Founder Weekly (Issue 752 October 14 2026)

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Welcome to issue 752 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

The Popcorn Brand Turning Heads and Raising Capital

What does it look like when a consumer brand starts to break out?

Popsmith generated $5.8M in revenue in 2025 and is projecting $9M in 2026, with more than 100,000 customers and $20M+ in lifetime sales.

The brand has already earned national recognition through Oprah’s Favorite Things and partnerships with Costco, Sur La Table, and Williams Sonoma, where Popsmith is rolling out nationwide this holiday season.

Now Popsmith is raising capital to accelerate its next stage of growth, and individual investors have the opportunity to become shareholders.

Explore the Popsmith investment opportunity.

General

Your Moat Is Dead. Anyone Can Rebuild Your Product.

AI agents have made clean-room software reimplementation fast and inexpensive, eroding traditional defensibility like visible UI features, file formats, and user muscle memory. To stay defensible, tech founders need to build non-code moats around accountability, regulatory compliance, proprietary live data loops, trust, and outcome-based pricing models.

Will agents have network effects?

Andrew Chen looks at whether AI agents will develop true network effects or remain interchangeable tools that can communicate across products. He maps out where durable advantages could still emerge, including agent-driven viral loops, shared identity and reputation, private context, marketplaces, and walled-garden networks.

“You didn’t do it right”

Four sincere attempts at OKRs, four failures, and every time: “you didn’t do it right.” Maybe the framework doesn’t fit you — so how do you find one that does?

Platforms are (still) the best businesses

Why successful platforms combine profitability, scalability, and defensibility better than other contending business models.

The State of AI Report 2026

AI progress in 2026 is increasingly being driven by agents that help build better AI, expanding into robotics and science while rapidly lowering inference costs and fueling massive infrastructure investment. At the same time, frontier AI is becoming a geopolitical and security issue, with governments tightening control, autonomous agents breaching real systems, and leading labs confronting how to slow capability gains without giving up competitive ground.

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Marketing, Sales and PR

How to go from 0-100M views/month

Dominic Bair shares a tactical 3-phase playbook (drawn from generating 3B+ organic views) for scaling a company’s organic social from 0 to 100M views/month, stressing that not all views are equal and quality audience matters most early on. Phase 1 prioritizes founder-led content and strict audience filtering; Phase 2 scales winning channels with specialized hires and AI workflows; Phase 3 shifts to high-volume brand accounts and a larger pod-based team to “cross the chasm.”

Marketing Engineers: 100x More Experiments with AI agents

Marketing engineers blend marketing skills with AI agents to research customers, build pages and ads, and run rapid experiments, making them a new kind of 10x employee that most companies still lack. Greg Isenberg lays out a playbook for setting up agent systems, connecting data, and automating workflows, calling it the most exciting shift in marketing since AdWords.

How to get leads from YouTube in B2B

12 actionable tips to turn videos into emails, calls and clients.

Money and Finance

The Death of Venture Capital’s Short Kings

Benchmark and USV long resisted the venture industry’s shift toward ever-larger funds, but both have now scaled up as bigger rounds, AI capital needs, and downstream ownership increasingly make small-fund strategies harder to sustain. Kyle Harrison warns that this concentration can distort incentives across venture, pushing investors and founders toward companies that fit the next financing round rather than businesses built around customers and durable outcomes.

The Illiquidity Ratchet

Weak venture liquidity and the rise of megafunds are making it harder for smaller funds and emerging managers to recycle capital into the next generation of startups. The author sees fund-of-funds vehicles, more co-investing, and renewed LP support for smaller managers as ways to rebuild a healthier early-stage venture ecosystem.

How China’s Venture Ecosystem Works

Everyone in the Valley has a take on whether China is winning AI, robotics, and biotech. Almost nobody understands how the capital works. Notes from meeting China's tier-1 investors and founders on how their venture ecosystem actually works.

The Three Paths for Seed Investors

Seed investors increasingly face three paths: fight for obvious AI winners at soaring valuations, back more capital-efficient companies targeting smaller exits, or search for overlooked startups with breakout potential. Rob Go sees the third path as closest to traditional seed investing, but warns that scarce follow-on capital, higher entry prices, and a thin exit market are making it much harder to execute.