TLDR FoundersMay 11, 2026

TLDR FOUNDERS 2026-05-11

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01GENERAL

02HEADLINES & TRENDS

IT'S A BUYER'S MARKET | AND A SELLER'S NIGHTMARE

AI has flipped the leverage in software deals because more tools are sliding into the "nice-to-have" bucket. One vendor in the piece was charging $50K a year right up until a competitor released a free module that did 80% of the same work. The renewal playbook now works because buyers have a credible threat that the seller can't easily dismiss. "We'll build it ourselves with Claude." That sentence, three months before renewal, is what gets pricing to move.

onlycfo.io8 min read

THE NEXT BIGGEST MOAT IN AI

The most important companies are actually organizational inventions. They create a new kind of institution around a new kind of work, which makes a new kind of person possible. Great companies are structures that let a certain kind of talent finally express themselves. The opportunity now is in companies that have not been possible before, and the people who have been waiting for it to exist.

links.tldrnewsletter.com14 min read

03STRATEGIES & TACTICS

WHY ATTACKING YOUR COMPETITORS ONLINE IS DUMB

Public competitor attacks never work. Naming a competitor only gives them more exposure, and most people don't care what's going on between two companies. Instead, make fun of trends, publish details and honest comparisons, bid on competitor keywords, and correct factual errors privately, if they actually matter. Use the energy instead to outship competitors and build a better product.

links.tldrnewsletter.com7 min read

HOW AI PRODUCTIVITY FAILS

Most AI users are only about 10% to 20% more productive, despite how 'game-changing' they claim the technology is. However, it is theoretically possible for 2x or even 10x+ productivity gains. Real transformation requires organizational refactoring and a change in personal practice. This article looks at personal and organizational pitfalls that bottleneck AI productivity. AI amplifies what you already do well and whatever your organization already enables.

blog.sshh.io13 min read

MOMENTUM IS THE SAFEST MOAT

Building momentum safeguards businesses against AI disruption by enabling rapid execution and innovation. Quick, cohesive shipping, as seen with Claude Code, provides a strong competitive edge. Companies slow down when scaling, so maintaining speed and focus is crucial to outpace giants with traditional moats like economies of scale.

elliotcsmith.com2 min read

04TOOLS & RESOURCES

LOCAL-FIRST COST TRACKER FOR AI CODING AGENTS

budi is a local-first cost analytics tool for AI coding agents. It allows developers to see where tokens and money go across most popular AI coding tools, breaking down costs by repository, branch, ticket, and file. budi runs everything locally by default. It has an optional team dashboard that syncs aggregated metrics.

getbudi.devTool

GOOGLE LAUNCHES GEMINI 3.1 FLASH-LITE IN GENERAL AVAILABILITY

Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite is now generally available through Google Cloud platforms. The model provides ultra-low latency and can handle high-volume processing. It is the most cost-efficient Gemini 3 model. Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite has multimodal capabilities and supports both text and image processing. The model can handle agentic tasks like tool calling and orchestration.

testingcatalog.com1 min read

05MISCELLANEOUS

FIGMA'S COLLAPSE SHOULD TERRIFY SAAS LEADERS

Figma has lost roughly 85% of its market value since its IPO in August last year. The market has been pricing design-tool disruption for months, and the question now is not whether agents will replace design workflows but rather how fast the transition will happen. Figma's vulnerability was that its product was the workflow itself, something that AI agents excel in. This post discusses a three-layer framework for repositioning products over the next few years to help companies avoid succumbing to the same fate as Figma.

hackernoon.com13 min read

IN THE TRENCHES WITH 50 MIDWEST CIOS

The story in enterprise AI right now is that the bottleneck has moved off the model. Fifty CIOs from Midwest enterprises met in Chicago last week, and when asked who had agents at scale, no one raised a hand. Of 25 in a smaller breakout, only 5 had agents in production at all. The reason isn't model quality. It's that nobody has actually written down how the work gets done inside these companies, so there's nothing for an agent to operate on.

whatshotit.vc7 min read

SLOP VS TASTE

Most people use "slop cannon" as an insult for a person making AI slop. The piece flips it. The slop cannon is a person using junky AI output as raw material to think with, then editing hard. Move fast in produce mode, slow down in selection mode. The piece also bets against the new OpenAI and Anthropic consulting joint ventures, on the grounds that most enterprise data isn't ready for the work being sold.

99d.substack.com4 min read