Founder Mode - 7 Dec 2025

Hi there,

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

Thanks for reading, and let’s dive in!

🔥 Top Finds

Building Faster with AI
Andrew Ng breaks down what actually matters when building with AI today: velocity, concreteness, and agentic workflows that eliminate entire layers of product friction. He talks about why execution speed is now the real competitive moat and how AI coding assistants are shifting bottlenecks from writing code to deciding what to build.

An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study with OpenRouter
OpenRouter processes more than 100 trillion tokens a year and is now routing traffic across 300+ models for over 5 million developers. Last week alone, it crossed 1 trillion tokens per day, giving the platform a uniquely broad view into real-world AI usage. If you want to understand where developers are shifting, which models are winning, or where demand is exploding, this dataset is a goldmine.

54 Books to Read in 2026
If reading is part of your 2026 goals, this list is awesome. It’s a curated set of recommendations from founders, operators, investors, and thinkers who consistently operate at the top of their game. A mix of strategy, biography, psychology, and big-idea books.

Google Workspace Studio: Automate Everyday Work with AI Agents
Google just rolled out Workspace Studio, a no-code agent builder that lets you automate work across Gmail, Drive, Sheets, Calendar, and your other go-to productivity tools. You simply describe the task in plain English and Gemini builds the agent. It’s rolling out now to Business and Enterprise plans.

Amazon Unveils Kiro, an AI Agent That Codes Autonomously for Days
Amazon introduced Kiro, an AI coding agent designed to work continuously for days at a time. It maintains persistent context, handles long-running tasks, and ships production-grade code without constant human supervision. Apply for the Kiro for Startups credits here.

Anthropic Preparing for One of the Largest IPOs in History
Anthropic is reportedly exploring an IPO that could value the company at more than $300B, while still raising fresh capital from Nvidia and other top investors. If it proceeds, it would be one of the biggest tech IPOs ever and a defining milestone for the AI industry’s power dynamics heading into 2026.

🎯 Startup Opportunities

🛠 Tool of the Week

OpenRouter
OpenRouter has quietly become one of the most important AI tools for builders. It gives you a single API that routes to 300+ models, from OpenAI and Anthropic to the latest open-source releases and lets you benchmark, swap models, or run fallback logic without rewriting code. Developers and builders love it because it’s fast, flexible, and sometimes cheaper than going direct.

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💬 Founder Mode Quotes

🙂 Fun Mode

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