Trends
What founders are reading this month.
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.
Distribution
The newsletter is the storefront now
Small companies have stopped treating the email list as a marketing afterthought and started treating it as the shop. The argument is about rent.
People
The first hire is a strategy document
Ask a founder what their company is for and you get a paragraph. Ask who they hired first and you get the answer.