Weekly digest #83: 2025 Wrapped
Taste Is eating Silicon Valley, Making markets in time, How to be more agentic
We (Matt and Shray) read hundreds of articles on company building, venture investing, and self-management and curate the best ones into a weekly digest to help investors, founders, and operators (IFOs) stay on the top of their game.
This issue covers some of our favorite reads this past year. We’ll see you again in 2026. Happy New Year!
Better thinking
50 things I know (10 minute read)
Here are 5 things Sasha knows that stood out to me (Shray): 1. People who are fluid with status display real confidence. They allow themselves to be the butt of a joke, or accept criticism, but also avoid false modesty, and inhabit the spotlight when it falls on them. 2. Listening is a neglected social skill. But an even more neglected social skill is candor. 3. Real freedom is earned by confronting things that embarrass and trigger you, over and over again, until you are cringe-proof in your desired environment. 4. Taking on a difficult project with some amount of public accountability makes people grow more reliably than anything else. 5. Environmental influence is the most effective form of behavioral control. Being in the wrong city will cancel out years of self-improvement.
The 100 best bits of advice from 10 years of First Round Review (22 minute read)
100 snappy snippets of some of the very best advice that First Round has shared on their digital pages over the past decade, which wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible entrepreneurs who shared their insights and expertise so that the next generation of builders may succeed. Read on if you’re seeking high signal-to-noise advice to grow as a leader, manage your team, start up, and improve your business or product.
Taste is eating Silicon Valley (4 minute read)
Tech's frontier has shifted from pure functionality to cultural resonance. In today's saturated software market, great code alone no longer guarantees success - products must speak to users' identities and values through thoughtful design, branding, and user experience. Silicon Valley's next wave of winners will be those who master both technical innovation and cultural taste, turning products into vehicles of self-expression rather than just tools.
Operational tactics
Developing taste (2 minute read)
As AI makes product development more accessible, brand, design, and user experience become key differentiators. In a world of abundance, taste matters most. Rather than being just personal preference, taste is a trained instinct developed through exposure to excellence, analysis of great work, and consistent practice with constructive feedback from trusted peers. This will make you not only a good judge of taste, but also, with time, a tastemaker. While early work may fall short of your standards, this gap between taste and ability is normal. Don't quit, it'll get better overtime.
Early stage brand design (2 minute read)
A candid look at the misconception that visual rebranding drives startup growth. While founders often spend excessive time and money on high-end brand design, what truly matters is building a product that solves real problems. Early-stage startups need only "good enough" design that enables them to move quickly and focus on product-market fit. Building trust with users ultimately matters more than visual polish.
Product management → prototype management (2 minute read)
Most product managers don’t see how rapidly their role is changing. Writing specs becomes building MVPs. Managing timelines becomes rapid iteration. As AI handles the coordination, what matters is talking to customers and learning to sell. The best prototype is worthless if you build without understanding or can’t convince others of its value. The bottom line is that the next wave of great PMs won’t be discovered through interviews—they’ll be found through what they build and sell.
Refer and we’ll send you our favorite books as a “thank you” for spreading the word.
Venture investing
A technical framework for valuing AI companies (23 minute read)
This analysis unpacks why traditional valuation methods fail for AI companies and introduces a framework that accounts for their unique “displacement risk.” Dive into the full article to see why most foundation models face a brutal zero-value threshold, how technical leadership determines survival, and what makes OpenAI worth closer to $175B than $300B. Essential reading for anyone investing in or building AI companies.
The beginner’s guide to angel investing (5 minute read)
Now, many of our readers here aren’t beginners, but this is a worthwhile refresher on the basics. When you’re starting out, angel investing works best when you think of it as community building rather than pure financial returns. Small checks function like an expensive MBA, giving you direct learning about business operations and social capital. One of the most important things is to simply not get in the way of the founders.
Making markets in time (15 minute read)
Abraham Thomas shows how venture capital’s “temporal arbitrage” breaks the long path from idea to IPO into discrete stages, reducing uncertainty for both investors and founders. Each step relies on consensus-driven signals such as revenue milestones or market traction to unlock further funding. This structure parallels the efficiency gains from futures trading in wheat, where standardized contracts let farmers, transporters, and millers each focus on a single part of the supply chain instead of handling every step. As a result, more capital now flows into VC, although the same consensus-based approach can intensify herd behavior and turn a boom into a dramatic bust.
Career management
How to make something great (4 minute read)
In any creative endeavor, be it art, software, or architecture, true greatness emerges from a cultivation of potential rather than a single stroke of genius. Creation at its core is a strange, messy, and unpredictable process. But it should be like this. The birth of something great is never linear and it’s okay to wrestle with an ambiguous artifact in its roughest form. In a world riddled with A/B tests and data-driven methodologies, an excellent idea can be killed too early because of a rush to validation. By viewing initial hurdles as a leading indicator that more exploration is needed, you’ll avoid destroying something that never had a chance to prove itself. At the end of the process, people only see the final state. What you know is the hidden complexity, how the artifact could have cracked and fallen to rubble at any misstep. Ryo Lu, Head of Design at Cursor, makes the intangible concept feel more tangible in this short read.
How to be more agentic (6 minute read)
There’s nothing radical about agency. Anyone, regardless of natural intelligence or talent, can manifest the determination to make things happen. It’s about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they unpleasant or annoying. Agency isn’t innate but learnable through deliberate practice: courting rejection to build resilience, meeting people randomly to increase your surface area for luck, embracing the temporary low status of learning, and setting boundaries to prevent burnout. Agency empowers you to shape your environment according to your vision, whether in career, relationships, or creative pursuits. No one is born with it, everyone can learn it, and it’s never too late.
Maximizing time for reading (12 minute read)
Who says that you need a fancy degree to improve yourself professionally? Reading is arguably one of the best ways to level up your skillset. Rather than ceding spare moments to distractions, carve out daily time to engage with reading material that challenges you, be it poetry, non-fiction, or even industry reports. Even if it’s just ten minutes here and there, those bits of reading compound fast. And over time, your deliberate practice will lead to clearer thinking and stronger communication - both golden tickets for career advancement. If you want to become more valuable at work, start valuing your mind.