TLDR Founders 2026-02-13

$587B in tech M&A flowed in 2025 - the highest in a decade. However, strip out five megadeals and average deal sizes actually dropped 17%. The tech bond distressed ratio hit 9.5%, the highest since Q4 2023. If you're building a solid-but-not-spectacular SaaS company, the PE escape hatch is closed. You can't build to $20M ARR and assume someone will buy you anymore. Growth is currency again - and "efficient growth" no longer substitutes for actual growth.

The rise of AI demands a focus on Agency Quotient (AQ), the ability to actualize and execute effectively, which surpasses traditional metrics like IQ and EQ. High AQ individuals transform intentions into reality, essential in an AI-driven world where passive reliance on technology risks overshadowing human initiative. As AI democratizes intelligence, those who direct and build, rather than simply consume, will thrive, making AQ a critical skill for future productivity and innovation.

Startups should simultaneously strategize for the opening, midgame, and endgame stages to avoid pitfalls and ensure growth. Successful founders balance initiating new ideas, achieving product-market fit, and envisioning future impact. This holistic approach enables nimble decision-making and sustained momentum, making businesses adaptable and resilient.

In environments of abundance, the strongest signal isn't what you broadcast - it's what others say about you. This playbook flips standard growth advice: instead of building your brand, find people already on your team who are respected in networks you care about and invest in building their brands. Not influencer marketing - the opposite. Linear tells the world something about you because of how it positions craft. Stripe didn't say "payment processing" - they said "increasing the GDP of the internet. AI has lowered the cost of building products toward zero, but it hasn't done anything to change the cost of attracting people to you.

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Major allows you to vibe code internal tools with enterprise security built in.

Hire AI Employees for your business.

AI agents for debugging production.

New announcements are coming out of the AI industry every day, but not much has actually changed for most people. The people talking about AI are the people whose daily experience of AI is genuinely transformative, because they're the ones building and using it at the frontier. This creates a situation where the discourse is dominated by people for whom AI has changed everything. While the technology is advancing at a remarkable pace, the diffusion of that technology into the broader economy is proceeding at a much more normal pace. AI is subject to the same frictions as every other technology.

AI isn't free to deliver, unlike traditional software. Compute and inference costs weigh heavily on AI monetization strategy. Every AI query incurs a non-trivial expense, which pricing must account for while capturing the value services create. This article looks at patterns and pitfalls from the experiences of dozens of AI teams to see how best to price an AI product.

A team of behavioral scientists analyzed Wispr Flow's onboarding and called it unanimously the best they've ever seen.

Obvious mistakes made by new team members are often due to a lack of communication rather than the person.

Users don't invest real effort and build meaningful habits because there's no commitment.

If a security product is entirely written and tested by AI agents, who is liable when something breaks?