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- Founder Weekly (Issue 694 July 23 2025)
Founder Weekly (Issue 694 July 23 2025)
Rahul Chaudhary
July 23, 2025
In partnership with
Welcome to issue 694 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
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General
Chelsea Finn describes her team’s progress in building general-purpose robots that can handle messy, real-world tasks like folding laundry and tidying kitchens by using foundation models and large-scale real-world data, rather than hand-coded solutions. She highlights the challenges and breakthroughs in training robots to generalize across tasks, emphasizing the importance of diverse, real-world data and advanced learning techniques inspired by language models.
Not all fast-growing startups become category leaders. This essay explores how AI hype, fundraising pressure, and short-term metrics create false-positive incumbents—and what founders can do to build lasting companies.
It's the first AI tool that feels like delegating to a colleague, not prompting a chatbot.
The rise of AI avatars and AI replicas isn't just a trend, but is the future of interaction.
Marketing, Sales and PR
The widening gap between early-stage startups and everyone else.
The B2B SaaS market is seeing a major shift. Buyers now expect to try products through hands-on free trials and proof-of-concepts (POCs) rather than just receive sales presentations. Companies with AI-powered, scalable demos achieve higher conversion rates because customers can experience and confirm value before making a purchase. To succeed, sales teams must adapt by focusing on tech-driven, customer-first POC experiences.
Money and Finance
This study shows that when venture capitalists and entrepreneurs look alike, the likelihood of funding rises by 3.2 percentage points, even after accounting for shared race, gender, or age. However, companies funded through these visually similar matches have a 7 percent lower chance of a successful exit. The influence of facial similarity vanishes when deal selection is managed externally, indicating it primarily operates as an initial screening shortcut, and that altering deal sourcing methods could help minimize its effect on investment results.
HALO deals allow tech companies to hire a startup's staff and pay a large licensing fee, providing an alternative to traditional acquisitions, especially as antitrust regulations tighten. These deals are designed to offer acquisition-like outcomes for employees and investors, while meeting growing demand for AI talent.
When Did Contrarian Give Way to Consensus?
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