Series is what happens when kids are told that they can do anything they put their minds to. Two DEI hires with unsubstantiated egos, leftist ideaology, and $3.1M in funding. Somehow, Nathaniel and Sean have grifted so hard that they managed to swindle the "most venture capital raised by current Ivy League students.¹" A few problems here.

Keeping in line with tradition, starting with founders. The red flags are always there, it just takes a bit of effort to recognize them, and a whole lot of retardation to ignore them. Here's a few highlights. Sean started as a consultant(womp womp), before going through Antler, another red flag. Nathaniel started Bullmont. Enough said. Furthermore, both founders are deeply untechnical. Not the team you want to be building in AI consumer social. The product, as of 4/14/2025, reeks of vibe coding.² I haven't yet tried to break it, but it seems like it'll crack pretty easily.

Product

Smoke and mirrors, but make it AI. Series heralds itself as an "AI-powered social platform that curates connections between users based on their needs." When are we going to stop lying. In reality, it's an AI messaging system twilio api to make "double opt-in intros" based on supposed "mutual value." For the record, as of 5/7/2025, it has only referred me to one person, and after having an account for roughly one month, it has created 0 new connections. The assistant also sucks at instruction following.

The founders criticize instagram/linkedin's emphasis on "likes, followers, and vanity metrics," yet series remains vague and unproven. Their promotional materials make grandiose claims about "reimagining how people build relationships online" without substantial evidence that their approach works better. This is basically Boardy but less cool and doesn't work nearly as well. Oh yeah, also Boardy was backed by HF0, the god-king of residencies.

Again, when are we in the venture ecosystem going to stop lying? And when are we going to take diligence more seriously? I've said it before, I'll say it again. Investors love to forget the truth. People love to the forget the truth. We need to stop lying. This is exactly why my mom thinks I work with snake oil salesmen all day.

PR training!

No writing is necessary for this section. Here's something fun.

"We're 6'5", Black, and technical - a direct foil to the Harvard story. And that difference is the reason Series tells a new story of how people connect online." -Source

"If I am approaching a girl, I'm not going to tell her, 'Well, I'm okay, but there are a lot of hot guys out there as well,'" Hargrow says. "I'm going to find a way to ethically tell her I'm the best guy ever." -Source

"The year I was born, in 2004 as my comment in Yale Daily News suggests, we let an egotistical psycopath, that had no real friends, father what we call "social media"." -Source

"Hopefully in the next few decades, we'll be like 50 or something and we'll be looking back and saying Harvard did it wrong in '04, and Yale did it right in 2025," -Source

"Consumer social" wouldn't be a concept without daddy zuck. What is this slander of literally THE consumer social guy? As a consumer social founder with no traction too? Literally :skull: emoji.

As of 4/18/2025 I've stopped maintaining the quotes section due to not having enough time. I wish I had more time to take detailed deep dives on these companies. The jokes just write themselves at this point.

5/7/2025