Founder Weekly (Issue 695 July 30 2025)

Welcome to issue 695 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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General

AI Market Clarity

A subset of AI markets have crystalized in the last 12 months, with the likely market leaders for the next year or two suddenly clear.

Linear’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Quality and Craft > Speed and Scale

Linear CEO and co-founder Karri Saarinen unpacks the $1.25B company's slow and deliberate path to product-market fit.

Six Principles for Production AI Agents

Practical lessons from building production agentic systems.

5 Harsh Truths of Customer Feedback that hold Products Back

Gathering and organizing product feedback is a hard task for product managers. Learn the hard truths about customer feedback + what to do about it.

Marketing, Sales and PR

How to get recommended by ChatGPT

What actually works in getting cited by AI search engines.

How Claude Is Building A Unique Growth Engine Out of User-Created Apps

Anthropic recently launched Claude AI-powered apps. It's unique constraints creates a potentially new powerful growth model. Here is a full breakdown.

Max MRR: Your growth ceiling

Your company will stop growing sooner than you think. The “Max MRR” metric predicts revenue plateaus based on churn and new revenue.

Money and Finance

VCs love to claim they’re independent thinkers. The data is more complicated.

PitchBook's analysis reveals that while venture capitalists like to present themselves as independent thinkers, their investment decisions often reflect complex interdependencies shaped by market trends, peer behavior, and strategic considerations. The data shows that VC activity is influenced by broader economic factors, sector-specific dynamics, and cautious dealmaking, indicating that true independence in decision-making is nuanced and often moderated by external pressures and collective sentiments.

Data is actually not a great VC-backed business

The article argues that data businesses (selling raw data) are generally good but not great venture capital investments because they tend to grow slowly and profitably rather than explosively, which is what VCs typically seek. Despite the increasing availability of data and AI, the market for buying data has not expanded as rapidly as expected, making data companies better suited for private equity or small-scale funding instead of large VC rounds. ZoomInfo is noted as a rare profitable unicorn that never heavily relied on VC.

Fund Size is Strategy - Extreme Power Law Will Make Portfolio Company Conflicts a Relic of the Past

As multi-stage funds get larger and larger and the need to get into all of the power law winners is required to make their own fund math work, what happens to portfolio company conflict policies?