Founder Weekly (Issue 702 October 1 2025)

Welcome to issue 702 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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General

The One-Person, Billion-Dollar Power Development Company

The article argues that advances in AI and robotics are enabling the emergence of a one-person power development company capable of moving 500 MW of project pipeline per year and generating about $100 million in development fees, potentially valued at around $1 billion by 2030. This transformation collapses traditional, labor-intensive, and sequential power development processes into accelerated, agent-driven workflows, lowering barriers to entry, speeding up power buildout, and helping the U.S. meet surging AI-driven energy demand and national targets.

Developer laws in the AI era

AI developer platforms are rewriting the rules of pricing, design, and defensibility in the age of agentic development. Here are eight (work in progress) laws for founders building for humans and agents.

The Hard Way Pays Off: Inside Sierra’s Design Partner Strategy

Sierra built its early success by creating a design partner program focused on real enterprise customers, not just “AI tourists,” involving them deeply in product development and aligning incentives through paid, time-limited collaborations. This hands-on strategy led to rapid product-market fit, a 100% partner-to-customer conversion rate, and a product offering where the majority of features originated from the requests and feedback of those initial design partners.

What we’ve learned about building AI-powered features

How to choose the right features, implement them the right way, and make them better (for real).

Marketing, Sales and PR

Cluely Thesis on Virality and Hype

Cluely’s virality strategy is founded on creating genuinely viral content organically seen by a few thousand users, which then naturally amplifies through reposts and engagement on platforms like X, with follower count playing a minor role beyond 10k followers. The real benefit of virality lies in generating top-of-funnel awareness to attract users or feedback, but long-term growth depends on having a competitive product that retains users beyond the initial viral boost. Cluely has used this approach to reliably test features, reach consumer markets, and drive consistent product improvement post-product-market fit.

The rising consumer to enterprise AI playbook

Inside Fyxer’s path from $1 to $17 million in 8 months.

Money and Finance

VCBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Venture Capital

VCBench is the first benchmark for predicting founder success in venture capital, built on 9,000 anonymized founder profiles with strong privacy safeguards. Early results show LLMs like DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o outperform both human investors and market baselines, setting a new standard for reproducible, AGI-driven venture forecasting.

How to Size the Market for Vertical AI

Why “small market” are the two most dangerous words in venture capital.

More Thoughts on the Existential Crisis in Seed: One Question, Two Views of the World

The article explores the existential crisis facing seed investing, framed around one key question of targeting the most profitable market inefficiency. It contrasts two worldviews: the “classic venture” focus on early-stage, pre-traction startups, and the “super-compounder” approach emphasizing rare, high-potential winners. The current market favors super-compounders due to AI-driven shifts and capital concentration, but cyclically, the opportunity for classic seed investing will reemerge as the market evolves.