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How to embed sustainability into unit economics, how to stay true to your mission, being an impact entrepreneur in a short-termist and finance-first World

How 11 battle-tested founders deploy AI to build capabilities competitors can’t match

After publishing my first article on how to build credible business plans and investor relationships in a harder market, one question kept coming back from founders: “And what about AI? How does it change the game for us?”

So I went back to the field.

In 2026, you want to build credible business plans and trust when money is tighter: a field guide from 10 battle-tested founders.
How should founders write their business plans — and manage investor relationships — in a shifting market that increasingly values truth and control over the old reflex of speed and slogans? Over the past weeks, I sat down with more than ten seasoned entrepreneurs to pressure-test this simple but vital question: I listened, I challenged, I compared scars. What follows is a synthesis of their practice in the field: clear points of convergence, honest disagreements, and the words that stayed with me.

Between the Great Wealth Transfer, data-backed outperformance, and generational change, women are becoming decisive players in venture capital — as LPs, GPs, and entrepreneurs.

When Klarna raised a fresh round in 2022 at half its previous valuation, investors hoped the Swedish fintech would soon tap the public markets. Three years later, the IPO window remains closed, and Europe’s most valuable fintech is still private, relying on secondary share sales to ease pressure on early backers. Klarna is not an isolated case: from Revolut in London to Back Market in Paris, Europe’s unicorns are getting older, their fundraising cycles longer, and their investors increasingly impatient. According to Dealroom and PitchBook, the median time between venture rounds in Europe reached 696 days in Q2 2025 — nearly two years without new capital, up 5% year-on-year. What once looked like a cyclical hiccup now appears as a structural transformation: Europe’s startups are stuck in extended limbo, and LPs are stuck with locked-up capital. A state that requires more runway for startups but also a clearer and faster path to profitability. Here’s the detailed state of the market by deal size.

The Ocean, Our Hidden Infrastructure—and Our Most Valuable Bet

We live off the Ocean more than most of us realize. It gives us every second breath we take, absorbs over 9 gigatons of CO₂ annually, and regulates our climate. Yet, while the sky is being mapped by satellites and Mars is on every billionaire’s radar, the Ocean—our planet’s last true frontier—remains largely unexplored and dangerously undervalued. This paradox is at the heart of what scientists, investors, and changemakers now call the « blue acceleration »: a surge in marine economic activity, environmental degradation, and geopolitical tension—all unfolding faster than our current systems can handle.

In the rarefied world of private equity, one word has become almost obsessive: liquidity. After a decade of exuberance—sky-high valuations, a flood of capital, and an IPO conveyor belt that seemed unending—the sudden halt in exits since 2022 has shaken the industry’s certainties. In the US, Axios recently reported that nearly one-third of VC funds raised in 2017 had still returned zero dollars to investors by March 2024—a stark awakening for Limited Partners long used to predictable distributions. “DPI is the new IRR,” quipped Tristan Tully of Brookfield at a Paris conference—plain English for “cash return now matters more than lofty performance metrics.” Once the classic closed-end model was celebrated for discipline; today, it’s groaning under its inflexibility. Once celebrated as the perfect marriage of so-called patience and performance, it suddenly looks outdated in an age where exits have dried up and capital has become scarcer.