Founder Weekly (Issue 721 March 4 2026)

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Welcome to issue 721 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

How Jennifer Anniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Anniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

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General

How to prepare for the next decade

A guide to preparing for the most destabilizing chapter in human history.

Dr. Tokens or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the AI Bubble

The Glorious History of Productive Delusion, The Physics of a Bubble (A Scientific Framework), Genuine Benefits of Mass Technological Psychosis, and Why Everything Will Go According To Plan.

The phone company always wins

Software margins are compressing. Network effects are still the best defense.

The Minimum Lovable Product Era

The article argues that “minimum viable product” has effectively degraded into “minimum functional product,” which is no longer enough in a crowded, AI-accelerated market where users have abundant high-quality alternatives. Instead, teams must aim for a minimum lovable product from day one: something fast, opinionated, and emotionally resonant that delivers a clear “this is actually nice” moment rather than just basic utility.

Marketing, Sales and PR

How to run multiple Clawdbots (aka Openclaw agents)

Bhanu Teja P, the founder of Site GPT, demonstrates how he manages a squad of 14 autonomous "Clawdbots" (OpenClaw agents) that act as a decentralized marketing team, saving him from hiring multiple full-time employees. By using a central "Squad Lead" agent named Jarvis, he orchestrates specialist agents for SEO, design, and development to analyze his website's conversion leaks and independently develop growth strategies.

Snowflake’s first sales hire on scaling from $0 to $3.5B

This episode profiles Chris Degnan, Snowflake’s first sales hire, and how he helped grow the company from zero customers to about $3.5B in revenue over 11 years as CRO. It focuses on his playbook for enterprise sales at different stages, the importance of MEDDIC-style methodology, hiring gritty reps, and building a disciplined, trust-based sales organization under multiple CEOs.

Money and Finance

What's My Stage Again?

Why seed is obsolete and the age of Inception capital.

Services Won't Become Software

The piece argues that AI won’t magically turn services firms into true software businesses, but it will make them more software-like: higher margins, more recurring revenue, and more automation, while the core service and human liability layer remain. It outlines how investors should underwrite AI-enabled services on their own terms, recognizing limits on margins and TAM but huge markets and durable moats rooted in trust, credentials, and owning the outcome, not just the output.

The VC Vintage Effect

The piece explains that venture returns are driven more by the timing of when capital is deployed (the vintage) than by short-term performance marks, and that long-term, consistent commitments across market cycles deliver the best realized returns (DPI). It also explains that diversification across vintages and focus on cash outcomes rather than interim valuations leads to better LP outcomes, and that disciplined selection combining consensus exposure with non-consensus judgment is key.