Tech and Startups
Move to buttondown, tech headlines, market insights, founder strategies
This week's newsletter might look a bit different, as blaze's email sending service has been moved to https://buttondown.com/. This comes with lots of benefits to subscribers including
- searchable newsletter archive at https://tech.blaze.email
- full-text newsletter RSS feeds at https://tech.blaze.email/rss
- nicer looking email!
Everything else about your newsletter stays the same, and you can can change your subscription any time you like 😊
📣 Headlines
• The AI compute land grab accelerated as Nscale deploys ~200,000 GPUs for Microsoft, while a Microsoft-, Nvidia-, and BlackRock-led group will buy Aligned Data Centers for $40B to lock in capacity.
• IBM doubled down on enterprise AI, showcasing new orchestration and infrastructure at TechXchange 2025 and partnering with Groq to speed LPU-based inference via watsonx.
• Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 4.5, added a Deloitte enterprise deal and projected strong 2026 revenue, signaling cheaper, faster options for teams.
• Wearables are surging: funding momentum is building led by Oura’s $900M+ round and AI-enabled devices, while performance tech like the NBA-tested BetterGuards adaptive ankle brace shows real-world traction.
• Startup funding highlights: Viven raised $35M for employee digital twins, 1001 AI secured $9M to serve critical MENA industries, and Kuku landed $85M to scale GenAI audio/video platforms.
• Early-stage investors focus on practical AI—back-office automation, robotics, healthcare, and drug discovery—even as VCs debate an AI bubble vs. durable upcycle.
• Startup ops are shifting as AI tools streamline hiring, screening, and outreach, and leaders show how to pivot product roadmaps to AI without losing customers.
• Consumer AI interfaces advance as Meta’s Ray-Ban Display smart glasses bring bright microdisplays, neural input, and live captions, with privacy and battery trade-offs.
🔧 Company Engineering Blogs
Beyond Founder Mode: Mission Mode (blog.palantir.com). Mission Mode organizes entire company around customer missions, embedding engineers with teams and prioritizing outcomes over founder involvement
4 Rules for Efficiency: Designing the Systems That Help You Work at Your Best (engineering.gusto.com). Practical rules for personal efficiency: adapting advice, focused workspace, mindset rhythm, and tool-enabled work
Agentforce’s Agent Graph: Toward Guided Determinism with Hybrid Reasoning (engineering.salesforce.com). How Agent Graph tackles drop-off and LLM unpredictability with hybrid reasoning, FSMs, and Agent Script for enterprise AI agents
Accelerate developer productivity with these 9 open source AI and MCP projects (github.blog). Nine open source MCP projects sponsored by GitHub to accelerate AI-native workflows, tooling, and security
Identify User Journeys at Pinterest (medium.com/pinterest-engineering). Explore dynamic extraction, hierarchical clustering, journey naming, ranking with diversification, stage prediction, and LLM-based evaluation for Pinterest's user journeys
💸 Market & Signals
In the air (benn.substack.com). VCs at tech conferences signal potential, while dbt and git reshape collaboration and data tooling amid Vegas Coalesce energy
Startups to Watch & Tech Talents (juliadeluca.substack.com). LatAm tech spotlight: Rivio, ScaleRep, Neon alums, stealth founders, and Tech Talents collaboration
Fourteen years ago at the blog: the "a pervasive fetish" line actually holds up better today than it did then (observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com). Discussion of the Rot Economy, growth fetish, and historical context with references to Ed Zitron and Marc Andreessen/Ben Horowitz
🚀 Founders & Strategy
Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas, PhD 21, on why he ditched pitch decks (newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu). Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas discusses ditching pitch decks, AI-driven questions, Comet browser, and rapid product iteration
I was interviewed about entrepreneurship (obryant.dev). Entrepreneurship reflections, solo building, invention vs business-building, and an interview with Jacob O’Bryant on The Sample/Yakread
Transcript: Henry Ward, Carta Chief Executive Officer (ritholtz.com). Henry Ward of Carta discusses cap tables, private data dematerialization, subscription pricing, and growth challenges
Something Personal: Customer Obsession (chsasank.com). Customer obsession drives over-engagement, blending support, product development, and sales to deliver value with Ubuntu LTS, PostgreSQL, and GPT-OSS
How to PM Production Changes with Devin: Tutorial From Gumroad CEO, Sahil Lavingia (news.aakashg.com). Sahil Lavingia demonstrates AI-driven full-stack PM workflow from Slack to production for Gumroad’s 10M ARR with one employee
Surrender to Chaos (writing.nikunjk.com). Founders embrace chaos over frameworks, risking perception of instability to pursue breakthrough PMF and market-disrupting visions
Dive into the Deep End (jared.xyz). Founders seek insane work ethic and AI-driven consumer product focus; hands-on, no-title collaboration leading to growth and eventual entrepreneurship
🏛️ Org Design & Mission
Google’s engineering culture (newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com). Explores Google’s engineering culture, tech stack, internal tools, design docs, performance reviews, and reinvention cycles with insights from Googlers
The Accountability Problem (jamesshore.com). Accountability in software shifts from dates to product bets, value trajectories, and maximum wagers amid agile, iterative funding
Dumbest Default: Functional Teams (avivbenyosef.com). Cross-functional teams beat by-functional silos; end-to-end collaboration, product outcomes, and management alignment over domain-based splits
Beyond Founder Mode: Mission Mode (blog.palantir.com). Mission Mode organizes entire company around customer missions, embedding engineers with teams and prioritizing outcomes over founder involvement
How to scale startup ops—lessons from FAANGM, Meter, and Alchemy (blog.ldtalentwork.com). Scaling startup operations through legible founder intent, decision records, and a system of record over tool sprawl
Navigating the Risks in Leadership (playfulprogramming.com). Leadership risks, care for people behind the screens, and navigating growth from engineer to VP with personal philosophy
🧭 Senior IC & Staff
Advice for New Principal Tech ICs (i.e., Notes to Myself) (eugeneyan.com). Principals balance hands-on coding with technical vision, alignment across orgs, and mentorship across product, design, and engineering
What is a Principal Engineer at Microsoft? (newsletter.techworld-with-milan.com). Dejan Dundjerski discusses becoming Principal Engineer at Microsoft, Azure SQL MI replatforming, AI troubleshooting, and problem-solving mindset
The Last StaffPlus NYC: When the Role Outgrew Its Room (laconicwit.com). Final StaffPlus NYC reflections on role maturity, mentoring, long-term impact, and the return of LDX3 with blurred IC/manager lines
The illegible nature of software development talent (elezea.com). Explores how software development talent is often ill-understood and the factors that shape expertise and hiring outcomes
Your next staff engineer is one warm intro away (partly.work). Staff engineers deliver immediate impact; near-network sourcing and leveraging existing connections beat cold outreach for top talent
Changing my mind on developer onboarding: code vs product (olshansky.info). Onboarding engineers: shift from code setup to product usage, user accounts, and real production problems
🔧 Engineering Ops & DX
Interview with a new hosting provider founder (ntietz.com). Diana builds Andromeda Industries / Gigabit.Host to deliver affordable, high-performance hosting using Proxmox, Temporal, Supabase, Next.js, TS, and Ansible
Building the Web that Moves Money: inside Web engineering at Revolut (medium.com/revolut). Revolut's web engineering approach emphasizes secure, scalable, and fast web products with XP-inspired practices and a large ecosystem
Byte Happens interview with Matt Crampton - From Development to Management Innovating in Tech (mattcrampton.com). Matt Crampton discusses his tech journey, Gigwalk, Headnote, AOL/Yahoo roles, and transitioning from engineering to management
Who Keeps the Lights On? (robbyonrails.com). Planet Argon helps maintain Rails apps after launch, focusing on modernization, risk reduction, and long-term stability
Pycon NL: workshop: measuring and elevating quality in engineering practice - Daniele Procida (reinout.vanrees.org). Daniele Procida discusses defining, measuring, and elevating engineering quality at Canonical with a simple dashboard and human-facing methods
⚙️ Engineering Flow & Craft
Programming Bowls (stevedylan.dev). Explores programming minimalism, ‘bowls’ like Next.js, dependencies, languages, and permacomputing through practical, privacy-focused choices
Avoid Complexity (elijahpotter.dev). Strategies to reduce Harper's complexity: trim build steps, parallelize CI, drop non-essential optimizations, and streamline deployment
Developer Flow (leadership.garden). Explores flow theory, blockers, and practical steps like 15% time, Flow Fridays, and flow-optimized tooling for engineers
The Fast Engineer Trap (digitalbunker.dev). Slow down to ship with depth: curb fast-ship habits, value questions, tests, and edge-case checks over constant surveillance
Space for innovation, continuous things, and scaling yourself 💡 (refactoring.fm). Explores piggybacking for tech capital, innovation intermissions, continuous delivery vs deployment, and scaling yourself
🧰 AI Infrastructure & Ops
Data and AI culture: How Nu’s philosophy became a competitive advantage (building.nubank.com). Nu's data and AI culture, Data Mesh, autonomy, and 100+ ML models powering customer-centric decisions
I want to see the claw (veekaybee.github.io). Advocates software mastery, humane collaboration, and beware of mediocrity in AI-assisted coding, citing Redis, cURL, uv, Ghostty, sqlite, and llama.cpp as exemplars
The AI concept that changed our company’s way of working (uxdesign.cc). How a Product Playground and Infrastructure design reshape collaboration, design handoff, and rapid prototyping across teams using AI-enabled tools
🎧🍌 Building AI-Native Infrastructure for Developers with Erik Bernhardsson, Co-founder and CEO of Modal (thespl.it). AI-native infrastructure with Erik Bernhardsson of Modal; GPU scarcity, consumption-based pricing, and startup culture insights
Engineering for the AI-Native Era : Office Hours with Calvin French-Owen (tomtunguz.com). Intimate talk on building AI-native systems at scale with Calvin French-Owen, focusing on infrastructure, velocity, and tooling
🤖 AI-Native Engineering
Rapid web app development with Devin - A Developer’s Perspective by James Camilleri (blog.scottlogic.com). Explores agentic AI Devin vs Copilot for building a carbon-emissions web app, including ACU costs and deployment workflow
Generative Development (blog.mgechev.com). Generative development with agentic tools like Gemini CLI and Cursor speeds prototyping, focusing on output over initial code, browser-first experimentation, and top-down refinement
🔗 Good coding agent advice (steipete.me). No-bs guide to agentic engineering: codex codex web, Claude Code, plan mode, subagents, MCPs, tmux, GitHub actions, and testing practices
ClaunkedIn (paritybits.me). ClaunkedIn explores using Claude models for software planning, وهو includes internal piloting ideas, opt-in candidate scraping, and buzz-fizzing with open-to-work talent
How to Build Multi-Agent AI Systems That Actually Work in Production | Tyler Fisk (news.aakashg.com). Tyler Fisk demos production-ready multi-agent AI with TypingMind, CassidyAI, and Claude/Perplexity for Apple customer service
Claude Code is unreasonably good at building MVPs (brethorsting.com). Claude Code accelerates MVP prototyping, collapsing idea-to-working-version time from weeks to hours for rapid user feedback
Hackertuah: From Idea to Top 20 on Hacker News in Record Time (kbr.sh). Rust CLI Hackertuah for Hacker News browsing; AI-assisted development with Claude.ai, Cursor, and Claude Code, achieving Show HN success
My Engineering Workflow in CursorAI (codeaholicguy.com). AI-accelerated software workflow using CursorAI with ai-devkit, MCP, and CLI prompts for faster engineering cycles