From Running to VC

From a 6K run to a cold plunge: before diving into the tech, we started the day running. It was an honor to hit the pavement with the Founders Running Club for a 6K run, capped off with some pushups and great conversations. There’s nothing quite like swapping raw founder stories with fellow entrepreneurs while catching your breath. To top it off, we took a quick, refreshing dip in the Limmat River right in front of the Ship26 venue to lock in our focus before the main event.

The highlight of the day was an incredible workshop by former Googler Yariv Adan, who now runs a VC fund. He walked us through how his fund operates with zero employees by leveraging a fully autonomous Agentic AI workflow.

Their setup is mind-blowing:

• Instant ingestion: the moment a startup submits a pitch deck, an agentic loop immediately ingests it.
• Autonomous artifacts: AI agents independently generate market analyses, flag data gaps, and prepare full investment committee briefs.
• 24/7 contextual awareness: the system acts, listens to meetings, reads emails, and continuously updates its own conviction score around the clock.

By designing a system where AI runs the fund independently, they’ve unlocked infinite scalability while keeping the General Partners directly connected to founders.

🦄 The death of the Unicorn: rise of the “Donkey”

But the biggest takeaway wasn’t just how they use AI — it was Yariv’s contrarian view on what makes a startup investable today. He explicitly stated that most software application layers right now are completely uninvestable for traditional VC. Why? Because traditional software moats are melting. “Vibe coding” is real: founders can build and prototype a top-50 app store idea in a single day. Because building is so cheap, hundreds of startups are attacking the exact same use cases simultaneously, and major AI providers are rapidly eating up specialized application layers.

The math for building a traditional $1B Unicorn — an engineering animal that might not even exist in this new economy — is broken. Instead, the massive opportunity right now is building highly efficient, cash-flow-positive businesses (what he called “Donkeys”). Especially in conservative, high-quality, high-willingness-to-pay markets like Switzerland, a lean team of 3–4 people can use AI to automate ideation, prototyping, and go-to-market execution. The goal? Focus on building hyper-automated businesses that generate $10k–$20k a month in rapid passive income and real dividends right now.

But then… who do you share your successes with? That is exactly what Ship26 is for. Because the more automated the world becomes, the more we need real, human community to celebrate the wins.