🕶️ A former monk raised $20M in a week

Howdy, founders. Hope your inbox is lighter than your calendar today.

Lilly Chen got into Colorado College without a high school diploma. Years later she raised $20 million in about a week. At each step, someone opened a door for her. That's today's theme: who holds the door. Google is letting outside apps into Gemini and Search, through a console it runs. The Justice Department is asking whether Nvidia buying Hugging Face would give one company the main entrance to open AI models. And Meta shareholders are in court trying to stop Mark Zuckerberg from issuing shares that carry no vote. So: whose door is your business standing behind?

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

When analytics on Postgres slows down, most teams add a second database. Then come the pipelines, the sync jobs, and a copy of your data that's always a little behind.

TimescaleDB takes a different approach: extend Postgres instead of splitting away from it. Hypertables partition your data automatically as volume grows. Hypercore compression cuts storage up to 95%. Continuous aggregates keep dashboards live without re-querying everything.

CERN runs Postgres this way for sensor data from the Large Hadron Collider.

No split architecture, no pipeline lag, no new query language to learn. Same SQL, same drivers, same tools.

Start on Tiger Cloud and get $1000 in credits.

Get $1000 Credit

Most founder stories start in a dorm room. Lilly Chen's starts in a monastery. The CEO of FSH Technologies (pronounced "fish") left high school at 16, spent about two years as a monk, and now runs a Philadelphia startup whose $20 million Series A came together in about a week, she told Crunchbase News. The product: software for government chores that bore Silicon Valley, like school food services and public records.

Monk mode: Chen had been hospitalized again and again for Graves' disease, a thyroid condition, when her mother suggested they move to China and become monks. Chen was ordained in the US, then spent months at a Chinese monastery with no internet, rereading the same books. When a fellow monk asked why she wasn't in college, she said she was sick. He pointed out that she seemed well. She realized she was.

From there, the clock speeds up:

A check before the idea: Chen left with no startup idea, and venture firm Contrary backed her anyway in 2021, betting on her motivation rather than a pitch. FSH took its current shape in 2024, and the Contrary investor who backed her, Jason Chen, is now its COO. Total funding: $25 million, with General Catalyst and Ramp in the Series A.

Her method comes from feeding koi at the monastery. The head monk kept asking if she was the fish or the pond, then told her: "You're the pond." At FSH, that means learning why government information is scattered before building anything, not slapping a chatbot on top.

Then came the slow part. Government contracts take a long time to win, so FSH made less than $100,000 in its first year.

Slow is smooth: that's Chen's team motto ("slow is smooth and smooth is fast"), and it's good advice for anyone selling to schools or governments. Her round took a week; her revenue took a year. Investors will move fast on "unsexy, boring" problems, but the buyers won't. If that's your market, raise enough to survive a first year like FSH's.

Looking ahead… With eight or nine employees and more offers out, FSH now has to turn a week-long raise into contracts on government time. The head monk would probably tell her to watch the whole pond.

Most companies approach YouTube like another marketing channel. That's usually the first mistake.

Running a YouTube channel for a tech company is very different from running a creator channel. You need the right team, the right host, the right type of content, and you need to know what you're actually trying to accomplish before spending thousands of dollars producing videos.

In this episode, Caya breaks down what we've learned from building Slidebean's channel over the last eight years: why the Producer + Host relationship matters, when a founder should be the face of the channel, how to structure a YouTube team, and why subscribers are mostly a vanity metric.

Google wants your app to live inside its AI, not on your customer's home screen. On Wednesday, the company opened its Connected Apps Platform, so any business or developer can submit an app that works inside Gemini and Google Search. Think asking Gemini to design a flyer in Canva or build a playlist in YouTube Music, without opening either one.

Who's on the guest list: Gemini already has more than 50 connected apps, from partners like Adobe, Experian, Localiza and Peloton, plus Google's own services like Photos, YouTube Music and Google Home. Search has fewer, including Instacart, Canva, YouTube Music and Yahoo Fantasy Football. Gemini's lineup comes to Search over the next few weeks, and Calm is joining both. Notice who has the best seats: Google's own apps sit right next to the partners, at a party Google is hosting.

So how does everyone else get in?

The bouncer is a console: you connect your app through a cloud-hosted MCP server (Model Context Protocol, a standard way for AI to talk to software) or Android's AppFunctions APIs. Then you register, test and submit it in the Google Connected Console, and pick Search, Gemini or both. Once you're live, you can track traffic, latency and error rates, and keep control of your verified logo and authenticated accounts. For now it's a US-only beta with a waitlist, and Google hasn't said when it opens wider.

Google isn't the only host. ChatGPT and Meta's Muse run their own versions, all built on the same bet: people stop opening individual apps and reach their favorite services through their favorite AI. TechCrunch compares it to SEO, the way companies once fought to rank in Google's results.

Front door, back room: if Google becomes the front door, your app becomes the back room. That's great for reach, and risky for everything else. The launch, as TechCrunch describes it, covers dashboards and logos, but not what you learn about the customers who find you through Gemini, or who they think they're dealing with. So join the waitlist and scope an MCP server, but first decide what has to stay yours: the login, the customer data, and a reason for people to come to you directly.

Looking ahead… Gemini's apps land in Search within weeks, and the waitlist is the only way in for now. If this does turn into the new SEO, getting in early matters. Just make sure you still own the house behind the door.

Scale your growth: Join names like HubSpot, Ahrefs, and Deel. Put your product in front of 85,000+ startup founders. Let's talk.