Founder Weekly (Issue 720 February 25 2026)

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Welcome to issue 720 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

The Lithium Boom is Heating Up

Thanks to growing demand, lithium stock prices grew 2X+ from June 2025 to January 2026. $ALB climbed as high as 227%. $LAC hit 151%. $SQM, 159%.

But the real winner may be a stock not listed on public exchanges, EnergyX.

This $1B unicorn’s patented technology can recover 3X more lithium than traditional methods. That’s earned investment from leaders like General Motors.

Now they’re preparing for commercial production just as experts project 5X demand growth by 2040. They’ve announced what could be one of the US’ largest lithium production facilities and have rights to approximately 150,000 lithium-rich acres across North and South America.

Unlike public stocks, you can buy private EnergyX shares alongside 40,000+ other investors. Invest for $11/share by the 2/26 deadline.

Invest in EnergyX Today

_{This is a paid advertisement for EnergyX Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.energyx.com. Under Regulation A, a company may change its share price by up to 20% without requalifying the offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission.}

General

Power in the Age of Intelligence

Or, strategy for those who plan to benefit from abundance.

Strategic choices: When both options are good

Real strategy means choosing between two good options and accepting all the consequences - even the painful ones you don't like.

Making $$$ with OpenClaw

The interview explains how the open source agent OpenClaw can be used to generate revenue by automating workflows for paying clients using sub agents and parallelization. They outline practical monetization paths, from landing automation gigs on platforms like Upwork to applying design thinking to identify high value workflows and build for clients quickly.

Marketing, Sales and PR

So You Want to Hire a Forward Deployed Engineer: How to Know If You Need One and How to Get the Role Right

Founders and operators who’ve successfully built forward deployed engineering teams share the nuances that make this idiosyncratic role work.

Modeling software after SaaS

Software will be bigger, more complex, and lower margin.

Praying for Distribution | AI Changes the Math

The 3 ways distribution spend shows up on the P&L.

Three Metrics Every New Founder Should Track

Focus on value delivery, not vanity dashboards, in your first 12–18 months.

Money and Finance

Founder Compensation 4.0

Creandum’s Founder Compensation 4.0 report provides the fourth annual snapshot of how early-stage founders are paid, showing that salaries rise with funding stage, include data from both Europe and the US, and that gender pay gaps have narrowed further. It also finds that US founders tend to earn significantly more than European peers and that AI-native founders are not the highest paid overall compared with sectors like FinTech and CleanTech.