The secret to fast startup growth isn’t early sales say top names in tech; plus, Rivian bought a world model startup to accelerate self-driving ambitions

0:01This is TechCrunch.

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1:13That's Framer.com slash tcstartups rules and restrictions may apply. The AI era has changed how fast startups can grow. Startups can grow so fast now that they hit high annual recurring revenue numbers, only to crash and burn a few months later. At this year's TechCrunch Disrupt, lovable go-to-market lead Luke Arno, Ben Broca of the AI platform Pulsia, and Theory Ventures' Tomas Tungus gave founders some tips on how to set their companies up for success in those first 90 days. Broca, whose company Pulsia uses AI agents to build and run businesses, with almost no human staff, said that product market fit is one of the hardest things to find right now, especially in an era when so many products can easily be copied by competitors.

2:04In response, Arno said that durable go-to-market strategies are those that can be reliably repeated. He added, the most critical thing for founders or early stage companies to do is develop learning density or pattern recognition. For where your customers are, Don't rush to build out a top-down, go-to-market motion if you're not there yet. That's why in those first 90 days after launching a commercial product that's ready to sell, founders should not mistake early fast revenue for a sign that the startup is ready to scale. Once a startup finds use cases that work, it will only be ready to build out a sales team and go for growth after it can attract new customers by repeating what has worked.

2:48If every sale requires new tactics, the startup has not truly hit product-market fit. Arno said, if I bring on 10 new customers in 10 different ways to solve 10 different problems, sure, I brought revenue in, but I don't have a way to go scale a go-to-market. If I bring three customers in with a similar motion to solve a similar problem, now I have high confidence that I can go scale. Lovable, the AI app-building startup, said a lot of those early benchmarks with how fast it grew, and now founders everywhere are feeling the pressure to do the same. Lovable is valued at more than$13 billion by its investors, says its ARR has passed$600 million and has raised more than$700 million in funding to date.

3:37Tungus said the expectations for overall execution speed are absolutely tremendous. But Tungus said growth, like lovable's, is still the exception, though founders should still move fast. The pressure they feel is real, he said, because far more money flows through the startup ecosystem at every stage than when he began investing in 2008. Today, a seed deal brought in by one of his partners could just as easily be a$5 million raise, a$50 million raise, or even a$500 million raise. The winners all focus on one thing, understanding their customers well enough to know what will keep them around even after any hype subsides.

4:23Broca added, community building is very important and being close to customers is very important. He said founders can send emails and throw events and he personally likes to talk to a lot of his customers. The general rule is always to be talking to customers. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast.

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5:12EV maker Rivian has acquired Third Dimension, a UK startup founded by veterans of the gaming and autonomous vehicle industries that uses AI to turn images and videos into lifelike 3D worlds. Rivian is not getting into gaming, but it does want to leverage Third Dimension's technology to turn real-world data into 3D worlds that can accelerate the development of its advanced driver assistance features and the self-driving system for the robo-taxis it plans to supply to Uber. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The 15-person team at Third Dimension, most of whom are based in the UK, will be absorbed into Rivian's autonomy and AI team, led by James Philbin.

6:00The acquisition also gives Rivian an opportunity to expand its AI hub in London, Philbin said in exclusive interview with TechCrunch. Third Dimension, which was founded by CEO Tolga Karte and Peter Sikulski in 2024, raised$7 million in seed funding from venture capital firms, including Abstract Ventures, MVP, Soma Capital, and Solari Capital. While the company's technology was built to speed up video game development, the founders saw other potential applications, including defense and autonomous vehicles. Now, under Rivian, they will be focused on automated driving. CART told TechCrunch in that interview, The team is excited to be able to focus on one problem.

6:44I think as a small company, having to serve many, many different masters is very hard. And so we're very excited to come work on a problem that has such an amount of scale, where our technology makes a true difference. Simulation is a critical tool for autonomous vehicle developers who use it to train and validate self-driving systems. Historically, these simulators were built on rendering or video game engines and often relied on synthetic data. These virtual environments might look like the real world, but a gap between the two remains. The workaround typically requires feeding the simulators ever larger amounts of data in hopes of closing that quality gap.

7:26Third Dimensions technology uses AI to match the physical world, which, when combined with Rivian's reams of data, could turn into a valuable simulator. Rivian collects driving data from tens of thousands of its vehicles on the road today. Essentially, any vehicle whose owner has enabled external camera sharing, that is. Rivian uses that data, which is aggregated and anonymized, to build training models for driving. According to Philbin, Rivian gets more than 400 ,000 sequences uploaded from its customer fleets per day. Third Dimensions Tech will allow Rivian to simulate complex driving conditions without having to wait for rare, real-world edge cases to occur.

8:08That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to TechCrunch.com.

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