TLDR FOUNDERS 2025-12-05

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THE STATE OF AI

The past year in AI has seen rapid shifts in capability, adoption, and developer behavior. These changes have reshaped how we build and interact with intelligent systems. This post looks at a new study that examines these changes through more than 100 trillion tokens of real-world model usage from OpenRouter. The goal of the study was to provide a large-scale empirical picture of what people do with AI today and what that tells us about the future of the industry.

A COMMENTARY ON THE GENERAL PHENOMENON OF BEST-IN-CLASS GROWTH COMPANIES RAISING SUCCESSIVE ROUNDS AT HIGHER AND HIGHER VALUATIONS

Most of the financing for best-in-class growth companies raising successive rounds at higher and higher valuations makes no sense. Growth equity capital is very expensive. Companies at this scale typically deploy a substantial majority of their expensive equity dollars into highly predictable, relatively low-risk GTM initiatives. The capital is being used inappropriately, and these companies should finance their GTM investments differently.

VERCEL'S AI SALES AGENT: 10 SDRS DOWN TO 1 IN SIX WEEKS

Vercel enabled its salespeople to spend most of their time with customers by transforming its inbound sales team. It used an AI sales representative to respond and analyze leads, which condensed the number of touches it took to convert. AI enabled quicker responses, creating an unexpected advantage. Increasing human contact means salespeople can develop deeper relationships and drive more success for customers.

TRANSPARENT LEADERSHIP BEATS SERVANT LEADERSHIP

A servant leader quickly becomes an overworked single point of failure. Once they leave, there is nobody else who knows how to handle the obstacles the leader moved out of the way for everyone. A good leader coaches people, connects people, teaches methodical problem solving, and explains values and principles embraced by the organization. They create direct links between supply and demand and allow their direct reports to grow their careers. Good leaders are continuously training their replacements and generally make themselves redundant.

FIZZY

A refreshing take on cards, columns, and kanban.

HONEYJAR

AI co-pilot for communications and PR.

PYLAR

Pylar is a platform that securely connects AI agents to data sources with granular access controls and observability.

BECOMING GREAT AT LISTENING

Your job as a listener is to consume decades of someone else's experience in minutes. This is impossible if you are busy mentally scripting your reply. The secret to world-class communication is to treat listening and thinking as mutually exclusive states. Turn off your analysis engine completely while they speak. When they finish, ask for a "thinking pause." That awkward silence is the only way to truly synthesize reality before you act on it.

THINK FIRST, AI SECOND

We are starting to see the long-term cognitive cost of "AI First" workflows: our brains are literally disengaging. An MIT study found that students who used AI at the start of a task showed lower neural activity and memory retention than those who did the work themselves. The fix is not to ban AI, but to change the sequence. Always force yourself to draft the structure or outline before you open the prompt window. By treating AI as a "Devil's Advocate" that critiques your existing thoughts rather than a generator to create them, you keep your cognitive edge while still leveraging the speed of the model.

API-BENCH V2

A new study revealed that general LLMs fail nearly 40% of the time when building real-world API integrations, proving that specialized infrastructure is still required to handle outdated documentation and debugging.

WHY SELL LIFETIME PLANS, IN A DEFAULT SUBSCRIPTION WORLD?

Evangelism is worth more than money, especially early on.

LOUD ISN'T ENOUGH

You cannot displace a giant with a spreadsheet, you have to turn their entire existence into a moral problem.