Founder Weekly (Issue 714 January 14 2026)

Welcome to issue 714 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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General

Canva’s Path to Product-Market Fit: How a Two-Hour Founder Date Led To a $42B Design Platform

Cameron Adams goes deep on finding early evangelists, the unconventional tactics that led to massive growth, and more.

Building Vertical AI: An early stage playbook for founders

Essential insights and best practices for AI startups ambitious enough to reimagine technology across vertical industries.

25 Things I Believe In to Build Great Products

Peter Yang’s manifesto outlines a "craft-over-corporate" philosophy, arguing that great products are built by choosing speed as a moat and saying "no" ten times more than saying "yes." He advocates for rejecting "product theater" and decision-by-committee in favor of small, mission-oriented teams that prioritize proof-of-work and fast feedback loops over bureaucratic processes.

Marketing, Sales and PR

The Step-By-Step Playbook for Building AI-Powered GTM Teams with Personio's CRO

Personio's CRO Philip Lacor shares a playbook for building AI-powered GTM teams, highlighting five key lessons like top-down/bottom-up adoption, cross-functional collaboration, and combining tech stack with context. He details real use cases including win/loss analysis, expansion SDR assistants (cutting research from 2 hours to 15 minutes daily), intent scoring, and AI chat that booked 140 meetings in 7 days.

What's working in SaaS pricing right now

Investigating 1,800 SaaS pricing changes from 2025.

Money and Finance

a16z: The Power Brokers

Packy McCormick’s essay argues that Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has evolved from a traditional venture firm into a massive, vertically integrated "power broker" that acts as a private-sector industrial policy engine. By raising a record-breaking $15 billion in early 2026, the firm is positioning itself to subsidize the high-capital costs of "American Dynamism" and AI, effectively picking winners and building the national infrastructure that traditional institutions have abandoned.

Cathay Innovation US: 2026 VC Outlook

Cathay Innovation predicts that 2026 will be the year of "clarity" where the market distinguishes between defensible AI moats like proprietary data and memory versus shallow LLM wrappers. The outlook highlights a shift toward embodied intelligence in the physical world and predicts that Series B rounds will become the most difficult milestone as investors demand real unit economics over hype.