Weekly digest #84
AI predictions, The future of B2B marketing, How to stand out in 2026
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 founders and operators stay on the top of their game.
Better thinking
Steam, steal, and infinite minds (8 minute read)
Really good read from Ivan (founder of Notion). He beautifully articulates that we’re in this middle ground with AI. Every era has a miracle material. Steel gave us skyscrapers, steam freed factories from rivers. AI is the miracle material for knowledge work. We’re deploying it in the ways we’re comfortable with (like chatbots). But to make the most use of it, we need to entirely redesign our relationship with work. Just like how steel enabled us to reimagine cities (we could build higher, rail could connect us), AI is inviting us to reimagine knowledge work.
2025 in AI predictions (14 minute read)
A really neat summary of all the lofty predictions around AI from 2023-2045. Some have turned out to be true, others were way off. You’d be unsurprised to hear that most predictions by founders/CEOs (aka, hype men) at large models were the latter. Interestingly, clusters of predictions start to form around 2030, suggesting this is the year that people are generally agreeing is when real impact happens.
Devotion > discipline (4 minute read)
Discipline is the act of doing the thing, even when you don’t want to. We’re often told to have more of it. While devotion encourages you to build habits and practices around the thing that help make committing to it more sustainable. Exercising either discipline or devotion requires you to think about friction. How much friction is there involved in doing the thing? You’re not going to do something that’s high friction when you have low devotion to it. Acknowledging scenarios like that and designing around them helps you overcome inactivity.
Operational tactics
The future of B2B marketing (5 minute read)
“Gen marketer” is a generalist marketer. And now, thanks to new tooling (read: AI), one person should be able to do many things. Having a generalist marketer doing those many things, versus a specialist (like a PMM or field marketer) works better. These new tools also place the power of specificity into marketers hands. Knowing your audience (Clay), building custom landing pages (Framer), embedding yourself into LLMs (Profound). I personally (Matt) think AEO is ngmi, but hey, this newsletter loves it.
The death of the tech conference (3 minute read)
Company-agnostic tech conferences are losing ground to company-specific ones. CES is still huge but the big moments don't happen there anymore. That started with Jobs launching the iPhone at Macworld instead of CES because he wanted full control and didn't want the product compared to anything else. Now every major tech company runs their own event. Stripe has Sessions, Figma has Config, Salesforce has Dreamforce. The old trade show format still works for meeting suppliers and catching smaller announcements, just not for the moments that shape the industry.
Standing out in 2026 (2 minute read)
A few years ago, companies started posting directly on social media instead of going through journalists (the whole “go direct” movement). Then everyone did it and it got noisy, so the edge became making good videos and podcasts (Summer 2025 was the year of the launch/fundraising vid). Now even that’s crowded. The argument here is that in 2026, the way to cut through is doing real things. Showing the actual work behind what you’re building, don’t overpolish, create moments people remember beyond a scroll, being a human instead of a brand. It takes longer but it lasts.
Refer and we’ll send you our favorite books as a “thank you” for spreading the word.
Venture investing
A16z, the power brokers (87 minute read)
Yes, you read that correctly. 87 minute read, recounting the history of a16z up until their most recent fundraise, $15bn. Yes, you read that correctly also, $15bn. Lots of people in the market are talking about megafunds getting too big (not enough opportunity, etc), this offers a good counterargument. It’s basically making the case that a16z is less a VC fund, and more a belief-driven institution betting on tech changing the world and eating everything. Lots of founder testimonials, returns data, and the argument that the firm actually gets better at scale.
Career management
The modern PM in the age of agents (6 minute read)
When AI hit product development I think a few of us thought the spec might go away a little (just prompt and iterate). With agentic workflows (agents doing things autonomously for you), it now looks like it’s making a resurgence. In fact, maybe the spec is even now the product. Product builders who can write well and clearly articulate the problem are at a much better advantage than those who can’t.
The grief when AI writes most of the code (2 minute read)
Gergely Orosz (Pragmatic Engineer) is feeling a bit bummed that AI now writes most of their code. They spent years getting good at programming, and there was real satisfaction in being “in the zone” writing code. Now that AI does it faster (and sometimes better), it feels like something’s being lost. He wonders “flow state” will just shift to higher-level thinking instead, and in fact, this loss is a net good for company building.
The disappearing middle of software work (2 minute read)
The “middle” of software development used to take up the most time. The pathway from an idea to shipped feature. Today, that middle is a little compressed. It’s quicker to go from idea to code now. What implications does that have on the craft of building software, and the roles we define across it? Karri, the founder of Linear, suggests that there’s a new type of craft evolving, and that’s managing a fleet of agents to carry out work on your behalf.