TLDR Founders 2025-10-01

Snowflake has long been an innovator and leader in pricing, and now it's adapting proven, usage-based pricing models for the age of AI and value monetization.

Today is your last chance to join the live virtual event with Snowflake and Metronome, where you'll learn:

• How to handle monetization with the same rigor, principles, and iteration as your product roadmap
• How Snowflake aligns finance, product, GTM, and engineering to scale pricing and maintain customer trust
• Lessons from Snowflake on designing pricing for predictability, visibility, and control in usage-based and AI-driven models

Sign up now →

Sora 2 delivers more realistic, controllable videos with audio and a new TikTok-style app that lets users generate 10-second clips with consent-based cameo uploads. The system enforces guardrails—no public-figure use without permission, no explicit content, and shows notifications when your likeness is used. The app is invite-only in the US and Canada, but OpenAI plans further rollout and public access.

Vercel secured $300M in a Series F funding round, raising its valuation to $9.3B, led by Accel and GIC, with participation from existing and new investors like BlackRock and Khosla Ventures. Vercel's user base has doubled with notable clients like OpenAI and PayPal, and the company plans to launch v0 Mobile, enabling app development through voice and camera inputs.

Periodic Labs has secured a $300M seed round from notable investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Nvidia, to automate scientific discovery through AI. Founded by former OpenAI and DeepMind researchers, the startup aims to create autonomous labs where AI scientists, aided by robots, discover new materials like superconductors. This approach seeks to generate novel data to advance AI further in material science, competing with other entities in the field.

Your sales team and growth team are both optimizing for speed, yet you're still losing deals. New data shows why - top performers activate 69% of customers within one week because they ignore departmental boundaries. Most companies have sales perfecting their pitch while growth optimizes onboarding, but the fastest activation often requires mixing both. Maybe your differentiating feature works better as an interactive demo before the sales call, not during it. Maybe prospects need a brief demo, then product access, returning to sales only when ready.

Julie Zhuo emphasizes how AI turns everyone into managers, requiring traditional management skills to handle AI agents effectively. Her "diagnose with data, treat with design" framework highlights balancing intuition and data in product development. Despite AI-driven hypergrowth leading to poor data infrastructure, this isn't a significant obstacle, according to Zhuo.

Growth hacking, a term coined by Sean Ellis, focuses on driving rapid, measurable growth through data-driven experimentation and unconventional tactics. It emphasizes metrics like acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral, using the AARRR funnel to prioritize efforts. Successful examples include Airbnb's Craigslist integration and Dropbox's referral loop, highlighting creative strategies that scale effectively. Growth hacking tools like SEO, social media, and A/B testing are crucial, but must avoid over-optimization, vanity metrics, and neglecting retention for sustainable growth.

AI-generated pricing pages with market analysis and customer engagement tools.

An open-source tool that lets agents search any app or database.

Unified interface for using multiple AI models to generate text, images, and ideas.

Give your time unlimited time and resources and watch them build nothing useful. An engineering leader kept seeing projects die not from bad planning but from too much freedom - teams would list requirements, estimate timelines, then stumble along optimizing features that shouldn't exist. The counterintuitive fix is deliberately limiting scope, resources, and time.

A copywriter outsourced 100 blog posts to look like an agency, got paid in full, and then a week later, the client demanded every dollar back. The posts were grammatically perfect but strategically worthless. That failure taught him what most founders miss about AI - prompts don't matter if you're feeding it nothing. The fix is context engineering. Before writing anything, gather customer interviews, support tickets, and competitor messaging. Distill those into strategy documents like positioning canvases and messaging frameworks. Only after loading those as context do you start prompting. This works beyond copywriting - a founder prepping for a board meeting shouldn't ask AI for a deck but should first load market research and competitive analysis, then let AI build the narrative.

xAI launched grok-code-fast-1, expanding its tech demand due to its quick, cost-effective coding model. Microsoft introduced MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview to develop proprietary AI models, showing advancements beyond OpenAI's tech influence. Intel faces financial strain with a $3.2 billion quarterly loss as it retains its foundry business under government pressure. Alibaba's Cloud Intelligence Group grew 26% in Q2, with AI-related revenues soaring. Fusion tech is gaining traction with Commonwealth's $863 million Series B2 funding, backed by notable investors like Google and Nvidia.

Workflows are shifting as automation and AI tools enable reimagined processes, such as AI-managed inboxes and transcription-based podcast listening.

Empathy is one of those qualities everyone tells you to have, but nobody can explain why.

Reve has launched a new image creation platform that combines an image creator, a drag-and-drop editor, a creative assistant, and an API.