Founder Weekly (Issue 698 September 3 2025)

Welcome to issue 698 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

General

The Silent Killer of Startups: Founder Role Ossification

The silent killer of startups isn’t competition. It’s when the founders stop evolving. The habits that fuel early success can quietly become the bottlenecks that choke growth. This is founder role ossification and it shows up earlier than most realize. Learn how it happens, the most common traps, and how founders can avoid becoming the ceiling on their own company.

The AI research experimentation problem

AI research faces major bottlenecks in rigorous experiment design, execution reliability, and reliable analysis, rather than just a lack of ideas or compute. Solving these problems requires improved scientific culture, collaboration, and tooling to accelerate valuable progress and ensure results are reproducible and meaningful.

To Learn a New Market, Start by Building Your Product — Tactics From a Twitter PM Turned Healthcare Founder

Color co-founder and CEO Othman Laraki built a billion-dollar company in an industry he had zero professional experience in. Here, he shares four product-building tactics that helped him learn the healthcare industry.

OpenAI’s Product Lead Reveals the 4-Part Framework for AI Product Strategy

The article outlines a guide to crafting an effective AI product strategy, emphasizing the need to focus on solving user problems rather than just adding AI features. It highlights OpenAI's role in driving AI innovation, with insights from industry leaders like Miqdad Jaffer, to create competitive AI products.

Marketing, Sales and PR

How Hotels Can Thrive in an Agentic AI World: From SEO to MCP

AI assistants are transforming hotel bookings by enabling efficient, personalized travel planning, but hotels risk losing visibility without AI-readable data. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) offers a solution, allowing hotels to integrate with AI agents for real-time queries, bookings, and enhanced guest services.

Pricing Power in Agentic Software’s Sophomoric Years

Agentic software faces pricing ceilings when buyers compare software against the cost of human labor or incumbent platforms, often limiting price to whatever a junior employee or existing system would cost. To unlock premium pricing, companies are repositioning agentic tools as “services,” tapping into larger budgets and shifting buyer perceptions away from simple software benchmarks to value-based outcomes.

Money and Finance

Is venture broken?

The thread analyzes the competitive venture capital landscape, showing mega-funds dominate larger early-stage rounds while boutique funds remain strong in smaller deals. It highlights evolving market trends, including longer Seed-to-Series A timelines and fundraising challenges amid constrained IPO markets.

The Rise of Front-Loaded Vesting

The post explains front-loaded vesting, where a larger portion of equity or benefits is granted early in an employee's tenure. This structure aims to incentivize early commitment but can pose financial risks if not managed carefully.