Haje Jan Kamps

Haje Jan Kamps is the director of portfolio at Bolt, a venture capital firm focused on hardware startups and enabling technologies. He was also a staff writer for TechCrunch.

The Latest from Haje Jan Kamps

Your pitch deck needs to be machine-readable

Keep the machines in mind; they are more pervasive than you might think. The good news is that making your pitch decks machine-readable is not actually hard to do.

If I’m being honest, I didn’t have what it takes to be a founder

If I map myself against the standards of fundraising today, none of those startups would’ve had a gnat’s shadow’s chance of raising money.

No, you can’t lie to your board of directors

If there’s anything I’ve learned from building companies, it’s that you’ve got to be straight and honest with your board.

How Headline is using AI to make better investment decisions

Startups are made or broken by product-market fit. Immediately before a funding round, founders know they need to show that they are growing rapidly. Throwing a bunch of money at sales and marketing c

Who knows what GamePlanner does, but Airbnb just bought the company

Who knows what GamePlanner does, but Airbnb just bought the company. Let's dive in to this and other news from startup land.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Fifth Dimension AI’s $2.8M seed deck

AI is a chaotic free-for-all right now, especially when it comes to the fundraising cycles. Does Fifth Dimension stand out from the crowd?

Fighting against AI makes me wonder what it means to be human

Art, psychology, theology and philosophy have all struggled with that question for as long as we’ve had conscious thought.

How Inversion Art is trying to become the Y Combinator of the arts world

What if a little bit of investment, a splash of mentoring and practical support, a slew of introductions, and a whole lot of belief could be used to help artists with their careers?

AI makes you worse at what you’re good at

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. If you’ve been following along with this newsletter, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been a little bit curious about

Pitch Deck Teardown: Phospholutions’ $10M Series A extension deck

Phospholutions' pitch deck embodies the essence of an effective pitch. But it's also riddled with small issues that add up,

With the power of AI, you can be mediocre, too

The heady, futuristic world of artificial intelligence brings us a new promise: The ability to be perfectly average.

Startups learn the hard way that relying on OpenAI’s tech can burn them

A recent update to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that allows users to upload PDFs and ask questions about them has sent ripples through the startup ecosystem.

Before you found a startup, think about your personal goals

If you're looking to make a significant difference in the world, your startup could be the vehicle that drives that change.

If your startup doesn’t seem impossible at first, it’s not hard enough

The key to a successful startup lies in its team and their ability to answer pivotal questions about the startup's purpose and challenges.

Pitch Teardown: The CancerVAX crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine

For this edition of Pitch Deck Teardown, we're taking a close look at the CancerVAX campaign on the equity crowdfunding platform, StartEngine.

Your startup should solve an impossibly hard problem

Most obvious problems that have obvious solutions don’t need startups.

Tech layoffs are back with a vengeance

Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. For my column this week, I told the story of how an ex-colleague was impersonated by an AI-powered spambot and almost tri

Pitch Deck Teardown: Aether’s $49M Series A deck

This pitch deck makes for some really interesting reading and storytelling, so let's dive in and see if we can spot what happened and how.

Spam is about to get even more terrible

As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it's becoming more adept at generating human-like text.

After helping sift through 400M photos, GoodOnes renames to Ollie

AI-powered photo-sorting app GoodOnes raised $3.6 million in seed funding earlier this year and dropped into the Apple App Store in April. Six months and 400 million photo sorts later, it is changing
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