Alex Salazar didn’t need to prove he could build a company. He’d already done that and sold it, then spent time as a VC, and had the kind of background that usually makes raising money the easy part. But when he started Arcade, he decided to do things differently. In this episode, we talk about what it means to go back to zero even when you don’t have to. Alex shares why he and his co-founder stayed in stealth, how they tested product ideas without writing a single line of code, and what it took to get real traction in a category moving as fast as AI. We get into opportunity selection, investor conviction, and what it actually looks like when someone gets preempted before they’re even out fundraising. Arcade eventually closed a $12M round... but the process behind that raise had very little to do with pattern-matching or momentum. It was all about building something that hit a nerve.