Founder Weekly (Issue 732 May 20 2026)

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Welcome to issue 732 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Moda is the AI design agent with taste

Moda's viral launch hit 4.4 million views in two days. Tens of thousands of professionals signed up. Startups, agencies, forward-thinking brands and top firms are now using Moda to create brand-aligned slides, ad creative, reports, social carousels and more.

Most AI tools tend to create what we call "AI slop": repetitions of the same colors, layouts and fonts. And when you try to fix it, you get stuck in a loop of re-prompting.

Moda is different. Drop in your website URL, and Moda learns your brand from the ground up: your colors, your fonts, your visual language. Then it helps you generate pro-quality slides, docs, and marketing assets. 

The best part? Every layer is fully editable on a real canvas, and exports to powerpoint, PDF and more.

Try Moda Free Today

General

From Open Source Software to Open Source Strategy

How the Smartest Executives Are Using Open Source Techniques to Optimize Corporate Strategy.

Products are out, brains are in

This essay argues that the traditional era of selling standalone software tools or "products" is giving way to a market dominated by "brains" - packaged, specialized AI systems capable of executing end-to-end work and decision-making autonomously. The author posits that value has shifted from providing the infrastructure where tasks are manually performed to selling the cognitive capability that finishes the entire job, transforming software companies from tool vendors into automated labor providers.

Is Software Losing Its Head?

Agents may kill muscle memory as a moat, but they do not kill operational logic and context as a moat.

Marketing, Sales and PR

AEO and GEO for AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity

What Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization mean, and how to get your site cited by AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.

I closed 70m in ARR in 2 years. Here's exactly how

Nickbruhman went from a broke 12-year-old flipping Roblox items, shitcoins, and sneaker bots (building multiple businesses up to $2.4M ARR) to adding $70MM+ in ARR at fintech startup Slash through relentless hustle and sales. He shares key lessons: spot opportunities everywhere, build real networks, play to your strengths, stay persistent through rejection, and combine confidence with customer obsession to drive growth.

Building a growth engine from zero: How one COO boosted ARR 38% using Claude Code

Most founders treat growth as a hiring problem. Build the function first, figure out the channels second. Omar Ismail of Ascend did it in the opposite order, and built a better engine for it.

Money and Finance

What Do You Have To Believe?

This essay explores the frameworks venture capitalists use to build mental models around risk and reward when evaluating early-stage investments. It highlights the importance of asking "what do you have to believe?" to clearly map out the core assumptions, such as market size, technology adoption, and founder execution, that must prove true for a startup to ultimately achieve outsized success.

How I Built AI Agents to Close the Books

The post explains a practical framework for building accounting agents around a reusable skill plus a config file, MCP connectors, and human review so reconciliations can run end to end. Its main example is prepaid accounting, where the agent queries the ERP directly and turns a roughly 2-hour manual task into about 5 minutes while still keeping a preparer/reviewer in the loop.