Founder Weekly (Issue 735 June 10 2026)

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Welcome to issue 735 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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General

How Six Months of Tinkering Led To A $100M ARR Company

Mukund Jha is the co-founder and CEO of Emergent, a platform that lets anyone without programming knowledge build, ship, and monetize real software by chatting with an AI agent. Launched roughly nine months ago, Emergent has surpassed 8.5 million users across 190 countries, seen more than 10 million apps built on the platform. At Startup School India, Mukund sat down with YC Managing Partner Jared Friedman to go over his founder journey and insights from building two successful companies.

What are you serving?

The Hidden Motivations of Great Founders.

The 4 arguments for the death of software, ranked from worst to best

The post argues that software is not dead; instead, AI is changing where value lives, with the weakest moats in pure feature velocity and the strongest in trust, proprietary data, and deep systems of record. The post’s practical advice is that AI-native startups should stop selling “we ship fast” and instead pitch high-accuracy workflows, data feedback loops, and embedded operations that customers can’t easily rip out.

Should I stay or should I go now? A field guide for discouraged founders

The post is a practical decision guide for discouraged founders wrestling with whether to keep going or shut things down, framing the choice around progress, runway, and emotional stamina. Its core message is to avoid making the decision from panic or ego; instead, weigh measurable traction against the cost of lost time, then choose the path that best minimizes future regret.

Marketing, Sales and PR

The SaaS GTM glossary that no one has written yet

Insight’s glossary says SaaS go-to-market is being rewritten by AI, so old vocabulary like “pipeline” and “qualification” no longer fully describes how buyers are evaluated and won. Its core idea is that AI agents now sit between vendors and humans, making products more discoverable, more evaluable, and more actionable by other agents.

How to build a powerful founder brand (without a PR team)

How Mews CEO Matthijs Welle uses unpolished, unfiltered, and deeply human storytelling to drive massive employer brand and business results.

Who should you hire for AEO?

This person looks more like a product manager than anything else, and not a marketing engineer or a content strategist who has picked up a few technical certifications along the way.

Money and Finance

SAFE Adjusted TVPI: How Early Stage VCs Should Communicate SAFE Note Markups to their LPs

Hunter Walk argues that traditional TVPI can understate the progress of early-stage funds because startups increasingly raise multiple SAFE rounds before a priced equity financing, delaying official portfolio markups. He proposes reporting a supplemental "SAFE-Adjusted TVPI" that uses recent SAFE valuation caps as a transparent proxy for portfolio value, helping LPs better track company progress while still keeping standard accounting-based TVPI separate.