Founder Weekly (Issue 712 December 17 2025)

Welcome to issue 712 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

The New Enterprise Approach to Voice AI Deployment

A practical, repeatable lifecycle for designing, testing, and scaling Voice AI. Learn how BELL helps teams deploy faster, improve call outcomes, and maintain reliability across complex operations.

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General

From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn

YC founder James Hawkins recounts PostHog's journey from six months of brutal "pivot hell" (trying sales tools, dev surveys, etc.) to breakthrough with self-hosted open-source product analytics just before YC W20 Demo Day. He shares hard fundraising lessons amid COVID chaos, scaling to 160 employees/$1.4B unicorn status via transparency/humor in marketing (wild billboards, humanized website), and betting big on AI-automated product tools like auto-generated PRs from customer data.

AI Best Practices for Bootstrappers (That Actually Save You Money)

Discover essential AI integration best practices to enhance your data handling with LLMs while building robust systems like Podscan.

2025: The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise

For all the fears of over-investment, AI is spreading across enterprises at a pace with no precedent in modern software history.

Systems of Record are Dead. Long Live Systems of Record

The author argues that systems of record are not dying in the age of AI agents; instead, reliable sources of truth remain essential as automation grows and workflows span multiple systems. While agents can orchestrate actions across tools and data, they depend on clearly defined canonical sources and semantic contracts to avoid errors and ambiguity in enterprise workflows.

Diffusion of AI Across Vertical Markets

Vertical Workflow Architects needed to fill the Adoption Gap.

Marketing, Sales and PR

Momentum

The post argues that in the AI era of 2025, startup "momentum" remains crucial—not as flashy pilots or outbound spikes, but as compounding efficiency in turning learnings into capital-efficient revenue systems that reduce acquisition costs over time. It warns founders against mistaking AI GTM "activity" (e.g., experimental budgets, logo slides) for durable progress, urging stage-specific metrics like repeatable ICP motions and a distinction between pilot vs. operational spend to preserve ownership and build real moats.

The AI churn wave?

A data-driven investigation into retention for AI apps.

Money and Finance

Why Most Investors Confuse Activity With Progress

In early-stage investing, visible activity often replaces real judgment, creating motion without momentum. The investors who win are not the busiest ones, but the ones who protect attention, form conviction early, and act decisively when it matters.

Does valuation or ownership matter more to a seed VC? Yes.

For a seed-stage VC, ownership is prioritized on a per-deal basis to ensure meaningful returns, while valuation is critical for portfolio construction to manage the number of companies they can fund. The goal is to hit a target ownership (e.g., 10-15%) but avoid excessive pricing that would severely limit the total number of investments the fund can make.

Some Thoughts on Equity

Equity underpins our entire industry, but we lack a good mental model for thinking about it. That won’t work anymore now that finance finally matters.