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Happy Saturday, and I hope you had a great week.
Mark Cuban’s message to young hustlers – learn and master AI! In an article for Forbes this week, Mr. Cuban went on to emphasize that AI will be a baseline skill like e-mail or Excel in 5-years and that entrepreneurs should embrace it or get left behind.
On a recent episode of the Hospitality Hangout podcast, Schatzy said if he another kid (he has three adult children), he was going to name the child “AI Schatzberg” which he felt would all but guaranty financial success for his progeny.
There is no question that AI is not only dominating the headlines, but with almost two-thirds of all US venture funding going to AI companies in the first half of 2025, they’re also doing pretty well in the category of attracting investment capital as well!
For avoidance of any doubt, Branded has enthusiastically jumped embraced AI and we’re thrilled to have partnered with the good people at ARI Venture Studio (the only venture studio exclusively focused on AI-solutions for restaurants) and we’re supporting our portfolio companies that are embracing AI for their respective platforms).
AI-solutions, however, while critically important and timely, isn’t the focus of this week’s Top of the Fold. It’s been the KISS theory (Keep It Simple Schatzy) that’s been on my mind and maybe it’s b/c of the understandable euphoria for AI that’s put me in that (New York) state of mind (that’s for you JB, and it’s nice to bring you back into the Fold).
I was reading this week about DoorDash and a reminder of how four Stanford University students made a pitch to Y Combinator in 2013 with a fairly basic idea – help restaurants deliver food. Their value proposition: restaurants want to deliver, customers want delivery, DoorDash will connect them (I want to give a thank you to Jordan Lio and his LinkedIn post that reminded me of this story and that simple & in-your-face ideas can be incredibly important and wildly valuable).
