Founder Mode - 11 March 2026

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Hi there,

Welcome back to Founder Mode.
It has been a busy Q1 with lotsa exciting learning and work planned for the year. Another catch-up bundle: the best things I’ve read, watched, and bookmarked, plus three open calls worth applying to.

Next week on the 18th March, I’m bringing together some awesome AI builders and community for the next AI Salon event! You’re welcomed to join us at the StartupX Space. I’ll be sure to take notes and share any interesting scoop here too.

Thanks for reading, and let’s dive in!

🔥 Top Finds

The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps
What’s actually working in consumer AI right now? This is it. a16z tracks who’s climbing, who’s stalling, and what categories are quietly getting real usage. My main takeaway, the AI consumer race isn’t just about having a better model, it’s about becoming someone’s default habit. 

How threat actors operationalize AI
This is the kind of security post that makes you sit up a bit straighter. Microsoft breaks down how attackers are using AI both as an accelerator and, increasingly, as something closer to a weapon.

What Comes Next Is Bigger Than SaaS Ever Was
SaaS was the warm-up. When “intelligence” becomes cheap and widely deployable, entire industries get rebuilt, not just upgraded. These are big claims, but it’s useful because it forces you to think in new business shapes, not old software categories. 

Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs raises $1.03B to build world models
LeCun just raised an absurd amount of money to bet against the “just scale LLMs” worldview. AMI Labs is going after “world models”. What on earth is “world models”? AI that learns from reality rather than only language. Whether you buy the thesis or not, $1B+ at seed-ish stage is a huge and we’ll

Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
One of the better attempts I’ve seen at measuring AI’s real labor impact without pure speculation. Anthropic introduces a framework that combines “tasks that LLMs can theoretically do” with “tasks people are actually using AI for,” then maps that to job exposure. Interesting if you’re hiring, reskilling, or simply trying to understand which roles get reshaped first. 

Helix 02 performs whole body, end-to-end living room cleanup
Robotics demos are usually either staged or narrowly scripted. This one is interesting because it’s framed as continuous, whole-body, end-to-end cleanup in a living room setting, which is closer to the messy reality of “robots in homes” than most clips you see online. Many are still skeptical but it’s not far fetched to see this replace robot vacuums.

Services: The New Software?
The next waves of tech companies may not sell software tools, they’ll sell the outcome, with software and AI doing the work behind the scenes. One questions to stop asking is “what SaaS should I build?”, start asking “what service can I turn into an autopilot service?”

🎯 Opportunities

Singapore Tourism Accelerator - Cohort 8

Open to both startups and established tech providers to pilot and scale solutions with tourism industry partners in Singapore, across 4 challenge area and deployment use cases.

Extended Deadline: 13 March 2026

Aerospace Open Innovation Challenge 2026

Open innovation challenge with real industry problem statements across digitalisation, productivity, sustainability in aerospace/space value chain. Registration open to global innovators.

Deadline: 17 April 2026

The Pitch by Deel

Enter with your 2-minute pitch to win a $1,000,000 investment for your startup. The Pitch is a global tournament built to reward the world’s best founders.

Deadline: 23 Mar 2026 Onwards depending on region

🛠 Tool of the Week

Obsidian
If you’re tired of being locked into note apps that feel slow, online-only, or hostage to someone else’s platform, Obsidian is a refreshing take. It’s local-first (your notes live as plain Markdown files), fast, works offline, and scales into a real personal knowledge system with linking and search that doesn’t crumble once you have thousands of notes.

💬 Founder Mode Quotes

🙂 Fun Mode

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