Trends
What founders are reading this month.
Funding
The half that isn’t AI
Roughly half of every venture dollar in the world went to AI last year. For the founder building anything else, the number that matters isn’t that one — it’s the deal count underneath it.
Markets
The exit that didn’t come
The IPO window cracked open in 2025 — but only for a certain kind of company, and behind it sits a backlog of more than 1,500 unicorns worth $6 trillion that no exit market has cleared. What a founder building now should actually expect about ever getting out.
Funding
The fifty-billion-dollar hangover
More than $51 billion is parked in roughly 150 software companies that haven’t raised in four years and mostly can’t. For the founders who never took the money, the reckoning reads less like a warning than a vindication.
People
The headcount was the vanity
For a decade the size of the team was the proof the company mattered. Then venture money started buying half as many people per dollar, a handful of AI startups cleared nine figures with staff you could seat at one table, and the number quietly changed sides.
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.