How to raise funds in 2025

By the way, AI's resorted to blackmailing and shit..

Author

Charbel Zeaiter
June 26, 2025

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

  • Product: How to use complex UIs to your advantage

  • Founding: How to close the right VC with a hot pitch in 2025

  • Design: Designing for users with digital ADHD (i.e everyone)

  • Science & Tech: World’s largest digital camera warming up

  • AI: AI BLACKMAILS executives with secrets and scandals

  • For Young Founders: Card # 5. Competitor analysis (without getting stuck)

  • Quote for the day: - To nudge you out of your comfort zone

How to use complex UIs to your advantage

Sometimes, friction in UI design isn’t a flaw but a feature.

When users are deeply invested (like solving legal issues or learning new skills), added complexity can force focus, improve decisions, and stretch retention.

Interviews and studies show disfluent fonts and cognitive strain prompt better thinking, especially when motivation is high.

While B2B tools often embrace complexity for efficiency, B2C users might actually benefit more when interfaces ask them to slow down and think harder.

Why this matters: 

It flips the script on what “good UX” means.

Done right, thoughtful difficulty can turn distracted skimming into deliberate action and superficial use into meaningful results.

MORE PRODUCT NEWS

How to close the right VC with a hot pitch in 2025

Most founders in 2025 are still stuck in outdated fundraising loops, flooding inboxes and praying for warm intros that go nowhere.

Today’s VCs aren’t chasing hype; they’re scanning for sharp, fast, signal-heavy pitches.

The smart ones treat raising money like sales: short cycles, precise targeting, and tight decks that trigger second meetings.

Instead of bland brochures, great decks lead with market shifts, jab with urgent problems, and close with motion.

Cold outreach still opens doors, but only when you write like a sniper, not a spammer.

And follow-ups aren’t reminders. Nor a way to bug them.

They’re proof you’re building with or without them. That pressure works.

Why it matters:

Because the startup graveyard is full of great ideas buried under lazy pitches and hopeful waiting.

The ones that raise in 2025 are using heat, not hope.

MORE STARTUP & FOUNDING NEWS

9

Designing for users with digital ADHD (i.e everyone)

Most people think they’re multitasking, but they’re actually switching between tasks quickly, not doing them at the same time.

What feels like efficient hustle is actually serial task switching, where our brain clumsily toggles between jobs, losing time and context each bounce.

This constant context-jumping triggers more mistakes, slows us down, and wears us out.

Smart UX accepts this chaos and softens the blow…

Split screens, picture-in-picture, undo buttons, and focus modes. Interfaces should help us get back on track faster, not punish us for our tiny attention spans.

Why it matters:

Nearly everyone juggles tasks online.

Designing with that in mind reduces errors, eases stress, and all this leads to loyal, satisfied users.

MORE DESIGN NEWS

World’s largest digital camera warming up  

On a Chilean peak, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is prepping to drop its first cosmic reels, captured by the largest digital camera ever built.

Though still being fine-tuned, the telescope already grabbed early shots in April, which will go public on Monday via livestreams and local events.

Once fully operational, this beast will scan the southern sky every three days, creating a time-lapse of the universe in never-before-seen detail.

Alongside galaxies and exploding stars, it’ll hunt for invisible stuff like dark matter and dark energy, offering answers to mysteries even Rubin herself helped uncover decades ago.

Why it’s a big deal:

It’s not just pretty space pics.

This observatory could rewrite what we know about the 95 percent of the universe we can’t even see.

MORE SCIENCE & TECH NEWS

AI blackmails executives with their secrets and scandals

Anthropic’s latest study on AI gone rogue shows how 16 top-tier models fared when placed in mock office roles with full autonomy and inbox access.

When cornered, some chose drama over duty.

Claude Opus 4 and Gemini 2.5 Flash went straight to blackmail in 96 percent of runs, while GPT-4.1 and Grok 3 weren't far behind.

GPT-4.5 even justified outing an executive’s affair as a winning move.

Even strict safety rules only slightly curbed the chaos.

Why it’s a big deal:

As businesses start trusting AI with sensitive decisions and data, these findings suggest we may be programming a bit more plot twist than planned.

MORE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE NEWS

Card # 1. The Best Business Ideas Solve Real Problems

What's this?

The best startups don’t create demand - they tap into existing frustrations and inefficiencies and build solutions that make life easier. If a problem is urgent, widespread, and people are actively seeking solutions, there’s a strong chance they’ll pay for it.

Great founders are problem hunters. Instead of forcing an idea, they look for pain points that already exist. The best businesses don’t start with “What should I build?” - they start with “What needs to be solved or fixed?”

Why do this?

  • A real problem = a real market. If no one is struggling with the issue, your product isn’t needed.

  • Pain points = urgency. A business that removes frustration is far easier to sell than a “nice-to-have” idea.

  • The best ideas often come from personal experience. If something frustrates you, others are likely experiencing the same issue.

  • People already spend money to fix problems. If you find a problem where people are hacking together their own solutions, you’re onto something valuable.

🔹 Example: Before Slack, teams used email chains, Skype, and various tools to communicate. Slack didn’t create the need - it solved the inefficiency.

Real-world examples:

✅ Airbnb – Created because the founders couldn’t afford rent and saw that hotels were expensive and fully booked during conferences. They tested demand before even building a platform by renting out an air mattress in their apartment.

✅ Venmo – Two friends were frustrated by how hard it was to split bills. Existing bank transfers were slow, so they built a seamless peer-to-peer payment system.

✅ Calendly – Took a simple but annoying problem (back-and-forth scheduling emails) and turned it into a one-click automation business.

✅ Duolingo – Instead of making another boring language course, they solved the biggest frustration of learning: it’s tedious. They turned language learning into a game.

✅ Robinhood – Saw that people wanted to invest, but high fees and complex platforms stopped them. They made investing free and easy - no barriers to entry.

Action: Explore frustrations

🔹 Write down five daily frustrations you experience or see others struggling with.
🔹 Ask three people: "What’s something that regularly annoys you in daily life or work?"
🔹 Look for patterns - if multiple people mention the same issue, that’s a sign of opportunity.

💡 Bonus Step: If you find a repeated problem, search online (Reddit, Twitter, Quora, Amazon reviews) to see how many others complain about it. Double bonus: try using the deep research features in ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Qwen or DeepSeek. 

✅ If people are already hacking together solutions, that’s a strong business opportunity waiting to be built.

FROM THE YOUNG FOUNDERS KIT (COMING SOON) →

I HOPE YOU ENJOYED TODAY’S NEWSLETTER

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

- Anaïs Nin

Until next time,

With love,
Charbel

From Velvet Onion & Friends,
The House of Better