It's 3.30am and William Lindholm is giving me a tour of a deserted Founders Inc office.
"These guys are building robot arms,” he says, pointing at one row of empty desks inside the incubator’s San Francisco HQ. “This guy has built a robot butler for your house.”
Lindholm — who recently turned 20 — isn't building hardware; he's "automating cakes". Companies hire his startup, Daymaker, to deliver baked goods to employees on their birthdays.
The six-month-old company — a self-proclaimed "caketech" — was a small hit in Lindholm's native Oslo, delivering over 1,000 cakes to local businesses in a matter of five months. But after bringing the idea to the US, a problem emerged. "We realised American companies don't care so much for their employees," Lindholm tells me via over a video call.
It wasn’t long before he and his cofounder Simon Dieu found a new angle: helping founders send personalised "pitch cakes" to investors.
A recent client dispatched seven cakes — each one inscribed with details about the startup and a funding request — to prominent VCs including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, Better Tomorrow Ventures and Index Ventures. Lindholm’s calling it cold-caking.
The VCs got a kick out of it — one tweeted about it and got hundreds of likes, while the founder bagged five meetings. "We've had quite a bit of inbound on the back of this too," Lindholm adds.
Why cakes? "It's not about the cake, it's about creating a meaningful human moment," he explains. "With AI, we risk things getting more impersonalised. With a cake, there's a thought there."
It wasn't the duo's first idea. An earlier suggestion — to automate mortgage refinancing with AI — was swiftly shot down by their chair, veteran Norwegian tech investor Ragnar Bø, who told them plainly: "This isn't the work you want to be doing, it's a cowboy business." Bø, for his part, is listed on Daymaker's website as the person "making sure the young founders behave at the party."
He may not need to worry. Lindholm and Dieu don’t lack work ethic, submitting their application to Founders Inc on Christmas Day. "Clearly this sent a strong signal," Lindholm says.
A different kind of viral moment
In an age of infinite content and shrinking attention, tech heads like Lindholm know they have to quickly become students of the online stunt, which is why so many founders are upping the creativity for their fundraising announcements.
Few creators are pushing things further right now than Callum Hill. The marketing lead of London-based fintech Bleap is on a run of ballsy videos, with a recent one showing him apparently blowing investor money on a new £90k jeep; in another, he’s so hungover that he can’t remember his company’s pitch.
Not every stunt needs to be provocative. Charles Maddock, CEO of Stockholm AI company Strawberry Browser, recently racked up plenty of reactions with a far more understated move: a video of him simply standing beside a massive cargo ship. The message: we'll be “shipping” a lot of product updates this year.
Of course, going viral is only half the battle. The other half is making sure people know it was you.
The algorithm is fickle: Paris-based Mago learned this the hard way. The company went viral for a genuinely great reason — a video made by an influencer using its AI tool, styled like Grand Theft Auto but set in Greenland, ripped across X and clocked more than 10m views in a single weekend. The problem wasn't the attention but that almost nobody knew it was theirs.
Publications like LADbible and half the gaming internet attributed the video to a Google platform called Genie 3. Headlines declared: "Google's Genie 3 is 'the end of gaming studios.'"
“It was flattering in one sense,” says Mago cofounder/CEO Alvaro Lamarche Toloza. “But also we realised we had to take action and tell people, ‘hey, this is actually our tool’.”
That turned out to be harder than it sounds, as much of the internet had already made up its mind. "It was a lot of manual work to email around and try to correct the story," says Toloza. "We were overloaded for 24 hours — but we knew we had to seize the moment." He described the Google misattribution as "a giant stumbling into your garden."
With only 12 employees — several of them freelancers — Mago had limited PR firepower to fight back. Toloza later posted about the experience on LinkedIn with a meme showing a guy standing alone in the corner of a party, caption reading they don't know it’s actually Mago.
Though Mago tools are helping to recreate realistic videos, Toloza isn't the type to make sweeping claims about AI eating Hollywood. He hears that a lot and rolls his eyes.
His ambitions are more grounded: he believes AI can cut costs for film and TV productions without replacing the people who make them. "VFX costs around €10k per minute to produce: if you bring that cost down from €10K to €1K per minute, that's already amazing for the industry." He's particularly excited about the prospect of helping directors fix the visual embarrassments of the past — the 80s action films, for example, where the monster was clearly a guy in a suit.
Would he like to go viral again? "Sure," he says, "if we get the credit next time." Bittersweet as the experience was, he's not complaining too much. "We had a few investors ping us — which is useful, because we're raising a round this year."
