Building Products in the Age of AI
Everyone is shipping faster. That means shipping fast is no longer the advantage. The builders who win from here are not the ones moving quickest - they are the ones who understand what actually compounds.
Ashish Sood is the Founder and GP of Curious Ventures, a $10M pre-seed fund writing $100K–$500K equity checks into Consumer AI, micro-earning platforms, and crypto consumer products. Curious Ventures is built on a single conviction: the world's best founders no longer come from the best schools or the best networks — they come from the best communities. That's why they're formally embedded in Network States like Network School, and why Ashish is here with you this week.
In this sharing session, Ashish explores the transition from ideation to system architecture in an AI-native world, examining the structural shift toward end-to-end execution and giving you a practical framework for distinguishing between high-velocity wrappers and venture-scale infrastructure. As the cost of technical execution collapses, the premium on strategic positioning and vertical depth has never been higher.
This is directly relevant to every Colosseum team finalising their submission. Judges do not fund clever prototypes. They fund founders who can articulate the architectural decision that creates a defensible moat, and Ashish evaluates exactly that for a living.
What you will walk away with: a clear mental model for evaluating your own project's strategic position, a framework for thinking about vertical depth versus horizontal speed, and the lens a pre-seed investor applies when deciding whether a product has category-defining potential or will be commoditised by the next model release.
Curious Ventures is running their first cohort at Network School this May. Come to this session. Talk to Ashish afterwards.
Can't make it IRL? We gotchu!
Dial-in: meet.google.com/ufe-gbzq-njt