Most founders take advice wrong. They ask for solutions when they should be asking for diagnoses. The person giving you advice will probably be right 50% of the time on solutions, but they'll nail the actual problem because problems don't vary as much as solutions do. Pick a topic where you have ideas but not conviction, find 4 people who've done it, and cold message them with a specific question. Before every call, write a one-pager summarizing where you are and what you want to ask. This is the single most important thing.
The cost of doing is approaching zero. The benefit of deciding is higher than ever. We are the bottleneck now. AI is too fast, too good at building. The skill that matters is shifting from execution to orchestration. Founders don't need to be operators anymore. They need to be systems architects.
2026.01.16·newsletter.angularventures.com·4 min read·TLDR Founders These are the signals that make smart angels walk away.
2026.01.16·thefounderplaybook.hustlefund.vc·3 min read·TLDR Founders Incredible amounts of revenue can be generated from companies improving their processes and data enabling improved models.
Proto-markets are evolutionary precursors to markets where demand exists but selection and speciation have yet to take hold.
Ego and fear of judgment keep us in the realm of certainty, where we are comfortable.
Varonis researchers discovered a now-patched vulnerability in Microsoft Copilot Personal, dubbed "Reprompt," that enabled single-click data exfiltration via indirect prompt injection in legitimate Copilot URLs. The attack allowed the extraction of usernames, locations, and chat history even after the victim closed the chat window. Microsoft 365 Copilot was not affected. The vulnerability has been remediated as of this week.
The Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) says that the data of about 750K Canadian investors was compromised in a breach last year. The compromised data includes social insurance numbers, investment account numbers, and phone numbers. CIRO stated that the breach resulted from a sophisticated phishing attack.
A breach at Eurail B.V., the company behind Eurail and Interrail passes, exposed travellers' personal details, including contact information and ID or passport data, and possibly bank and limited health data for some DiscoverEU participants. Affected systems were secured, passwords reset, and customers have been urged to watch for phishing, change related passwords, and monitor bank accounts for unusual activity.
JFrog's Security Researchers have demonstrated successful remote code execution exploitation of CVE-2025-62507, a stack buffer overflow in Redis 8.2.x's XACKDEL command with a CVSS score of 8.8. Unauthenticated attackers can overwrite the return address using crafted stream IDs, a vulnerability made easier by the lack of stack canary protection in the official Docker image. Shodan detected approximately 2,924 servers running vulnerable versions that are immediately exploitable without authentication, while 183,907 additional instances with authentication could also be at risk. Organizations are advised to upgrade to Redis 8.3.2, enable authentication, and compile with the -fstack-protector option, as the research highlights that CVSS scores alone should not determine patching priorities, since high-severity vulnerabilities can still offer straightforward remote code execution paths.
Slack's security team introduced an agentic system for investigating security issues that involves a Director persona instructing a series of SME personas, with the results checked by a Critic persona. The Director persona reviews the investigation's status and poses a question to the experts, who use their domain expertise to prepare answers. The Director then queries those answers to advance the investigation loop or conclude the investigation. This system also enables cost optimization: expert personas, which process more data, can use cheaper models, whereas the Director persona, which requires more reasoning, can use more expensive models.
Local computer use agents fundamentally shift the endpoint security industry because a properly functioning agent can be indistinguishable from a malicious agent or attacker, diminishing the value of signatures. A previous analogue is the adoption of PowerShell by both attackers and sysadmins, which made context necessary to distinguish attacks from standard use. Successful organizations will need to build contextual defense systems rather than trying to push back on agent adoption.
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Rust's cryptography ecosystem has matured significantly, with aws-lc-rs and ring now serving as the official crypto providers for rustls. At least two libraries, aws-lc-rs and boring, offer FIPS 140-3 certification alongside post-quantum KEM support via Kyber algorithms. The ecosystem divides between pure-Rust implementations, such as RustCrypto, dalek-cryptography, and graviola, which offer better auditability and cross-compilation, and C library wrappers that provide assembly-optimized performance. This is a relevant trade-off because 37.2 percent of cryptographic library vulnerabilities stem from memory safety issues. For teams requiring FIPS compliance and performance, aws-lc-rs is recommended. For WebAssembly targets and easier cross-compilation, RustCrypto crates remain the preferred choice.
isVerified offers mobile apps that secure executive and institutional phone calls by detecting AI-generated voice deepfakes in real time and binding a verified user identity to a hardened VoIP channel, protecting enterprises from vishing and voice impersonation attacks.
This GitHub repository contains 65+ tools and resources useful for blue teaming activities.
A former House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure sysadmin was indicted for allegedly ordering 240 government cell phones, shipping them to his home, and selling over 200 to a pawn shop in a scheme that cost taxpayers $150,000. The scheme unraveled when one phone, which was instructed to be sold only "in parts" to bypass MDM controls, ended up intact on eBay. The buyer called the House IT help desk number displayed on boot. The case highlights the importance of asset management controls and segregation of duties for personnel with procurement authority.
Microsoft coordinated civil actions in the US and UK to take down RedVDS, a cybercrime-as-a-service provider that rents cheap virtual servers, fueling large-scale phishing and fraud campaigns worldwide and causing at least $40 million in reported US losses. The operation involves domain seizures, infrastructure disruption, and collaboration with Europol, German authorities, and victim organizations like H2-Pharma and a Florida condo association.
France's CNIL fined Free SAS and Free Mobile, subsidiaries of Groupe Iliad, a combined €42 million after a 2024 breach exposed bank and other personal data of 24 million subscribers. Regulators cited weak VPN authentication, poor anomaly detection, and inadequate breach notifications, and criticized the firms' basic security lapses. The companies, which have since upgraded controls, plan to appeal, calling the sanctions unprecedented and disproportionate.
South Korean education conglomerate Kyowon Group confirmed a ransomware attack impacted 600 of its 800 servers.
Microsoft's updates on January 13 patched the WinSqlite3.dll component across Windows 10/11 and Server 2012-2025 after third-party security tools flagged it as vulnerable to CVE-2025-6965, a memory corruption flaw.
Hackers accessed Central Maine Healthcare's network between March and June 2025, exposing names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, treatment details, provider information, service dates, and insurance data for 145,381 people.
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Campaign briefs in one place, creative files in another, and the haunting feeling of missing status updates—it all adds up to more headaches and fewer things getting done.
Years of predictions about privacy regulation reshaping digital advertising have not played out in practice, despite dozens of state laws now being active. Enforcement actions have resulted in relatively small fines that have not disrupted business models or significantly altered data-driven targeting strategies. For most advertisers, privacy compliance has become a manageable cost rather than a fundamental constraint on growth.
Pinterest's 2026 Palette features 5 bold colors shaped by global search and save behavior: Cool Blue, Jade, Plum Noir, Wasabi, and Persimmon. Each hue offers a distinct emotional effect, from grounded optimism to expressive escape. The forecast draws on billions of user signals, visual search analysis, and expert curation to identify shades gaining momentum and how they combine across aesthetics.
The agreements with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity formalize how large AI platforms reuse Wikipedia and other Wikimedia content at scale while providing structured, high-volume access designed for enterprise data needs. Wikimedia positioned the partnerships as both a revenue mechanism and a governance layer for AI reuse, emphasizing that Enterprise customers gain faster, more reliable access than scraping public endpoints.
This playbook begins by creating topics from customer research and sales calls. Each SME records a 1-hour interview. Interviews are turned into a long-form article, 5 video clips, and 8 LinkedIn posts. Content is posted on personal LinkedIn profiles 3-5 times per week for maximum reach. It is repurposed across the website, YouTube, and a weekly newsletter. After 3 months, top posts are amplified with Thought Leader Ads. After 6 months, an employee advocacy program uses existing content to expand organic reach.
This article reframes SEO success around revenue instead of rankings, positioning branded keywords as the foundation that most companies overlook. It shows how brand searches often suffer from low impressions, weak click-through rates, or incorrect page routing, all of which quietly leak conversions. By building content that explicitly answers brand-related queries and expanding coverage around how users actually search for the brand, companies can unlock compounding gains without chasing low-intent keywords.
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Growth doesn't come from guesswork, and neither should client management. Turn your disparate client communications into a single system of commercial intelligence [10] that surfaces expansion signals, relationship health, and emerging client risk across your portfolio. Get executive-level visibility into where to focus to drive growth and when you might be at risk of churn. Start a free, 30-day
Snowflake industry experts will break down how AI agents are changing the rules of marketing, what shifts are already underway, and what marketing leaders should be preparing for now. They'll discuss how to adapt in 2026 as customer behavior evolves. The free event will take place on January 21 at 10:00 AM PT.
Google is rolling out a US beta of Personal Intelligence for Gemini that links apps like Gmail, Photos, YouTube, and Search to deliver tailored answers. It retrieves details from your data to handle tasks such as car info or trip planning while keeping control and privacy settings in your hands. Gemini cites sources for transparency, avoids assumptions on sensitive topics, and lets you disable or limit personalization.
AI success in 2026 will depend more on product design and workflow fit than on model performance, as users don't care which model runs behind the scenes. The strongest AI products meet workers where they already operate and minimize behavior change, especially in complex enterprise environments like in-house legal. Sandstone shows this approach by integrating into 30 existing tools and acting as a central system of context, which helped cut legal cycle time by 35% in its example workflow. “Invisible AI” that learns organizational context over time can shift workers away from repetitive tasks and toward higher value decisions while compounding its usefulness through captured precedent.
UX drives revenue by removing friction that blocks users from accessing value. At ARxVision, poor onboarding caused returns and support costs, so an AI-guided setup cut returns and helped users get started quickly. At AdInMo, SDK complexity led to broken or abandoned integrations that distorted data and lost revenue, so a redesigned onboarding flow let developers integrate in minutes and even self-serve. Both cases show UX as a value multiplier and prove that targeted fixes based on real user friction can unlock growth.
Tactics include casual copy, sharp comparisons, and mixing confidence with vulnerability.
AI turned an 8-week, $20k landing page project into a 2-hour build with better results.
AI models often amplify existing social, psychological, and linguistic biases, especially when optimized for engagement, which rewards emotional and in-group content and can distort information ecosystems.
2026.01.16·insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu·10 min read·TLDR Marketing Sponsored
When ISVs like Shopify, Ninetailed, and Vercel wanted INSTANT VISIBILITY within the workflows of thousands of builders, developers, and enterprise teams WHO ARE ACTIVELY LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS, they chose Contentful [4].
AI perception is now a product signal. The Product Perception Loop helps PMs measure what AI believes about their product and deliberately improve it over time.
2026.01.16·amycmitchell.substack.com·6 min read·TLDR Product Good startup bets optimize for learning and upside. Choose problems you care about, markets that grow, and teams with a real edge and early momentum.
Growth now runs on trust. As AI commoditizes everything else, the products that win are the ones users believe in and stick with.
Roadmaps break when belief hardens into certainty. Treat every roadmap item as a hypothesis, and let learning, not delivery, decide what survives.
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82% of leaders want AI that helps teams collaborate, but something's missing. That's the finding from a NEW FORRESTER STUDY of 500+ AI decision-makers. On Jan 22 [9], Forrester analyst J. P. Gownder and Miro dig into the data and explain why CANVAS-BASED COLLABORATION
Strategy works when teams believe in it. Build buy-in early, communicate often, and treat execution as a shared commitment, not a mandate.
Leaders stall when they wait for perfect ideas. Share early, ask for feedback, and let learning, not ego, set the bar.
Progress comes from fixing one bottleneck at a time. Focus beats busyness. Throughput improves only when the true constraint is removed.
2026.01.16·theengineeringmanager.substack.com·6 min read·TLDR Product Entrepreneurship improves when you learn how to see uncertainty, not eliminate it. Effectuation turns luck into a skill by reshaping how decisions are made under risk.
Metrics can make products worse when they replace judgment.