Founder Weekly (Issue 716 January 28 2026)

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Welcome to issue 716 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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General

The Adolescence of Technology

Dario Amodei argues humanity is entering a technological adolescence as powerful AI nears capabilities far beyond humans, creating risks that could test our political and social maturity. He calls for pragmatic, evidence-based responses to these risks and urges careful governance and intervention to steer AI toward beneficial outcomes without overreaction or cultural polarization.

The missing piece in robotics: A model of the world

The article argues robotics still struggles in real environments because current models lack a rich internal understanding of the world, and advances in World Models, JEPA and LeJEPA offer a promising direction for learning predictive, physical intelligence. It suggests building systems that can model dynamics over time and context will be key to closing the gap between impressive AI perception and robust real-world robotic control.

Model-Market Fit

Product-market fit has a prerequisite that most AI founders ignore. Before the market can pull your product, the model must be capable of doing the job. That's Model-Market Fit.

Personal Land-Mines Determine Failure in Startups.

Adam Draper shares that when his fund reviewed its outcomes, most startup failures were not due to market timing, tech risk, competition or fundraising but rather personal founder issues like divorce, breakups and shifting priorities. He concludes that founder durability and long term commitment may matter more for early stage success than conventional metrics.

Marketing, Sales and PR

How I built 2 unicorns: Surprising advice from a unicorn founder

Jason Cohen shares a practical five-step framework to diagnose stalled startup growth by examining retention, pricing, net revenue retention, channels, and target market. The conversation shows how small insights about cancellations, positioning, and growth curves can unlock massive gains or reveal when growth is the wrong objective altogether.

Pitch your fellow founder

How Imagine AI leveraged founder-created media to build brand awareness.

Money and Finance

Why Pattern Matching Is Killing Early-Stage Returns

Pattern matching feels like experience in early-stage investing, but it often filters out the very opportunities that drive outsized returns. Investors who rely on familiar shapes and past winners optimize for comfort and consensus, not for discovering the next true outlier.

Brex and The Pros and Cons of Hubristic Fundraising

Jason Lemkin highlights Capital One’s pending acquisition of Brex for $5.15 billion and uses it to critique hubristic fundraising when startups raise at very high valuations that create unrealistic expectations about what counts as success. He argues that such fundraising can attract talent and capital but also warps incentives and narrows exit options, making strong outcomes like Brex’s feel like failures because they fell short of peak private valuations.