Founder Weekly (Issue 713 January 7 2026)

Welcome to issue 713 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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General

AI’s trillion-dollar opportunity: Context graphs

The article explores the shift in enterprise software from traditional "Systems of Record" to AI-driven "Systems of Agents," emphasizing the need for "Decision Traces" and "Context Graphs" to capture nuanced decision-making processes like policy exceptions and precedents from past deals.

State of Startups 2025

The Carta "State of Startups 2025" report provides a comprehensive overview of the venture capital landscape, highlighting trends in fundraising, valuations, and employee equity. It notes that while the market has stabilized since the post-pandemic correction, startups are facing longer intervals between rounds and a heightened focus on profitability over growth-at-all-costs.

How Base44 was bootstrapped and sold for $80M in 9 months

Direct insights from a Reddit AMA where Maor Shlomo breaks down how he built Base44 from solo founder to acquisition.

The Last Moat Standing

In a world where anyone can build a product quickly, the real moat is an opinionated perspective on how a problem should be solved, not the code itself. Enduring products win by accumulating judgment, context, and switching costs over time, making them harder to replace than anything a user can spin up in a weekend.

Marketing, Sales and PR

What it’s like to work at a profitable AI startup built for the trades

Inside Hearth: $35M ARR, 15,000+ customers, and the unfinished work of building autonomous revenue systems for small businesses.

4 Predictions for GTM in 2026

The article predicts that in 2026, GTM teams will battle “no decision” as their biggest competitor, navigate decentralized buying journeys, and rely on revenue leaders who operate as cross-functional, data-driven mini-COOs across product, marketing, finance, and CS. It also forecasts a major resurgence of founder-led prospecting, especially for horizontal or new-category products, as founders’ personal brands and highly personalized outreach outperform generic SDR-led outbound in those markets.

Money and Finance

$1 of EBITDA

A story about how Jack Soslow’s company Ciridae initially failed to create even $1 of real EBITDA for a small home restoration business, despite building an AI system that clearly worked and increased deal value. It then describes how, by repeatedly returning on-site, codifying tribal operator knowledge, and grinding through change-management until humans actually adopted the tools, they eventually scaled this approach to generate meaningful, provable EBITDA across PE portfolio companies, healthcare systems, and other real-world businesses—arguing that this unsexy transformation work is what most of the AI industry is avoiding.

Is Community the Most Overlooked Edge in Venture Capital?

On the quiet rise of community design as a strategic discipline.