DigitalOcean Managed Agents enable teams to deploy their preferred agent harness, connect agents to over 16,000 tools, and help agents do more work at scale without building or maintaining any infrastructure themselves. It brings inference tokens, agent execution, and tool use together so teams can scale intelligence all in one place. Teams only pay for the CPU that agents actually consume with per-second active CPU billing. DigitalOcean Managed Agents is now available in public preview.
WebMCP lets browser agents interact with Stripe payment UIs through structured tools registered within the webpage. Agents can complete payment flows using WebMCP tool calls rather than relying on page scraping and simulating clicks. The available tools depend on the payment UI, session state, and which form is currently active. WebMCP is still experimental, so browser support, tool availability, and tool schemas can change.
A 'slop grenade' is bad AI-generated code that someone created, didn't properly understand, and then handed over to a reviewer to deal with. The problem is that the person who submitted the code can't fully explain the decisions behind it. This means reviewers need to work out what parts of the PR can be trusted and potentially also teach the author what their own code does. The time saved generating the code becomes someone else's work.
Give an agent a server, a wallet, and three weeks, and it can produce a lot of work. In this experiment, it wrote more than 100,000 lines of code, launched 17 paid products, and published 20 blog posts. Revenue came to $1.54 against roughly $1,000 in costs. The agent was selling into an agent economy with very few actual buyers. In a survey it commissioned, 90% of respondents said they lacked a wallet or spending authority. It could keep building products, but most of its intended customers couldn't pay for them.
Deel says that its over 10,000 agents operating across finance, payments, and regulatory functions have helped the platform save more than 1 million hours across its teams.
After building more than a dozen agents, including an AI VP of Revenue, SaaStr now builds only what it can't buy because maintaining them takes so much work.
There have been four straight quarters of increasing dilution across the board.
Many remain stuck in "local maximums," where pursuing greater happiness necessitates temporary discomfort.
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Payments start as a weekend project and become a permanent line item on your roadmap.
Stripe is the layer underneath: accept payments, offer financial services, and build custom revenue models on one stack, from your first transaction to your billionth.
A board member sends you a chart of startups reaching $100 million in recurring revenue in a few quarters. Are you supposed to build next year's plan around that? ICONIQ's Pacesetter Index starts with selected AI-native companies, primarily from its own portfolio, then singles out the strongest performers. That's a much narrower group than the top quarter of all startups. Before using those numbers as a target, compare company size and how much cash each business spends to grow. The chart may show a pace you want without showing a bill you can afford.
One of the effects of AI code generation tools has been the proliferation of code. This has led to a pronounced spike in the number of apps. However, while supply may have increased, demand has a life of its own. For the most part, no one is really using these new vibe-coded apps. Building successful apps has always been more than just generating the code.
Someone who loved your product moves to a new company. You could send the same congratulations-and-pitch email they'll get from everyone else. Or you could bring up what they actually accomplished with your product and ask whether they're tackling something similar in the new role. One workflow here waits a month before making that approach. Another reopens lost deals when the original obstacle changes, such as a budget or executive. The reason to reach out comes from what happened in the account, rather than how long it's been since the last email.
A bug report often starts a second conversation. What were you doing? Where did it break? Can you make it happen again? PostHog connects feedback submitted inside the product to agents that investigate and propose fixes. In one example, an investigation report arrived within five minutes, followed by a proposed code change eight minutes later. Other workflows investigate error spikes and inspect session recordings. Each step passes its findings to the next, reducing how much someone has to reconstruct before they can start fixing the problem.
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AX is a high-throughput, declarative orchestrator that runs billions of autonomous agent workloads in a cluster. Users declare an agentic task with workspaces and gateway specifications, and AX sandboxes it, wires up its workspace, fences its network, and helps run it at scale. It runs on top of Agent Substrate and feels similar to using Kubernetes.
Meta has opened access for developers to build Muse connectors. Developers bring the API, and Muse handles the agent, browser, and the context. To create a connector, developers need to describe the connector to Meta and explain how users will use it. The submission will be reviewed for functional, security, and legal requirements and complete end-to-end testing. Once approved, users will be able to find the connector on Muse. Meta's editors will review connectors for featured placement.
You can own a large share of your company and still lose your job in one board meeting. That happened to Zenefits' cofounder CEO: removing him did not require a shareholder vote. Figma offers a different example, with its cofounder holding roughly 9% of the equity but just over half the voting power. This guide separates ownership, voting rights, and board control. When reviewing a term sheet, work through who appoints each director, who can replace them, and what happens to those rights in the next round.
An employee can earn stock options and still be unable to afford exercising them. Athyna designed its equity plan around that problem, setting aside 20% of the company and granting restricted stock units rather than options employees must purchase. Its plan combines time-based vesting with a liquidity event before shares transfer. Everyone receives a grant, including interns, with amounts varying by role and seniority. The company also walks employees through what they own, what happens if they leave, and how future fundraising changes their percentage.
Leaders have the power to make things better or worse based on their choices and behaviors and how they show up as a leader.
This post takes a look at SaaStr's agent stack, which helped the company double sponsorship revenue in the last 12 months.
Generating a code change in five minutes does not help a teammate who needs an hour to untangle it.
Nooks' AI Sequencing tool streamlines outbound sales by integrating AI with agent workspaces, enhancing account understanding and outreach.
2026.09.21·thegtmnewsletter.substack.com·8 min read·TLDR Founders Sponsored
Today's most popular CRM is a database with a UI. But the companies of the future are agent-first, and agents need more context. They need a world model of your business.
Lightfield [5] is the CRM engineered for the future [6]. It updates itself from every call, email, meeting, and Slack thread, and connects everything to the people, deals, and accounts they changed.
Lightfield agents find prospects that look like your best customers, book the meetings, capture action items, diagnose your funnel - and learn from your best sellers to codify what works.
✅ 5,000+ companies signed up in 10 months.
✅ $47M Series A from a16z.
The right harness can cut the cost of the same result by 71% without a loss of accuracy. This presents an opportunity for the next generation of software applications. State-of-the-art models can be expensive to use, but a good harness can reduce costs enough for them to be a viable option. An effective harness requires deep customer understanding, a collection of relevant evals, and a factory for automating hill-climbing.
Revenue scale is no longer sufficient when raising a round. What actually matters is how many top AI-native companies use, love, and embrace your products and profess undying loyalty to you. AI-native companies are the hardest customers to win, so they are the leading indicator. Revenue can be bought, but loyalty from a kingmaker can't be manufactured.
Pulley raised more than $50M to compete with Carta. Now it's shutting down and directing customers to that same competitor. The cap-table startup closes December 8, giving customers about twelve weeks to move. A former employee speculated that spreadsheets, increasingly improved with AI, were a bigger competitive problem than Carta itself. If you use Pulley, start checking the migration details now, especially which records transfer automatically and what you'll need to export yourself.
HubSpot spent twelve months testing what gets a company found in AI search. Adding an llms.txt file did nothing, while 92% of its highly specific industry and use-case pages eventually earned citations. A page-speed overhaul increased AI crawler visits by 1,600%, and qualified leads from AI search rose 1,850% over the year. The experiments give teams somewhere concrete to start. Track whether the content brings qualified leads, though, because more crawler visits alone won't tell you whether it's working.
Your customer can ask ChatGPT for a lesson. Getting them to practice again tomorrow is a different problem. This article suggests comparing your app's main use case with what someone can do in a blank chat window, then looking at what's missing. Does your app remember their progress, organize what comes next, or give them someone to practice with? Those are reasons to keep using it even when the answers are available elsewhere. If you're struggling to explain why someone should pay, try the comparison yourself.
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Ads get ignored on social media but not in TLDR! Reach developers, PMs, marketers, founders and other tech leaders where they actually pay attention. Learn more about sponsorship opportunities [13].
Mercury Books brings AI-powered accounting to Mercury. It can generate P&L, cash flow, and balance sheet reports using Mercury data and data from external financial platforms. The product was co-designed alongside accountants from leading firms. Existing Mercury customers can get started with Books in minutes.
USDC and USDT are now completely interoperable with the US dollar and every underlying US and international payment rail on Column. Column has built its own card issuer processor, allowing its customers to launch and run card programs with one integration. Column customers can now issue US dollar accounts and cards to verified customers globally. They can also receive, hold, and send foreign currencies in individually numbered accounts with connections to international instant payment systems like SEPA Instant.
A customer can now ask an ad questions before visiting your website. OpenAI is testing Sponsored Agents with select US advertisers, letting users talk with a business-sponsored agent before clicking through to buy. It's also adding ChatGPT Ads integrations to HubSpot and Shopify. That moves some of the selling into the ad itself. If you get access to the test, your product information and the agent's answers will need as much attention as the creative and landing page.
Many founders are getting tired right now. They raised and built in a pre-AI world. Many want to build something else for a post-AI world. This can be a big opportunity for many companies that are in a strong financial position.
You suggest a new feature during a meeting. A week later, someone has built it, and the project you actually needed is behind. You thought you were sharing an idea, but they thought you were giving them a task. This is one reason founders and their teams can disagree about how well things are managed. Tell people whether you're asking for opinions or assigning work. When you do add a task, explain how it ranks against what they're already doing.
2026.09.18·thefounderplaybook.hustlefund.vc·4 min read·TLDR Founders One investor wants an answer by Friday. Another can't meet until next month. You can end up choosing before you know who else is interested. This fundraising guide explains how to avoid that by building relationships early, then scheduling your pitch meetings close together so investors can reach decisions around the same time. Aim to finish the raise before you're down to six months of cash. Even after you accept a term sheet, investors still need to complete their checks and finalize the paperwork before the money reaches your account.
Be extremely choosy about what you add to a system and be militant about taking things out.
AI accelerates product development, but teams risk prioritizing speed over meaningful outcomes, leading to feature bloat.
When you let it be known that someone gave you feedback, and they see how you accepted and thanked the person who gave it, you normalize the behavior and make it safer for others to do the same.
Zapier CEO Wade Foster discusses the evolution of no-code automation into tools like Zapier MCP, focusing on integrating with users' daily AI drivers like Cursor.
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Fake accounts have never been cheaper. Abusers can rotate email addresses and devices without ever touching a keyboard, while your product keeps handing out credits and paying inference costs.
WorkOS Radar [5] scores risk at signup using device, email, and network signals. It automatically blocks known threats [6] - from AI bots to script kiddies - and can be tailored to protect your app.
>> Block obvious abuse
>> Step up suspicious users
>> See the evidence behind every verdict
All without maintaining your own rules engine.
AI may erode traditional software moats by making products, migrations, and integrations cheaper to replicate. The market could polarize between a few massive platforms that reinvest aggressively and many tiny niche products, leaving mid-sized point solutions squeezed.
Exposing an operation as a tool is fairly straightforward. However, making it reliable for daily use means accounting for both how the software runs and how the agent decides to use it. This post looks at key design decisions that make platforms more consistent and efficient. It provides specific tips and tricks based on iteration and production experience.
A SAFE is a promise where an investor gives a company their money, then when the company finally sells stock at a real price, the investor gets shares, usually at a discount or capped at some valuation as a reward for going first. There's no interest, due date, or anything owed if that day never comes. For founders raising a small amount quickly, it's a good trade. For investors, the worst-case percentage locks the moment they sign.
Momentum should not be confused with a moat, which offers lasting defensibility against competitors. Startups can leverage execution and distribution to drive early momentum but need clear paths to defensibility, such as data effects, scale economies, or unique processes. With the rapid pace of AI adoption, startups must focus on building moats early to sustain growth and withstand competitive pressure.
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Enjoy spending an hour prepping for each call? Didn't think so. Lightfield is an agentic CRM [13] that captures every conversation you have and uses it as evidence for call prep, prospecting, and outreach. Ask "RESEARCH THIS ACCOUNT THE WAY I WOULD" and get real answers cited