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In many accelerators, startups spend the program looking to ship and validate a minimum viable product, or MVP, readying it to a point to pitch to investors by demo day. In Elbow Grease, founders mostly knew how to use the various vibe-coding and agentic tools already in the market from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI; they could ship a product in a matter of days. Programming and workshops instead oriented around recruiting, sales and other aspects of company building.

Alex Konrad
1d ago

Inside the companies pulling ahead — Anthropic, Cursor, Cognition, Replit, and a small number of others — a different unit shape had emerged: five-to-ten people, direct CEO reporting, broad decision rights, hybrid roles, communication overhead at roughly one-tenth of a comparably-staffed conventional product unit.

1d ago

Few – if any – startups in Silicon Valley history have grown as big as Notion, or for as long, without some semblance of a board. But by virtue of a quirk of its own fundraising history and an intellectual internal leadership style, it's the position Notion found itself in even after more than a decade in operation, and as its valuation reached $11 billion.

1w ago

"There's a hype cycle game that sometimes works. And one model someone gave me was B2B software, AI whatever, in 2026 is much more like crypto in 2021, than [it is like] B2B in 2021. The hype matters. The hype goes into the next round. When you have that round and you have the valuation, you get more investors, you get more customers, you get more employees. Hopefully, then, you're using that to build real things, and rinse and repeat. But there is a hype 'fake it 'til you make it' game that I think can work."

1w ago

Over the next two and a half years, they visited and onboarded 100 doctor's offices onto test versions of their software, starting with basic use cases like managing claims with one insurance provider. 'You will not find many other people that are willing to obsess for so long, and so deep, over this,' Pelle says.

1w ago

He shares lessons from building Zynga, missing the opportunity behind social networking before Facebook took off, navigating platform risk during Zynga's explosive growth, and rebuilding his confidence after major failures.

1w ago

Nobody told you more than 220 companies that once hit billion-dollar valuations are now considered 'fallen unicorns'. The concentration of capital is also damaging - in that, the AI boom that has funneled more than $250 billion into OpenAI and Anthropic and reset valuations on entire classes of startups.

2w ago

2026 has been the year of Anthropic. They are the creator of the large language model Claude, which has taken the world by storm: The company was founded by a group of ex-OpenAI executives, who purportedly set out to create a more ethical generative AI tool.

3w ago

The difference between a business that's working and one that isn't is that the working one has solved the hard problem, and the non-working one hasn't. Most people spend all their time on easy problems.

2mo ago

The difference between a business and a cult is that a business creates value for the outside world; a cult extracts value from insiders and gives it to the leader. Most startups fail not because the idea is bad, but because the founder confused the two.

3mo ago

The difference between a business and a cult is that a business creates value for people who are not going to work there. A cult is just a business where you worship the CEO.

3mo ago

It's never been easier to launch products, which means the biggest challenge product teams are facing is quickly becoming distribution.

3mo ago

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

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