The Daily Index — Monday, August 14, 2023 · TLDR Index

HEADLINES & TRENDS

TLDR Founders

TLDR Founders

AI.COM FLIPS FROM CHATGPT TO ELON MUSK’S X.AI

AI.com now redirects to x.AI, a company that aims to understand the true nature of the universe. OpenAI had seemingly purchased this domain back in February, but it looks like Musk has swooped in.

techcrunch.com · 2 min

TLDR Founders

THE RIGHT TO PAY ANONYMOUSLY HAS BECOME PART OF AN EU CULTURE WAR

There’s a growing movement across the EU to save cash as governments, banks, and merchants encourage consumers to go digital.

qz.com · 3 min

TLDR Founders

SHOULD LATER STAGE STARTUPS CONSIDER AN ANNUAL LIQUIDITY PROGRAM?

Liquidity puts capital into the hands of employees and early investors, enabling them to reinvest into the ecosystem or themselves. We still see very few secondary events in the startup world, but it looks like that might change, with all the new products and communities propping up to support private share sales.

davidcummings.org · 2 min

TLDR Founders

THE PRINCIPLES OF GREAT STRATEGY

A lot of people have a romantic view on strategy. You do this big lift, lock in a strategy, and then flip to pure execution. In reality, building a company is this dance between strategy and execution. Follow these principles to avoid writing a strategy doc that nobody ever looks at more than once.

longform.asmartbear.com · 28 min

TLDR Founders

PLAID: FINANCE’S NEXT GREAT NETWORK

A long deep dive into Plaid and how its product, model, and culture led it to become a FinTech giant.

generalist.com · 30 min

TLDR Founders

GOOGLE’S PROJECT IDX

An AI-enabled browser-based development environment for building full-stack web and multiplatform apps

techcrunch.com · 2 min

TLDR Founders

“TECH COMPANIES”?

A zero interest-rate policy environment can drive a lot of things in the wrong direction. This article unpacks some ‘winner takes none’ outcomes, where even the best/surviving companies end up consuming a tremendous amount of dollars and delivering little value.

hunterwalk.com · 2 min

TLDR Founders

REAL-WORLD DIVERSIFICATION

As a big advocate of side-gigging and combinatorial creativity, I like this approach of using hobbies and extracurricular activities to build out T-shaped knowledge. What you do outside of work is going to influence how you show up to work.

capitalgains.thediff.co · 5 min

TLDR Founders

THE RACE TO CAPTURE VALUE: CLOUD LESSONS FOR THE AI ERA

We get it, AI is changing everything. But with any disruptive technology, doing the math on that disruption is actually pretty hard. Enter a16z with their typical deep-dive on how AI is going to disrupt the cloud and application layers. Dense (although good) read.

a16z.com · 8 min

TLDR Founders

HUMAN CREATIVITY AMONGST AI DOMINANCE

More marketers and content producers are turning to AI for efficiency. Over time, this will lead to a level of genericism in the market. The antidote will be authentic human production.

thebootstrappedfounder.com · 3 min

TLDR Founders

TOP 10 SAASTR TIPS FOR FOUNDERS & CEOS

We’re big fans of the folks over at SaaStr and this recap of a bunch of their tips for founders & CEOs resonates this time of year when we’re taking a break and also preparing for the big push into Q4. Always insightful and timely advice.

saastr.com · 4 min