TLDR FOUNDERS 2026-09-02

Performance or price? Choose both →

THE NEW VALLEY

Investment committees now pause weekly on AI companies with great revenue curves to ask what is truly unique, since every viral product has copycats. As one founder-investor put it, AI made it 10x easier to build a $10M ARR company but did not make it 10x easier to build a $1B one. A seed and Series A investor at FPV Ventures calls the stall zone the new valley, $5M to $25M in ARR. Carta found 15.4% of Q1 2022 seed companies reached a Series A within two years, down from 30.6% for 2018. The four ways out are talent M&A and seed-strapping, raising small, getting profitable fast, and keeping 80% of the company.

THE HARNESS, THE HORSE, OR THE HAY

There are three ways to make money in the AI industry: models, the harness, and everything else the model and harness need to stay healthy at scale. Founders picking a category need to make sure they're using the right playbook. The categories are obvious, but the strategies are close to inverted. This article looks at each category to see what works.

THE NEW HIRING FILTER

AI is changing hiring faster than many organizations can adapt. Companies are changing how they think about who they hire, when they hire, and why. Competitive advantage is increasingly shifting toward judgment as AI lowers the cost of execution. Traditional markers of pedigree still matter, but they are becoming less predictive than evidence that someone can learn, adapt, and operate in unfamiliar requirements.

THE COMPANY DOES NOT LIVE IN THE LLM

Deterministic systems should be used to establish context. Large language models should be used to reason over that context. Models shouldn't be used to establish whether something has happened or what the current state of a system is. Systems should be used to assemble that information into context so that models can interpret, connect, reason, and synthesize.

CITATION SHARE IS NOT A METRIC YET

The discovery layer and the infrastructure layer have never been equally measurable. The industry puts all of its attention and spend into the layer where the numbers are contested, produced by interested parties, and unstable across instruments. The layer that determines whether agents can transact with them at all returns a clean pass or fail on every check. Both citation and infrastructure matter, but infrastructure is what gets you transacted with.

"I'M CHURNING" | 10 BIGGEST THREATS TO SAAS

This is the person on the other side of your renewal itemizing how he decides to cancel. A working CFO lists what he is cutting and why, including a workflow tool that quoted him double what he pays for Claude and a $ 50K-a-year point solution whose function a larger vendor now bundles for free. His own playbook is opening renewal conversations four or more months early, and he reckons 30 to 60 minutes of demoing alternatives buys enough negotiating power. Backdrop is the Bessemer cloud index up 55% in six months, its highest since early 2022.

THE "PLAYER-COACH" ROLE IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY HARDER

Teams using coding agents open 6x more pull requests than traditional teams and 3x more than they did in 2024, according to Linear's report on AI usage in software teams. Review load is climbing faster than anyone's model of the job, which is the likeliest way your first engineering manager hire burns out. Managers already see only about 40% of what a report does in a day. The squeeze lands hardest on engineering managers and tech leads: the people expected to write code and manage at once.

KEEPING CREDENTIALS OUT OF AN AI AGENT'S CONTEXT WITH RELAY

WorkOS Relay proxies third-party agent API calls and injects the credentials at the boundary so prompt injection attacks are unable to steal tokens. It lets apps call third-party APIs on behalf of users without directly handling secrets. Requests are proxied through WorkOS, where credentials are swapped in based on the user and organization context. Relay is still in early access, and access requires contacting support.

BEHIND THE BUILD: GENERATIVE PLUGINS AND SHADERS AT FIGMA

Figma has introduced generative plugins and shaders to the canvas to give users a way to design the tools they need, when they need them. Users can publish plugins and shaders to the Figma community or privately within organizations on Organization or Enterprise plans. The agent can build motion and interactivity into any effect, and users can view and download the code behind any shader or plugin. The Figma MCP server can be used to view, change, and export generative plugins and shaders.

INTRODUCING ADAPTIVE INTELLIGENCE: UNDERMINING THE ECONOMICS OF EVERY BOT ATTACK

Adaptive Intelligence is a new bot detection engine from Cloudflare that makes getting through so slow and costly that attacks stop being worth running. Not every attack is obvious to spot, and the economics of deterministic detection are always in the attacker's favor. Adaptive Intelligence makes sure that nothing attackers learn stays true, so each new attempt costs more than the last. It recognizes bots without visibly reacting to them and treats detection as a statistical judgment, weighing many signals at once so there's no single piece of logic for an attacker to isolate and beat.

WHY ADDING MORE AI AGENTS MAKES YOUR TEAM SLOWER

Agent scaling is about how cleanly a system allows agents to work in isolation without stepping on each other all the time. This requires expertise in the problem domain, a keen eye for good architectural decisions, and good measurement. Coding is the easy part of writing software - it's everything else that takes most of the time. There's only so much you can streamline before you start losing a significant amount of quality.

“ENSHITTIFICATION” ISN'T REAL

"Enshittification" isn't real. Social media platforms change to meet evolving user needs, not to worsen user experiences. Despite complaints, user satisfaction and engagement with platforms like Instagram continue to rise. Critics mistake platform evolution and user dislocation for deterioration, but the data shows that people use these platforms more, not less.

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OPENCLAW 2.0, ACCIDENTALLY

An open-source coding agent shipped a release carrying 16,000+ merged pull requests from 933 contributors, about half of every PR ever merged into the project, after a seven-week pause to rebuild foundations that followed 106 releases in 230 days.

HOW TO LIE WITH DATA: THE NULL HYPOTHESIS

Lying with data occurs when decisions lack proper retrospective analysis and disregard the Null Hypothesis.

SHOPIFY NOW WORKS WITH STRIPE PROJECTS

Shopify users can now use a Stripe account for setup and billing across all providers.