“Pulled the Atlas international expansion as the hook — not her current title.”

“Opened on her recent post about developer-facing video agents, skipped the company pitch.”

“Referenced his thread on session-replay sampling rather than the obvious 'congrats on the round'.”

“Led with the FLUX latency benchmark he shared last week, framed the ask as a swap of notes.”

“Anchored on his open-source AI thesis, not the firm — and named one specific portfolio overlap.”

“Picked up his recent take on agentic UIs and reframed our pitch as one concrete answer to it.”

“Skipped the company entirely — referenced a single SST commit that solved our exact problem.”

“Opened on his Replit Agent demo from Devcon, then made the ask a 10-minute reaction video.”

“Referenced her paper on noise audits — and admitted upfront we'd applied the framework imperfectly.”

“Quoted his 'no code is the best code' tweet back at him, then asked one specific question.”

“Pointed at her `react-hooks-snippets` repo and asked for a 30-second sanity check on our hook design.”

“Anchored on the Postgres-as-everything thesis from his recent essay, not the YC association.”