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<div style="display: none; max-height: 0px; overflow: hidden;">Founders lose the fundraising game by waiting until they need money to start pitching. The process begins with building an investor prospect list </div>
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<h1><strong> TLDR Founders <span id="date">2026-02-20</span></strong></h1>
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<strong>Moonlighting as HR? Justworks lets you focus on your day job (Sponsor)</strong>
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You didn't start your company to spend hours on payroll spreadsheets and benefits paperwork. But somehow, that's been your life ever since you hired your first employee. <p></p><p>With <a href="https://tracking.tldrnewsletter.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fwww.justworks.com%2Fhome1%3Futm_source=tldr%26utm_medium=email%26utm_campaign=fy26_tentpole_selling_season%26utm_id=XH0T3G%26utm_content=Email_Newsletter_Primary_Placement_H2/3/0100019c7b3be81e-7da9f3fc-8f7b-4dc3-9f05-8501c5e8611d-000000/vxXUFgEk2V91Gjet8GNZq8KoAQ99jjZMof7d-EuuisM=445" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank"><span>Justworks</span></a>, you can simplify:</p>
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<p>Justworks keeps all of that stuff organized in one place, so you can actually focus on what you built your company to do. </p>
<p>And whether you're hiring your first employee or scaling your team, <a href="https://tracking.tldrnewsletter.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fwww.justworks.com%2Fhome1%3Futm_source=tldr%26utm_medium=email%26utm_campaign=fy26_tentpole_selling_season%26utm_id=XH0T3G%26utm_content=Email_Newsletter_Primary_Placement_H2/4/0100019c7b3be81e-7da9f3fc-8f7b-4dc3-9f05-8501c5e8611d-000000/wSLDeDbs0VVY8pE8EFliJ_29jnc8ZylZ9DPMETew0C4=445" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank"><span>Justworks</span></a> handles the complexities for you with real 24/7 human support.</p>
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 36px;">📈</span></div>
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<h1><strong>Headlines & Trends</strong></h1>
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<strong>Fundraising starts before you need capital (2 minute read)</strong>
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Most founders lose the fundraising game by waiting until they need money to start pitching. The real process begins with building an investor prospect list and seeking feedback rather than capital to establish early relationships. By sending monthly updates and executing publicly, founders create scarcity and FOMO, often securing commitments before a round even officially opens.
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<strong>Power in the Age of Intelligence (43 minute read)</strong>
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Tech companies like Stripe, SpaceX, and Base Power illustrate the "winner takes more" trend, where firms leverage technological advancements to dominate industries. The focus shifts from protecting software moats to identifying industry constraints, breaking them, and seizing "High Ground" for expansion. As technology progresses, companies controlling scarce assets benefit the most, driving increased economic concentration and growth opportunities.
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<strong>The Software Shakeout: What Is Durable and What Is Not in the Age of AI? (10 minute read)</strong>
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$1T in software market cap evaporated in three weeks. This framework sorts the survivors from the dead. Software in the path of doing work (CrowdStrike, Stripe, Shopify) is durable. Software that generates paperwork about work (DocuSign, Monday.com, Zendesk) gets replaced by AI that just does it. The scary middle - Atlassian, Salesforce, HubSpot - is eroding slowly but the cliff is coming. If you're building a product that humans fill out so other humans can read, rethink the entire premise before your next board meeting.
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<h1><strong>Strategies & Tactics</strong></h1>
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<strong>Hiring for a new role/function for your first time? Do this first. (3 minute read)</strong>
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A bad first hire in a new function costs you a year. The fix takes one week. Before you write the JD, do 5-10 calibration calls with people who already hold the role at companies one stage ahead of yours. You'll learn what "great" actually looks like, what comp is real, and which interview questions actually separate the best from the mediocre. Most founders skip this step and end up hiring on vibes. Don't be that founder.
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<strong>Advice we rejected to become one of the fastest growing start-ups ever (2 minute read)</strong>
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Deel co-founder Shuooo Wang details how the company scaled by ignoring traditional startup "best practices," such as hiring a VP of Sales early or focusing on the SF talent pool. Instead, Deel prioritized founder-led sales to maintain customer context, hired for traits over pedigree, and invested in 100+ local entities to build a moat around compliance and reliability. By favoring frugality and vertical M&A over high burn, the company leveraged first-principles thinking to become one of the fastest-growing startups.
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<strong>Against “Against Taste” (2 minute read)</strong>
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Taste is informed judgment built through experience rather than passive curation. True taste is exercised during the creation process through invisible, compounded decisions that lead to elegance and coherence. While AI can generate outputs, humans remain the essential definers of quality, setting the standards and directions that tools cannot shortcut.
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<strong>Boost.space (Tool)</strong>
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Single source of truth database for automations and AI agents.
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<strong>Layers (Tool)</strong>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
AI marketing agents that analyze your product and run growth campaigns.
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<strong>Conway (Tool)</strong>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
Autonomous AI agent infrastructure layer.
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<div style="text-align: center;"><strong><h1>Miscellaneous</h1></strong></div>
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<strong>There Is No Product (5 minute read)</strong>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
If you remove the difficulty, you remove the product. If it only takes a weekend to build a product, then anyone else could do it in a weekend, too. You can't just add features and hope the market comes back, because there's no core product. Some software will still be an asset, but most of it will become inventory, and every model generation will push that line further.
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<strong>In Defense of Vertical Software (12 minute read)</strong>
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The industry is currently asking why vertical software needs to exist when AI companies are pouring billions of dollars into building the most powerful general-purpose AI systems in the world. Enterprise software is just code, but that's not where the value of software comes from. The value of enterprise software comes from understanding the process and the organization well enough to make the software do exactly the right thing. Process engineering will continue to be the foundational advantage or vertical software.
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</span>
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 36px;">⚡</span></div></div>
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<h1><strong>Quick Links</strong></h1>
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<strong>Why CEOs' AI hype really isn't landing with employees (4 minute read)</strong>
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</a>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
Business leaders are struggling to translate AI enthusiasm into effective organizational change as employee skepticism grows.
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<a href="https://tracking.tldrnewsletter.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fjasonevanish.com%2F2026%2F02%2F18%2Fsaas-reset-why-saas-is-changing-not-going-away%2F%3Futm_source=tldrfounders/1/0100019c7b3be81e-7da9f3fc-8f7b-4dc3-9f05-8501c5e8611d-000000/Y6qNfR4UWYyzmjxhpwgKaLjcf05mbvo7LWhwxTF_b2M=445">
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<strong>The SaaS Reset: Why SaaS is changing, not going away (4 minute read)</strong>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
The traditional build vs. buy equation has flipped as AI drastically reduces software creation costs.
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<strong>The Best Companies You've Never Heard Of (3 minute read)</strong>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">
A portfolio company went from zero to $30M+ run rate in two years.
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