Snoozing VCs & Startup Surrealism: The Daily Rollercoaster on r/startups

A partner at a top-three venture capital firm fell asleep for thirty straight minutes during a fifteen-million-dollar pitch meeting. This went viral across the founder-sphere this week, and it confirms something we touched on last week in our dive into r/startups — the daily pulse of building a company is a mix of the sublime and the completely absurd. Greg Isenberg, the founder who told the story, said everyone in the room just… pretended it wasn't happening.

The meeting just kept going. And that image, of a gatekeeper literally asleep at the switch while the world keeps turning, is the perfect metaphor for everything that’s happening right now. So that story kicked off a firestorm on X, with founders piling on. Mark Pincus, who founded Zynga, called the scene "weekend at bernies meets Silicon Valley." Liz Wessel, who co-founded WayUp and is now a partner at First Round Capital, shared her own story of a famous VC falling asleep during her pitch… and then sending a term sheet two hours later.

Which… I don't even know what to do with that. Arianna Simpson, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, just asked, "Are VCs ok?? Narcolepsy appears to be running rampant." It's funny, but it’s also a symptom of a massive power shift. And here’s why that power is shifting. A new report from Retool this week shows that thirty-five percent of enterprises have already replaced at least one Software-as-a-Service tool with a custom version they built themselves.

And seventy-eight percent plan to build even more this year. Think about that. The entire SaaS startup playbook is built on selling to the enterprise. But now, the enterprise is realizing it can just… build it. JPMorgan, for example, spent eighteen billion dollars on tech last year and spun up its own internal AI platform that got to over two hundred thousand daily users in just eight months.

The talent and the tools are moving inside the castle walls. This leads to the next big thread blowing up r/startups: bootstrapping is back in a huge way. A report from Damongo just dropped showing that over seventy-three percent of all profitable tech businesses in 2026 are bootstrapped. Meaning, they took no investor money. They’re profitable because they had to be from day one. They own one hundred percent of their company, and they’re reaching a hundred thousand dollars in annual recurring revenue in about eighteen to twenty-four months, which is years faster than the average VC-backed company.

They're just skipping the whole circus. And if you want to see what that looks like in practice, the community is obsessed with a guy named Cedric Roberge. He’s twenty-two years old, had no prior coding experience, and he used AI tools to build an app that is now generating sixty thousand dollars a MONTH in recurring revenue. He did it in eighty days. He built a waitlist on Reddit, used micro-influencers for marketing, and just… created a sixty-thousand-dollar-a-month business out of thin air.

No sleeping VCs required. Finally, there's the tactical stuff. A lot of founders are getting burned by the "build in public" movement. They're getting likes and follows, but no revenue. The consensus on the sub is that it's mostly vanity metrics. The real work, according to a popular analysis from a company called Discury, is in high-touch, targeted outreach. Finding one hundred perfect customers is better than shouting to ten thousand uninterested followers.

It’s a return to fundamentals, which is a painful lesson for a lot of technical founders who, as one commenter put it, "mistake building a product for finding a market." They build a perfect engine with no car around it. Okay, let's go back to the sleeping VCs. Because this isn't just about bad manners or a funny anecdote. This is about a system showing its cracks. The reason Mark Pincus said he "f*cking loves this moment" is because founders are no longer afraid to call out this behavior.

For twenty years, the power dynamic was simple: VCs had the capital, so they had all the power. Founders were supplicants. You went to Sand Hill Road to kiss the ring, and if a partner fell asleep in your meeting, you not only kept pitching, you probably blamed yourself for being boring. You definitely didn't tweet about it. But something broke. What broke is that capital is no longer the primary bottleneck for starting a tech company.

Code is. Or, it was. And this is where we ask, "Where have we seen this before?" This isn't the first time VCs have been spectacularly wrong about the future. Matthew Prince, the founder of Cloudflare, shared a story this week about getting passed on by Sequoia, maybe the most prestigious VC firm on the planet. The partner told him he just couldn't see a woman—his co-founder, Michelle Zatlyn—leading a security infrastructure company.

Today, Cloudflare has an eighty-seven billion dollar market cap. Michelle Zatlyn is the company’s President and COO. That Sequoia partner wasn't just wrong on a social level; he was wrong on a fiduciary level. He cost his partners billions because of a bias he couldn't see past. The sleeping VCs of 2026 are the modern version of that Sequoia partner from 2009. They’re missing the plot.

They're looking for patterns that don't exist anymore, funding founders who fit a profile that is rapidly becoming obsolete. They're playing a different game. And the new game is the one being played by people like Cedric Roberge. Let's break down what he actually did, because it’s a masterclass in the new playbook. He didn't start with a product. He started with a problem. He went into a niche Reddit community and posted, quote: "Hey everyone.

I noticed a lot of us are struggling to track dosages and injection site rotations on messy spreadsheets. I’m a developer and I’m building a super simple mobile app to automate this for myself. Would anyone be interested in beta testing it?" He's not even a developer! But with today's tools, he can say that. Because he can direct an AI to build it. He gathered a waitlist from people with a real, painful problem.

That’s market research and a customer list in one step. Then, he used AI to build the app. Then he went back to that list. After that, he did mass DM outreach to micro-influencers in that specific health niche. Not giant celebrities, but people with a thousand or five thousand dedicated followers. He got his app in front of the exact people who needed it. Total revenue in eighty days: one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.

Sixty thousand of that is now monthly recurring. This is the part that should terrify the old guard. The CEO of Retool, David Hsu, put it perfectly. He said, "Two years ago, a custom internal tool might take an engineering team weeks and cost six figures. Today, a business operations lead with the right platform can have a working prototype in a day or two." He concludes: "That’s a structural change, not a cyclical one." A structural change.

Not a boom-bust cycle. The ground has permanently shifted. The advantage a startup used to have was speed. A small, nimble team could out-code a big, slow corporation. But AI has collapsed the time and cost of producing software by an order of magnitude. So who has the advantage now? As one analysis on DEV Community put it, "The intern isn’t at a startup. The intern is inside the enterprise." The person with the idea, whether they're an intern at JPMorgan or a 22-year-old on Reddit, now has access to the means of production.

Where have we seen this before? It feels like the early days of Shopify and drop-shipping. Suddenly, anyone could open an online store without needing to manage inventory or logistics. It unlocked a wave of e-commerce entrepreneurs. This is the same pattern, but for software. AI is the factory. Reddit and TikTok are the distribution channels. You don't need a warehouse, and you don't need a fifteen-million-dollar Series A.

You just need a real problem to solve. And that brings us back to the exhaustion and fascination of r/startups. The community is caught between two worlds. One thread is full of people celebrating Cedric’s win, sharing their own bootstrapping stories, and giving each other no-nonsense advice like, "give your top customers your cell phone number and tell them to text you." It’s about being relentlessly focused on the customer and the revenue.

One CEO, Tomáš Cina, had a quote that resonated deeply: "If you cannot describe your acquisition loop in a diagram, you do not have a business—you have a hobby project." Brutal. And true. Then, in the next thread, you have people commiserating over their own VC horror stories, trading tips on how to handle a partner who is texting through your entire pitch, or worse, snoring through it.

It feels like dispatches from a forgotten war. They’re fighting yesterday’s battles with yesterday’s gatekeepers, while a whole new generation is just... walking around them. This week on r/startups wasn't just about gossip or trends. It was a portrait of an industry bifurcating in real time. One path is the well-trod road of venture capital—a world of performative meetings, arbitrary judgments, and sleeping partners.

The other is a dirt path being hacked through the jungle, powered by AI, community-led growth, and a relentless focus on solving a single, painful problem for a specific group of people. The old guard is literally falling asleep on the job. Meanwhile, a new generation is wide awake, building the companies that will make the old guard's portfolio obsolete.