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Wrnt at Microsoft: Employees Get Options. Partners Get Warrants.
Wrnt (as in warrant), the infrastructure company for stock warrant programs, was selected to pitch at Llama Lounge 26, the AI startup event series founded by Jeremiah Owyang of Blitzscaling Ventures and hosted this edition by Microsoft for Startups at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus on September 10, 2026.
Co-founder and CEO Duane Good delivered Wrnt's pitch to a room of several hundred founders, investors, and corporate AI leaders, and the Wrnt team spent the evening at a full demo table.
The evening ran in four parts: Owyang's talk on where a startup's edge comes from when code is free, remarks from sponsor Fireworks AI, a panel of three Microsoft teams that work with startups, and crisp pitches from selected companies, followed by questions from Valerie Bertele, AI & Startups Growth at Microsoft, who co-hosted the event.
The pitch: alignment is the new dependency
Wrnt's pitch made a short argument. AI is making companies leaner, and more dependent than ever on the partners around them: cloud, chips, models, capital, services, and distribution. Alignment with those partners can decide the outcome. For employees, the alignment tool is stock options. For partners, it is the stock warrant. Warrants let a partner share in the upside it helps create, and they help founders win the deals that matter most on better economic terms, tied to outcomes.
The problem is that warrants work, but using them does not. Most founders do not know they are an option. The ones who do face a process that is costly, messy, and easy to get wrong. Wrnt is fixing that with purpose-built infrastructure and AI grounded in thousands of real warrant transactions. The platform is live and is running programs at enterprises and regulated banks today.
Good closed with one question for the room:
"Is there a partner who could materially change your story? If there is, come see us. And if you're the partner, you've earned a seat at the table."
"AI is shrinking teams and growing dependency maps at the same time," Good said after the event. "Every founder in that room will lean on a handful of partners to fully realize what they are building. Employees get options. Strategic partners should get warrants. The instrument has always worked. What was missing was a way to use it that a founder, a bank, and an auditor can all live with. That is what we build."
Owyang: the one-weekend moat
Owyang opened with a question: how long is a technical moat in software? His answer was one weekend. Blitzscaling Ventures backed Feltsense, a company that rebuilt the software of an entire Y Combinator batch in two days. Not all of it worked, and that was the point. Code was never the moat. It used to take long enough to write that it looked like one. A chart from Stanford's AI Index showing frontier model capability converging completed the argument: if the application layer can be rebuilt in a weekend and the model layer is the same for everyone, a startup whose edge depends on either has no edge.
His answer, from a talk he calls "How to win when code is free," fits on one slide: data, community, product-led growth, distribution, and network effects. Distribution, partners whose sales force is not yours, was the category the evening was built around.
That is the category Wrnt lives in. A partner's sales force is not yours, and neither are a partner's incentives. Distribution needs an instrument behind it that keeps both sides aligned through the outcome. That instrument is the warrant.
Llama Lounge began three and a half years ago. This was its twenty-sixth edition.
Microsoft: 35,000 sellers and a Marketplace
Bertele said the goal of the panel was to show founders a unified Microsoft. Zain Gulamali, who runs startup business development for Microsoft for Startups, covers companies from pre-seed through Series B. Patrick Cook leads the Scaling AI team, which picks up companies with product-market fit. Shaloo Garg leads the team that works with companies past Series B with strong revenue.
The panel described the program's reach: 35,000 Microsoft sellers who are incentivized to co-sell startup solutions, and access to the 97 percent of the Fortune 500 that are Microsoft customers, without the usual vendor approval process. Garg described her team's "market making," a joint press release with a Microsoft executive quote or a slot at a marquee event, and said a single press release has moved a startup's valuation. Her filter for who gets it: does the product have the chops to sustain demand in a volatile market, when a neighbor is building product B and someone else is building product C?
The part that matters most is the Microsoft Marketplace, which lets a customer pay for a startup's product out of money it has already committed to Azure. That turns a sale from a procurement event into a line item.
Microsoft's program is the supply side of Wrnt's argument. The Blitzscaling playbook says a company scales on two inputs, financial capital and human capital. AI startups now run on a third: partners who supply compute, customers, and distribution. The instrument for aligning with those partners has been missing. The warrant is the contract side of that relationship.
Fireworks AI, an inference and fine-tuning platform for open models, sponsored the evening. Maximilian Stein of its partnerships team made the case for tuning an open model on data nobody else has, which is where Owyang's first category, data, becomes a product.
On the floor
Wrnt's table was full from the first break to the last. The conversations ran to corporate AI leaders building partner programs, investors whose portfolio companies depend on a few critical relationships, and founders whose next product is only as good as the cloud, model, or distribution partner behind it. Many were building something that a critical other in their ecosystem would have to help realize. Most knew little about warrants. Some had never heard of them.
That gap is the opportunity. The Wrnt team is working through dozens of follow-up conversations from the evening, most of them with founders who want to understand how a warrant works and how an aligned partnership gets done.
Further reading
Bruna Porto of the Wrnt team wrote a full account of the evening, "The one-weekend moat," on her Substack (brunamporto.substack.com). The full recording of Llama Lounge 26 is on YouTube.
About Wrnt
Wrnt (as in warrant) is infrastructure for stock warrants, built for aligned growth. The platform is the system of record for warrant programs: the experts, infrastructure, and tooling for warrant programs in the innovation economy, so that companies, banks, funds, and strategic partners can issue, accept, and administer warrants as a program rather than a one-off. Wrnt is live with clients across regulated banking, venture funds, and venture-backed companies. Wrnt was founded in 2025. Wrnt's team includes former VC-backed founders, experienced operators, and domain experts who have run warrant programs at scale.
Stock Warrants, Operated.