Search the archive

Terms and Conditions apply, linked HERE [5].

THE “ALIEN” ECONOMICS OF AI MONETIZATION

Two-thirds of the companies on the Forbes AI 50 list use some form of usage-based pricing. AI's variable costs and unpredictable demand are causing today's leading companies to operate in ways that would seem alien to traditional SaaS businesses. These companies are iterating much faster on pricing, prioritizing market share over ARR, and pursuing multiple go-to-market strategies at once.

WHY THERE WILL BE MORE PRO RATA CONFLICTS

Early-stage funds increasingly exercise pro rata rights across multiple rounds as they grow, driven by outliers offering significant upside potential. The rise of secondary markets and financial vehicles like Fund of Funds and SPVs supports smaller funds in monetizing pro rata shares. Faster round pacing within a fund's investment period further contributes to potential pro rata conflicts.

38 THINGS WE'VE LEARNED ABOUT BUILDING AI PRODUCTS

PostHog has built 10 different AI products over the last four years. These include PostHog AI, PostHog's install Wizard, Replay Vision, and Scouts. PostHog's AI products are used by nearly 100,000 people every month. This post details what the company has learned from building them.

ARR VS GAAP REVENUE | SPOTTING “ARR” LIES

Businesses need to stay honest about what ARR actually is. If ARR doesn't ultimately lead to revenue and cash, then it's a fake metric. Most companies need to redefine or evolve their definitions of ARR for the AI era. ARR should turn into GAAP revenue, and it shouldn't take a really long time for that to happen.

HOW TO GROW A MASSIVE BRAND (FULL 2026 MASTERCLASS)

A founder's account and a company's account don't need to publish the same things. This guide assigns the founder the beliefs, lessons, and experience of building, while the company explains products and launches. It also distinguishes posts that attract new people from posts that build trust or encourage a purchase. That gives teams a clearer way to judge results: a post meant to introduce the company should not be assessed only by immediate sales. Interested followers can then move into email or a community for a longer relationship.

SEE HOW IT WORKS

RUN RECURRING JOBS ON STRIPE WITHOUT A CRON SERVER

Stripe Workflows now supports recurring schedule triggers. Users choose when a workflow runs, and Stripe starts a run at each scheduled time. Scheduled workflows pair well with list actions and loops. The workflow lives in the Dashboard, so the team that owns the process can read it, change it, and see every run.

GEMINI 4 ARGON AVAILABLE ON GOOGLE CLOUD, BUILT TO HELP SOLVE YOUR BUSINESS' HARDEST PROBLEMS

Gemini 4 Argon is now available on Google Cloud. Argon was trained to work with both depth and precision. It can maintain context across long, multi-step tasks and produce precise, verifiable results. Argon launches with an introductory rate of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off through to November 30, after which the standard pricing of $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens will apply.

OK, I MIGHT HAVE BEEN WRONG ABOUT BUILDING WITH A LEAN TEAM IN THE AGE OF AI

Chatbase is now at 40 people, and it plans to double its number of employees in the next 6 months. Building is now much easier, and the opportunity cost of not building more is huge. Companies that want to build more, grow more, and achieve more still need to hire because humans are still needed in many parts of the building loop. While this might change, it doesn't make sense to act like it isn't true right now.

CAPITAL STACKS FOR ATOMS

Capital allocation has shifted from bits-based businesses to atoms-based businesses over the last few years. Investors have been directing capital to overcome the physical-world bottlenecks of inference. There's an emerging cohort of atoms-based companies in the fields of energy, manufacturing, space, robotics, and beyond. These hard asset businesses are increasingly built and valued on bundles of cash flows rather than revenue multiples. This requires an entirely different approach to capital formation across the company lifecycle.

FRICTION

AI enables us to do the things we previously procrastinated over.

WHY MORE FEATURES WON'T SAVE YOUR STARTUP

Adding more features isn't a guaranteed solution for struggling startups.

THE DEATH OF VENTURE CAPITAL'S SHORT KINGS

Small VC funds face pressure to grow so they can keep investing in their companies and retain influence in later rounds.

DON'T DIAGNOSE YOUR OPPONENTS

Deciding that a colleague opposes your plan because they fear change does not tell you whether their objection is correct.

WE HIRED OUR WAY INTO GOING SLOWER

A founder has to protect their focus, attention, and execution on purpose, even when it's uncomfortable.

INCENTIVES DRIVE BEHAVIOUR

Angel investors prioritize founder stories and conviction over data, investing personal capital without external pressure.

EXPLORE STRIPE TREASURY

SOFTWARE'S CENTAUR AGE MAY LAST DECADES

Human engineers paired with AI coding systems are more effective than either by themselves. This fact is likely to remain true for the next decade or two. Software engineers have plenty of time to consider their next move. There's no need to panic and jump ship early when there's still time to live out an entire normal-length career.

THE DEVELOPER HIRING REBOUND FAVORS SENIORS

CNBC reports that software-development job postings rose even as overall US postings declined. Senior jobs supplied most of one measured increase, while employment among developers aged 22 to 25 remained under pressure. Founders should distinguish demand for experienced AI-capable builders from a broad recovery across the engineering talent market.

PART 1/3 OWNING INTELLIGENCE SERIES: HOW COINBASE BUILT, EVALUATED, AND POST-TRAINED A FRAUD AGENT

Coinbase built an LLM risk agent onto Onramp's existing ML model and rules. Online A/B experiments showed a 30% reduction in fraudulent transactions and 22% less fraud value. Coinbase then post-trained Qwen3.5-9B on its proprietary Onramp fraud dataset. The resulting model outperformed Opus 4.5 on all fraud detection metrics while delivering 55% lower end-to-end online serving latency.

“YOU DIDN'T DO IT RIGHT”

When OKRs don't work, how many times are you supposed to try again? WP Engine gave them four attempts, including paid training and coaching, and kept hearing that it wasn't doing them properly. What eventually worked was much smaller. One team picked a metric it cared about, set a loose goal, and followed it for a quarter before adding anything else. The metric also had to measure something the team could actually control, so people weren't being judged on a number their own work couldn't fix.

YOUR CHURN PROBLEM STARTED IN THE COMP PLAN

Your reps are hitting their targets, but a year later the customers are gone. One founder in this piece lost 30% of the previous year's new customers and wanted to know what was wrong. The answer starts with what reps get paid to sell. In a separate Airtable example, a birthday-calendar user counted as much toward the new-logo target as a team running a critical workflow. Airtable began scoring prospects against its best customers, giving reps smaller account lists and paying more for customers with room to grow.

Hire your first AI worker now →

CLAUDE LAUNCHES DASHBOARDS AND MOTION IN BETA

Claude Dashboards and Claude Motion are now in beta. Claude Dashboards connects to data platforms, allowing Claude to build dashboards that update as the underlying data changes. Claude Motion converts reports, charts, and product walkthroughs into short animated explainers. Claude's broader artifact suite now supports team editing, admin-controlled external sharing, PowerPoint and PDF exports that retain formatting, editable Google Slides exports, and mobile editing.

INTRODUCING OPEN INTELLIGENT UI: THE OPEN-SOURCE ALTERNATIVE TO CHATGPT'S INTELLIGENT UI

Open Intelligent UI answers prompts with charts, maps, and working tools, and can create interfaces on demand. Interfaces can be downloaded as a standalone HTML file. Open Intelligent UI is compatible with any model and works with existing components. It runs generated code in an isolated iframe, and it can only load libraries from an approved list of CDNs.

MODELS AS INSIDER RISKS IN THE SUPER INTELLIGENCE ERA

We need to separate the supply of intelligence from the authority over it. This means surrounding non-deterministic models with strong, deterministic system design, human controls, and reliable operating procedures, and establishing industry standards where existing ones are insufficient. Any sufficiently capable actor with access to important systems can make mistakes or be compromised. The architecture of containment and control must account for that.

HOW CHINA'S VENTURE ECOSYSTEM WORKS

China's venture ecosystem pushes startups toward early IPOs through investor repayment clauses and a weak acquisition market. Government-backed funds, domestic USD investors, financial advisors, and relationship networks shape fundraising, while industrial policy directs capital toward strategic sectors.

CLOUDED JUDGEMENT 10.9.26 - CACHE IS THE NEW EGRESS

Egress matters because it created real switching costs - cache is similar in that swapping out models mid-session means building that cache over again.

I THINK YOU CAN EASILY INSTALL POSTIZ OPEN-SOURCE WITH LLMS.

Postiz's founder argues that making self-hosting difficult loses users who create tutorials and spread the product, while frustrated users who pay instead are unlikely to stay.

HOW TO GO FROM 0-100M VIEWS/MONTH

This is a tactical guide on how to scale a company from zero to 100 million organic views per month.

THE DOUBLE-COUNTED FUTURE

Everyone wants to operate with fewer employees because their collective can be much higher due to productivity gains from AI.

4 TEAM RITUALS THAT DRIVE AI ADOPTION

Teams need to create forums centered on peer support where both beginners and skilled practitioners can learn, practice, and refine AI skills in a low-pressure environment to foster team-wide adoption.

EXPLORE STRIPE TREASURY

THE INFINITE SAAS FACTORY

Microsoft has announced more than 30 new Copilot skills across Dynamics 365 Sales, Service, and Customer Insights, allowing users to use Copilot across Chat, Cowork, Autopilot, and Code to complete even more end-to-end workflows. Microsoft has also introduced Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime, which provides hosting infrastructure that lets code run safely inside a company's environment, governed by IT. Together, these new tools start to form what the company envisions as an infinite SaaS factory.

YOU NEED A NEW CFO

AI-driven tools are transforming the CFO role, shifting focus from data management to strategic business architecture. Finance teams, now leaner and equipped with AI-native software, are evolving toward continuous forecasting and automated workflows. This change allows CFOs to prioritize real-time decision-making, enhancing their strategic influence within companies.

MARKETING ENGINEERS: 100X MORE EXPERIMENTS WITH AI AGENTS

Marketing engineers are the new 10x employee. Part marketers, part builders, marketing engineers understand the customer the best and can act on this understanding the fastest. The best marketing teams in the future will be one or two marketing engineers running dozens of agents. Most people sitting in growth, content, and ops roles right now are one weekend of billing away from becoming a marketing engineer. This post provides a full playbook on how to become one.

PRODUCT DEFINITION

Product definition is the ability to define requirements, functionality, and context in a clear, actionable form that enables humans and agents to deliver the right product. It involves getting the right product built well, understanding the people you build for, choosing the outcomes that matter, and rallying people around the organization to make things happen. The foundation of successful product management is the ability to work with a cross-functional team to define, build, and launch well-designed, stable products. The best product builders strive to execute flawlessly.

REFERENCES ARE THE MOST UNDERRATED TOOL IN HIRING

By the time you're calling references on a candidate you want to hire, it can be hard to change your mind. This hiring guide starts the calls after the second interview, with the candidate's permission, and spreads them through the process. Build ten questions about what you still need to know for this particular role. Ask for stories and comparisons with other colleagues instead of adjectives like smart or hardworking. The answers can shape the next interview, including which claims to test. If a reference suggests another person to call, get the candidate's permission first.

START FOR FREE

INTRODUCING THE GEMINI AGENT

The Gemini agent is a single, universal agent for work. It can gather all of a user's business context to complete tasks from knowledge work to answering questions, and from content creation to coding, all from a single prompt box. The agent plans the work, uses skills and tools, connects to systems, and returns something finished. It chooses the best model for the job and has built-in cost controls. The Gemini agent is able to follow security, administration, and governance policies set by the company.

ULTRAFAST MODE

OpenAI has released an API service tier for latency-sensitive work. Ultrafast mode is now broadly available for GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol. It has separate rate limits from Standard and Fast modes. Ultrafast is best suited for tasks where speed justifies a higher cost.

CLAUDE HAIKU 5.5

Run high-volume summarization, classification, coding, support, and browser tasks efficiently.

AI VERSUS VENDOR LOCK-IN

Lock-in persisted for a long time because leaving was too expensive and risky. AI changed the cost of migrations. It's now possible to build a purpose-made converter, reimplement the behavior the business depends on, and use agents to move both code and data across. Businesses now have the ability to leave when the cost of staying gets too high.