Trends
What founders are reading this month.
Workplaces
The office is back — but only if the founder pays for lunch
Small companies are filling their desks again without a single mandate. The method is unglamorous: food, chairs, and a room where nobody talks to you.
Tools
Back to paper: why analog planning is beating dashboards
Founders are cancelling the analytics stack and buying notebooks. The argument isn’t nostalgia — it’s that a dashboard measures and a page decides.
Hardware
Prototype cities: where physical products get built in 2026
A handful of mid-size cities have quietly assembled everything a hardware founder needs within a twenty-minute drive. The ingredient nobody can buy is the machinist.
Strategy
Niche is the new scale: the rise of the $10M “small giant”
A cohort of founders is capping revenue on purpose and taking the margin instead. The hard part isn’t the decision — it’s holding it after the first good year.
Funding
Customer-funded: the quiet alternative to the seed round
Deposits, pre-orders and retainers are financing more first years than any fund is. The money is real — the trap is that it doesn’t feel like debt.
Craft
Heritage brands, new hands: apprenticeships as succession plans
Craft owners in their late sixties are handing companies to the people who swept their floors, and structuring it as a sale. The maths is worse than private equity and they’re doing it anyway.