TLDR FOUNDERS 2026-03-16

Replit

AI WON'T REPLACE INNOVATION

History suggests that the future of AI will look less like a monopoly and more like an ecosystem. Frontier labs will build the infrastructure while thousands of companies emerge to turn that intelligence into products, workflows, and systems that solve real problems. Completely new jobs will likely be created. Founders and startups that are willing to deeply understand customers, build thoughtful systems, and focus relentlessly on specific workflows will see more opportunity than ever.

DATA IS THE ONLY MOAT

Think about the metadata you collect when people use your platform or when you observe the consequences of using your product. For example, the times when people post from social media share links, when most people engage, or what kind of content drives the most engagement. This data is your most unique data moat. Use it to improve how people use your product and how they run their own businesses.

RETHINKING SAAS METRICS FOR AI

If you're still tracking ARR as your north star, it's lying to you. AI-native companies need different metrics - token consumption is the one that's hard to fake because the fastest-growing companies sit directly in the token path. Raw tokens don't tell you if you're creating value or just passing through infrastructure costs, so gross profit per million tokens is becoming the real scorecard investors are pricing companies on. DAUs stop mattering when AI agents are doing the work inside other products via MCP, and nobody trusts the LTV of any AI product right now.

HOW TO THOUGHT LEAD (2026)

Earn mindshare for your topic by regularly posting information, products, and mental models to be used by others. Thought leadership boils down to six principles, ordered explicitly in descending order of importance: have credibility; know what people aspire to; be authoritative, knowledgeable, and useful; be quoteable; be strongly opinionated; and be first, or be funny. This post looks deeper into these principles to provide a formula for thought leadership. The best thought leaders do the work first, earn credibility, and then let everything amplify a foundation that's already solid.

DEVELOPER RELATIONS: WHAT IT IS, AND HOW TO MEASURE IT

DevRel is such a flexible and multifaceted role that it means very different things depending on what company you're at. The role has five primary facets: documentation, engineering, content and events, product feedback, and community management. This article talks about each facet, what they mean in practice, and why they sit where they do in the stack ranking.

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NAOMA AI

AI video agent that runs live product demos 24/7.

STRUCT

Root-cause engineering alerts from logs and traces.

PRAVA

Payments stack built for AI agents.

WIZ HAD 4 CO-FOUNDERS. DATABRICKS AND ANTHROPIC HAVE 7. STOP OVERTHINKING IT

Don't try to find the right number of co-founders. Co-founders who just met a month ago are a risk. Founding team trust matters infinitely more than founding team structure. Having the right team to make the pie big is worth more than having a larger slice of a smaller pie.

VENTURE CAPITAL DOESN'T EXIST

What we call 'venture capital' is a conflation of seed stage investing, traditional venture, supercharged growth investing, and previously small-cap growth tech stocks. The more the individual parts are acknowledged, the better off everyone will be. Large capital providers can still deploy capital to all four types of investing. However, founders and funders need to be aware of what game they're playing - the reality is that most genuinely don't know.

SELLING YOUR COMPANY

Confident buyers won't mind if you talk to other bidders because they know they're the better outcome for your business if you want to sell it.

HOW TO GIVE A DEMO THAT DOESN'T SUCK

Most demos are 45 minutes of monologued clicking through every feature while the prospect zones out.

STARTUPS SHOULD EVALUATE ENGINEERS DIFFERENTLY FROM BIG COMPANIES

A founder hired a FAANG backend engineer who aced every interview.