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<div style="display: none; max-height: 0px; overflow: hidden;">The technology vendors that win are the ones who figure out how to make the technology actually work in the messy reality of enterprise operations </div>
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<h1><strong> TLDR Founders <span id="date">2025-11-28</span></strong></h1>
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Over 6 million tech professionals read TLDR including developers, product managers, marketers, founders and executives. Get in front of your target audience with an ad placement just like this one! <a href="https://tracking.tldrnewsletter.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fadvertise.tldr.tech%2F%3Futm_source=tldrfounders%26utm_medium=newsletter%26utm_campaign=secondary11102025/3/0100019aca938702-f9f3d380-f5b8-4487-8cce-da35cb18ea58-000000/Jhr3ay2Tv0xFGutBUzNJdbTHawrcYGKmWPqjKA1_g6w=433" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank"><span>Learn more</span></a> about running a test campaign.
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<strong>Narrative power in the AI era (11 minute read)</strong>
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AI's narrative and technological advancements are tightly linked, with recent shifts from focusing on AGI to superintelligence reshaping industry goals. Companies like OpenAI and Meta are harnessing these narratives to drive capital investment and recruit top talent, illustrating how storytelling influences technological development and economic momentum. This evolving narrative reflects AI's ongoing progress, as recent breakthroughs demand a new frontier beyond human-level capabilities.
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<strong>Our 20+ AI Agents and Their Moats: Real But Weak (11 minute read)</strong>
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The differentiation between AI agents is fairly narrow. While there are some differences between UX, integrations, features, and infrastructure, the core AI is basically the same everywhere. It's possible to copy from one system to another and get almost the same result. Companies need to consider what is actually defensible.
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<strong>Notes From an Interview With Jony Ive (3 minute read)</strong>
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Jony Ive emphasizes care in design, valuing attention to detail even in trivial aspects like packaging to convey thoughtfulness to users. He believes products reflect interpersonal relationships within teams, underscoring the importance of a supportive work environment. Ive also values designing in personal spaces, arguing it influences creative thinking differently than traditional conference rooms.
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<strong>Eat Pain, Excrete Product: The FDE Playbook (4 minute read)</strong>
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The technology vendors that win are the ones who figure out how to make the technology actually work in the messy reality of enterprise operations. Forward Deployed Engineering takes engineers who are experts in the core technology and embeds them directly with industry experts. They help build solutions that work for a specific context, then extract the generalizable pieces that can be reused across similar problems. Always build towards something reusable.
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<strong>Going to market when no market exists (5 minute read)</strong>
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Building a new category requires ignoring almost all standard business advice. Since nobody knows they have a problem yet, your product technically has zero value. This lures founders into a fatal pricing mistake. They lower the price to get traction, but this actually destroys the business model. You cannot sell a new idea without an expensive sales team, and a low price makes that team impossible to afford.
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<strong>Win $1M @ NexHacks, the biggest hackathon in the U.S. (Sponsor)</strong>
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Apply to NexHacks, Jan 17th-18th at CMU, <a href="https://tracking.tldrnewsletter.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fnexhacks.com/1/0100019aca938702-f9f3d380-f5b8-4487-8cce-da35cb18ea58-000000/iY7JrqNXs_0jB-JiNQeWy5v2sWdfiFyy8_vPo6susIU=433" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank"><span>to compete for $1M in prizes from Nvidia, JPM, Cursor, Polymarket, Vercel, etc.</span></a> We're also inviting 100 VCs/founders for the biggest speed-dating session, backed by a16z, General Catalyst, YC, etc. If you're a builder, don't miss out. Apps due in 2 days.
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LLMHub is an AI-powered collaborative search platform that turns research into shared workspaces with real-time agents and zero friction for teams.
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<strong>192 Weeks (15 minute read)</strong>
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After leaving a pivotal role at Modal, a startup that grew to a $1 billion valuation, this engineer reflects on the journey from college to the tech industry. Modal offered opportunities to build complex systems, navigate social dynamics within a growing team, and contribute significantly to the codebase. Looking forward, the engineer plans to pursue new challenges while maintaining a focus on innovative system development and meaningful connections.
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<strong>How startups lose their edge (6 minute read)</strong>
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In football, "prevent defense" is a strategy used to protect a lead. It usually backfires. This same mindset kills startups. When an IPO gets close, founders often stop playing to win and start playing "safe." They hire people with impressive resumes who dilute the culture and turn product building into a committee process. The moment you stop doing the weird, risky things that got you traction is the moment you cap your outcome.
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Investors just dumped $227 million into startups that essentially build fancy dashboards.
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Vertical SaaS is about to repeat the "Embedded Finance" success story, but this time with AI.
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<strong>How to do user research without users (4 minute read)</strong>
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Suggesting you build a product without talking to humans is usually heresy in Silicon Valley.
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Writing "undetectable" AI content is a low-ROI trap.
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