Moats vs. margin 🏰, Private Equity for GTM 💰, product evals 🤖

Investors obsess over gross margins, but Apple is at 38% - roughly half of most software companies - and it's one of the most valuable businesses ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With  TLDR Founders 2025-11-26 Don't spend your early-stage funding on $180K data engineers (Sponsor) You can't run a company without data - but spending a huge chunk of your seed round on data pipeline engineers isn't sustainable. Bruin gives you an AI data engineer instead. Ask it "ingest Stripe data and calculate MRR by cohort." Bruin writes the ingestion, transformation, quality checks, and orchestration. Your report ships in minutes.. No Airbyte, no Airflow, no dbt to manage. Ask and get answers. Open-source. Managed platform. A fraction of an engineer's salary. Get enterprise data infrastructure on a seed budget 📈 Headlines & Trends Private Equity: The New Distribution Channel for AI Startups (1 minute read) Private equity firms are rapidly becoming key distribution channels for AI startups, offering access to a mid-market profile that accelerates sales cycles. AI tools that cut costs and automate workflows fit well with PE's profit motives, creating efficient deployment across portfolios. This model transforms go-to-market strategies, allowing AI startups to reach over 14,000 PE-backed companies, bypassing traditional enterprise sales approaches. Moats Before (Gross) Margins (5 minute read) Investors obsess over gross margins, but Apple has a 38% margin - roughly half of most software companies - and it's one of the most valuable businesses on earth. Margins don't determine great companies, moats - like Network effects, economies of scale, brand power, and switching costs - do. In the AI era, the obsession with high margins is even more dangerous. It might just mean your product isn't using any AI at all. 🧠 Strategies & Tactics Product Evals in Three Simple Steps (9 minute read) Building evals can result in immediate payoffs. They allow you to run multiple experiments to iterate to a working product quickly. Having evals makes development much quicker than if it were bottlenecked on human annotations after each configuration change. This post details how to build product evals. Essential SaaS Metrics for a Series A Fundraise (7 minute read) Key metrics for a SaaS Series A fundraise include Annual Recurring Revenue, Monthly Recurring Revenue, and Year-over-Year growth, which demonstrate traction and scalability. Investors also focus on metrics like Customer Acquisition Cost, Lifetime Value, Net Revenue Retention, Gross Revenue Retention, and Burn Multiple to assess efficiency and growth potential. Understanding and effectively presenting these metrics can enhance credibility with investors and improve valuation. ⚒️ Tools & Resources Ambient is an AI chief of staff that preps every meeting on your calendar (Sponsor) Founder mode means being back to back all day, and still performing at your best. Ambient's AI briefing agent scours internal and external data sources to ensure you're ready for what the day brings – saving you and your team countless hours of prep work in the process. Try Ambient today, free Kite (Tool) Kite is an AI email assistant that declutters your Gmail, automates responses, and gives you back hours each week with smart, secure workflows NeetoCal (Tool) NeetoCal is an AI-powered scheduling tool that syncs calendars, handles payments, and simplifies booking for any kind of meeting. mention.click (Tool) mention is an AI-powered lead generation tool that surfaces relevant Reddit conversations for your product to enable organic outreach, validation, and customer discovery. 🎁 Miscellaneous Some notes from the CEO of Spotify (2 minute read) This thread contains tips given by the CEO of Spotify during a two-hour-long presentation. Spotify made the legal option faster and easier than piracy, and it only widened its focus when its core was working. It built a reusable distribution engine and let teams own outcomes. The company invested early in experimentation infrastructure and was built for global from day one. It only bets on AI when it moves core metrics. The key to the company's success was focus, compounding iteration, and small autonomous teams with real accountability. How to get on a VC's radar in 30 days (using only LinkedIn + X) (2 minute read) You don't need followers, content, or a personal brand to get on a VC's radar - just strategic commenting. Pick 25 investors you want to meet, turn on their post notifications, and show up early with thoughtful takes. ⚡ Quick Links Shot called a year ago (1 minute read) Taste and judgment, not execution, are the bottlenecks when Cursor can take you from idea to code in minutes. Invert, Always Invert (3 minute read) Instead of asking how to succeed, ask how to fail, then systematically avoid those things. Stumbling (1 minute read) The smartest people in the room are often terrible communicators. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/fbea1bf0/7 Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of founders, executives, and decision makers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Andrew Tan & Kevin Wu Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR Founders isn't for you, please unsubscribe.