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For many Black tech founders, raising venture capital is often positioned as the ultimate milestone. It signals that your idea is validated, your business is taken seriously, and opportunities begin to take shape. As the managing partner of an early stage VC firm, and a 3X Black tech founder that speaks and meets with thousands of founders a year, I can tell you the truth is far more nuanced. Venture capital can be powerful, but its not for everyone. Before chasing your first check, founders need clarity, preparation, and strategy. Fundraising is not just about storytelling or networking; its about understanding the system youre stepping into and deciding whether raising venture capital truly aligns with your long-term vision. Venture Capital Is a Business Model, Not a Badge of Honor It’s important for first time founders to understand the venture business model. Investors are not simply backing good ideas”; we are seeking outsized returns within a defined time horizon. That means VCs are looking for companies that can scale rapidly, dominate large markets, and potentially return 10x, 50x, or even 100x their investment. For founders, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, this distinction matters. Too often, VC is treated as a symbol of success rather than a strategic tool. Before you fundraise, ask yourself these tough questions: Is your business designed to scale quickly? Does it address a large enough market? Can it grow aggressively without breaking what makes it special? If the answer is no, that doesnt mean your business isnt valuable, it just simply means venture capital may not be the right fuel for it. And thats okay. VC Readiness Starts Long Before the Pitch Deck Many first-time founders assume fundraising begins when the pitch deck is finished. In reality, thats often the final step. True VC readiness starts months earlier. It takes time to develop your story. Even at the earliest stages, founders should be able to clearly articulate who their customer is, what problem theyre solving, and why their solution is meaningfully different from competitors who are already in market. Part of that story are performance metrics, why your team, and why is this the right time. Equally important is team readiness. VCs invest in people as much as products, especially first-time founders. Youre almost betting on the person more than you are the business concept. Founders with complementary skill sets, operational discipline, and the ability to execute consistently tend to inspire confidence with VCs. For solo founders, this often means building a roster of strong advisers, impressive early hires, and/or strategic partners who help de-risk the business. The more prepared you are, the better leverage youll have throughout the fundraising process. Holding Your Power in VC Rooms Venture capital, like most industries, doesnt hold Black founders in mind, and that reality shows up in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. From biased pattern matching to lowered expectations, founders will encounter dynamics that challenge their confidence. Thats why entering investor conversations with the right mindset is critical. You are not lucky to be in the room; you earned your place there. I see founders make this mistake often. Investors are evaluating an opportunity, but you need to remember that youre also evaluating them. Not every VC is the right fit for your business. Alignment, values, and long-term partnership matter just as much as check size and valuation. Holding your power means controlling the narrative around your business, being clear about your vision. It also means taking a collaborative approach to conversation as opposed to a subordinate one. You are supposed to answer questions to VCs but youre not in a job interview. Confidence (not desperation), when backed by preparation and performance, can shift the entire dynamic of a fundraising conversation. Knowing When Venture Capital Is Or Isnt The Right Move Its important to remember that not every successful company needs venture capital. Bootstrapping, revenue-based financing, grants, and strategic partnerships can often provide growth capital without sacrificing equity or control. This is more possible than ever in the era of agentic AI. Founders need to be sure that they have a massive market, directional customer demand that validates the market, and the right team at the earliest stages. Even better is true confidence in scaling the offering to $100M+ revenue in 57 years, given ideal conditions. VCs are looking to accelerate something thats already working, not serve as a lifeline. Raising money out of desperation only leads to two possible outcomes: a bad deal from a predatory partner or no deal at all. Extraordinary people with amazing opportunities know their worth in a room. Its also important to consider, the larger the raise, in most cases the deeper the partnership with your investors. This is why setting up the correct relationships up front is key. You want to be in position to work with your board, not for your board. Take the time to evaluate whether a VC truly fits your business model, personal goals, and tolerance for risk. The Real Work Starts After the Check Clears Fundraising is often glamorized, but the real work begins after the money is in the bank. Scaling a team, managing burn, hitting milestones, and navigating investor expectations can be more challenging than raising the round itself. Post-funding success requires operational maturity, strong communication, and the ability to grow as an individual. Youll quickly find that what you did to get to level one does not work to get you to level two. This is where clarity of values matters. Founders who raise with intention and choose investors who understand and respect their vision are better positioned to grow without losing themselves Raising venture capital is a strategic decision. Understand how VC works, prepare deeply, know how to manage your power dynamic with investors, and choose the right path to build your company (not theirs). If you decide that venture capital is the right path for you, the goal isnt just to get funded. Its to build something meaningful, scalable, and sustainable on your own terms.
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E-Commerce
Every TV and movie critic is loving to hate on Darren Aronofsky these days. The Academy Award-nominated filmmakercreator of lyrical, surreal, and deeply human movies like Black Swan, The Whale, Mother!, and Pihas released an AI-generated series called On This Day . . . 1776 to commemorate the semiquincentennial anniversary of the American Revolution. Though the series has garnered millions of views, commentators everywhere call it “a horror,” slamming Aronofsky’s work for how stiff the faces look, how everything morphs unrealistically. Although calling it “requiem for a filmmaker” seems excessive, they are not wrong about these faults. The series, created using real human voice-overs and Google’s generative video AI, does suffer from uncanny valley syndrome (our brains can very easily detect what’s off with faces, and we don’t buy it as real, feeling an automatic repulsion). But this month, two new generative AI models from China have closed the valley’s gap: Kling 3.0 and Seedance 2.0. For the first time, AI is generating video content that is truly indistinguishable from film, with the time and subject coherence that will make the 2020s “It’s AI slop!” crybabies disappear like their predecessors in the aughts (“It’s CGI!”) and the 1990s (“It’s Photoshop!”). Seedance 2.0, developed by TikTok parent company ByteDance, released in beta on February 9exclusively in China for now. Its widely considered the first “director’s tool.” Unlike previous models that gave the feeling you were pulling a slot machine lever and hoping for a coherent result, Seedance allows for what analysts at Chinese investment firm Kaiyuan Securities call director-level control. It achieves this through a breakthrough multimodal input system. ByteDance has redesigned its model to accept images, videos, audio, and text simultaneously as inputs, rather than relying on text prompts alone. A creator can upload up to a dozen reference filesmixing character sheets, specific camera movement demos, and audio tracksand the AI will synthesize them into a scene that follows cinematic logic. The results have been startling. “With its reality enhancements, I feel its very hard to tell whether a video is generated by AI,” says Wang Lei, a programmer in Guangdong who tested the model to generate a 10-second history of humanity. He described the output as “smooth in storytelling with cinematic grandeur.” One of the tricks is that ByteDance trained it on the vast video dataset of Douyin (Chinas TikTok). This gave the model the capacity to understand human nuance, which shows in the everyday shots it produces in addition to the Hollywood-level cinematic shots it can create. [Image: Kuaishou] And then there’s Kling If Seedance is the visionary director, Kling 3.0 is the rigorous cinematographer. Launched February 5 by Kuaishou Technology, Kling 3.0 has earned the moniker “Motion Engine.” While other models struggle with the basic laws of physicscars floating, people walking through wallsKling 3.0 respects gravity and light. [Image: Kuaishou] “The physics simulation finally lets you art direct motion instead of hoping for it,” Bilawal Sidhu, a former Google product manager and AI strategist, said on LinkedIn. This makes it uniquely suited to be integrated into commercial work where a product must look and behave like a real object. Commenters on Reddit were in awe of the models new abilities, especially for long takes and multishot. [Image: Kuaishou] Klings major breakthrough is its Elements feature, which allows users to upload reference videos to lock in character consistency. Before, generative video AI would change the characters’ faces at random, like in Aronofsky’s series. With Kling, they always look exactly the same in any shot it generatesa holy grail feature for filmmakers who need actors to look like the same person from shot to shot. It doesn’t just generate pixels; it understands narrative pacing, cutting, and continuity. The level of realism is so high that Kaiyuan Securities believes the new model is positioned to be widely adopted first in AI manga and short drama areas, bringing down costs and improving efficiency to benefit companies with large holdings of intellectual property or traffic. The markets agreed. The release of these models immediately sent shockwaves through the Chinese tech sector. Digital content company house COL Group skyrocketed in the anticipation it will use these models. Shares in studio giant Huace Media and game developer Perfect World rallied 7% and 10% respectively. Investors arent betting on a toy; theyre betting on the total replacement of traditional production pipelines in gming, film, and publishing. An industrial revolution for the visual arts For many professionals in the trenches, generative AI tools are not toys; they are the new standard. Julian Muller, an award-winning director and creative producer, told me the shift is already visible to everyone. “Just from what I saw in the Super Bowl commercials on Sunday, many incorporated AI elements to achieve creative results. We are definitely at the beginning of a shift in what is possible under tighter timelines and leaner production investments, Muller says. I’d say these models [Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0] clearly can produce stunning visual results, Muller tells me, noting, however, that theyre not perfect. They are very close to being indistinguishable from real production footage, yet I think there is still a detectable artificial quality to it. Muller does believe that we have passed the point of no return. “Directors and producers who don’t use AI tools to enhance their projects will soon become the exception and not the rule,” he says. “This is te future, and we’re definitely not going back.” This sentiment is echoed by Tim Simmons, a 17-year Hollywood veteran who analyzes the industry on YouTubes channel Theoretically Media. He told me that while big studios are paralyzed by their own infrastructure, indie creators are adapting. “Adoption at the large studios will remain slower because of the rigid postproduction specs that necessitate building customized AI workflows,” he says. “The challenge is the time required to build such a workflow versus the speed at which AI models are evolving.” Basically, by the time the studios have finished constructing your bridge, the river has moved 150 miles to the north, he points out. Setting aside the complex discussions regarding unions and talent for a moment, its safe to say that through 2026, you’ll see tentative steps from larger studios, Simmons says. But for indie studios and international production houses working outside the traditional Hollywood system? Utilization will rise rapidly. A demo video from the Kling 3.0 announcement [Image: Kuaishou] No soul in the machine Not everyone is ready to embrace the algorithm, of course. While the technology has nearly conquered the visual uncanny valley, a deeper, emotional chasm remains. “I dont think weve ever been amazed and saddened like we are today,” Peter Quinn, a VFX artist and director known for his surreal, handcrafted effects, told me via email. “Spectacular art has just become so dull,” he says. Quinn argues that we value art not just for the final image, but for the human struggle behind itthe painter mixing colors, the stop-motion artist moving a puppet millimeter by millimeter. “Kling 3.0 and Seedance 2.0, while spectacular, are 2026s latest shiny AI toys . . . capable of generating soulless marvels, birthed in a data center somewhere,” he says. “Its interesting how the wow fades when we hear its AI.” In fact, Quinn is in the process of creating a TV docuseries about the anti-AI. Titled The Creators, it intentionally features dozens of “real” artists whove found interesting ways to express creativity by leaning heavily into showing the process, time, and effort it takes to make something. We see a painter mixing and painstakingly applying paint to a canvas over days, stop-motion artists timelapse of weeks of tiny well-considered adjustments, a dancer getting it wrong, a collage artist cutting hundreds of pieces by hand, an artist who can create photo-real pencil sketches, a sculptor who knows the nuance of clay, or a photographer who sees something nobody else does, he tells me. It just feels like its time. [The] time it takes is what makes it valuable and worthy of looking at or hanging on a wall. Titans of the industry share his skepticism. Guillermo del Toro has famously dismissed AI art as “an insult to life itself,” while Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan says he wont use tools that remove the human element from storytelling. In Pluribuss credits there is a line that says that humans proudly made it. Maybe TV and cinema will bifurcate between a minority of human-only-made art for the galleries and the purists, and algorithmic content for the masses. Just like there are fanatics of real film, like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, who refuse using digital cameras like everyone else in the industry. A demo video from the Kling 3.0 announcement [Image: Kuaishou] The new impressionism I understand Quinn, Del Toro, Nolan, and every purist out there. But, from a historical perspective, it really doesnt make a lot of sense. Despite the existential angstand leaving aside the huge problem that this will cause in terms of jobs and copyright issues, a topic for another articlethere is reason for deep optimism. We are standing at a moment in history that mirrors the state of art in the late 19th century. Before the industrial revolution brought us the collapsible paint tube and pre-stretched factory-made canvas, painting was an expensive, studio-bound endeavor reserved for the elite who had the patrons that would pay them enough for them to grind their own pigments. The industrial revolution in paint manufacturing liberated every artist. It allowed Monet and Renoir to leave the studio, go outside, and paint the light. It birthed Impressionism. Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0 may be the paint tubes of cinema and TV, which has seen its cost go down with the analog and video revolutions, but its still reserved for a very few. Those modelsand the ones that will come next from Google and otherstruly open the gates for true AI-generated stories that will feel as real as the ones produced with real people, whether the purists like it or not. Simmons believes “there is a ‘new media’ coming that isn’t ‘just movies but cheaper.’ It will be interactive, generative, and personalized in ways we can’t fully articulate yet, he says. I dont think we have the language for it yet. Right now, we are looking at the internet in 1990 and asking, ‘How will this change the fax machine?’ The answer wasn’t a better fax machine.” I believe that he is right. By lowering the barrier to entry to zero, Seedance and Kling are inviting billions of people who have never held a camera to tell their stories. With the uncanny valley closed, the gatekeepers are gone. The only thing left is to see what humanity decides to paint with this terrifying, wonderful new brush.
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E-Commerce
When my business went through a difficult season, I turned to my friend, ChatGPT. I asked the Large Language Model (LLM) for insights and advice on how to leverage my strengths and pivot my business as budgets for womens leadership programs shifted downward. When the well-framed answers started pouring in, I didnt pause to check in with myself and ask if my opinion diverged from ChatGPT or whether this advice aligned with my values and mission. In fact, I didnt even think to ask ChatGPT what might work in my favor if I just stayed the course.I was a LLeMming: a term Lila Shroff uses to describe compulsive AI users in The Atlantic. Lila Shroff shares that just as the adoption of writing reduced our memory and calculators devalued basic arithmetic skills, AI could be atrophying our critical thinking skills. A MODERN LEADERSHIP BLIND SPOT In my TEDx talk, I share that we are all susceptible to a cognitive bias called authority bias, which means we are heavily influenced by the opinions and judgments of perceived authority figures. This could be accepting your bosss input without critical evaluation, or it could be blind trust that ChatGPT always provides the right answers. Large Language Models offer us 24/7 access to advice and guidance. Its easy to fall into an authority bias toward LLMs because not only do tools like ChatGPT answer all questions with an astonishingly confident tone, but outsourcing our decision-making is convenient. Also known as Cognitive Offloading, the outsourcing of cognition helps people manage mental load, memory demands, and decision burden. There is also discomfort and effort involved in turning inward (and checking in is not quick, nor are the answers obvious). Given the fact that LLMs are not well-rounded, critical-minded people, this can be dangerous. LLMs have been known to hallucinate by making up data or resources, reduce cognitive problem-solving skills, and hinder spontaneous creativity. It also has a bias for positivity, which means it can validate or support even the worst of ideas. This bias can be especially powerful in making you drift off track as a leader. Heres what to do when you realize youre outsourcing your thinking (whether to an LLM or to a person). GET CURIOUS ABOUT YOUR MOTIVATIONS When I sought out ChatGPT to help me make some business pivots at the beginning of 2025, it seemed like a safe place to go to express my concerns and get advice without judgment. What I was really seeking was a sense of certainty in an uncertain time. Its tempting to default to our favorite LLM when uncertainty hits. One of my clients, a founder in the events industry, was feeling stuck in a creative strategy. She wanted to offload some of the uncertainty she was feeling around her marketing strategy, and so she asked ChatGPT to give her feedback. It gave her a host of strategies to try. When she asked my opinion, I asked her: Does the strategy align with your values? Does it move you and your team closer to your goals and objectives? Most importantly, does this recommendation energize you, or does it drain you?If you are wondering whether or not to use a strategy or idea suggested by AI, you can ask yourself these same questions. You can also start to take track of your own tendencies, like how frequently you turn to your favorite LLM to solve a problem, or even validate your choices and beliefs. Are you: Trying to eliminate uncertainty? Seeking validation? Craving alternatives? Or looking for novel ideas? When you notice why you turn to your favorite LLM for advice, it becomes easier to slow down and ensure you are using it for the right reasons. TRUST YOURSELF FIRST For over three months, I’ve stopped asking ChatGPT (my preferred LLM) for advice on business challenges after I realized I was drifting off course. While building a skill set around AI and LLM is critical as a leader, this exercise helped me rebuild self-trust. I feel better in my physical and mental health, my creativity has returned, and I feel back in alignment with my business, my decisions, and my future. I made some hard decisions to quit things that weren’t working for me (that were very well supported by ChatGPT). One of my clients realized that she was trusting Claude, her preferred LLM, too much for leadership advice. To combat this, she started to read the advice in a toddlers voice. It helped her remember that the recommendations, while sounding smart, generally offer no more experience and education than a toddler. Its often guessing at best. Sow down enough to assess whether this advice aligns with your value system, feels aligned, or even whether its advice youd entertain if a younger coworker suggested it. DONT OUTSOURCE YOUR LEADERSHIP POWER A client of mine remembers the precise day she started looking for a new job. It was the day she shared her annual marketing strategy with her CEO. As CMO, she had spent months gathering enough data and research to craft this careful plan. Her CEO took her plan, put it in ChatGPT, and told her they would be moving forward with one of ChatGPTs strategies, instead of her custom-crafted plan. She felt her intelligence was undermined as the CEO swapped her decades of marketing knowledge for a tool that has been known to guess. As modern leaders, we should be both proficient in using AI tools and also cognizant of when not to use them. We have to trust that we can bring all of our five senses to real business issues, and AI cannot. Delegating our approach and decisions to AI leads to a sea of sameness, and in my clients situation, employee disengagement. In my own experience, defaulting to LLMs for the answer made it harder to think creatively and on the fly for solutions. Remember, your experience, insights, and senses are unique and valuable. They are your competitive advantage. No AI tool can replace this.
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E-Commerce
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