Founder Friendly Holiday 🇺🇸 Reading
Selection of articles for Triangle builders to think about while taking some time off to recharge their batteries for a big Second Half of 2025! 🚀
First, for all the founders working in the SaaS world, Figma filed their S1 and it’s a ‘must read’ for anyone in the SaaS world. I’ll leave it to you to do that, but when you are done, the best analysis is from Altimeter’s Jamin Ball on his substack: ‘Clouded Judgement’
In there he benchmarks Figma across the public SaaS universe. I’ll give you my top three:
Best-in-class Revenue Growth
Insane NRR
Rule of 40 🤯
In summary this is the bluest of bluechip IPO we’ll see in a long time, it’s going to 🚀. Yes, I’m going to make some calls and try and get an allocation.
Cloudflare Data on Inbound Traffic
At the Cannes AdTech love-fest, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, dropped some crazy data at an Axios event about human vs. bot traffic online best summarized in this table.
You know that we were super early on this at Tweener Times thanks to our network of > 150 Triangle Founders who were seeing this starting in oct/nov of 2024. These are two datapoints, I think in another 6 months we’ll be able to chart the curve
3 Essays on building, marketing and coping in the GenAI/Agentic Future (that’s here now)
These three are kind of thematic and really got me thinking, so perfect to read before a long drive or before you have a walk on the beach. Many of you have AI companies, many are mixing AI into your companies. Even if you aren’t doing anything with AI, I think you’ll get something from these from GTM to org structure to not getting too freaked out.
The Great Differentiation (Not Boring substack)
In this essay, Packy highlights that in an increasingly GenAI world, doing things that are the opposite, different, unique and authentically your brand will increase in value. In our world, that means stores. This is a great time to elevate the store experience to be just that - an experience. Only you can answer the question of what that looks like, but I’ll point you to a piece I’ve mentioned before and gone back to a couple of times as I think about all this - Melina Falabiano’s piece on Creative Commerce substack titled ‘AI is taking over, so what’. She talks about ‘Being offline is the ultimate luxury’, the inversion of discovery and ‘real humans’ as a mark of luxury’. I think she’s onto something there.
The rise of the AI native employee
In my startup and other AI founder circles, this is the default - we have agents on our org chart. Elena came from a traditional org in a growth role, and now has jumped feet first into an AI native company. Her observations are spot on.
My challenge to you - how do you move your org to thinking more AI Native? Is it an edict from the CEO? Is it an experiment? If you could start using some agents vs. employees on your team where would it be (hint: anything that’s moving data around in a workflow/process/inter-dept coord is a good place to look).
Just like when we moved from Analog (Store) to Digital (ecommerce), this is an existential crises. DAINVB (Digitally AI Native Vertical Brands) are sure to be born with 10-20 people doing $100-500m and they will use that lean-advantage to lower prices. Get ready now.
Stop Worrying: 3 AI Reality Gaps and How to be UnLLMable
I know when you read all of these non-stop articles, it’s scary, the good news is there are many reality gaps that once you get deep into AI you realize not only is everything going to be better, but AI gives you and your org superpowers. You can **FINALLY** do the things you always wanted to because you cut through meaningless busy work without a thought. This essay from Every’s Sari Azout does a great job stripping down to the reality and gives practical advice.
Thanks for reading and post July 4th Holiday, we’ll be back with more original content and some killer pods exclusive to the Triangle startup community.
Scot
Happy 4th everyone! 🇺🇸🎇🇺🇸🎆