Founder Weekly (Issue 736 June 17 2026)

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Welcome to issue 736 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

50 Excel Hacks That Make Spreadsheets Work For You

Most Excel users waste hours on tasks that take experts minutes. The difference is not talent. It is knowing the right shortcuts.

These 50 Excel hacks from Kenji Explains cover the functions, formulas, and workflows that make spreadsheets work for you instead of against you.

Each one comes with step-by-step instructions and ready-to-use templates. Subscribe to Marketing Against the Grain and get all 50 free.

Here's what you'll get:

• Time-saving shortcuts that eliminate the most common formula frustrations

• Interface essentials most users never discover on their own

• Game-changing functions for data analysis, automation, and visualization

• Guided practice template so you can apply every hack immediately

The people who are fast in Excel are not smarter. They just stopped fighting the tool.

Get 50 Excel Hacks free when you subscribe to Marketing Against the Grain today.

Get The Guide

General

How to Earn a Billion Dollars

Paul Graham argues that becoming a billionaire through startups is not only possible but often the result of creating enormous value for users and benefiting from sustained exponential growth, rather than exploiting others. He explains that the best startup ideas come from deeply understanding user needs, building products people love, and operating in large markets where growth can compound over time.

Who will set price / intelligence?

AI is commoditizing and repricing intelligence itself, turning it into the central axis for markets, companies, and geopolitics. Labs, apps, and nations now battle over control of cost, capability, latency, and other fast-moving variables. Unlike stable SaaS metrics, AI creates a self-rewriting system where variables (capability, cost, inference-time compute, task horizon, geopolitics, etc.) constantly shift, driving layer migration risks and requiring founders to treat building like actively trading a volatile book of bets.

The Magic of World Building

Creating Something Out of Nothing.

3 product-market fit patterns working right now

What's working for founders building toward real demand.

No, everyone is not using AI for everything.

People are consuming AI like they eat meat: some are embracing it, some are limiting their use of it, and some are avoiding it altogether.

Marketing, Sales and PR

LLMs are picking winners. Here’s how to become one

A startup's guide to answer engine optimization.

It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests

The post shows that a tiny snippet of retrieved text, just 13 words, from a UGC website such as Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can consistently cause AI agents to generate spam or scam content.

Money and Finance

Mike Volpi on Why AI Breaks Traditional Venture Capital

Mike Volpi shares lessons from building and investing in category-defining technology companies, drawing on his experience at Cisco, Index Ventures, and boards including Scale AI, ClickHouse, Confluent, and Ferrari. The conversation explores how AI is reshaping venture capital, software, robotics, defense tech, and startup building, and why many of the industry's traditional assumptions are being challenged.

The Untrainable

Sarah Guo’s piece says the most valuable AI opportunities are often in “untrainable” areas where correctness is private, context lives inside organizations, and outside benchmarks can’t capture whether the work is actually right. The implication is that moats come less from better models and more from permission, workflow integration, accountability, and systems that can prove they’re correct in the real environment