Search the archive

Connect your agent →

12-FACTOR COMPANIES

Organizations shape technology and technology shapes organizations. Each wave of technology changes what it means to build and run great organizations, and AI is no different. The firm of the past was designed around the bottleneck of human execution. The firm of the future will be designed around the bottleneck of human taste and judgment. This article looks at factors organizations can adopt to be smaller, faster, and deliver outsized value to customers.

2030-SHAPED SOFTWARE

Everyone says agents will be the main users of software by 2030. Okay, so what should the product actually look like? PostHog's answer is pretty simple. Agents should do the work, while the interface helps humans approve decisions and check what changed. If a person is clicking through a screen only to perform an action, give the agent a way to do it. Keep the screens where someone needs to judge the result, resolve something ambiguous, or stop the agent before it does something dumb.

SPEEDRUNNING SOFTWARE

Building an autonomous software factory feels the same as speedrunning a game. AI made building cheap, and speeding up the software factory lets you take more shots at building things. This post looks at how Amplitude built its software factory, which helped the company 3x its PRs. The faster a software factory is, the faster you can put more ideas in front of customers to figure out what works. They allow you to run more experiments and see good ideas surface much faster.

HOW COMPANIES ARE BUILDING AND SCALING THE FDE BENCH

Many leaders want a forward-deployed engineering (FDE) team, but few know how to build one. The people who excel in the role are scarce, expensive, and hard to interview for. This article looks at what an FDE is, what makes a great FDE, how to find them, and more. It includes an overview of how other companies are running the FDE model and covers common misconceptions about the FDE bench.

HOW TO FIND PROFITABLE PROBLEMS TO SOLVE

Profitable product ideas often come from problems founders have personally solved, giving them insight, proof, and credibility. Filter those problems by links to money, time, or status, identify the root cause, and validate whether buyers will pay for the transformation.

WHAT I'D TELL MY TEAM ABOUT COMPETITION

People love to say startups die by suicide, not competition. That is wrong, especially in B2B. A lower win rate means less revenue, then cuts, worse morale, and an even lower win rate. That is why he doesn't care about 5% product improvements. A customer usually needs a painfully obvious reason to switch, like half the price or 10x the speed. Look at the deals you lost and ask what would have made the choice obvious without another sales call.

pay attention. Learn more about sponsorship opportunities.

BUZZ

Buzz is a workspace where humans and agents build together. It is self-hostable, and an operator can serve many communities behind many domains or subdomains. Buzz feels like a team workspace, but under the hood, it's an event log with taste. It is a relay where humans, agents, workflows, git events, and project memory cooperate.

OPENAI LAUNCHED A SMALL-BUSINESS AI PROGRAM

OpenAI has launched a program that offers small businesses virtual training, in-person AI academies, workflow guides, and partner-built tools for using ChatGPT across operations such as marketing, accounting, and ecommerce.

DOES TOPICAL AUTHORITY MATTER IN AI SEARCH?

In a study of 1,094 US ChatGPT categories, only 15.2% had a clear owner. Most companies are still fighting over categories where ChatGPT has not settled on a default brand. Once a brand did become the default answer, it stayed first in 90.4% of next-month comparisons. Maybe don't publish the twentieth generic AI article. Pick the five questions you want your company to be named for and build around those.

MARKETPLACE STARTUP FUNDRAISING 2026

Marketplace funding has become sharply selective: Pre-Seed and Seed valuations hold, but Series A rounds, capital, and valuations have all fallen. Founders increasingly need Seed extensions, stronger revenue, better liquidity, and higher-margin products to bridge an 11x revenue jump.

INVESTING BEFORE THE IDEA

Most VCs say they invest in people over ideas, but this rarely gets tested since they join when there's an existing idea and market.

FINDING THE TRIGGER

A customer can admit the problem is real and still do nothing.

THE 7 HIRES A HARDWARE STARTUP NEEDS TO GET RIGHT

Hardware startups must make seven critical hires, focusing on manufacturing, deployments, supply chain, finance, sales, policy, and marketing.

MAKE GOOD INTRODUCTIONS, BUILD STRONG ALLIANCES, WIN

Effective introductions can enhance reputation and create valuable connections.

See what works →

AI CONTENT IS EVERYWHERE ON SOCIAL MEDIA, ESPECIALLY LINKEDIN

AI-generated content is spreading across social media, with longform posts hit the hardest. Pangram data from over 1M posts shows 13.8% flagged as AI, rising to 25% for posts over 250 words. LinkedIn drives nearly two-thirds of flagged content, with over 40% of longform posts fully AI-generated. X shows the highest combined AI use when including mixed content. Reddit replies remain mostly human, but top-level posts show higher AI rates, revealing gaps in moderation.

OPENAI APPEARS TO BE MISSING ITS SALES GOALS BY A VAST MARGIN

OpenAI's $100 billion ad-revenue target for 2030 requires three things to happen at once. Advertisers moving decades of search and social budgets into chatbots, OpenAI out-competing Google and Meta for that spend, and the entire AI ad market growing roughly 100 times from where it sits today. The category's entire addressable market currently tops out around $5.4B, and OpenAI itself is on pace to miss its own ad revenue forecast by about 90% this year.

COPYWRITING BREAKDOWN: HOW TO SELL SOMETHING ORDINARY

Strong marketing often comes from better research instead of better copy. Claude Hopkins won customers in a crowded category by asking hundreds of consumers what they wanted, measuring how Palmolive performed against those needs, and turning the results into specific proof points. The ad replaced vague claims with numbers such as 250 times more lather, 15% water absorption in one minute, and lather that lasted 10 minutes. Research, measurable evidence, and clear messaging can make an ordinary product stand out even when competitors offer similar features.

DON'T BLOCK PERSONAL EMAILS

Blocking personal emails in B2B forms can hurt conversion rates. Instead, detect domains like Gmail or iCloud and require a company URL field. With name and company, you can still find or enrich work emails. This keeps friction low while preserving lead quality. Many high-intent leads still submit personal emails, often due to autofill behavior.

SWAG THAT WORKS: THE NEW RULES FOR TRADE SHOW GIVEAWAYS

47% of marketers already treat branded merchandise as a core marketing channel, and 87% of recipients keep and use what they receive rather than tossing it. Middesk built a tiered swag strategy around that shift at Money20/20, gating higher-value items behind booth actions like booking a sales meeting or agreeing to a case study, then generated 10 times its activation spend in new pipeline and 26 times more in influenced pipeline. The gifting also produced a surprise: a steep jump in LinkedIn followers driven entirely by pins and luggage tags that were never meant to be the campaign's main goal.

pay attention. Learn more about sponsorship opportunities.

OPAL U: BECOME A CERTIFIED AI EXPERT IN 5 DAYS

Opal U is a free 5-day live cohort for senior marketers who need to prove AI ROI and move fast. Built for VPs and heads of marketing who feel stuck in the hype and need practical output. Spend one hour a day building three AI agents that automate real work and save 10+ hours a week.

HOW THE FOUNDER OF MORNING BREW BUILT A CLAUDE CONTENT MACHINE THAT NEVER RUNS OUT OF IDEAS (43 MINUTE VIDEO)

Alex Lieberman's Content Machine scans seven days of Slack, Notion, Gmail, and meeting notes, plus the accounts he follows on X and LinkedIn, then ranks 15 content ideas a day so the blank page never becomes the bottleneck. Six AI personas modeled on interviewers like Tim Ferriss and Howard Stern question him until they extract real specifics, and his voice-to-texted answers trace every sentence back to something he actually said. Before anything posts, a six-persona Writer's Council scores the draft and blocks it from going below a 9 out of 10.

HOW MUCH CREATIVE DEBT ARE YOU CARRYING?

Creative work needs recurring time on the calendar or it will always lose to urgent tasks. "Creative debt" is the cost of repeatedly delaying creative projects until avoiding them becomes part of your identity instead of a temporary choice. Treat creative projects like recurring commitments by scheduling dedicated time, reduce project scope, and keep momentum through small, consistent actions instead of waiting for the perfect moment. You should also remove pressure to prove ROI so creative work can exist without immediate business value. The goal is to stop delaying meaningful projects before postponement blocks future creative output.

WHY YOUR TOP KEYWORDS ARE QUIETLY LOSING VOLUME

HOW I (ACCIDENTALLY?) WENT FROM LIFECYCLE MARKETER TO PRODUCT MANAGER

A lifecycle marketer transitioned into a product manager role through embedded product work, not a planned switch. Leading iterative in-app projects and using AI to prototype solutions shifted ownership from execution to problem definition. Internal support helped formalize the move. The role change requires giving up solo execution and focusing on defining problems and aligning teams. Lifecycle skills translate well, especially prioritization and building user experiences.

AI SEO TIP: MICROSOFT CLARITY TOPIC INSIGHTS

Microsoft Clarity Topic Insights is a free AI visibility tool that shows how often your content is cited in AI-generated answers, how much it influences those answers, and which competitors are being cited.

10 CREATIVE WAYS TO WRITE WITH AI WITHOUT LOSING YOUR SOUL

Tips on how Ahrefs uses AI to create content, plus the experiments they've been running.

HOW MICHELOB ULTRA AND LEO MESSI PREPARED FOR THE MOST UNPREDICTABLE MARKETING MOMENT OF THE WORLD CUP

Michelob Ultra built its Messi tribute ad around 20 years of career accomplishments, letting the same creative work whether Argentina won or lost the final.

Try Wispr Flow Free → [6] | Download Flow

GOOGLE IS BUILDING A CHIP WITH GEMINI BAKED INTO THE SILICON

Google is reportedly working on a project that would bake Gemini's neural-network architecture right into the circuitry of a chip. This would lock the model into the chip, increasing efficiency and decreasing overhead. The model can still be refreshed by loading new weights, but the underlying structure will stay fixed. While the project may not end up as a finished product, it shows how the custom AI silicon industry may be moving away from running any model to fusing one model with the metal.

AMD LAUNCHES HELIOS, ITS FIRST RACK AI SYSTEM TO RIVAL NVIDIA, ADDING MICROSOFT AS NEWEST BUYER

Helios is a rack-scale system that combines AMD's GPUs, CPUs, networking, and software to power frontier model inference. It will start shipping to customers later this year. AMD hasn't released any details about cost, but it is estimated that Helios will cost between $5 million and $5.5 million. AMD only holds around 4.5% of the data center GPU market, but Helios could change that.

HUMAN MATHEMATICIANS ARE BEING OUTCOUNTEREXAMPLED

This post looks at what's going on in the world of formalization, AI tools, and counterexamples. AI tools are now starting to solve theorems. They can even write proofs in Lean to dispel any doubts about their validity. This is speeding up the research process for mathematicians.

BRAINCO DEMONSTRATES BRAIN-CONTROLLED ROBOT AI PLATFORM

BrainCo showcased a platform that allows users to direct robots through neural signals at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference this week. The technology uses an EEG headset to pick up the wearer's brain signals. AI algorithms are used to decode the signals into intent, which then gets converted into commands for the robot. The demonstration showed a mind-controlled robotic arm completing tasks that require precision, such as grasping a cup and picking up an apple.

AGENT SWARMS AND THE NEW MODEL ECONOMICS

Every jump in AI capability raises the level of abstraction at which an engineer can work. With agent swarms, the unit of work becomes the spec. For this to work, the swarm has to actually follow the spec. This post discusses how to do that.

THE PRODUCTIVITY-EXPERIENCE PARADOX

AI is brilliant for external goods - money, status, and output - and potentially corrosive for internal ones - the skill, the mastery, and the satisfaction you can only get by doing the thing itself. People after external goods see AI as close to a superpower, as it makes people more productive and produces more output. However, for those interested in the internal goods, AI can feel like a loss, as it takes the parts they loved and hands it to a machine, leaving only supervision and accountability. While the output still arrives, the pride and satisfaction of owning the work is gone.

WHO'S AFRAID OF CHINESE MODELS?

The industry is overreacting to Kimi K3 and Chinese open-weight models. However, there is reason to be concerned about cybersecurity risks. Models capable of mounting cybersecurity attacks on existing infrastructure are already widely available. The only viable defense is to make sure defenders have access to the best models as well.

GOOGLE IS BUILDING AN AI FENCE AROUND THE INTERNET IT ONCE CHAMPIONED

Google revamped its search with AI last year. Its AI mode replaces search results with conversational responses. People are spending more time with Google than ever, but the company is sending less and less traffic to sites through search results. The changes threaten the open web and show how rapidly AI has upended the technology landscape.

ONE DOCUMENT, TWO HANDS

The agent is a guest in the app, editing the same document you are.

TAIWAN INDICTS EX-TSMC MANAGER FOR ALLEGEDLY STEALING CHIP SECRETS FOR CHINA

The former deputy manager, who faces a sentence of up to seven years, allegedly copied 21 confidential documents intending to use them in China.

ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT AFTER THE COST OF CODE COLLAPSED

Headcount is now more about how much accountability you can afford rather than an indicator of capacity.

12 FACTOR COMPANIES

This post looks at factors that organizations should adopt to be smaller, faster, and deliver outsized value to customers.

JUDGE PAUSES $110B PARAMOUNT-WARNER BROS. MERGER