Hiring your first AEs before you have a pipeline is like buying a race car without building a track. Founders must prove outbound works themselves first. The biggest mistake is that founders outsource their target account list too early. Your new AEs see logos, you see patterns from dozens of customer calls. Build the list yourself, automate the outreach so AEs start with full calendars, then get out of their way. Their only job is closing deals, not fixing your CRM.
Build iOS mobile apps with AI.
Transkriptor is an AI-powered tool that transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes conversations into actionable insights.
PromptPerf is a tool for testing and comparing AI prompt outputs across multiple models with similarity scoring.
Google just killed a $425 million company by making its product free. Marin Software spent 7 years building the perfect dashboard to manage ads across Google, Facebook, and Yahoo - agencies loved it, and it IPO'd in 2013. Then Google improved Ads Editor and Facebook launched Business Manager, both free. Marin's revenue peaked in 2015 and slid every year until this week's bankruptcy.
Carta ran 20,000 simulations comparing two VC strategies and found something VCs don't want to hear. A "spray and pray" fund with 100 investments beats a "conviction" fund with 20 investments almost every time - 2.6x returns vs 2.1x, and 99.7% chance of not losing money vs 81.9%. Only the top 5% of funds do better with conviction. Yet VCs still concentrate because LPs love the story of genius stock-picking. The math says most VCs would do better admitting they can't predict winners and making more bets.
The phrase, "AI improves developer productivity by 100x," is meaningless hype without data. Most engineering leaders report 0.3-1x actual improvement. DX's framework measures what matters - not just if developers accept AI suggestions, but whether that code makes it to production. Track three dimensions that follow the AI adoption lifecycle: First, utilization (are people using it?), then impact (is it actually helping?), and finally, cost (is the ROI positive?). Most importantly, measure AI agents as part of the team overseeing them, not as standalone contributors.
2025.07.07·newsletter.eng-leadership.com·5 min read·TLDR Founders No other vendor will care about their success like you will because their success means your survival.
2025.07.07·averageentrepreneur.substack.com·3 min read·TLDR Founders Your business depends on three early choices: your platform (like Amazon vs Shopify) sets your costs, your investors decide your timeline and pressure, and your customers shape everything else.
Anthropic has provided a directory of 29 companies, many of them coding-focused, that are using Claude to build AI-powered products.
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Catwatchful, an Android spyware app marketed for "stealthy monitoring," leaked sensitive data from 62,000 users due to an SQL injection vulnerability. The breach exposed email addresses, plain-text passwords, and monitoring data.
TalentHook, a cloud-based applicant tracking system, accidentally exposed the resumes of nearly 26M applicants. Cybernews found an open Azure Blob Storage container with files. The exposed data includes names, emails, addresses, education, and employment history.
Ingram Micro, a business-to-business technology distributor, has been suffering an outage since Thursday. The outage was caused by the SafePay ransomware. The threat actors breached the company through its GlobalProtect VPN.
This write-up explains how to create a "schizophrenic ZIP file". This type of ZIP file appears differently depending on the parser used. The trick relies on how parsers locate the Central Directory, with some using the offset field and others calculating it from the size. As a result, each method points to different Central Directories containing different file content, allowing the same ZIP file to display different contents depending on which parser opens it. This enables malicious files to be opened without the user's knowledge.
Studies have shown that code generated by LLMs contains many security vulnerabilities. Developers should move security earlier in the development process by creating rules files for IDEs like Cursor, which include security guardrails and instructions. This post offers guidance on writing prompts for these rules files. Early research indicates that simply adding the word “secure” to a prompt can significantly reduce vulnerabilities.
TradeTraitor, a North Korean threat actor, has stolen over $2.4 billion through social engineering and cloud attacks, compromising developer credentials to inject malicious code and reroute ETH. Its attacks involve harvesting AWS tokens, injecting JavaScript into cloud applications, with defenses including short-lived tokens, full CloudTrail logs, MFA, and credential monitoring.
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Compyl provides solutions for compliance, asset management, contract management, policy management, user access reviews, and risk management (including vendor risk).
A tool to audit Erlang and Elixir dependencies to make sure your Gleam projects sparkle.
LiteLLM is a Python SDK, LLM gateway, and proxy server to call 100+ LLM APIs in OpenAPI format.
Cybersecurity experts report a 19-fold increase in malicious campaigns using Spain's .es domains, making it the third most abused after .com and .ru. Since January, 1,373 subdomains on 447 .es domains have hosted malicious content, with 99% of it focused on credential phishing, targeting Microsoft users via fake HR-themed emails.
A California court has ordered Google to pay $314 million for illegally using Android users' cellular data without consent. The lawsuit revealed that Google transferred device information even when phones were idle, which used up users' data allowances. Google intends to appeal this ruling.
While testing a personal tool, the author of this post noticed that certificates for instagram.com had unusual expiration times. The author set up a machine that attempted to pull the certificates for instagram.com and www.instagram.com every 5 minutes. They discovered that Instagram uses certificates with a lifetime of 8 days, replaces them daily, and uses unique certificates for instagram.com and www.instagram.com.
A China-linked hacking group called Houken exploited three zero-day vulnerabilities in Ivanti Cloud Service Appliance devices to breach French government, telecom, media, finance, and transport organizations starting in September 2024, using sophisticated tools and rootkits to steal credentials and maintain persistent access.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) warns the public about scammers pretending to be federal agents demanding Apple gift cards of $500 or $1,000 to "clear red flags" from accounts, stressing that real federal agencies never ask for payments via gift cards, wire transfers, or cryptocurrency.
IdeaLab, a California tech incubator, suffered a data breach in October 2024 when hackers stole sensitive information.
Consumers are becoming more privacy-aware and are taking control over their data. 42% read cookie banners often, and 46% clicked "accept all" less than they did three years ago. Trust in brands now depends on transparency, with 44% of consumers saying clear data use is the top reason they trust a brand. Privacy-Led Marketing has become a strategic necessity, turning privacy from a legal checkbox into a competitive advantage. Brands that embed transparency and education into every touchpoint can build deeper trust and reduce friction.
Many social media creators face severe burnout due to constant online pressure, lack of structure, and absence of traditional workplace support. In a survey of 1,000 US and UK creators, half reported experiencing burnout, and 37% considered quitting. Melanie Murphy, a creator with 800K followers, reduced her workload and income by $20K after a breakdown in order to prioritize her mental health. The industry demands creators juggle content creation, brand relationships, and self-promotion, all while monetizing their personal lives, which many say takes a lasting emotional toll.
Startups can now run marketing operations with as few as 5 people by combining a lean human team with AI tools. A traditional 30-person team at Postmates costs $2.5M annually. However, a modern AI-enabled team of 8 can achieve similar output for about $700K, a 72% reduction. The new structure includes one marketing lead, one or two offshore executors, and AI tools for tasks. Companies that adopt this model early could gain an 18-month competitive edge.
Jack Friks built Post Bridge to solve his own problem of posting content across multiple platforms. This turned into a business earning $11K in monthly recurring revenue. Instead of competing on complex features, Post Bridge focused on simplicity, speed, and low pricing, with plans starting at $9. It targeted solo creators rather than teams, offering only the features needed to get the job done. Friks' social media presence helped grow the tool organically by resonating with creators facing the same struggles.
This Claude prompt acts as a full-stack AI marketing strategist that creates a plan based on your product, target audience, goal, and tone. It automates customer research, landing page copy, social content, cold emails, and SEO ideas.
Non-endemic ads let non-retail brands target Amazon's vast audience using first-party data. Amazon Retail Ad Service centralizes campaign management across retailers but still lacks scale. Amazon Attribution tracks how external channels drive Amazon sales. Social commerce is growing around Prime Day, with influencer content on TikTok and Meta driving traffic to Amazon. Prime Video and Live Sports offer ad space with diverse audiences, giving brands more ways to reach customers through streaming and live events.
F1 has transformed its brand by embracing Hollywood and streaming. Its partnership with Netflix's Drive to Survive has doubled US viewership and grown its global fanbase to 827M. 1 in 4 fans cited the show as a major reason they follow the sport. Apple's new F1 movie continues this strategy with real race footage and star cameos. F1 is now positioned as a global brand engine, appealing to younger audiences and attracting streaming platforms competing for upcoming US media rights.
Good SEO leaders solve user problems instead of just ranking for keywords. They align efforts across the entire user journey, build scalable systems, and treat SEO as a product with continuous improvements. They tie SEO efforts to revenue and business growth and work closely with product, engineering, and content teams. Their goal is to improve customer retention and reduce churn, positioning SEO as a key driver of business success, not just a marketing tactic.
Reasons why users leave your product, and fixes for each one.
Polaroid's OOH ads celebrate real life in a world of digital overload.
Instagram inspo from PerfectTed, Maebe, BYOMA, and Summer Fridays.
Google's AI Overviews are facing an EU antitrust complaint from the Independent Publishers Alliance.
pgstream is an open-source change data capture tool that improved its snapshot performance for PostgreSQL databases. The initial implementation used native tools for schema capture and transaction snapshots for data reads, but suffered from slow write speeds. By switching to binary COPY FROM for bulk inserts and deferring index creation, pgstream improved its snapshot performance, surpassing pg_dump/pg_restore in speed.
1990s-era CGI can still handle over 200 million requests per day on modest hardware using Go and SQLite. CGI's performance bottleneck was traditionally attributed to the overhead of process creation for each request, compounded by slow scripting languages. However, advancements in hardware and the use of faster languages like Go and Rust have improved CGI's efficiency and its ability to use multiple CPU cores properly.
This dev's favorite programming interview question involves an asynchronous queue designed to prevent a faulty server from handling multiple simultaneous requests from a single-threaded client. The interview starts with implementing a `sendOnce` function and then progressively adds complexity with features like minimum delays, `sendMany` functionality, request cancellation, retries, and prioritization. This question tests a candidate's ability to reason about code, handle new requirements, and adapt to a single-threaded environment.
This dev criticizes NVIDIA for issues with the RTX 50 series launch, including scalpers, melting power connectors, and misleading marketing. NVIDIA prioritizes data center GPUs over consumer graphics cards, leading to defective products with technologies like DLSS used to compensate for insufficient hardware performance.
Opencode is an open-source AI coding agent for use in the terminal. It has similar capabilities to Claude Code but is provider-agnostic, supporting Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and local models. Opencode has a terminal-based user interface and a client/server architecture, allowing for remote control from various devices.
OmniTools is a self-hosted, web-based app with a variety of online tools for simplifying tasks related to coding, images, videos, PDFs, and more. It processes files entirely client-side.
"Baba is Eval" is a project that turns the puzzle game "Baba is You" into a benchmark environment for language models. The project enables models to fetch game states, control the level through actions like movement and undo, and automate menu navigation. Initial experiments with Claude 4 show poor performance, which means AI needs better reasoning capabilities and context management for solving more complex levels.
"Local-first software" combines the benefits of cloud apps, like real-time collaboration and multi-device access, with the data ownership and control of traditional local applications. This approach prioritizes local storage and networks over centralized servers, making data modifications and access faster and independent of constant internet connectivity. Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are a promising foundational technology for achieving these goals, but more research and experimentation are still needed.