AI Broke the Five Families

The mafia era gave us predictability. The AI era gives us dispersion and with it, the chance to build conviction before consensus.

When I first broke into venture, everyone talked about the mafias. PayPal. Facebook. Airbnb. Uber. Stripe. If you wanted to back a breakout founder, you just traced the family tree, found the alumni, wrote the check, and let compounding do its thing. The sourcing map was tight, almost cozy. Predictable.

That era is gone.

AI didn’t just disrupt product cycles. It blew up the sourcing manual. The next generation of founders isn’t spilling out of five familiar mafias. It’s forty-five different companies, labs, collectives, and weird in-between places you’ve barely heard of. Some of the sharpest founders I’ve met lately aren’t ex-FAANG, not YC, not even from the “usual suspects.” They’re coming out of research labs, open-source Discords, insurance API startups that pivoted, or failed consumer apps that somehow turned into infra. The old “who’s your prior” test? It’s broken. Or better yet, more complex.