Good Morning, this is Napkin Notes: the startup newsletter that knows you’re sad it’s the first day of September so we proactively send you memes, startup ideas and pumpkin spice lattes to cheer you right up.

We’re keeping today nice and tight to honour those who are soaking up their final moments of peace at the summer cabin before returning to the grind.

For the keeners who want today’s menu, scroll below. 🍽

Newsletter Line-Up

• 🗞 News round-up

• 💸 Pitching in a Zoom room vs. a Dealroom

• 🤫 64 startup ideas from smart people

• 🐦 Laughs + Learns of the Week

📰 Startup News You Missed: All your friends are partying at Burning Man. Everyone’s looking for an invite to Apple’s “Wonderlust” event. OpenAI’s on pace to generate $1B+ ARR. Elon live-streamed his Tesla’s Full Self-Driving mode. Instacart and Klaviyo filed to go public. Amazon and Shopify became best friends. Reid Hoffman is stepping back from his investment role at Greylock. NVIDIA’s 1.2 trillion USD market cap is now worth more than the entire crypto industry. And Ed Sheeran is long on PSLs. ☕️

If you’ve been busy sailing on Bezos’ Boat or singing your heart out at Drake’s concert, you probably didn’t hear our big news last week. And to be honest, you made the right call. You gotta send it when someone DMs you a yacht invite.

But now that you’re back at your laptop and searching for startup goodness, we wanted to send you an invite of our own.

We’re launching a beta version of Dealroom to our readers because Zoom calls suck and we wanna make virtual demo days better for everyone:

• the accelerators that host them

• the founders that pitch at them

• and the investors who listen

We built Dealroom to help accelerators raise more money for their founders through a more engaging video, voting and CRM engagement process. And we’d love to show you behind the curtain if you’re game to test it out.

Did our pitch lure you in? Hit the button below to test out the software and maybe you can charm our head of product to let you pitch at our next demo day…

Now that we’re done our soup + salad, let’s hit the Steak + Potatoes. 🥩

💡 64 High Signal Startup Ideas

• Michael is the Chairman and co-founder of Dura Software, the second-largest software company in San Antonio. Michael is also a partner at the Geekdom Fund, a seed-stage tech venture capital fund that has invested in over 50 high-growth tech companies. Pitch him here.

Sarah’s the founder of Conviction, an early-stage VC firm for software 3.0 startups. Before that, she did 10 years at Greylock a tier-one VC firm. Go Pitch Sarah here.

• Alex founded morningbrew.com which he eventually sold to Business Insider for ~$70m. Now he’s angel investing and ideating quite a bit. Pitch him here.

• Brian’s a billionaire founder and investor who’s the CEO of Coinbase. He just tweeted he wants to hear from more Web 3 founders. Pitch him here.

• This one’s a joke but someone reading this should build it.

And here are 50 more startup Ideas from CB Insights founder Anand Sanwal (founder of a $100m media co) if you have the time to go through them.

All you have to do now is:

• Pick a startup idea

• Post it on Kernal for folks to give feedback

• Email/LinkedIn/ or Twitter DM a couple cool people to validate it

• Drop [email protected] a line to get it featured to 15,000 readers

First come, first serve…

Don’t forget to click below to request a demo of our new Dealroom tool.

🍷 Swipes of the Week

One of you should make this and sell it to Apple:

Is it crazier to see one company’s worth so much or one industry shrink to be so small?

Great list to reference from G-Isenberg:

Running on lego is the new way to describe building a startup

Reply and let us know which one’s your fav.

💚 The Kernal Fam

P.S. You’re awesome, thanks for reading our newsletter.