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Startup Playbook · Sam Altman
If your agents are shipping features users don't need, no amount of automation compounds in your favor — the underlying logic still has to be right first.
Sam Altman's Startup Playbook compresses the YC operating logic into four imperatives: a great idea, a great product, a great team, and great execution — with growth as the measure of whether any of it is working. Written for founders who ship by typing, it holds up remarkably well for founders who ship by directing. The translation requires honesty about what changes and what does not.
Why Job Interviews Don’t Work · Farnam Street
If you're making decisions about who — or what — to trust with consequential work, the research on interviews is a cold bucket of water: confidence and competence barely correlate. That applies the moment your agent roster starts expanding.
Most hiring conviction is pattern-matching dressed as insight — and the same cognitive failure that breaks human interviews now breaks how founders design trust into agentic systems.
The Superhuman Product-Market-Fit Engine · Rahul Vohra (First Round Review)
Founders wiring agents into their stacks need to know whether the product is actually working before they scale the automation — Rahul Vohra's PMF method gives you the measurement apparatus to find out. The hard part is still yours: deciding what the number means and who to listen to.
When software is cheap to build, the question is never whether you shipped — it is whether the right people care that you did. Rahul Vohra's method, outlined in "The Superhuman Product-Market-Fit Engine" in First Round Review, turns that question into a number you can act on, and that discipline matters more, not less, when agents are doing the building.
Disciplined Entrepreneurship · Bill Aulet
When your agents can serve anyone, the discipline to serve only one segment first becomes harder — and more consequential — than ever. Aulet's framework was built for human teams; the founders who remap it to agent workflows will outpace those who don't.
Before you build agents that scale, you need a problem small enough to measure — the beachhead market is that constraint, and it doubles as your first evaluation harness.
The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups · Paul Graham
Graham's failure taxonomy was written for human teams, but every mistake on his list gets cheaper and faster to commit when agents are doing the execution. That's the trap founders need to see clearly right now.
Paul Graham's "The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups" is two decades old and still precise: most startup deaths trace back to not making something people want, and nearly every other mistake on the list is a consequence of that one. For founders building AI-native companies today, the list reads less like history and more like a warning that the new tools do not retire the old traps.
Individuals Matter · Dan Luu
If your agents are doing the work, it's tempting to assume the human layer is now fungible. Dan Luu's essay says that assumption was always wrong, and the cost of holding it just got higher.
Dan Luu's essay "Individuals Matter" dismantles the comfortable organizational myth that no single person is irreplaceable — and for founders building AI-native companies, where human judgment is the scarce and consequential input, that dismantling has direct operational weight.
12 Things about Product-Market Fit · Tren Griffin (a16z)
If your agents are doing the work, you need to know whether the market is pulling that work out of your hands or whether you're still pushing. The signal hasn't changed; the surface has.
In "12 Things about Product-Market Fit," Tren Griffin argues that PMF is not a milestone you declare but a sensation you feel — usage pulling the product forward faster than you can manage. For founders building AI-native companies today, that sensation is real, but the signal requires more careful reading when agents are executing on behalf of users rather than users acting directly themselves.
The Four Steps to the Epiphany · Steve Blank
Steve Blank wrote Four Steps to the Epiphany for a world where founders could still plausibly fool themselves into thinking a launch would validate their assumptions. Agents compress that timeline into days — which makes the underlying discipline more urgent, not less.
Steve Blank's *The Four Steps to the Epiphany* makes a claim that cuts harder in the agent era than it did in 2005: you cannot automate your way to product-market fit, because fit is a human judgment earned through direct contact with customers, not a workflow output.
How to Get Startup Ideas · Paul Graham
If your agents are exposing real friction — tasks they can't quite close, handoffs that keep breaking — that's not a bug to suppress, it's a product idea to follow. Paul Graham's logic applies harder when the tooling is this new.
Paul Graham's "How to Get Startup Ideas" argues that the best ideas are noticed, not invented — and that argument lands harder now that the cost of building has collapsed to nearly zero.
How to Raise Money · Paul Graham
If you're running agents that compound daily, every week in fundraising mode is a week your system didn't learn. The cost is asymmetric and most founders undercount it.
In "How to Raise Money," Paul Graham argues that fundraising should be treated as a discrete operational mode — entered deliberately, run with focus, and exited as fast as possible so founders can return to building. For founders running AI-native companies, that framing cuts even deeper: the humans in your company are already the scarce resource, and pulling them into a prolonged fundraise is not just distracting, it is structurally dangerous.
The simplest test for whether a company is AI-native is also the most ruthless: remove the model and see what stops. An AI-native company is built so that intelligence is the operating system, not a convenience layer on top of something else.
Retention Is King · Andrew Chen
If your agents are doing the work, users have less reason to stay hands-on — which makes retention both harder to measure and more dangerous to ignore from day one.
Acquisition gets you users; retention is what turns those users into a company. For founders building with agents, this distinction is not abstract — it is the difference between a product people return to and a demo they forget.
Running Lean · Ash Maurya
Ash Maurya's method was built for founders who move fast and waste nothing — which is exactly the situation you're in when agents can spin up tests overnight.
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