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Upstarts Year One: The Ones Worth Keeping34
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2w ago
lennysnewsletter.com
A guide to advanced B2B positioning

There is a sharp distinction between investor positioning and customer positioning; confusing the two is one of the most common mistakes founders make. While the board wants a grand vision of the future, buyers simply want a reason to choose your product to solve a specific, painful problem today.

2w ago
wildfirelabs
The Founder's Paradox: When Competence Becomes a Liability

A founder's greatest strength—personal competence—eventually becomes the company's biggest liability as it scales. To reach the next level of growth, you must evolve from an orchestrator of systems to a network node that distributes actual decision rights, not just repetitive tasks.

2w ago
hypeyourself
How to write a press release (that doesn't get ignored)

Only write a press release for real news: launches, events, big partnerships, original research, awards, or crisis updates. Structure it like a news story with the key facts—Who, What, When, Where, Why—in the first 1–2 sentences. Avoid the 'look how great I am' trap; it's not an opinion piece or a blog.

2w ago
aprildunford.com
Positioning vs Strategy vs Vision

Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at providing some value that your best-fit customers care a lot about right now. It is firmly rooted in the present and describes why a specific type of customer should choose your product over any other alternative today. Positioning changes over time as we follow our strategy on the journey to the vision.

2w ago
zenkoh
The Exception Economy: Healthcare AI’s Real Market Is the Work That Refuses to Automate

The scarce asset is ownership of exception-heavy workflows where administrative burden, clinical ambiguity, reimbursement friction, and safety accountability intersect. A modest AI company embedded deeply into prior authorisation, post-acute coordination, or payer-clinician documentation may be more valuable than a technically impressive company floating above workflow reality.

2w ago
robertwachter
Can AI Rescue Us from the Mess of Prior Auth?

The question is not, “Should prior auth go away completely?” It can’t and it won’t. Rather, the question should be, “Can prior auth be made more ethical and less infuriating?” I believe it can, and that AI can help. But it will require a rethinking of the entire process.

2w ago
waseem
Delegate, don't abdicate

There is a big difference between delegating responsibility and abdicating responsibility. While you want to give new hires ownership and agency, you are still ultimately accountable for everything the business does; you must stay close enough to the details to understand if the work is succeeding or if you need to intervene.

3w ago
wsj.com
The Era of the Tiger Mom Is Over. Enter the Beta Mom. - WSJ

In 1975, for example, women spent an average of 14 minutes a week helping their kids with their homework. By 2018, the most recent year for which the modern data is harmonized with historical, that amount had nearly quintupled (to an hour and nine minutes). The pattern holds across every child-centric category of adult time-use, including infant care (up from an hour and 40 minutes to nearly four hours) and playing with kids (from 36 minutes to nearly three hours).

1mo ago

You boarded, you set sail, you've made the passage. Time to disembark. If it's for another life, well, there's nowhere without gods on that side either. If to nothingness, then you no longer have to put up with pain and pleasure, or go on dancing attendance on this battered crate, your body—so much inferior to that which serves it. One is mind and spirit, the other earth and garbage.

1mo ago
fathom.video
Interview: Ivan Mehta (TechCrunch) <<>> Richard White (Fathom)

I think it's kind of a tragedy of the commons thing where it's like, you know, for most folks, when you're in like a public, quasi-public meeting, like a sales meeting or CS meeting, having bot meetings is not a big deal. I think more and more as these tools become kind of so ubiquitous because they're so valuable. Everyone has the experience of like, I'm on an internal meeting and there's more bots than people.

2mo ago
bloomberg.com
The Rise and Fall of Peter Attia’s Longevity Empire

As part of his self-education, Attia read journalist Gary Taubes’ 2007 book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, and traveled up from San Diego in 2011 to meet him in San Francisco, armed with a 27-page list of questions, according to Taubes’ blog.

3mo ago
jamesclear.com

"Trust in yourself is not only built through successful repetitions, but also through failed ones. When you have worked through failures in the past, you fear them less in the future. You know you can bounce back. Successful repetitions build competence. Failed repetitions build resilience."

3mo ago

Things ordinary people are impressed by fall into the categories of things that are held together by simple physics (like stone or wood), or by natural growth (figs, vines, olives...). Those admired by more advanced minds are held together by a living soul (sheep, herds of cows). Still more sophisticated people admire what is guided by a rational mind – not the universal mind, but one admired for technical knowledge, or for some other skill.

3mo ago

Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpse once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.

3mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
Meet The AI Ring Startup Taking On OpenAI And Meta In Wearables

The thing that gets me excited is the promise of technology as an augmentation of the individual, that places the human in control, makes the human more capable, more free. And I really don't see any other product making that the center of all of their design choices.

3mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
Flexport's Ryan Petersen On Tariff Refunds, AI Agents And How To Win Back Customers

“You have to remember that no one cares about your startup. I’m blessed that you’re asking me questions about my startup, and you seem to be interested in it, but in general, nobody cares about your startup. They care about things that are happening that are relevant in their world, and they’re only going to care about you to the extent that you are either providing perspective on that other thing, or are a good example of the thing.

3mo ago

The particular has no power without the universal, and the universal has no meaning without the particular. We cannot live only by bread, nor only by beauty; we need both, and in the right proportion.

3mo ago
a16z.com
The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps — 6th Edition | Andreessen Horowitz

For pure consumers, the most common standalone AI desktop applications are voice-related. Notetakers like Fireflies, Fathom, Otter, TL;DV, and Granola, have reached users via PLG and increasingly saturated enterprises — with a combined 20M visitors combined across the top five players. Workspace apps like Notion (debuting on this list), have also increasingly integrated AI via notetakers, research agents, and even task automation.

3mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Monday Media Diet with Tom Junod

“I told him to get as many copies as he can of Joe Brainard’s “I Remember.” It’s a slim book that consists of nothing but sentences that begin with the words “I remember.” They seem offhand and incredibly random: “I remember Dole pineapple rings on a bed of lettuce with cottage cheese on top and sometimes a cherry on top of that.” But they add up with incredible accumulative power..."

3mo ago
bloomberg.com
Apple to Expand Ultra Lines After $599 MacBook Neo; 3D-Printed Aluminum; iMacs - Bloomberg

Just a few years ago, it would have been nearly impossible for Apple to build a product like this. Several developments helped make it viable. New manufacturing technologies lowered the cost of producing aluminum enclosures. The Apple A18 Pro chip from the iPhone 16 became inexpensive enough to deploy at scale. And macOS has gradually been redesigned with more color and visual personality, making Macs potentially more appealing to a younger audience.

3mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
Designer VCs At Character Capital Raise $52 Million Fund

"There’s nothing more “agonizing” than laboring on a product nobody wants. It’s a tool for isolating and crystallizing your intuition about your business. It’s elementary stuff, but time and again since we started doing this, it’s proven remarkably useful, even for very sophisticated founders.”

3mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
More Bangers, More Fun: 6 Upstarts Media Resolutions For 2026

But whether you’re sized more like a small business or an AI unicorn, the emotional rollercoaster of being a founder is probably the same. At Upstarts, I vacillate daily between the exuberance of empire-building, and questioning what it means to really exist.

3mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
AI Lab poolside's Founders Talk The Model Race, Meta, And Bad Advice From VCs

"Your data moat is asymmetry of information. You’re on this call with us, getting asymmetric info. When you get a revenue number, only you have it. A journalistic scoop is something where human contact is critical, because as humans, we’re willing to share those things.”

3mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
Loyal's Celine Halioua: From Defying Doubters To Pioneering Dog Longevity

“I just thought this was super unacceptable When you’re a kid you’re like, ‘Oh, adults can always fix everything. And the realization that that wasn’t the case, and we all have these ticking time bombs inside of us, and that one day you could just get this diagnosis and that’s it? I kind of had an existential breakdown, honestly.

3mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
Exclusive Interview: Wiz's Co-Founder On AI, Security And Google

“We invested a lot in making a very nice UI with a graph, a very nice graph. And maybe it’s not important anymore,” he tells Upstarts. “It’s great, but I’m trying to forget it… you either reinvent yourself, or you will be replaced.”

3mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
AI Lab poolside's Founders Talk The Model Race, Meta, And Bad Advice From VCs

“Apps are the expression of intelligence, whereas core intelligence itself is derived from the models. Look at any apps or agents that exist in the market, and how few lines of code they are. They don’t need to be what we thought of previously as software, because they’re effectively just wrapping up this new thing, this alien intelligence that we now have.”

3mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
AI Lab poolside's Founders Talk The Model Race, Meta, And Bad Advice From VCs

“Venture capitalists are no longer in the foundation model race, because they can’t be at this scale, so the narrative quickly becomes that the application layer is going to win,” says Kant. “If your incentive structure is oriented towards the application layer, that’s what you have to say,” adds Warner.

3mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
IPO Interview: Klarna's CEO Talks IKEA, Vibe Coding With Cursor, Stablecoins

“People ask me about the IPO and ringing the bell. I’m sure all of that’s going to be really cool and a fantastic experience. But for me personally, emotionally, after being this kid from this small city north of Stockholm, to actually stand in Bentonville at Sam Walton’s grave — and to realize that I will now have the opportunity to work with the biggest retailer in the world, that I’ve always been the biggest fan of — that to me is emotional on a different level.”

3mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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