Founder Mode - 27 Aug 2025

Hi there,

Welcome back to Founder Mode, every week I’ll keep you updated on the top finds and opportunities for startups, so that to save time and stay in the know.

Let’s go 🚀

🔥 Top Finds

The Electric Slide
Explore the single “Electric Stack” cost curve—batteries, compute, magnets, motors, to show how a 99% price collapse since 1990 opens the door for everything from cheap drones to home robots. It’s history lesson, strategy, plus an interactive slider to test when your idea becomes feasible. Worth a skim-and-save.

Hemant Taneja on “peak ambiguity” in AI investing
General Catalyst’s CEO on backing founder intuition in frothy times, why this moment is murky for AI bets, and the uncomfortable risk of broad job displacement. Insightful if you’re fundraising.

Carta: State of Startup Compensation — H1 2025
Fresh comp charts: salaries are up (especially for legal, product, and AI roles), equity is largely flat, and hiring remains selective with bright spots in hardware.

Want a SaaS idea that sells?
Copy this dead-simple playbook: pick a crowded category, scrape 100–500 G2/Capterra reviews, run them through AI to rank the real pain points, then “fake-door” test a 1-page landing page with ads to collect 20–30 emails before you write a line of code. Use AI again to scope the bare-minimum MVP and iterate with the signups. It’s crowdsourced market research from people already telling you what’s broken.

🎯 Startup Opportunities

🛠 Tool of the Week

Macaly
AI site builder that outputs clean, indexable HTML, with built-in hosting, CMS, forms, analytics, and A/B testing. Handy for fast landing pages and launching quickly.

This week’s newsletter is in partnership with Shutterstock

AI leaders only: Get $100 to explore high-performance AI training data.

Train smarter AI with Shutterstock’s rights-cleared, enterprise-grade data across images, video, 3D, audio, and more—enriched by 20+ years of metadata. 600M+ assets and scalable licensing, We help AI teams improve performance and simplify data procurement. If you’re an AI decision maker, book a 30-minute call—qualified leads may receive a $100 Amazon gift card.

Book a call

_{For complete terms and conditions, see the offer page.}

💬 Founder Mode Quotes

🙂 Fun Mode

👋  Want to share something or partner?

Got a tip, cool tool, or collab idea? Hit reply and drop it in my inbox. Your note can be as quick as a meme or as deep as a pitch deck. Either way, I read every email.

If this newsletter sparked an “aha,” pass it along to another builder who should be in Founder Mode. Sharing is free and motivates me to help bring you the best finds every week.

- Ray