TLDR FOUNDERS 2026-06-12

Read the blog to learn more about AI discoverability

ASSUME EVERYTHING YOU SAY AT WORK IS NOW RECORDED

VENTURE'S PAPER WEALTH IS AT A RECORD, ITS BANK ACCOUNTS ARE DRY

Demo days are packed and $500M funds keep getting announced, but the cash actually flowing back to investors has slowed to a trickle, because the IPO and acquisition exits have been welded shut for years. There are now more than 1,500 unicorns worth around $6 trillion with nowhere to go, and at the current pace, one estimate says it would take 49 years to clear the backlog. Look at the secondary market, where stakes change hands at 40 to 60% below their official marks, the real write-down happening where the quarterly letters won't show it.

HOW THE FASTEST AI COMPANIES REBUILT CUSTOMER SUCCESS

CSM hiring flatlined for four years while Forward Deployed Engineering grew 1,000%+, and Assembly AI's Ryan Seams confirmed it filled a TAM pipeline overnight by switching the title to FDE, Lovable's Monica Perez rebuilt CS on Lovable replacing Gainsight and Harvey's Tom Ronen stayed traditional with on-site EBRs because selling AI to law partners is change management not software. The panel killed NPS unanimously, agreed 50%+ of CSM activities have no correlation with retention, and Bobby Cooper's Weave case study showed moving closed-won to an implementation success threshold dropped churn from 4% to ~0.5% monthly while scaling $8M to $200M ARR.

WHY YOUR AI BILL KEEPS EXPLODING

Most AI bills balloon for a dumb reason: companies run frontier models for everything, when open-source models are now nearly as good and often 90% cheaper. One team swapped off Opus and cut costs by 93% with nobody noticing. The fastest win is routing: send only the genuinely hard work to the expensive model and push the rest to a cheap one, and the bill drops the same day. The other money pit is rewarding raw usage, because the minute you post a most-tokens-used leaderboard people burn cash to top it, so track spend per person and judge everyone on impact instead.

IN A CONFUSING MARKET, BUYERS BUY YOUR POINT OF VIEW

When a market is changing fast, buyers stall because they're scared of picking something they'll regret in five years, and what reassures them is hearing your clear view of where the whole market is going. This is your belief about where things are heading, the assumption your roadmap rests on, and it should be rooted in what you do better than anyone. Notice how the giants each push a future that conveniently centers their own strength: OpenAI says AI is a metered utility, Microsoft says models are commodities and context is king, and ServiceNow says it's all workflows and governance. Stake out yours just as deliberately.

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STRIPE PROJECTS: NEW AGENT INTEGRATIONS, MORE PROVIDERS, AND CUSTOM DEVELOPER CONTROLS

Stripe is expanding Stripe Projects with new agent integrations, additional providers, and new developer controls. Stripe Projects is now available as a skill in Hermes, an open source self-improving AI agent. Stripe Projects handles infrastructure provisioning and management, while Hermes carries context across sessions. The update gives developers working on complex products over days or weeks access to a persistent AI collaborator that returns to a project the same way a human developer would.

SAVE TIME AND GROW YOUR BUSINESS WITH NEW GEMINI TOOLS

Google is introducing new Gemini app features specifically designed for business owners that transform the AI into a deeply knowledgeable, in-pocket partner that natively understands the business and helps business owners get more done. The new features will connect directly to users' Google Business Profiles to access real-world context like customer reviews, customer questions, and performance data. They will allow business owners to offload complex, time-consuming tasks, like turning insights into action. The updates are rolling out globally this month.

ABOVE THE MODEL

AI will transform white-collar work, but the real value lies in how companies harness human creativity and judgment that AI cannot replicate. Companies leading in this transformation are integrating AI to enhance internal knowledge and decision-making, turning individual insights into institutional advantages.

THE AI GLASS CEILING

Anthropic's Fable AI imposes crucial guardrails while offering unprecedented power, evident in Stripe's rapid Ruby codebase migration and enhanced AI benchmarking scores. This setup ensures stability in tech and finance amidst evolving AI capabilities. The AI landscape shifts rapidly, necessitating adaptive strategies for maximizing these powerful tools safely.

HAVE YOU EARNED YOUR OPINION ON AI?

Your opinion on AI is only worth something if you earned it by actually using the tools, rather than absorbing a position by proximity and defending it like a team you root for. Ask yourself what would change your mind, because if your honest answer is nothing, you've stopped holding a view and started defending an identity, whichever side you're on. Being early counts for less than staying clear-headed and updating as the evidence changes.

SALES IS THE CUSTOMER CLOCK

The sales workflow is increasingly automatable, and the market knows it.

SAME BUSINESS, ONE IS WORTH 20X MORE

Bill and Ramp do recognizably similar things, yet Bill trades around 2x revenue while Ramp just raised at $44 billion, roughly 15 to 30x.

OUR ACHILLES HEEL

Many people struggle to understand probabilities, leading to stress and misaligned expectations, especially in areas like college admissions and investments.

FAST MOVING WATER

Startup growth hinges on being in a rapidly expanding market, not just executing well.

SELECTION DEBT: ON DOING THINGS THAT DON'T MATTER

Selection debt is the cost of moving quickly on a poor foundational premise.