Check it out. 🔗

👀 What we’re reading (and seeing):

• No founder can hold all the signal alone. The launch of VSI made one thing very clear: the problem isn’t lack of input. It’s that the input is scattered everywhere, and most teams still make decisions from memory. Watch here. 🎥

• Beyond the Numbers - Eric Carbijn. AI changes how we build. It doesn't change what makes a great entrepreneur. Eric Carbijn shares the real story behind decades of building companies, the moments it flew, the moments it almost didn't, and why honesty beats "nice" every single time. Watch the episode. 🎥

• Stop prompting. Start writing loops. The head of Claude Code at Anthropic says he doesn't prompt the model anymore, he writes loops that prompt it for him. Same thesis we keep landing on: the moat isn't the instruction, it's the system around it. Watch here. 🎥

Final word: what’s real?

There’s a lot of AI theatre right now. Demos. Agents. Dashboards. Big promises. Better buttons.

But the question underneath all of it is still simple: What’s real?

Real customer pain. Real buying intent. Real founder obsession. Real evidence that the market is pulling, not just politely listening.

That’s what VSI is built to surface. Not the story you hoped was true. The signal that actually is.

And that’s also where Builders is moving.

Less guessing. Faster loops. More evidence. Better companies.

Forward, always,

Michael van Lier
Managing Director at Builders