Pathways to Startup Success
London Business School
A course on venture capital, startup language, and the funding landscape for aspiring founders.
AI & Entrepreneurship Researcher · Entrepreneur · Investor · Lecturer
Illai Gescheit
I am a four-time startup founder, investor, and lecturer. Today I advise founders and venture funds, teach Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, and I am an Executive Fellow at Harvard University.
Essays
Essay
How to live in the future
What sets apart the outlier founders who live in the future — their worldview, their misunderstood visions, and their sci-fi engineering.
Open Letter
We want to pace the frontier but what about pacing its venture funding
A call for investors and venture capitalists to share responsibility for AI risk, alongside labs and governments.
Illai's Newsletter
AI is a new type of 'Intelligence Capital'
A framework for seeing AI not as a productivity tool, but as a new class of capital that is eating other types of capital alive.
Illai's Newsletter
The 2x2 of Building & Funding AI Ventures
A simple matrix for founders and investors to position themselves when building and funding AI ventures.
Illai's Newsletter
Founding Choices when starting an AI Startup
Strategic choices AI founders face at the earliest stages of company building.
Illai's Newsletter
AI Made Ventures Great Again!
Why the time to $100M ARR is collapsing and what it means for early-stage venture capital.
Medium
Between Ventures
Reflections on founding four startups and the awkward feeling of building between ventures.
Lectures
A webinar on using AI to build an investor pipeline, prioritise the right VCs, and rehearse pitches with an AI voice agent.
Introduction to AI-Driven Lean Startup
Maven / Webinar
A practical introduction to the 3A Framework, Business Model Canvas, and AI-driven discovery.
Research
AI + Entrepreneurship Research
Exploring how AI is reshaping entrepreneurship, venture building, and startup strategy.
Intelligence Capital
Research into AI as a new type of capital and its implications for founders and investors.
Artificial Entrepreneurial Intelligence
Work in progress
A research agenda on what happens when AI itself acts as an entrepreneurial agent — spotting opportunities, assembling resources, and starting firms.
About
My work sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship, strategy, and artificial intelligence. I have founded and built companies across enterprise software, consumer technology, healthtech, climate tech, and energy.
I am an Executive Fellow at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science and a LinkedIn Top Voice, where I write about the practical realities of building ventures and investing in them.
