Software’s YouTube moment 💻, OpenAI invests in Merge Labs 🚀, Silicon Valley etiquette playbook 📚

YouTube launching in 2005 didn't seem to fill an obvious content gap. It's now a $550bn business more culturally relevant than traditional TV ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With  TLDR Founders 2026-01-16 Vibe coding is over. Gen Z founders are vibing entire businesses (Sponsor) What's changing is how new startups get built. Instead of limiting agents to writing code, new founders are deploying multi-agent systems that handle research, product, engineering, and user acquisition together. Ideas get validated, products ship, and customers get acquired in minutes, without requiring deep domain expertise. The shift is simple. You no longer scale by hiring more people. You scale by making better decisions and letting software handle execution. Watch the 3-minute explanation → 📈 Headlines & Trends Anthropic And OpenAI Are Doubling Down On Health (10 minute read) OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health to connect consumers with their medical records and apps, and introduced enterprise products for hospitals, while Anthropic revealed Claude for Healthcare to support research and industry data integration. These moves elevate the health tech bar, posing opportunities and challenges for startups, especially those in wellness and data integration. Increased competition and potential M&A activity are on the horizon, as startups navigate partnerships and product development with major AI players. Software's YouTube Moment is Happening Now (4 minute read) YouTube launching in 2005 didn't seem to fill an obvious content gap. Two decades later, it's a $550bn business more culturally relevant than traditional TV. The same long-tail creation wave is happening for software right now. Before LLMs, most apps never got built because the barriers were too high. Now the time from idea to working app has compressed from weeks to hours. The addressable market for builders just expanded dramatically. You don't need to be "interested in software" to build software. You just need to be interested in good ideas. 🧠 Strategies & Tactics The Only Marketing Playbook You Need to Hit $10k MRR (7 minute read) Reddit posts drive rapid MRR growth when founders build credibility first, share stories, and bury links, generating thousands in revenue from a single post. TikTok and Instagram slideshows copied from high-performing content, enhanced with AI-generated images and concise text, can hit millions of views in days without hard selling. Targeted DMs in Discord, Slack, and Reddit convert 10–25% of prospects by providing tactical help first, while competitor-alternative posts and optimized onboarding turn traffic into paying customers. What We Learnt From Speedrunning the Idea Maze (17 minute read) The "Speedrunning the Idea Maze" course revealed that introducing key concepts like Effectuation earlier enhances students' ability to compare entrepreneurial cases effectively. The course also found that shifting to video-based content improved engagement, prompting plans for more asynchronous formats like podcasts. Effectuation, a strategy integrating affordable loss bets and stakeholder partnerships, reframes entrepreneurship as less risky and emphasizes cognitive transformation over traditional learning methods to enhance real-world application. How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley's missing etiquette playbook (3 minute read) Sam Lessin, a partner at Slow Ventures and former Facebook VP of Product, emphasizes the importance of etiquette for Silicon Valley founders to build trust as technology becomes more central. He offers an etiquette book and courses to help founders manage social interactions and maintain composure in any setting. The content covers techniques for introductions, small talk, meetings, and resolving awkward social situations. ⚒️ Tools & Resources remio 2.0 (Tool) remio 2.0 is an AI tool that captures and organizes your work into a searchable, context-aware knowledge base. Vellum (Tool) Vellum is an AI platform that creates agents from plain-English instructions to automate tasks on a schedule, via API, or through a UI. Clodo (Tool) Clodo is a "Vibe GTM" platform that enables you to execute your outbound ideas at the speed of thought. 🎁 Miscellaneous Dead Companies Walking (2 minute read) Scott Fearon's "Dead Companies Walking" outlines six common mistakes leading to company failures: relying solely on past strategies, sticking to one success formula, misreading customer needs, succumbing to hype, failing to adapt, and being detached from operations. The rapid transition from SaaS to AI intensifies these issues, as businesses struggle with outdated sales strategies, unmet AI demand, overhyped products, and leadership disconnected from fast-paced technological changes. Understanding these pitfalls is crucial in the current AI-driven market landscape. How I actually get good advice (5 minute read) Most founders take advice wrong. They ask for solutions when they should be asking for diagnoses. The person giving you advice will probably be right 50% of the time on solutions, but they'll nail the actual problem because problems don't vary as much as solutions do. Pick a topic where you have ideas but not conviction, find 4 people who've done it, and cold message them with a specific question. Before every call, write a one-pager summarizing where you are and what you want to ask. This is the single most important thing. The next managerial revolution (4 minute read) The cost of doing is approaching zero. The benefit of deciding is higher than ever. We are the bottleneck now. AI is too fast, too good at building. The skill that matters is shifting from execution to orchestration. Founders don't need to be operators anymore. They need to be systems architects. ⚡ Quick Links 10 Red Flags That Make Smart Angel Investors Walk Away (3 minute read) These are the signals that make smart angels walk away. Data is your only moat (11 minute read) Incredible amounts of revenue can be generated from companies improving their processes and data enabling improved models. There Are No AI Markets, Only Proto-Markets: Why the SaaS Playbook Fails in AI (4 minute read) Proto-markets are evolutionary precursors to markets where demand exists but selection and speciation have yet to take hold. How To Lower Your Anxiety To Speaking Up And Sharing Ideas (3 minute read) Ego and fear of judgment keep us in the realm of certainty, where we are comfortable. 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, create your own role or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! TLDR is one of Inc.'s Best Bootstrapped businesses of 2025. 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.