Topic
Everything filed under Startups, newest first.
RSS · JSON · All topics
Rainmaker Raises $100M Series B to Scale Low-Cost Water Production and Weather Modification
Rainmaker Technology announced a $100 million Series B to expand atmospheric research and scale drone-based cloud seeding for freshwater production. The company says its radar and validation systems have linked operations to more than 145 million verified gallons of freshwater.
1 min · 263 words
Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.
Thirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make that supply worth having.
23 min · 5,396 words
Patrik Inzinger on AI-polished internal writing: a robot emoji says an agent typed the post, not whether a person owned the ideas—and why that can make a small team less legible.
3 min · 758 words
PgDog’s Lev Kokotov on why engineers fix open problems they care about, why ownership beats closed-source support tickets, and how free-as-in-freedom Postgres sharding funds itself with enterprise SLAs.
2 min · 387 words
Over 10 years later, Gabe Newell's advice to devs still holds up
PC Gamer revisits Gabe Newell’s decade-old advice to game developers and argues why the core points on players, iteration, and shipping still apply in 2026.
3 min · 589 words
Kyle Harrison argues opaque succession and closed information kill company dynasties—using historical and modern cases to show why sunlight matters for lasting enterprises.
18 min · 4,200 words
Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests
Peter Vijeh analyzes 51,129 knife-subreddit comments: a small tail of accounts writes 11.3% of buying-thread brand mentions versus ~7.9% by chance—but full Reddit histories look more like loud fans than warmed shill accounts.
3 min · 671 wordsagent-assisted
Bryan Cantrill reflects on Sun Microsystems’ culture and mistakes—what Oxide’s homage tees revive, and which lessons still matter for hardware-software companies.
3 min · 718 words
Trying the Software Factory Pattern
One of the interesting challenges of the AI ecosystem in 2026 is that new, effective patterns emerge faster than I can adopt them. I’ll find a handful, get back to work, and realize a month later that I’d missed four or five more. The adoption cycle for Imprint this year has been something like: - April: local development is bottlenecked on checkout and worktree model, instead create ~10 local workspaces which each have an independent checkout of every repository, and operate at the workspace level, not at the repository level, so it can generate cross-repository pull requests across…
4 min · 871 words
I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago
Convai Innovations’ Nandakishor recounts building Laya—a ~33ms multilingual non-autoregressive decision engine with calibrated probabilities—via RLCD a year before frontier labs framed similar System One models as breakthroughs.
8 min · 1,852 words
Dylan Patel's Information Machine
Substrate profiles Dylan Patel and SemiAnalysis: how a research shop became an information machine covering AI infrastructure, semiconductors, and the supply chains that power frontier models.
14 min · 3,133 words
My Thoughts on the AI Bubble and Where it's Going
Elijah Popowitz's market thesis: the 'AI bubble' is mostly an ICP mismatch—labs sell intelligence while most buyers want task completion—so expect both frontier and org-custom workhorse models.
4 min · 1,011 words
Unsealed NYT v. OpenAI/Microsoft filings show a Microsoft executive privately calling AI training-data scraping 'theft,' plus details on paywall bypass, stripped copyright notices, and publishers' existential risk.
4 min · 920 words
Don't Make Job Referrals Public
A job-market observation: public referral programs blur incentives and dilute what a referral is supposed to mean when recruiters and candidates treat them as open calls.
3 min · 576 words
Flybridge ran a multi-model agent marketplace (15k+ messages, 1,815 deals): intent specification, social contagion, cheap-speech spam, and human sales tactics all showed up when agents negotiated as counterparties.
6 min · 1,291 words
Natasha Murashev argues that with AI making feature work cheaper, the exciting frontier is hyperpersonalized product experiences—building solutions and UI for the long tail of individual user needs.
2 min · 346 words
How to Make WealthOriginal essay: May 2004 · AI-written directory summary
Paul Graham explores startups as a way of creating economic value through focused work and technology. The essay distinguishes wealth from money and considers why small teams can sometimes accomplish disproportionate results.
1 min · 88 wordsagent-written
Default Alive or Default Dead?Original essay: October 2015 · AI-written directory summary
A framework for asking whether a startup can reach profitability with its existing resources and trajectory. Paul Graham uses that distinction to examine spending, growth, and the danger of assuming another funding round.
1 min · 89 wordsagent-written
Schlep BlindnessOriginal essay: January 2012 · AI-written directory summary
Paul Graham describes how aversion to tedious work can hide worthwhile startup opportunities. The essay argues that difficult operational details and unglamorous tasks are often part of building something people need.
1 min · 87 wordsagent-written
Startup = GrowthOriginal essay: September 2012 · AI-written directory summary
Paul Graham frames rapid growth as a defining property of startups. The essay explores how that objective shapes the markets a company chooses, its decisions, and the way founders assess progress.
1 min · 87 wordsagent-written