Peter Day - super{set}
“At the moment there’s this unwritten belief that AI is a chatbot. And I think that in the not too distant future, that will be seen as the dumbest integration of AI for most use cases.”
Connect with Peter
https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-day/
VC Uncovered’s View
Peter Day, a general partner at super{set}, is the kind of investor that reminds you that venture capital doesn’t have to be passive or performative. He embodies the type of investor VC Uncovered aims to highlight. One who provides more than capital to founders. Super{set} operates not just as a fund but as a co-builder, defining itself as the OG of AI-native ventures that rolls up its sleeves, providing capital and deep operational experience to build companies from the ground up. This hands-on, builder-first approach is the opposite of the box-checking practices that often slow larger funds.
Day’s insights are particularly relevant now because he tackles two of the biggest challenges facing technical founders: the go-to-market struggle and the current chaos of AI adoption. He believes a great way to reduce startup risk is to find founders who have both a “paranoia” about failure and an “obsession with adoption.” Day recognizes that because writing software is easier than ever, the real advantage is understanding customer problems and knowing how to sell.
His conviction that “getting your sales motion right is harder than building super complicated software” is a crucial message for technical founders and a great example of the fresh thinking we seek to spotlight.Meet Peter
Q: You can be anywhere. Eating, drinking, and reading your favorite thing. Paint the scene.
A: Hanging out with my family on an island off of Cambodia eating a local dish called Lok Lak and drinking a cold local beer on the beach.
Key Quotes
“At the moment there’s this unwritten belief that AI is a chatbot. And I think that in the not too distant future, that will be seen as the dumbest integration of AI for most use cases.”
“Spotting the capacity to have conviction that you can change the world, but also paranoia that it might fail and holding those two things in equal regard and being able to handle that, I think is something that I had to learn the hard way.”
“Getting your sales motion right is harder than building super complicated software.”
“We’re obsessed with adoption. We believe adoption stats over pretty much any other number.”
“Things work because people make them work, so we always look for evidence of founders running through brick walls. ”
Original Responses (Lightly Edited for Clarity and Flow)
Background and Personal Journey
Experiences Shaping My Investment Approach
I learned a lot from launching new products that missed their revenue goals. It reminds me of the brutality of competition and the crucial challenge of go-to-market execution. These experiences, where new products struggled, instilled humility and spurred an aggressive focus on validation, tempered by the knowledge that things might not work. I now look for founders who demonstrate the capacity to hold two essential qualities in equal regard: conviction that they can change the world, and a healthy paranoia that it might fail. This ability to handle that creative tension is a critical insight I learned the hard way and now use to identify potential in a team.
Unconventional Belief
I don’t know if it’s unconventional, but I think one of the hardest things in the world for any company is go-to-market sales, and it is underrated by most technical founders. It is close to impossible to build a company unless your founder can sell, because selling to your first customers is an insanely hard thing to do. The things you learn in your first six to twelve months in that regard are going to be the hardest to change five years down the line. Getting your sales motion right is harder than building super complicated software.
Philosophy and Insights
Values When Working with Founders
Tenacity has to be one of them. Things work because people make them work, so we always look for evidence of founders running through brick walls. We look for tenacity, self-belief, and paranoia all together, the chip on the shoulder that really gives them that drive and need to succeed. We care a lot about clock speed. To build a company now, you need to context switch 400 times a day, so that rate of learning is more essential than ever. Specifically, can you context switch and have a conversation right now about how GPUs work and then pivot to what a good balance sheet looks like. Being able to navigate that is insanely valuable.
The Perfect Founder Pitch
We have one undisclosed portfolio company whose founders were able to explain the customer pain so intimately we felt it, and they told us stuff we didn’t know. They were able to paint a picture of the future that made us want to buy the product even though we weren’t even in the industry. You could just see they’d lived it. Then they showed us a demo of the product, and you could see that the product had been built with deep empathy for customers and users by all of the design choices made. It turns out they had actually done the job for ten years before they decided to be a tech company founder. The way the whole problem was framed and the solution was built was so compelling, we felt we either needed to invest in this or we should just not enter that space for the next ten years.
Approach to Risk
We are obsessed with product adoption. We believe adoption stats over pretty much any other number. When we think about risk, it is all about quickly validating: do people want this, are they willing to pay for it, is it technically feasible, and can we make money doing it. We get super aggressive about adoption. An idea is great, a demo is better, a customer using it is the best. We really try and encourage all of our portfolio companies to get it out there and to onboard those customers as quickly as possible to create that feedback loop. If you do that, your risks go down massively. The biggest failures we see are where they overbuild without actually validating anything, and they paint themselves into a product corner that can be very difficult to get out of.
Trends and Future Vision
Exciting Trends and Technologies
I think at the moment there’s this unwritten belief that AI is a chatbot. I think that in the not too distant future, that will be seen as the dumbest integration of AI for most use cases. There’s a whole bunch of work to do to reimagine what taking advantage of this wave and the next wave of foundation model innovations can bring to bear, certainly in terms of user interaction and system integration. When we see really good startups right now, they’re often doing some interesting things around UX. Building software is now way easier, but validating its output is correct is orders of magnitude harder than it’s ever been. We’ve got these amazing LLM things; they’re a little bit like toddlers, and wrestling them and telling them what to do via increasingly long prompts that they occasionally ignore is a really hard problem to solve. Research around the controllability and the evaluation of these technologies is super exciting.
Misconception About VCs
There are a number of operating models, and they don’t neatly fit into one box. In our model, we want to co-build with people because we all love building. The misconception is that all venture looks the same. I think there is also a misconception that valuation is everything at every stage, and maximizing your valuation is a smart play. Picking the right venture partner for you, for your business, for your team, is more important than percentage points.
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