Founder Weekly (Issue 710 December 3 2025)

Welcome to issue 710 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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General

From Network Effects to Cognitive Effects: The New Rules for Platform Dominance

The new rule for platform dominance is shifting from Network Effects to Cognitive Effects, where a product's primary moat comes from its deep, irreplaceable understanding of the individual user. By using AI to build a compounding, personal "cognition" layer based on cumulative interactions, a platform becomes indispensable because no competitor can replicate its unique predictive intelligence.

9-9-6-0

The essay reflects on the current AI startup “gold rush,” arguing that 9-9-6-style grind culture can easily leave many workers with burned time, worthless equity, and no guaranteed payoff even if they do everything “right.”

The TAM Is All of Human Labor

The total addressable market for AI is expanding to encompass all human labor, as verifiability is the key to automating complex white-collar work. Startups are building the core infrastructure for this shift, using reinforcement learning (RL) environments to turn messy workflows into graded, verifiable tasks for model training.

How startups lose their edge

A firsthand account of how "playing not to lose" can accidentally kill your startup.

From tasks to systems: A practical playbook for operationalizing AI

How to automate real workflows and upskill your team with the CRAFT Cycle framework.

Marketing, Sales and PR

What world-class GTM looks like in 2026

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (Vercel COO, ex-Stripe) details world-class 2026 GTM: AI agents automate SDR workflows (10x efficiency), GTM engineers build custom tools, and sales treats GTM as a product with segmentation, Gong-powered deal bots, and engineer-respected teams.

LLM Seeding: An AI Search Strategy to Get Mentioned and Cited

LLM seeding helps your brand get cited in AI responses. Learn how it works, why it matters, and how to start.

Money and Finance

The Merger Playbook: Crossbeam’s CEO Breaks Down Every Detail of the Deal That Worked

A founder's firsthand account of how he merged with a competitor to materially change the trajectory of his company.

The Price of Progress in Venture

The "price of progress" in venture capital is a bifurcated market where easier software creation has intensified competition, causing valuations to soar for top-tier "breakout" teams while squeezing the middle class of startups. In this environment of abundant capital, success now hinges on an investor's "taste" to identify rare outliers and a founder's resilience to navigate necessary pivots toward true product-market fit.

Private Equity : The New Distribution Channel for AI Startups

Private equity firms now own nearly four times as many US companies as the public market, creating a massive, consolidated distribution channel for AI startups. This shift offers AI companies a streamlined path to scale, as PE firms are motivated buyers seeking efficiency tools to deploy across their extensive portfolios of mid-market companies.