Founder Weekly (Issue 688 June 4 2025)

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StartEngine’s $30M Surge — Own a Piece Before June 26

Private markets are having a moment, thanks to companies like StartEngine.

The leading alternative investing platform is helping everyday investors like you access deals once reserved for VCs and insiders, including exposure to private market titans like OpenAI, Databricks, and Perplexity.¹

How’s it going? In Q1 2025, StartEngine pulled off $30M in revenue, its biggest quarter ever (based on unaudited financials).²

But StartEngine isn’t just a middleman. The company earns 20% carried interest on select pre-IPO offerings, unlocking value for shareholders when these deals succeed.³

How can you tap into this diversification play? By investing in StartEngine.

StartEngine has crowdfunded $85M+ to date, and you can join 45K+ shareholders before the company’s current round closes on June 26.

Invest in StartEngine

_{Reg A+ via StartEngine Crowdfunding, Inc. No BD/intermediary involved. Investment is speculative, illiquid & high risk. See OC and Risks on page.}

General

Trends - Artificial Intelligence

AI is evolving at an unprecedented pace, outstripping even the early internet in user adoption, usage trends, and capital deployment. This data-driven report highlights surging innovation, spending, and competition across startups, tech incumbents, and global powers.

The Art of Evals

How Figma Put People at the Center of Its AI Product.

Voice-First Playbooks in Vertical AI

The post argues that conversational, speech-to-speech voice agents are poised to become a major force in Vertical AI, enabling more natural, frictionless interfaces and unlocking new market opportunities across industries where phone-based workflows are critical. It highlights how advances in native voice models and specialized developer tools are driving adoption, but stresses that deep vertical expertise, workflow integration, and trust are essential for startups to build defensible, high-value voice-first products in an increasingly competitive landscape.

The Great ERP Unbundling: Seizing Startup Upside in the Replacement Super Cycle

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the largest software market on the planet, and it’s on the cusp of its greatest disruption in 20 years.

Should You “Rent” an Exec for Your Startup? A Fractional COO Weighs In

A veteran strategy and ops leader turned fractional COO walks us through why, when and how early-stage founders can tap fractional execs to learn and grow faster.

Marketing, Sales and PR

Designing an AI-Native Marketing Team: A Guide for Founders

As we enter the AI era, early-stage companies enjoy a significant advantage when building their marketing teams. There’s no legacy martech stack to untangle, no complex integrations powering cross-functional workflows to break, and few marketing specialists whose roles might soon be automated. But this advantage comes with a challenge: How do you design a marketing?

You should play with vibecoding for GTM

How to use tools like Lovable, Bolt, Cursor and Replit to quickly build GTM leverage.

Money and Finance

The Return of Taste: Why Consumer Investing Is Back and Smarter Than Ever

Why recent funding rounds like David Protein ($725M), Grüns ($500M), and exits like Rhode ($1B) and Poppi ($1.65B) mark a new era of profitable, repeat-purchase consumer brands.

An Allocator’s Manifesto: Why is every single fund top quartile?

The post critiques the venture capital industry’s overreliance on “top quartile” metrics, arguing that such averages are misleading in power-law environments where outlier funds drive nearly all returns. Instead, it urges allocators to focus on identifying and deeply understanding outliers, since robust statistics like medians obscure the real signals that matter for outsized success in venture investing.

How to raise a seed round

The post offers a clear, practical guide to raising a seed round, covering how much to raise, choosing between equity and convertible instruments, crafting a compelling narrative, and understanding investor expectations. It draws on firsthand experience from both founder and VC perspectives, providing actionable advice on team composition, dilution, milestones, and the fundraising process to help first-time founders navigate early-stage capital raising with confidence.