TLDR Founders 2026-06-05

Ramp reports DeepSeek as the top trending software for June, indicating renewed interest from American firms despite past security concerns. Companies are also increasingly using open source AI models and platforms like Fireworks AI and DeepInfra, moving away from OpenAI and Anthropic. Despite AI developments, design tools like Figma and Paper remain popular, showing resilience against new AI solutions.

When building software gets as cheap as posting a meme, the unit stops being a product and becomes a drop: made fast, judged on whether it lands, forgotten by Friday. Roadmaps stop mattering; taste, timing, and an audience start to. That's why some VCs now scout founders the way labels scout musicians: can you make a hit, and can you do it again?

The SaaS CFO Ben Murray lays out 12 design decisions for true outcome-based pricing, drawing the Sierra-style line that distinguishes outcome from consumption dressed up as outcome. Real examples include Intercom Fin at $0.99 per outcome, Help Scout at $0.75 per AI resolution with a free 3-month training window, HubSpot Breeze at $0.50 per resolved conversation and $1.00 per recommended lead, Zendesk's 72-hour LLM-verified resolution window, and EVE CoreGuard's $37.5K-to-$1.2M risk-avoidance ladder.

External voices are having a growing influence on buying committees. Decision makers trust podcasts, communities, thought leaders, and online trends more than sales reps. Companies that understand this stop being just sellers and start creating educational content in their industry. This post discusses how to use LinkedIn as a channel to help influence buyers.

One excited champion isn't enough to close a deal anymore. Even a mid-sized sale now has to get past product, finance, security, legal, and the execs, and each of them cares about something different. Product wants clarity, finance wants the numbers to work, security wants to know it's safe, and your champion wants to not look bad for picking you. The trick is to tell one clear story and adjust it for each person, instead of using seven different pitches. Instead of asking buyers which message they like, look at how your existing customers actually decided to buy.

Sentry had a non-engineering team migrate around 2,500 pages of its marketing site to Markdown and code in a git repository over four months. Before the project, most of the team hadn't written code before. This post discusses why Sentry decided to have a non-engineering team complete the task and the lessons the company learned during the migration.

Google's new 'Search profiles' allow website owners and creators to shape their own presence on Search. Search profiles can be accessed via a creator or publisher's Knowledge Panel, Discover feed, or through a direct URL. They can contain page and social media links, videos, and posts. More capabilities will be introduced in the coming months. The feature is coming first to the US before further expanding to more publishers and creators worldwide.

Agents fail in the enterprise due to a lack of organizational memory and understanding of roles and responsibilities. Asana has been building the infrastructure that fixes these issues even before agents existed to use it. Its Agentic Work Management Platform is a system designed to align humans and agents around the same plan, context, and governance. It is composed of a chief-of-staff agent called Dash, a new generation of AI Teammates, and three vertical applications that target IT, software development, and professional services.

Homebrew's Hunter Walk pushes back on the "competitors are raising bigger funds, so I have to" reflex he hears from legacy and new VCs, arguing the chorus signals commoditization of capital and a slow regression toward mediocrity collected via larger fee paychecks. The first-principles questions VCs should ask before scaling AUM: why does the firm exist, what playbook is it best suited for, what resources are already in hand, what needs to be acquired, and what needs to be shed.

AI will reduce repetitive, tedious work and make us better at many things. The question is now what we choose to do with the space it creates. You could use the efficiency gains to add more things to work on, or you can spend the extra time to think carefully and meaningfully about the things that actually matter. Creativity and ingenuity come from making space to think, daydream, and wonder.

Audience research won't make developers love marketing, but it prevents budget waste and points you towards places where they're actually paying attention.

Don't build for today's model, build for next year's.

Shipping faster with AI can actually make your product worse.

Startups can no longer rely just on "skin in the game" due to shifts in incentives from easily monetized options like secondaries and SPVs.