A founder can fill a calendar with investor meetings and still have no round. "Interested," "keep us posted," and "we could participate" sound positive, but none means an investor will set the terms, anchor the valuation, do the deepest diligence, or give everyone else a deadline. A lead does those jobs. Keep likely leads separate from likely followers, then ask directly whether each fund would actually set the terms. Ten more meetings with followers still leave the lead column empty.
Backups and monitoring can be working perfectly even when nobody logs in. One company with hundreds of thousands of customers searched its first 30 days of human activity for something that predicted who would still pay 12, 18, or 24 months later. It found nothing. The integration was doing the work, so the useful signals were whether data was still moving, volume was falling, or errors were rising. A cancellation may arrive months after the product stopped working, which means the real churn date happened much earlier.
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Google has introduced new AI Overviews, new AI data dashboard tools, and a new benchmarking AI feature to Google Ads and Google Analytics. The changes are aimed at simplifying users' workflows and expediting their path to business growth. A video of each new feature in action is available in the article.
Grok Bot provides a team of AI agents, each with their own computer, that can perform real work inside tools and apps, 24/7. Bots can sign in to tools and work across apps, inboxes, and more. The agents can finish jobs end-to-end, and only report back when something needs human approval. They remember conversations, learn how users like to get things done, and get sharper the more you work together.
Deel grew from zero to $1.5B ARR in seven years. It has been EBITDA-profitable for three consecutive years now. This post looks at how the company got here and where it is going. It covers what most people get wrong about growth, the lightbulb moments that changed how the company operates, how Deel changed as it grew to a 7,000-people remote operation, the impact AI will have on Deel's next growth curve, and more.
Robotics startups have secured $23 billion in funding in 2026. This surge highlights increased investor interest and potential growth in the robotics sector.
PostHog sets aside $45,000 every month for marketing ideas that may fail. Anyone can pitch one in Slack, and a two- or three-person "Council of Weird" scores the cost, effort, and whether people actually want to make it. Some bets did almost nothing. Billboards got zero comments, Easter eggs were found by about three people, and a documentary got 2,000 views. Most startups can steal the setup for far less money by fixing what they are willing to lose each month and judging several experiments together.
Diversifying startup investments by sector, stage, and geography can mitigate risks associated with market volatility. Sector diversification helps balance industry-specific cycles, while stage diversification mixes potential high-reward early-stage investments with more stable later-stage companies. Geographic diversification protects against regional economic fluctuations, though it can be challenging to access international deals.
Applied AI companies sell completed work - their agents run end-to-end workflows, and they own the outcome.
Traditional SWOT analysis falls short when market-required strengths aren't existing strengths.
Rubrik is growing 46%, twice CrowdStrike's 23%, but CrowdStrike trades at more than three times the revenue multiple because investors still see it as the category winner.
Founders should identify their archetype to tailor their communication strategy effectively.
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Airtable's acquisition by Bending Spoons forced the tech community to confront the sobering reality that software companies must grow or die. The acquisition didn't include Airtable's Hyperagent platform, which was carved out prior to the transaction. Bending Spoons mainly acquired Airtable's incumbent SaaS businesses. Airtable's Hyperagent spin-out from the legacy platform shows how success in the AI era may require a full bend away from the past.
If there is no growth, then great topline is meaningless, and if topline is near zero, great growth doesn't mean much. Complex stories drag on momentum. You've probably already lost as soon as you find yourself justifying the size of your opportunity. Frame yourself as simply as possible with the goal of being a financial earworm, meme, or cognitive virus, and grow.
AI as a channel sends fewer people than search, but those people, on average, spend more time on site. Treat the homepage as a front door for visitors who already know what to do. AI systems cite knowledge from deep pages, but they usually direct users to the homepage. Most sites are handing their best new traffic to the one page still built for a stranger.
Notion now has more than 100 million users and crossed $500 million in revenue in 2025. It's always good to see what a company like that looked like in the beginning. Notion once cut the team to two, borrowed $150,000 from its founder's mother, and rebuilt the product in Kyoto. One of its best early growth hires was a fan whose template site already brought in 20,000 to 40,000 visits a month. Look for the people already teaching, supporting, or distributing your product. They may have started the job before you posted it.
Continuous deployment reduces release risk by keeping changes small, observable, and reversible instead of batching weeks of work. Fast CI, strong monitoring, feature flags, automated rollback, backward compatibility, and staged rollouts make production the safest place to validate changes.
AgentBlog helps users install a blog that ranks and gets cited with just one command. The agent has seven skills and a rule block to help it format posts correctly. Every post is a Markdown file in the repository. Prerendering, structured data, feeds, and crawler wiring are built in.
Rippling's AI Spend Console gives CFOs and CTOs a clear view of AI spend, connects it to business outcomes, and governs the use of approved LLMs. It ties AI spend to employee attributes so leaders can understand which departments, teams, or roles are driving AI spend. It also connects spend to key business metrics so decision-makers understand where token usage drives improved business outcomes. This post looks at how and why Rippling built the tool.
This post contains advice on how to operate teams. It covers topics like the North Star framework, trees/pyramids, shipping speed, lanes, and more.
Investment casting is the kind of industry most software founders never look at. A conventional part can require a $500,000 mold, eight months of waiting, and up to 40 hours of labor. Rangeview says it can make a pour-ready mold in about 12 days without changing the customer's approved design. Its founder found the market by ranking more than 100 manufacturing processes, then picking one where old tooling and a shrinking supplier base had become the bottleneck. The output stayed the same. Rangeview rebuilt how it gets made.
2026.08.10·rationaloptimistsociety.substack.com·9 min read·TLDR Founders In 1995, only 262 PC games shipped all year. Today, you can buy a complete Unity game template for $30 to $100. Making games got much cheaper. Getting anyone to notice got much harder. MobyGames lists about 1,100 PC releases in 1998, while the first PlayStation had roughly 1,500 Western releases across its entire life. Software and media are moving the same way. If customers can choose from thousands of decent products, distribution may matter more than one more feature.
Consultants risk not getting paid, and clients risk not having their problems solved.
Enterprise AI adoption metrics hide a barbell: a small group of power users captures most value and token spend while most employees barely engage.
Max Hodak, the CEO of Science, a company that is building a retinal implant that restores vision to people who have gone blind, explains how the company buys things and hires people, and why those systems determine how fast it can move.
One coding-agent task ran for 7 hours 23 minutes and tried to release 13 times because an 86-line skill meant to help it ship quietly expanded the job into migrations, policy changes, retries, and production recovery.
One founder posted every day for 23 days across X, Reels, Quora, and 22 AI directories, then ended with eight outside signups and zero customers.
Amjad Masad started Replit in 2016 with his wife, designer Haya Odeh. Replit began as a website where beginners could run code in a browser without having to install anything. Today, it features an agent that can design, write, test, deploy, and host applications from a prompt. This post contains an excerpt from an interview with Masad where he discusses the way AI is changing work, AI job losses, the future of software, and more.
The rumors of the demise of modern software are greatly exaggerated. However, the nature of what makes software valuable is quickly changing. SaaS companies can no longer survive by being a slightly better UI for a human workflow. Defensibility remains at the intersection of data and risk.
Founders used to pay a premium for experience. AI made that premium pointless, but that doesn't mean that talent got cheap. The market is currently mispricing new grads as a discount option, when they're actually the best deal on the table. That mispricing won't last.
Airtable's no-code advantage eroded as coding agents let operators build directly on Postgres, while organizational drift and incremental AI features slowed adaptation. Selling the legacy business and spinning out Hyperagent creates a clean break, preserving upside without dragging old architecture.
A seed investor can love your company and still skip the next round. The math may leave no other choice. A fund's $100,000 at a $2 million valuation can return 100 times at a $200 million exit. If it puts its remaining $500,000 in at a $10 million valuation, the company needs a $1 billion exit for that new money to do the same. The fund may prefer five early bets. A Series A fund that invested early for access and then passes at Series A is a different signal. Ask what earns the second check before taking the first.
2026.08.07·thefounderplaybook.hustlefund.vc·5 min read·TLDR Founders PromptBase has 500,000 users and roughly 300,000 listings. It started with no users, two listings, and a bad website. The founder became seller number one, uploaded the first prompts himself, and found the next sellers in Reddit threads. He messaged them after their first sale, fixed bugs quickly, and shared their listings. Storefronts and lower fees gave sellers a reason to bring buyers, while every prompt became a page Google could find. The marketplace grew by hand before it grew through sellers and search.
Channels SDK is an open-source SDK for bringing any agent into any chat platform. It connects an AG-UI-compatible agent to the communication platforms teams already use. The agent can understand conversations, stream responses, call tools, work with files, render interactive UI, and pause for human approval. Managed connections for Slack and Microsoft Teams are available through CopilotKit Intelligence, with more channels on the way.
Flint lets an AI create or edit a chart once, then render it in Vega-Lite, ECharts, Chart.js, Plotly, or Excel, with ten built-in visual themes.
Overpromising career rewards to retain high performers can backfire, damaging trust and causing significant personnel issues. Despite well-intentioned optimism, unexpected circumstances often prevent managers from fulfilling these promises. Managers should instead focus on controllable actions, provide disclaimers, and avoid guaranteeing outcomes to maintain credibility and trust with their teams.
Someone spent $11.25 and less than an hour making up a deodorant brand. Three weeks later, ChatGPT started mentioning it. By day 30, the fake brand ranked first in four answers and once beat MAGS Skin, a real product with clinical testing and a National Eczema Association seal. No fake reviews, Reddit posts, or press. It did not take over deodorant search. It worked for only two narrow questions about sensitive skin. Claude, Gemini, and 13 broader searches ignored it. Native still won 99 of 180 answers. The fake brand found two questions the real brands had left open.
Second-time Y Combinator founders have been showing up in greater numbers lately.
An aggressive AI strategy can harm exit value by complicating due diligence, increasing vendor dependency, and introducing security risks.
A company that can grade every answer may not need an expensive general AI model.
A launch post got 28,000 views, 167 shares, and 67 upvotes, then produced zero sales and only a couple of trials.
Crosby is an AI native law firm. It employs lawyers from elite law firms as well as engineers from top startups. The firm takes on commercial contracts like Non-Disclosure Agreements and Master Services Agreements, the basic units of doing business. This article looks at how the firm operates and how it uses AI to complete tasks in minutes that would otherwise take a human hours.
More bots than people visit Time on most days now. So it started selling ads to the bots. Every article gets a stripped-down markdown twin with one sponsored FAQ telling crawlers what a brand wants them to know. Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute are among the first buyers. Time charges more than it does for a human ad because an answer engine could repeat the message across thousands of answers. The catch is that nobody knows whether models will absorb it, ignore it, or treat the whole page as cloaking.
Don't let people slow you down. Build and operate with strong edge-case detection, great testing frameworks, pre-mortems, and intense heads-down focus. Write down a plan, test it in your head, and sprint. Things are often possible in insanely fast timelines.
Astro handed more than 200 open GitHub issues to four agents that separately reproduce, diagnose, verify, and fix each report. The backlog is now around 30, and the team expects to reach zero for the first time in Astro's five-year history. The four-agent split matters more than the agent count. No agent owns an issue from start to finish. Each leaves evidence for the next one, GitHub labels hold the state, and the original reporter tests a preview package before a pull request opens.
Two college dropouts sold a $100,000 contract to a public company from one cold LinkedIn message. They did not have a product yet. They had not even decided exactly what to build. An enterprise does not buy anything. One person with an urgent priority does. Use the first call to test the pain and your rough solution. Use the second to get the yes and map the path through legal and procurement. Group demos and pilots only matter if your champion needs them.
2026.08.05·thephysicsofstartups.substack.com·4 min read·TLDR Founders Unilever activated 50,000 creators during the World Cup and reached more than 600 million people. The hard part was not finding them. It was vetting, contracting, briefing, and reviewing them without getting 50,000 versions of the same post. Its full network now has 300,000 creators, from big long-term partners to small local accounts that can move around one cultural moment. AI can handle more of the paperwork. It can also push every brand toward the same safe creators and the same safe work. Scale fixes logistics faster than it fixes taste.