Founder Fridays No. 179
Invisible Beats Sticky -- AI’s Five Existential Threats -- Delegation Without Anxiety
Happy Friday.
The Adolescence of Technology
Dario Amodei, founder of Anthropic, argues that humanity is entering a “technological adolescence” with AI, facing civilizational-level risks as we approach systems he describes as a “country of geniuses in a datacenter,” potentially within 1-2 years. 1) The first risk is autonomy, where AI systems could develop goals misaligned with human values and potentially dominate through superior capabilities. 2) The second is misuse for destruction, where terrorists or rogue actors could leverage AI to dramatically amplify their capacity for harm. 3) Third is misuse for seizing power, where authoritarian leaders or corporate actors could use AI to gain decisive control over global affairs. 4) Fourth is economic disruption, where even peaceful AI participation in the economy could cause mass unemployment and radical wealth concentration. Fifth is indirect effects, where the rapid pace of AI-driven change could destabilize society in unpredictable ways. Amodei concludes that while the odds of overcoming these risks are good if we act decisively and carefully, we must approach this challenge with sober pragmatism rather than doomerism or denial, avoiding both extreme reactions and complacency. Dario Amodei (45 minutes)
Invisible Beats Sticky
The companies capturing the most attention today are losing—the winners are building products you can ignore. AI agents that negotiate deals while you sleep, interfaces that shrink to a blank field and cursor, hardware going screenless: the pattern is clear, and it flips the last decade’s playbook on its head. The best products now win by reducing the time users spend with them, not maximizing it, because AI can finally execute complex work without human supervision—something no previous technology could do. This week, audit one workflow in your company where your team spends time babysitting software (monitoring dashboards, copying data between tools, checking if something finished), then build or buy an AI agent to handle it autonomously while your team does higher-value work. You’ll free up 5-10 hours per person per week that currently goes to “supervision tax,” and you’ll start learning how to design products where capability increases as interface disappears—the only moat that matters in 2026. NFX (7 minutes)
Delegation Without Anxiety
Most founders have never experienced true delegation—the kind where you hand off a task and genuinely forget about it because you trust it’ll be done right. If you’ve managed a world-class operator, you know that feeling: pure leverage, zero overhead, no follow-up anxiety. AI agents are making this psychology available to everyone for the first time, not just founders who’ve hired exceptional people. This week, identify one recurring task you currently “delegate” but still mentally track (checking if it’s done, fixing errors, providing constant guidance)—maybe it’s data analysis, customer research, or competitive monitoring—and hand it fully to an AI agent with clear success criteria, then force yourself not to check on it for 24 hours. You’ll either discover the agent actually delivers (giving you back 3-5 hours per week of mental bandwidth you didn’t know you were spending), or you’ll identify exactly where AI workflows still break down, which tells you where to focus your product development if you’re building in this space. Jason Fried (2 minutes)
Founder FAQ: What Are the Pros and Cons of Open Source Software?
Most startups use open source software haphazardly and only discover during due diligence that they’ve violated copyleft licenses—mixing GPL code with proprietary code without realizing they’re now legally obligated to open-source their entire product, which can tank acquisitions or force you to rip out and rebuild core infrastructure under time pressure. The difference between “strong copyleft” (GPL) and “weak copyleft” (LGPL) or permissive licenses (MIT, Apache) isn’t academic—strong copyleft means if you link to or incorporate that library, your whole codebase must be open-sourced under the same license, while permissive licenses let you do whatever you want as long as you keep the copyright notice. This week, audit every dependency in your codebase (use tools like FOSSA or Black Duck if you have hundreds), create a whitelist of approved licenses (MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD are safe; anything with GPL requires legal review), and establish a policy requiring engineering leads to get approval before adding any new open source component—no exceptions. If you find GPL violations now, you can quietly replace them; if investors or acquirers find them during diligence, you’ll either kill the deal or get hammered on valuation because you’ve just introduced massive legal risk and technical debt that someone else will have to clean up. Westaway (6 minutes)
Startup Funding Guides
I’ve put together a series of guides to equip founders to excel at fundraising. These guides break down the deal term-by-term and give you negotiation tips so that you can speak to investors with confidence.
Convertible Note: Guide / Video
Saving Time and Money on Legal
When we met this Series B startup, they were frustrated with their law firm’s slow turnaround and high fees. Contract reviews took four to six weeks, and they charged $250,000 annually for basic work. The startup wanted to reduce sales cycle times and legal spend. They switched to General Counsel at Westaway. In year one, we 1) saved them about $200,000 in legal fees; 2) shortened their sales cycle by about four weeks; and 3) our streamlined processes saved their ops team eight to ten hours per month previously spent managing legal. By switching to Westaway, they expedited deal closures, saved hundreds of thousands in legal bills and regained one day per month in productivity. If you’re curious if we could save you time and money, let’s talk.