How to sell to devs 👨‍💻, common accounting mistakes 📊, lessons from Supabase CEO 📚

Engineers assume all salespeople are incompetent. They think about scalability, speed, and reliability, but not money so much ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With  TLDR Founders 2025-12-01 📊 Startups on Carta combined to raise over $27 billion in Q3 2025 — see what's driving growth (Sponsor) Startups on Carta raised the highest amount of funding in three years — up 48% over 2023. The latest State of Private Markets report analyzes this and other trends in the venture capital industry. Read the report to learn why: Early-stage valuations are rising Down rounds are growing less frequent The Bay Area still reigns supreme Although most of the market is raising at steady levels, a few mega-checks, sometimes reaching billions of dollars, are influencing Q3 totals and valuation benchmarks. Read the full findings and analysis 📈 Headlines & Trends Supabase CEO on the "painful" decisions that built a $5B company (1 minute read) Supabase, valued at $5 billion, raised $100 million after previously raising $200 million at a $2 billion valuation. Its CEO, Paul Copplestone, prioritizes sticking to a product vision over accepting demanding enterprise contracts. What Does a "Healthy" Venture Market Actually Look Like? (4 minute read) Boutique Seed funds continue to lead the majority of sub-$10M rounds, despite mega-funds increasingly entering earlier-stage investments. Series A activity clusters around $20M, but competition intensifies above that level, with mega-funds taking a dominant role in rounds above $50M. This shift in dynamics compels investors to differentiate by emphasizing talent and innovation, as traditional stage boundaries blur and AI drives significant opportunity for reinvention. 🧠 Strategies & Tactics How to sell to engineers (9 minute read) Engineers assume all salespeople are incompetent. They think about scalability, speed, and reliability, but not money so much. Focus on how your product will save time and reduce effort. Don't be too loud, don't agitate them, and let them come to you. Most Common Accounting Mistakes (7 minute read) There are a lot of accounting mistakes that can make benchmarking an apples-to-oranges comparison. Your accounting needs to be clean, or your leaders and board won't trust you. This post discusses the most common accounting mistakes. Don't wait until you are deep in M&A diligence or prepping for an IPO before correcting these mistakes, or it may materially impact metrics. Peter Thiel on how to identify great talent (2 minute read) Peter Thiel recruited the founders of YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Affirm before any of them started those companies. When asked what he looks for in undiscovered talent, he said he wants people who are both stubborn and open-minded. ⚒️ Tools & Resources Justworks: One Platform for Payroll, HR, and International Contractors (Sponsor) Scaling a team across borders? Justworks lets you pay US employees and international contractors in 60+ countries from a single dashboard - no tool-juggling required. Pay in local currency or USD, with 24/7 support when you need it. Sign up for any plan now and add on international contractors for free until 2027. Get started with Justworks. Replit for designers (Tool) Turn any creative concept into an interactive, fully functional app with Replit. Trae (Tool) Trae is an AI IDE that collaborates like a real engineer. It plans, codes, and orchestrates your full development workflow to help you ship faster. Yapify (Tool) Voice-powered email tool that drafts replies in your style using context-aware AI, saving time by turning spoken input into perfectly formatted messages. 🎁 Miscellaneous Why Airtable bought DeepSky (5 minute read) Airtable recently acquired DeepSky just four months after launch. The speed of the deal signals a shift in what enterprises value in AI. While most startups compete on the "execution layer" (writing text or code faster), DeepSky focused on the "judgment layer" - the messy research and reasoning that happens before a decision is made. Instead of instantly answering a prompt, the system pauses to plan, runs parallel research threads, and synthesizes findings into business memos. Airtable owns the workflow. By acquiring DeepSky, it now owns the thinking that feeds it. 9-9-6-0: When all you build is character (5 minute read) The current AI gold rush is built on a dangerous gamble: trading "996" work weeks (9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week) for a future lottery ticket. While VCs risk borrowed money, employees risk borrowed time - an asset that cannot be refunded. When the bubble inevitably bursts, many will face the "9-9-6-0" outcome: years of sacrifice that yielded zero dollars. Your perfectionism is lying to you (4 minute read) We often mistake perfectionism for "high standards," but it is usually just procrastination wearing a tuxedo. The obsession with flawlessness prevents you from finishing. In creative work, completion is the only currency that matters. The most successful builders shift their goal from being "perfect" to being "prolific." You are not sculpting stone, you are planting a garden. The only way to get quality is to force yourself to ship quantity. ⚡ Quick Links The Information Diet (3 minute read) Your brain evolved to seek information for survival, but the modern world hijacks this instinct with high-calorie, low-nutrient "junk food" like 24-hour news and social outrage. Garage studios (3 minute read) The "garage startup" is a Silicon Valley cliché, but the psychology behind it is real. Checklist for VC Due Diligence (6 minute read) VC due diligence involves evaluating a startup's founding team, market opportunity, financials, legal structure, and product. Running a Business Means Contact With Reality (8 minute read) Effectively selling requires active effort and understanding customer behavior, often through simple tactics that are underestimated. 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.