Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

Growth

ICYMI

One of my favorite early AI companies in this era was DoNotPay.

It started off back in 2015(!) using machine learning to fight parking tickets for you.

Why it’s appealing seems obvious. Everyone knows how tedious and convoluted most government-run processes are (how was your last DMV trip?) but they’re notoriously hard to innovate for.

DoNotPay gave people a way to get both their time and money back in one of these situations.

All of this to say, I like this idea that Eren Bali shared for the same reason:

Whether you want to do anything, from building an addition onto your house to setting up a retail store, you need an in depth understanding of the often confusing zoning and permitting laws in your area. In some parts of the country (cough cough SF) these are particularly complex

This, maybe surprisingly, is a high-leverage point to claim ownership of as a result and exactly the kind of idea that looks small at first but can get much larger as it gets embedded into how users solve these types of problems.

…or you could just build it as the agentic equivalent of a micro SaaS and help people out regardless.

Hold your pirate jokes, we’ve got the AARRR framework this week.

Pirates don’t really have anything to do with funnel design and customer acquisition (though I guess they “acquire” treasure…? Kind of a stretch tbh) but here we are nonetheless.

The takeaway here is that if any of these five stages is leaky or not working right, you’re going to be wasting money on acquiring new customers in the first place.

So, before you go spend your treasure, make sure each stage (below) is running smoothly.

The concept of the 10x engineer is dead, actually.

Olivia Moore from a16z shared a chart from Cursor showing that the gap between the number of lines of code that are committed per week by the 90% percentile of engineers vs the median is rapidly growing.

The best engineers have always shipped more than the average, but now that delta is getting larger and larger.

Wait… doesn’t that mean 10x engineers are more valuable, not dead?

Stay with me here.

We’re moving into an era of “super ICs” more broadly.

What we’re observing here is that the value of ICs who master LLM-powered tools and workflows is growing much faster than the value of those who don’t.

So the 10x engineer is getting more valuable.

But engineering is just the easiest discipline to measure this in.

Olivia and I agree that the this is likely happening across every type of role.

So it’s not worth singling out engineers as the only discipline where “10x” is possible, and these super ICs are more than 10x more valuable than an average performer at this point anyway.

Last weekend’s deep dive was about why you should build what you know, and the advantages that gives you.

Let’s take that one step further.

It’s one thing to know a space or a problem.

It’s another thing for it to be impacting you to the degree where you would legitimately pay for the solution you’re building.

Not only can you move faster by speaking the language, so to speak, but you are also inherently motivated to solve the problem because it will make your actual life better.

So when you’re building something new, and trying to decide if it’s worth going to market with, hold it up to that exact standard: would you buy it yourself?

That sounds easy but it requires a lot of integrity on your part. It’s easy to delude yourself here. You want it to be true. You want to have uncovered something worth building.

It’s a super common founder impulse to fall in love with your own idea.

Fight that. Stay true to how you evaluate products and services in your actual life. And then it becomes a useful filter.

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Founders: treat yourself for once.

A few of our partners are offering $$$ for taking a quick call with them (that’s it).

Honestly, block off a couple hours, knock them all out, and walk away with some cash to get off the ramen diet for the weekend.