In 2009, a PhD student, Lester Mackey, entered a competition Netflix had created to find the best movie recommendation algorithm. The prize was a million dollars. The rules were simple: beat Netflix’s own algorithm by 10%. There was just one problem: the dataset was too large to fit on a laptop.

Mackey asked a labmate who would become his co-founder if they could build something to handle it. They wrote 600 lines of code over a weekend. Mackey competed. He tied for first place on the improvement score. He lost the million dollars because the other team submitted their entry 20 minutes earlier.

That 600-line weekend project became Apache Spark. The open source standard for data processing used by most of the world’s largest companies. The seed of Databricks, now valued at over $130 billion.

Reynold Xin, Databricks’ co-founder, tells this story without drama. That’s partly his style, but it’s also because he understands something most founders spend years resisting: the beginning of a great company almost never looks like one. It looks like a competition you lose. A product nobody will pay for. And 3 years of misery in the middle of what looks, from the outside, like a success.

When Traction Is a Lie

By 2013, Databricks was a real company with real momentum. Apache Spark had become the de facto standard for large-scale data processing. Thousands of engineers were showing up to conferences. There were selfies. There was what Reynold diplomatically calls “massive open source traction.”

There was also, by the end of 2015, roughly 1M dollars in annual revenue. 3 years in.

“We were a commercial failure for the first 3 years,” Reynold says.

“From the outside it was hard to understand because a lot of the metrics were vanity metrics about open source adoption. But when you looked at revenue…”

And this is a huge trap. Not failure — the appearance of success while the business itself doesn’t work. The metrics that feel good are not the metrics that matter. Thousands of downloads and a room full of raving fans is not a business.

The breakthrough, when it came, had two parts.

First: building actual go-to-market machinery. Databricks was a group of engineers and founders wandering around trying to sell a product. That’s fine as a learning experience — Reynold believes it — but it doesn’t scale. You need the infrastructure of a real business.

Second, and more fundamentally: creating proprietary IP. This is the part founders of open source projects resist most. But Reynold puts it like this:

“Just because we created a massively successful open source ecosystem doesn’t mean customers should pay us for what they’d have gotten for free. There needed to be some value that was justified.”

The vision didn’t change. The go-to-market and the proprietary layer had to be built around it. One without the other is either a movement or a charity.

What Mike Did That Almost Nobody Does

Before Ada, Mike Murchison was building a consumer app. It was growing. And then, the way scaling companies do, it started treating its own customers as a liability.

“Customer service got worse the bigger we got,” he says. “We went from knowing our users’ names, craving their feedback — to our customer service operations being focused entirely on reducing contact.”

He started cold-calling VPs of Customer Experience to understand why. He talked to twelve of them. All twelve said the same thing: we talk to our customers less as we grow. Customer service is a cost center. I am literally compensated on how much I can reduce contact this year.

“When I heard that maybe the twelfth time in a row,” Mike says, “I started to develop a thesis.”

Here is where Mike did something most founders don’t. He didn’t go build. He went back to those same twelve VPs and asked if he and his co-founder could join their teams — as customer service agents. Seven said yes. He spent a year in the weeds, working support queues, learning the operations from the inside, before he revealed what he was actually building.

“We learned very manually how to provide great service at scale,” he says. “That has informed our approach and continues to today.”

This is the thing that separates deep founders from competent ones. Mike didn’t just understand the problem intellectually. He lived it. He wasn’t studying the problem from the outside. He was the problem.

The Only Advice That Actually Matters

Reynold texted his co-founders before going on stage: What advice would you give?

Several responded. Then their CEO, Ali Ghodsi, replied: “I disagree with all of the above.” And offered a single sentence.

“Nothing can substitute for creating a product that is 10 times better than something else that exists.”

That’s it. Not 10 times better than the closest alternative at some features. 10 times better, full stop. Or going zero-to-one — solving something that was previously impossible. Do either of those things and you have a business. Do neither and no amount of execution, culture, or fundraising will save you.

“The 10x doesn’t mean exactly ten times,” Reynold clarifies. “It means it can’t be something fairly incremental if you actually want to build a very successful business.”

Mike adds the practical path:

“When you start a company, you’re so resource-constrained. You look at successful companies and think – they have resources, infrastructure, distribution that I don’t have. But there is one thing you can genuinely be the best in the world at: understanding your problem more deeply than anyone else.

That’s the edge. Not capital. Not talent. Not even technology. All of which you can eventually acquire. The edge is understanding. And it’s available to everyone who’s willing to actually do the work of getting it.

When Reynold talks about customer obsession, he’s not talking about a cultural value written on a wall. He means something specific. He was doing 10 customer meetings himself — not his sales team, not his product managers — over a two-week stretch that spanned an American holiday. He texts design partners on a first-name basis. He asks them not “what’s wrong with the product” but “what are your concerns” and “what else can we do for you.” The distinction matters. One question narrows, and the other opens.

Right now, those conversations are surfacing a single theme: AI token costs.

The world has swung from “use more, use more, use use use” to “I burned through my entire annual budget in the first quarter, now what?” Every company is having this conversation. That’s a product opportunity. You only find it if you’re in the room.

What the AI Era Actually Changes

Both founders are building AI companies and running their businesses on AI. Here is their take.

The cost of writing software is falling fast. A two-person team can do work that used to require a hundred people. The arbitrage opportunity for small companies right now is speed — moving while large incumbents are still figuring out their governance and approval processes.

Mike says:

“Showing up as a two-person team that can do the work of a hundred-person team really does make a difference, more so than it used to.”

Taste Is the New Moat

There’s a question that used to be fairly simple for founders: what makes us defensible? You’d answer it with technology, patents, network effects, switching costs. The standard toolkit.

Mike Murchison thinks the answer has changed:

“The most important thing right now is taste. It’s never been more important for you to say: this is what an amazing experience looks like, and to be able to paint it.”

He’s not talking about design sensibility. He’s talking about something harder: the ability to hold a precise, uncompromising vision of greatness at the exact moment when building has never been cheaper, faster, or more democratic.

At Ada, almost everyone in the company is now creating pull requests, contributing directly to the product, regardless of their background. Non-technical people shipping features. The cost of participation has collapsed.

That premium shows up in a specific way: the people who will win are the ones who can clearly say “this is not good enough”, before the market tells them. Not after the NPS score comes back. Not after a competitor ships. Before. The vision has to be internal and precise, not external and reactive.

Reynold agrees, and then adds a wrinkle that makes the argument more complicated.

“If you assume the cost of software continues going down,” he says, “one natural outcome is that it becomes easy to copy. You can reduce taste by poor judgment, yes. But you can also simply copy it.”

His point:

Taste is real and it matters, but it isn’t a durable moat by itself. What can’t be copied overnight is the oldest, most unsexy list in business — brand, distribution, trust.

“A red Ferrari is a red Ferrari,” Reynold says. “You can’t have a red Xiaomi and sell it for half a million dollars.”

For founders at the earliest stages, this sounds like bad news — you don’t have any of those things.

Read it differently and it’s actually clarifying. In the short run, taste and speed are your moats. Move fast, build something extraordinary, get close to your customers before larger players figure out their governance process. In the long run, you’re racing to convert that early advantage into brand, distribution, and trust before the window closes.

The companies that do both — start with taste, compound into moats — are the ones that become generational.

The question to ask yourself isn’t whether you have taste. It’s whether you can define, specifically, what “extraordinary” looks like in your market — and whether every decision you’re making right now moves toward it or away from it.

The Things Successful Founders Don’t Usually Say

Reynold says something at the end of this conversation that most successful founders won’t say. Asked whether founders should start companies, he doesn’t give the standard answer.

“If you’re a strong engineer who can find a well-paying job,” he says carefully, “the expected value of working might actually be higher. The risk of failure is pretty high.”

He says it not to discourage anyone, but because he’s being honest in a room full of people who are about to make a consequential decision. He follows it with:

“That said, fail once, fail three times, keep going. There’s nothing wrong with it. The rate of learning is the highest with entrepreneurship. You will develop a skill set that your peers who went to big companies simply won’t have.”

Mike extends it: “The downside is so much more minimal than you think. And there’s so much more upside in starting something than most people realize.”

Both of them, in different ways, are pointing at the same thing. The failure people fear is rarely as catastrophic as it feels in advance. The learning is irreplaceable. And the environment you choose — the five people you spend most of your time with, the peer group that shapes what you think is ambitious and what isn’t — turns out to be one of the most important decisions you make.

“You can be the best in the world at understanding your problem,” Mike says. “You get to choose who influences you to be more ambitious. Those are both in your control.”

That’s the brick. The rest is building.

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post How to Build a $100B Company, Brick by Brick appeared first on BYVI.

A VP of Customer Success at a Series C SaaS company spent months building what she was proud of: a proper CS machine. Health scores tied to product usage. Automated alerts at 90, 60, and 30 days before renewal. A QBR cadence. A team of CSMs who knew their books of business cold.

Then one of her best accounts churned. She found out why a year later: the customer had quietly shifted strategy 9 months earlier, following a new CFO hire. There was no signal in the data. No flag in the CRM. No alert. Just a renewal conversation that started three weeks before expiration, and a customer who had already made up their mind.

This is the central contradiction of proactive customer success: most of it isn’t proactive at all.

The CS Mantra That Became a Myth

“Proactive customer success” has become the operating philosophy for virtually every CS org at growth-stage companies. Conference tracks are dedicated to it. Job descriptions demand it. Entire platforms have been built around it.

And yet churn keeps happening. Net Revenue Retention keeps disappointing. And CS leaders at Series C companies (companies that have already figured out product-market fit, that have mature CS organizations, that are spending real money on tooling) are the ones who feel this most acutely.

These teams aren’t failing for lack of effort. The tools they’re running on were designed around a narrower model of what knowing your customer actually means.

What Actually Breaks at Series C

At Series A and B, customer success is still a relationship business. You have a manageable number of accounts, relatively similar customers, and enough CSM bandwidth to maintain deep context on each one. You can look across 3 to 5 systems to understand an account and you can get away with outreach that treats your base as a single segment. It works because the math still works.

Series C breaks this entirely.

“Headcount cannot solve the issue,” says Archana Somasegar, founder of MineMe, a customer intelligence platform.

“As your customer base diversifies, you need to bring data into one place to raise real opportunities and separate signal from noise.”

Archana Somasegar, founder of MineMe

The portfolio grows. Customer profiles diverge. The CSM-to-account ratio stretches. And the “proactive” motions that worked at smaller scale (the health score dashboards, the renewal-triggered workflows, the QBR cadences) start to collapse. Not because the tools are bad, but because they were designed for a world that no longer exists.

The strategic imperative also shifts. At Series A/B, the name of the game is new logo acquisition. By Series C, the growth model has to run on retention and expansion: maximizing revenue from an existing, diversifying customer base. That requires a completely different CS playbook, and most organizations are still running the old one.

The Blind Spot in Every CRM

Here is the architectural problem: your CRM was built to track what is happening in your world. Product usage. Support tickets. NPS responses. Login frequency. Health scores. It is, in every meaningful sense, a record of your customer’s relationship with your product.

A new CFO who comes in with a mandate to cut SaaS spend. A layoff that eliminates the internal champion who drove your product’s adoption. An earnings call where the CEO announces a strategic pivot away from the use case your product serves. A competitor product launch that reshapes their roadmap.

These are the signals that actually predict churn, and almost no CS platform ingests them natively.

This is the proactive customer success trap: teams invest in faster, more sophisticated reaction (better health scores, more granular triggers, more automated playbooks) and call it proactivity. But reacting quickly to signals your own system generates is still, structurally, reactive. You’re just shortening the lag.

The Real Difference Between Reactive and Proactive Customer Success

The distinction is more consequential than most CS leaders acknowledge.

Reactive CS, even when fast, operates inside a closed loop: something changes in your data, a workflow fires, a CSM acts. The ceiling on this approach is determined by the quality of data you already hold, and that data is almost entirely backward-looking.

Truly proactive CS operates in open context: the customer’s business environment is continuously modeled, signals from outside the product are weighted alongside signals from within it, and outreach is triggered by what’s happening in the customer’s world, not just in yours.

This requires a different kind of tooling and a different organizational mindset. Most CS platforms, even sophisticated ones, haven’t been built this way. Their underlying data models are still centered on the vendor relationship, with AI layered on top to summarize or generate templates.

The difference matters at scale. Static models become stale. Customers change faster than CS teams can update their playbooks. And by the time the lag shows up in your health score, you are already in a reactive posture. You just don’t know it yet.

3 Questions Every Series C Customer Success Leader Should Ask

The path forward doesn’t start with buying new tooling. It starts with an honest audit of what your current motion is actually optimized for.

1 . Does your CS data model include anything that happens outside your product?

Not just what the customer does in your platform, but what’s happening in their business. Hiring signals. Earnings reports. Executive changes. Product launches. If the answer is no, your “proactive” motion is operating on a fraction of the relevant data.

2. Do your CSMs have any systematic way to know when a customer’s business context has shifted, before the customer tells them?

The best CS teams at Series C aren’t waiting for customers to surface problems. They’re surfacing context the customer didn’t know they needed to share.

3. Are your “proactive” outreach triggers based on what just happened, or on a model of where the customer is heading?

There’s a meaningful difference between a health score that reflects last quarter’s usage and a model that predicts next quarter’s risk. Most organizations are running the former and calling it the latter.

The Customer Success Practices That Look Proactive But Aren’t

The habits that need to change aren’t only about tooling. They show up in daily practice: QBRs built around metrics that matter to you rather than to your customer, outreach cadences that only accelerate when a renewal is 30 days out, CS teams positioned primarily as a buffer between customers and support queues. These aren’t fringe behaviors. They’re industry defaults, and they share the same underlying logic: the system is oriented around what’s easy to track inside your own ecosystem, not what actually predicts whether a customer renews.

That’s not a criticism of the teams running these motion. It’s the natural output of a category built around vendor workflows rather than customer realities. The tooling caught up to the relationship layer of CS years ago.

The intelligence layer (the part that models what’s happening in a customer’s world, not just in your product) is exactly what MineMe was built to solve.

The CS leaders who close that gap first won’t just see lower churn. They’ll find themselves having fundamentally different conversations: not “here’s how you’ve been using the product this quarter,” but “here’s what we noticed in your business, and here’s how we can help.” That shift changes the entire nature of the relationship.

A team that monitors your product usage is a vendor. A team that watches your world is something much closer to a strategic partner.

And for Archana Somasegar, the real goal was never purely defensive to begin with. “NRR is an exceptional metric,” she says. “You want to reach your churn goals, but importantly, growth opportunity is critical.” A CS org built to earn that growth isn’t built on better dashboards. It’s built on paying attention to the right world.

Insights by Archana Somasegar

Archana Somasegar is the founder of MineMe, an AI-native customer intelligence platform that combines real-time external signals (funding rounds, executive hires, product launches) with CRM data to predict next-best actions and surface expansion and retention opportunities for customer-facing teams.

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Why Proactive Customer Success Keeps Failing at Series C appeared first on BYVI.

Every CMO I know has the same private suspicion right now: the things that used to be hard are getting cheap, the things that used to differentiate are getting commoditized, and the only thing that still feels defensible is the way customers feel about you. A recent Startup Grind panel — featuring marketing leaders from Figma, Vanta, Brex and beyond — landed on the same conclusion from five different angles.

Brand is what people feel you stand for — not what you ship

The most quoted line of the night may also be the simplest: “At the end of the day, your users, your community and the people who love your product want to know what you stand for.”

Copy can be copied. Features will be replicated by a model in 3 weeks. The emotional and values-based residue your company leaves behind — what one panelist called the “beyond product functionality” layer — is the only asset that doesn’t get cloned.

For marketing leaders, the implication is uncomfortable: a lot of what counts as “marketing output” right now contributes nothing to that residue. It generates impressions and timeline real estate while leaving the underlying brand exactly where it was.

The launch treadmill is a vanity metric

The panel was especially blunt about shipping cadence. “It’s a trap to fall into the launch treadmill because it makes you feel very active if you’re producing all these artifacts,” said one speaker. “People like your posts on LinkedIn and Twitter. But the reality is it’s really meaningfully shifting whether customers are adopting, using, engaging deeply with your product.”

Frequent launches feel like progress because they look like progress. Internally, they fill review meetings; externally, they get reposts. But the metric that matters — does this change how deeply customers use the thing — is rarely the metric being optimized. Worse, teams slip into “a binary, we launched it, we’re done kind of mentality and then onto the next,” which severs the marketing function from the actual adoption curve.

The fix is counterintuitive in an industry built on momentum: launch less, bundle more, and let the timing serve the story. “What you do could mean pushing back a launch, collapsing launches together so you have a bigger moment, telling the more thematic bundle.” A thematic moment that lands is worth 10 “launches” that scroll past.

A caveat about pace: don’t read OpenAI’s cadence as a benchmark. As one panelist explained, “the big labs, you’re building from model capabilities forward” — they ship because their job is to educate the world about what models can now do. Product companies “shift from customer needs backwards,” which is a fundamentally different game. Importing the frontier-lab tempo into a vertical SaaS company is cargo-cult marketing.

Pick your enemy, not your competitor

Brand is sharpened by what it’s against. But the panel was careful to distinguish picking an enemy from picking a fight.

For early-stage companies, the most productive enemy is usually the status quo itself. “For us, our first enemy was a taxi, not Lyft,” said the Uber alum on the panel. That framing did something a competitor jab could not: it told users what kind of world the company believed in. Taxis weren’t another app; they were a daily indignity. Naming the indignity gave Uber a meaning beyond the product.

For more established companies, going after a much larger incumbent remains the safest, highest-leverage play. Scott from Brex described the famous Concur campaign: “We turned their name into a curse word, Concur…rrrgh!. And when you have a competitor that’s significantly larger, it’s a very safe bet and a great way to get more mind share if you go with them.”

Anthropic’s Super Bowl spot aimed at OpenAI was, in his read, the same playbook scaled up — “incredibly unexpected and because of that was one of the most bold things I’ve seen.”

The harder question is what to do with rising peers. The traditional answer is to ignore them and refuse to lend them legitimacy. That instinct is being rewritten. “The prevailing wisdom is to do nothing there and not recognize them,” Scott said, “and my prediction is you’re going to see more of [direct rivalry] because markets are getting some more competitive.” Harvey vs. Legora is the current poster child: “The fight becomes the story and it elevates both of the projects.”

A warning, though: this only works from a position of clarity. “You have to come at it from a position of confidence and clarity about your why and what you stand for,” said Figma’s speaker, who pointed to the company’s own decade-long stance — advocacy for design as a discipline — as the anchor that lets sharper messaging work. Without that anchor, “done wrong, it can have really negative repercussions on your brand.”

Build the marketing team your funnel actually needs

The most useful operational thread of the night was on hiring. The panel pushed back on the default reflex of “we need a head of marketing” with a more diagnostic frame: hire to the bottleneck.

In this era, the most contested hire is product marketing.

“Product marketing is probably one of the most sought-after hires right now,” and for good reason: the central job is to “figure out your why — what makes you different, what makes you differentiated in the market. That, I think, is the north star of this current time and era.”

When every competitor can ship the same feature in a quarter, the team that can articulate why their version matters wins.

Two practical updates to the old org chart are worth flagging.

First, the disciplines are blending. “With the aid of AI, it’s much easier to flex into demand generation or into brand storytelling,” and a strong product marketer can now read a demand-gen dashboard without a translator. The cycle from idea to execution has collapsed — “you can go from idea to execution in a much shorter cycle time than before” — because the ad ops, design, and analytics layers that used to require entire teams can now be carried by one operator. Expect more from each hire, but expect to need fewer of them.

Second, the founder is part of the marketing team whether they like it or not. The panel was unanimous that the best founders “intuitively care about brand and communications and how you tell a story.” When that’s true, the first hire can be a growth marketer rather than a narrative one — the founder is already carrying the narrative. When it’s not, product marketing has to come first, because nothing the rest of the team builds will compound without a sharp answer to “what are we, and what are we against.”

The pricing pendulum hasn’t landed yet

A short detour on pricing, because every CMO is being asked about it. The fashionable claim that “per-seat is over” is, in the panel’s read, overblown. Consumption pricing is real and rising, but it carries its own friction: high cognitive load for users trying to value individual tasks, and runaway-spend anxiety from buyers who answer to a CFO. The pendulum will swing back. The likely steady state is a hybrid — consumption bucketed into predictable tiers, with thresholds that trigger upgrades rather than running counters that trigger panic.

A test you can run yourself

The most operational takeaway from the panel was also the most testable. Quiz every person in your company on two questions:

1. Who are we building for
2. How are we different

If everyone answers the same way, you’ve won 75% of the battle.

Most companies won’t pass. The fix is not a brand refresh. It’s writing down — in the founder’s voice, not the agency’s — a half-page of prose that backs up the positioning, and then making sure the website headline reflects it without jargon.

“Memorialize your vision beyond your head,” the panel said, because if it only lives in the founder’s head, the company has no brand asset at all.

Today, that half-page may be the most valuable thing the marketing team owns. Product gets copied. Pricing gets matched. But the story — the one your team tells with conviction, in your founder’s own voice — is yours alone. And that’s the moat.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Brand Marketing: The Only Moat Left Is How You Make People Feel appeared first on BYVI.

Sam Altman’s Stripe Press talk delivered something more useful than headlines: a handful of observations, for founders, about how to actually build a company in this moment. These are the notes from the room, and what’s stuck with me a few days later.

The “idea guys” are winning again

For years, “idea guy” was an insult. If you couldn’t ship, you didn’t matter. Altman flipped that. His read: non-technical founders who deeply understand a user and a problem now have an unusual advantage, because so much of the building part is becoming AI-assisted. Technical talent isn’t suddenly unimportant, but it’s no longer the only ticket in.

That clearly landed for me because I’ve lived the old version. In 2018, when I was building my first startup, we had to hire a CTO and two software engineers before we could put anything meaningful in front of a user. That was the table stakes. The product idea wasn’t unusually technical, and the user insight was solid, but the only way to translate it into something real was to assemble a team and a payroll first.

Now I keep meeting solo and two-person teams who, a few years ago, would have needed exactly that same setup – and they’re already shipping. They’re not doing it well because they’re great engineers, they’re doing it well because they have taste, judgment, and proximity to the user, and they’re letting AI fill in around that. The early validation that used to cost 3 hires now costs a weekend.

AI adoption is a CEO job, and a data-access decision

The clearest pattern Altman has seen in companies that successfully adopt AI: the CEO drives it personally. He cited Tobi Lütke’s mandate at Shopify as the archetype – leaders getting their hands dirty building with the tools, not just signing off on someone else’s pilot.

I’ve had very good results running autoresearch with local qwen 3.6 26b model as long as I had a simple vibed pi “advisor” extension that allowed it to periodically ask GPT 5.5 for ideas. I think this direction has a lot of merit.

— tobi lutke (@tobi) May 18, 2026

The other half of that pattern was less comfortable. The teams getting the most out of AI are giving their systems what he called “uncomfortably permissive” data access — codebase, Slack, email, recorded meetings, the works.

Two- and three-person startups are running everything through a single Slack channel: planning, coding, deploying, log analysis, customer support. It doesn’t scale to a Fortune 500 yet. But for small teams, the upside-to-risk ratio is currently very favorable.

I’m sitting with this one. There’s a real tension between “give the AI everything and move faster” and “this is sensitive data we said we’d handle carefully.” I don’t think it’s resolved. But pretending the tradeoff doesn’t exist is worse than picking a deliberate point on the spectrum.

OpenAI wants to be the utility, not the empire

This was the line that surprised me most. Altman was explicit: OpenAI does not want to gobble up the entire value chain. The aspirational analogy was Stripe, a piece of infrastructure that’s tightly aligned with its customers, runs on low margin and high volume, and wins when its customers win.

He doesn’t think huge AI margins will hold long-term anyway, because switching costs are staying low. Models keep getting substitutable. When one gets clearly better, customers move. That dynamic pushes toward utility economics, not lock-in economics.

Shared convictions beat shared chemistry

The part of the talk I didn’t expect to find super practical was about managing brilliant, difficult people. Altman attributed a chunk of OpenAI’s early success to getting a room of people, each of whom believed they were the smartest person in it, to actually collaborate.

His read on why it worked: they didn’t need to like each other. They needed to share 3 convictions:

1. that scale matters
2. that concentrating resources matters
3. that running one focused research program (rather than many small bets) mattered

Those shared beliefs let them tolerate personal friction that would have wrecked a team with less alignment.

I keep thinking about this in the context of small teams. Founders often optimize for “do we get along?” Altman’s framing suggests a sharper question: “do we agree on the few things that actually determine whether we win?” Those are different filters, and they produce different teams.

The founder-relationship signal

Quieter point, but worth flagging: he said one of the strongest predictors of a startup working is that the founders have known each other for a long time. Teams formed right before launch — co-founder dating, hackathon pairings, mutual-friend introductions made the week before incorporation — are statistically less reliable.

This isn’t a new observation, but it lands harder coming from someone who has watched thousands of teams. If you’re forming a company with someone you met last month, the bar to make it work isn’t impossible — but it’s higher than the founder-talk economy would have you believe.

The agent moment that everyone will remember

The lightest thread, and the one I’ll close on: Altman talked about how strange it still feels when agents do something unexpectedly human. He gave the example of an agent buying itself a novelty gift, and of asking a model how it wanted its own launch handled — and getting a surprisingly specific, slightly funny answer.

He wasn’t making a philosophical point. He was acknowledging that even people who built these systems still get briefly thrown when the systems act like they have preferences. I appreciated the honesty of it. Most of what’s said about AI in founder circles right now is either utopian or apocalyptic; almost none of it captures the actual texture of using these tools day-to-day, which is that they’re extraordinary and occasionally just weird.

Sam Altman’s closing advice

His closing advice for founders was anti-dramatic, but it has teeth: durable companies are the ones positioned so model improvements help them rather than erase their value. As he put it, you want to “be on the side of hoping that AI gets smarter.”

The flip side, in his telling: if your product’s value rests on papering over a current model weakness — a workflow that exists because the model can’t yet do something — the next model release will eat it. The same improvement that makes everyone else more productive quietly deletes your moat.

It’s good advice precisely because it’s actionable. Nobody who has to ship next week needs a worldview about AI. They need a heuristic, and that one holds up: build so smarter models make you more valuable, not less.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Sam Altman’s Advice for Founders from Stripe Press 2026 appeared first on BYVI.

I’m based in Toronto, but you can feel San Francisco from here. The mood spills into founder chats, hiring conversations, and every feed. Right now, the vibe feels hectic.

When OpenAI said it had closed a $122 billion round at an $852 billion post-money valuation, everyone noticed. When Anthropic’s $30 billion Series G put that company at a $380 billion valuation, the message got even louder. The upside in AI is massive. It is also packed into a very small circle.

Stanford HAI reported that private AI investment reached $344.7 billion in 2025, up 127.5% year over year. The same report shows California alone pulled in $218 billion. That kind of money changes behavior fast.

People outside that circle start doing ugly math. They look at their salary. Their options. Their runway. Their age. Then they look at a small group of people who made retirement money in a few years. A lot of them start asking the same question: am I already too late?

I care about that question because of its impact. It breeds fear and envy, causing smart people to abandon real problem-solving to chase big-name startups. This is the dark side of the AI boom: the money is real, but so is the crushing pressure.

The Gold Rush Is Warping How People See Work

For a long time, the Bay sold a simple story. Work hard. Be sharp. Join the right company. Stay close to the future. Your outcome might not be perfectly fair, but it could still make sense.

A gold rush breaks that story.

Suddenly the corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. People start asking if they should become founders. Or switch jobs again. Or learn AI overnight. Or somehow get into the tiny group with life-changing upside.

Even the baseline is warped. Census data shows San Francisco County has a median household income of $140,970, a median home value of $1.39 million, and median gross rent of $2,476. In that environment, a very good income can start feeling average. That messes with your head if you let it.

This is where comparison gets dangerous. You stop asking, “What problem am I good at solving?” You start asking, “Which path gets me rich fastest?” That shift looks small. But it changes everything.

A lot of people now feel they can do all the right things, work a well-paying job for years, and still never touch those outcomes. Layoffs make that feeling even sharper. So does watching AI change the day-to-day shape of work almost overnight.

The Fear Is Real

The fear around work is not made up. Gallup’s 2026 survey found that 50% of U.S. employees now use AI in their role at least a few times a year. The same survey found that 18% believe their job is very or somewhat likely to be eliminated within five years because of AI or automation.

The emotional side looks rough too. Pew Research Center found that 52% of workers feel worried about workplace AI and 33% feel overwhelmed. Only 6% think it will create more job opportunities for them in the long run.

What does that do to a 24-year-old engineer? What does that do to a manager with kids? It makes work feel shaky at the exact moment people need stability.

A lot of engineers are wondering whether the skill they built their whole identity around still carries the same value. Younger workers feel this especially hard. A Stanford Digital Economy Lab paper found a 16% relative employment decline for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations. You can see why so many younger people feel like the future moved without asking them.

Middle managers feel the pressure differently. Many have families. Many do not have deep AI skills. Many do not feel they can just wake up tomorrow and start a company. They can see the writing on the wall, but they do not see a clean path forward.

This is why I keep telling founders to stop thinking in black and white colors. The labor market is moving fast, but the answer is still messy. BLS projects software developer jobs to grow 15.8% through 2034, while data scientist roles grow 33.5% and computer programmer roles decline 6.0%.

Then look at how the tools behave. A Harvard Business School and BCG study found that GPT-4 users completed more tasks and finished faster when the task fit the model’s strength. The same study found accuracy dropped on a task outside that frontier.

AI helps. But AI also creates hidden challenges.

That grey area matters. If you panic, you either freeze or chase hype. Both are expensive.

Sudden Wealth Can Scramble Purpose Too

There is another side to this story that people do not talk about enough. Some people “made it” so fast that their old life plan stopped making sense.

I am not asking anyone to feel sorry for them. I am saying purpose gets weird when money arrives before meaning catches up. If work was your path to freedom and now you are already there at 30, what comes next? For some people, the answer becomes status, attention, or building another company just because they can.

You can feel that emptiness in the ecosystem too. Some companies are being built from obsession. Some are being built from envy. Some are being built for status points. The market eventually feels the difference.

I do not believe early-stage founders get a clean work-life balance. There is more like work-life blend. Your brain is 100% on. That only works when the problem matters to you so much that you turn your work into play. If the mission is fake, the grind gets very dark very fast.

The dark side of entrepreneurship has always been there. AI money just made it louder.

The Media Machine Is Feeding the Wrong Lesson

Traditional tech media keeps pushing the same signals to the top. Big rounds. Big valuations. Big names. That trains everyone to believe only the already visible companies matter.

I believe this is a major gap in the startup world.

The founders who need visibility most are usually the ones who get ignored. The bootstrapped founder who will never get a TechCrunch headline may be solving a sharper problem than the loudest company in the room. They may understand their customer better too.

That gap is exactly why I built BYVI. My team and I went through a period when getting traction and exposure felt really hard. Then a journalist came out of nowhere and wrote about us. That story changed our path. It led to partnerships and clients. I never forgot that feeling.

It made something very clear to me. PR matters most when you are early. Later, press can be a nice signal. Early on, it can change the company.

What Founders Should Do Now

Build from Proximity, Not Panic

If AI has you feeling late, slow down. Panic is expensive.

I gave this advice to a founder once, and I would give it again today. Build in the industry you already understand. A founder friend of mine wanted to jump into a space that had nothing to do with his background. He had 10 years of experience elsewhere. My advice was simple: stay close to what you know, solve a problem for people you understand, and use the expertise you already paid for with your life.

That advice matters even more in a hype cycle. Go by what’s already happening under the hood. What problem do you understand deeply? Which customer do you actually know? Where do you already have trust, context, and language?

Across BriefBid, DeckLinks, and BYVI, I keep coming back to the same pattern. I saw a gap. Then I built something practical around it. I did not start with the trend. I focused on the problem and the people I cared about most.

If you are still employed, you do not need to blow up your whole life tomorrow. Learn while you are inside the system. Talk to buyers. Notice repeated pain. Sometimes the best startup idea is sitting inside the workflow that currently frustrates you.

Own Your Own Content Engine

The AI boom changed distribution too. Visibility now comes from many places at once. Google. AI search. Reddit. Reviews. Product docs. Niche blogs. Newsletters. Founder posts. Your brand story gets built across all of them.

AI search does not go by keywords the old way. Buyers now explain their whole situation, almost the same way they do on a sales call. Your content needs to answer that directly.

That is why I feel very strongly about this point: own your own content engine. The true authority cannot be outsourced. Bring the content writing in-house. Or at least keep the raw knowledge in-house and turn it into content with care.

Don’t forget that LLMs are pattern matching machines. They look for consistency. Depth. Proof. They crawl Reddit for community sentiment. They crawl reviews. They read case studies. They read documentation. If your website says one thing, your founder says another, and your customers say something else, the model gets confused. Then it forms the wrong narrative about you.

This is where founder-led content gets very powerful. Edelman and LinkedIn found that 53% of decision-makers say high-quality thought leadership makes brand recognition matter less, and 79% of hidden decision-makers are more likely to advocate for an RFP from companies that publish it consistently.

At DeckLinks, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how B2B content feels on the receiving end. Human-centered content still wins attention. In the AI era, it wins even more. Buyers want a human behind your brand.

What Investors, Advisors, and Ecosystem Builders Need to Change

This part is not only on founders. Investors, advisors, journalists, and community builders shape the mood too.

Stop rewarding headline theater. Look for the founders who are quietly solving boring, painful problems.

If you really want to support early-stage founders, do more than applaud them online. Buy from them when there is a fit. Pilot the product. Make the intro. Put them in the room with the right buyer.

Founder communities cannot live on encouragement alone. Founders need customers. Partners. Momentum. Otherwise the community just turns into a pointless social club.

I also think communities should be highly curated. Verticalize the events. Keep the room relevant. Founders open up more when they feel they are among peers who understand the same reality. That’s when the conversation gets honest. And that’s when people stop performing success.

The ecosystem learns faster when people close to the problem speak openly. Founder-to-founder stories do that better than polished PR ever will.

Final Thought

SF’s AI gold rush is changing wealth, work, identity, and ambition all at once. That is why it feels so intense. It reaches far beyond a tech trend. It is reshaping how people measure themselves.

I still think this is one of the best times to build something new. New technology creates new pain points, and pain points create companies. But you need the right reason to build.

Solve the problem you know. Stay close to your niche. Own your own content engine.

I hope founders do not give up, no matter how loud this market gets. Most founder stories are not straight lines. They are hustle, grind and endless pivots. Keep going anyway. Keep iterating. You are going to get somewhere.

And if you have influence in this ecosystem, use it to make visibility and opportunity accessible to the people who actually need it.

FAQs

How is the AI boom impacting junior engineering roles at early-stage startups?

It is actively shrinking entry-level opportunities. A Stanford study found early-career workers in highly AI-exposed roles faced a 16% relative employment decline. Startups are leaning on models to execute junior code, forcing new hires to demonstrate senior-level problem solving immediately to survive the current market.

Does the AI capital boom make building a startup outside Silicon Valley harder?

Capital is aggressively localized, but your customer base is not. In 2025, California absorbed $218 billion of US private AI investment. While funding is intensely concentrated, founders outside SF can leverage lower burn rates to build highly profitable, bootstrapped businesses without the extreme local psychological pressure.

Can generative AI genuinely bridge the resource gap for bootstrapped founders?

Absolutely, especially when scaling basic operations. Research indicates that generative AI assistants increased customer support productivity by 14% on average, heavily benefiting less-experienced workers. Bootstrapped founders can leverage this to build incredibly lean teams, accelerating execution without raising VC money just to cover overhead.

Should non-AI startups force generative AI features into their MVP to attract investors?

Absolutely not. Forcing AI into an MVP signals panic, and panic is expensive. While generative AI companies pulled in $170.9 billion in 2025, sophisticated ecosystem builders see right through thin wrappers. Solve your core customer’s actual pain point. Do not build for the hype cycle.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post The Dark Side of AI Gold Rush: Why Everyone Feels Behind appeared first on BYVI.

When a VC-backed founder hits a big milestone, the celebration usually looks familiar. A new laptop. A high-end gadget. Some branded swag. Maybe cash.

I understand why people do it. It is fast. It feels polished. It looks good in a photo.

I also think it misses the moment.

I love tech. I use it every day. I built parts of my own business with it. I am not against useful things. I just know that a tool helps you work. It rarely helps you feel seen.

And founders need that more than most people realize.

I have spent more than 20 years working in marketing, customer experience, loyalty, and retention.

In every setting, one truth keeps showing up. People stay where they feel appreciated. Clients do. Employees do. Founders need it too.

If you are building with board pressure on one side and growth targets on the other, you know how strange the milestone moment can feel. The headline says success. Your body says pressure. The outside world sees the raise, the launch, the revenue number. You see the late nights, the pivots, the self-doubt, and the moments you had to sound certain when you did not fully feel certain.

That is why I care so much about better gift ideas for entrepreneurs. Some of these are gifts you can give a founder in your life. Some are things you can bring into your own company. All of them go deeper than tech and gadgets.

Why Gadgets Miss the Moment

When someone hits a revenue goal or a big company milestone, they typically get something standard. A laptop. A gadget. Something expensive enough to feel official.

The problem is simple. It celebrates the event and skips over the human being.

Founders spend years betting on themselves. They carry the risk quietly. They carry the doubt quietly too. The people around them may see how hard they are working, and the founder can still wonder if anyone truly notices what it has cost.

That is why cash often misses too.

Cash is a great gift in many situations. It is usually not the best gift for a founder. The business always needs something. More runway. Better tools. Another hire. As I often say, cash goes straight into the machine and the founder never actually receives it. It becomes one more resource to manage.

And founder loneliness is real. It gets sharper after the win, because everyone assumes the win solved everything. It did not. One report says entrepreneurs are about 30% more likely to experience depression than non-entrepreneurs. So when you choose a gift, you are doing more than marking a milestone. You are speaking into a very human pressure point.

Founders are givers by nature. They give their time, their energy, their certainty. Sometimes they give certainty before they fully feel it themselves. So if you want to give them something meaningful, give them something that reaches the person, not just the company.

What Makes a Gift Actually Land

A meaningful gift for an entrepreneur usually does three things.

1. It reaches the person.
2. It gets specific.
3. And it lasts.

Specific matters because vague praise disappears fast. “Great job” is fine, but it does not stay with people. “You kept this team steady when things got messy” stays. “You made people feel safe when everyone else was anxious” stays. Those words have weight.

This is not just a warm and fuzzy idea. Recognition affects retention in a very real way. Gallup found that well-recognized employees were 45% less likely to have changed organizations after two years, and employees who received high-quality praise were 65% less likely to be actively looking for another job.

The gap is bigger than most leaders think. Gallup found that only 22% of U.S. employees say they receive the right amount of recognition, while 55% report getting none at all or getting recognition so weak it does nothing for engagement. If you are trying to scale and keep great people, that should get your attention quickly.

I see the same pattern in business growth work. Most companies are sitting on a goldmine of insight and never use it. The same is true with appreciation. The people around you often see your impact more clearly than you can see it yourself.

I use this analogy a lot because it is true. You can’t see yourself if you’re inside a jar. You can’t read the label that’s outside of the jar, but everybody else on the outside can.

Founders live inside the jar every day.

That is why the best gifts are the ones that hold up a mirror. They give the founder words they can come back to later. And I really believe in writing things down. Your brain is for thinking, not storing.

6 Gift Ideas That Go Deeper

1. A Timeless Messages Book

This is the gift I built, for exactly this reason.

A Timeless Messages book gathers messages from the people who know the founder best. Family. Friends. Colleagues. Mentors. Teammates. Anyone who has truly been part of the journey. Depth matters more than volume here. When those voices come together in one place, the founder receives something money usually cannot give them. They receive proof.

The idea came from a book I made for my daughter’s 20th birthday. When she read it, she said, “I didn’t realize people saw me that way.” That moment stayed with me. It became the mission behind Timeless Messages, because people don’t need more stuff, but they do need to know that they have made a difference.

That is why this gift lasts. It sits on a desk. It gets opened again on hard days. It reminds the founder that the people around them noticed, even when the world moved on to the next thing.

I also know busy people delay meaningful gifts because they think it has to become a big project. I hear this all the time.People try to create something like this on their own, and it turns into a scrapbook that never gets finished. I care about removing that burden. Waiting for perfection costs people in business and in relationships. Clarity comes through action. 

2. Handwritten Impact Letters

If you need something meaningful this week, start here.

Ask a small group of people to write letters to the founder. Keep the request simple and focused. Ask them to answer one real question. What did this founder do that made a difference for you? What is one quality they have that they may not see in themselves? Tell me about a time something didn’t go as planned, and what they did next.

That kind of prompt changes the quality of what people write. You move past generic praise very quickly. You stop getting “Congrats” and “Proud of you” and start getting truth.

There is research behind this too. A study in Psychological Science found that sincere thank-you letters boost positive feelings for both the sender and the recipient. The same research showed that people underestimate how much happier the recipient will feel after receiving one. That part matters. A lot of people hesitate because they think the gesture will feel awkward or small. Usually it lands far more deeply than they expect.

3. A Milestone Dinner Built Around Real Stories

If you are going to gather people, make the gathering mean something.

A flashy dinner can look great from the outside and still leave the founder empty. A smaller dinner with the right people can stay with them for years. The key is the room. Invite the people who were actually there. The people who saw the hard parts. The people who know what it cost.

Then ask everyone to share one real story. Not a polished speech. Not a generic toast. A story. What did they witness? When did they see this founder steady the team? What did they do that revealed character, not just performance?

This works especially well after a raise. The public version of that milestone is already loud. The founder has already heard the headlines. What they have not heard enough is what the people close to them noticed while all of it was happening.

If you are a board member or investor, this kind of gesture can shift the tone of the relationship too. People can sense when they are being treated like a transaction and when someone genuinely wants to build a relationship.

4. A Customer-Voice Keepsake

This one is close to my heart because it brings both of my businesses together.

At Barrera Marketing, I help business owners uncover the voice of their clients. Most companies are sitting on a goldmine of insight and never really mine it. When you ask the right questions, clients tell you why they stayed, what they valued, where the business made a difference, and what they would miss if it disappeared.

That voice can become a very powerful gift for a founder.

Gather real customer notes, client messages, support emails, or user reflections. Pull the words that show impact. Keep them in the customer’s own language. Then turn them into something the founder can hold.

This matters because high-growth founders can get buried in metrics, board decks, hiring plans, and pressure. Those things matter. They can also pull you far away from the reason you started. Real words from the people you serve bring you back to intention very quickly.

And again, write it down.

Your brain is for thinking, not storing. A founder should not have to rely on memory when they need to remember why the work matters.

5. A Protected Day of Presence

Sometimes the best gift is time, but only if it is truly protected.

A vague “You should take a break” does not help much. What helps is a day where the founder does not have to carry every moving part. Someone else protects the calendar. Someone else handles the low-level decisions. Someone else creates actual space.

That space can be used in different ways. It might be family time. It might be quiet time alone. It might be a day with no meetings and no expectation to perform. The form can change. The gift is the same. You are giving them a chance to be fully present where they are.

I do not believe in perfect balance. I think balance changes by season. Some seasons lean hard into business. Some lean more into personal life. What keeps people steady is presence.

As a founder and a mother, I care about that deeply. Let your children see the entrepreneurial journey. Let them see the effort, the pivots, and the wins. And also protect moments where you can actually be with them. That kind of gift gives a founder something they almost never get enough of, which is their own attention.

6. Open-When Letters for the Hard Days

Entrepreneurship moves through emotional seasons very fast. One week can hold celebration, fear, pride, exhaustion, and doubt all at once.

That is why I love open-when letters.

Write a small set of letters for the moments founders usually do not talk about out loud. One for the day they doubt themselves. One for the day after the milestone, when the pressure comes rushing back. One for the nights they feel alone. One for the days they need to remember why they started.

Keep the writing simple. Say what you saw. Say what they meant. Say what they helped make possible. Founders are givers by nature, and words that give something back have a kind of staying power that a gadget never will.

This works especially well for solo founders. When you do not have a co-founder, your support system matters even more. Mentors, family, close friends, and community can become the voices you return to when things feel heavy.

If You’re the Founder Doing the Giving

The same thinking matters inside your company too.

A lot of startup leaders feel pressure to automate everything as they scale, including appreciation. I understand the impulse. Process matters. Speed matters. Still, when recognition turns into a generic HR transaction, people feel it right away.

I have seen this for years. Someone is retiring, a card goes around the office, and everyone writes the same thing. “Congratulations.” “It was great knowing you.” “All the best.” It is polite, but it stays on the surface. A much better question is, “What did this person do that helped you?” That is where meaning starts.

If you want appreciation to scale, build a system around collecting real stories. Do not flatten the stories themselves. Give managers and teammates better prompts. Ask what a person did that helped the team. Ask what quality they bring that they may not even realize is valuable. Ask what would be different if they were not here.

Start this on day one. In onboarding, ask about the person before you obsess over the job title. Ask what makes them who they are. Ask what they have been through. Ask what people around them see in them that they may not see in themselves. That conversation tells the new hire something important. It says this company cares about the whole human being, not just the output.

And this matters for retention. It matters for engagement too. Employees whose recognition met strong strategic criteria were nine times as likely to be highly engaged. At the same time, roughly 51% of U.S. employees were watching or actively seeking a new job as of May 2024.

If you lose a strong leader because they never felt seen, the cost gets expensive fast. Gallup estimates replacing a departing manager or leader can cost roughly 200% of annual salary.

So yes, gifting and recognition are personal. They are also strategic.

They shape culture. They shape loyalty. They tell your team what kind of company this is. And in a market where top talent has options, that matters.

3 Quick Checks Before You Buy a Gift for an Entrepreneur

Before you buy anything, ask yourself 3 quick questions:

1. Does this gift go to the person, or does it go straight back into the business machine?
2. Could this gift be handed to almost anyone, or is it specific to this founder?
3. Will it still matter on a hard day, long after the milestone post is gone?

Those questions clear up a lot very quickly.

Final Thought

I am drawn to building. I always have been. And the best things I have built all come back to the same truth.

People stay where they feel seen. People grow where they feel appreciated. People remember the words that helped them understand their own impact.

So if someone is on your mind, do not wait for the perfect moment. Do something this week. Write the letter. Gather the stories. Give the founder proof.

Nobody deserves to go through life without knowing the impact they have made on others.

FAQs

How should I approach gifting to retain early-stage leadership when runway is tight?

Cash might be tight, but losing your leadership is much more expensive. Replacing a manager costs roughly 200% of their annual salary. Instead of financial bonuses, give them high-quality, specific praise. Document their exact impact on the business. People stay where they feel deeply seen, not just where they get a branded hoodie.

How do I redirect generic milestone gifts from my board into something meaningful?

When investors send standard champagne or gadgets, politely redirect that energy. Ask board members to write a specific note about what they admire in your executive team. The business always needs runway, but your team needs proof they matter. Shared validation scales culture faster than any corporate swag.

As a solo founder, what is the most strategic gift I can give myself post-funding?

Give yourself a protected day of actual presence. The pressure spikes after a raise, and entrepreneurs are about 30% more likely to experience depression than non-entrepreneurs. You cannot sustain rapid scaling if you are hollow. Step away from the machine, protect your calendar, and give yourself your own attention.

Does implementing peer-to-peer gifting budgets actually impact our startup culture?

Yes, but it is not about the monetary value. Research shows people assigned to give even $5 away report significantly greater happiness than those keeping it. Empowering employees to recognize each other tangibly shifts your culture from isolation to connection. Meaningful peer recognition builds a deeply resilient, engaged team.

Can authentic founder-to-employee recognition be used as a recruitment strategy?

Absolutely. Top talent has options. Gallup found roughly 51% of U.S. employees were actively seeking new jobs in May 2024. If you build a culture that documents human impact, you will stand out. High-performers want proof they will be valued as whole people, not just equity operators.

About the Author

Fatima Barrera is the founder of Timeless Messages, a premium personalized hardcover memory book service that captures the words of the people who matter most. She has 20+ years of experience in marketing, customer experience, and loyalty.

The post Gift Ideas for Entrepreneurs: Beyond Tech & Gadgets appeared first on BYVI.

Most companies call me when they needed to hire somebody as of yesterday. That part hasn’t changed.

What has changed is this: AI is now sitting inside your hiring process whether you asked for it or not. It’s in sourcing. It’s in screening. It’s in scheduling. It’s in the way candidates write their resumes and prep for interviews.

And in 2026, it’s going to be even more baked in.

If you’re a founder or a hiring leader at a startup, you don’t have time to chase shiny tools. You need hires that stick. You need people who can perform. You need alignment.

So when I talk about AI, I’m not talking about theory. I’m talking about what helps you hire better, faster, and with less risk.

AI is already everywhere (and the data proves it)

This isn’t a “future” problem. It’s already here.

Insight Global’s 2025 AI in Hiring Report says 99% of U.S. hiring managers are using AI in some way, 98% say it improves efficiency, and 93% still say human involvement matters. That lines up with what I see every day. AI helps with speed and admin. Humans still own judgment.

The catch is simple. Most teams use AI to move faster inside a messy process.

Speeding up a messy process doesn’t make it better. It just gets you to the wrong outcome quicker. So before we talk about trends, we need to get honest about what AI can and can’t do for you.

What won’t change in 2026: hiring still lives and dies on alignment

Here’s the thing most people miss. Hiring breaks because people avoid alignment.

They avoid the hard conversation. They oversell the role. They hide the ugly parts. Then they act surprised when the hire doesn’t work out.

Employers don’t like to know the hard things about hard things. I get it. You’re proud of your company. You’re building something. You want people to want it.

But surface-level, most startups look the same now. Remote. Flexible. Great mission. Solid benefits. AI is going to make that sameness even louder, because every job post will read like it was written by the same “perfect” template.

Your advantage in 2026 won’t be better words. It’ll be clearer truth.

Overcomplication is still the real enemy

Founders tell me hiring is complicated. Then I look at their process and it’s 10 steps long. Seven rounds. Five stakeholders. No clear decision-maker. Half the team is interviewing off “gut feel.”

That’s where hiring dies. Not because talent doesn’t exist.

Hiring can be much more of a straight line than you make it. You just have to stop adding things that don’t actually reduce risk.

And I’ll keep saying this until it disappears:

If you hire really well, you don’t need to fire at all. You also can’t move so slowly that a competitor signs the best person before you even make an offer.

TAG still matters: trust, attitude, grit

In startups, I use TAG as the acronym: trust, attitude, grit.

AI can help you find profiles. It can summarize calls. It can highlight patterns. It can’t tell you if someone is going to show up with grit when the roadmap blows up on a Tuesday afternoon.

TAG is still the filter. And in 2026, with AI making everyone look “polished,” TAG becomes even more important.

Trend 1: “Off-market” talent becomes the main market

Job boards aren’t going away. But if you’re building a serious team, you can’t depend on them.

The best candidates usually don’t apply online. They’re working. They’re busy. They’re already getting messages.

This is exactly why I built Hipo around “off-market” talent and smart matching. Startups need access to people who aren’t raising their hand publicly.

In 2026, AI will make this shift faster. You’ll see more teams using AI to map talent pools, spot likely movers, and keep pipelines warm.

The danger is how people use it.

AI makes it easy to spam. It makes it easy to send 500 messages that sound “personal” but aren’t.

Candidates can feel that instantly. You burn your brand. You burn your team’s time. You get ghosted.

And please, let’s kill this idea while we’re here. I can’t stand it when people say the candidate was in your back pocket. People are not sitting there waiting for your job. You have to understand their motives, career trajectory, and what they actually want next.

AI can help you do the research faster. It can’t replace the relationship.

Trend 2: Resumes will look perfect, so verification will matter more than ever

In 2026, resumes will get cleaner. Cover letters will get smoother. LinkedIn profiles will get sharper.

That doesn’t mean candidates are lying. It means the “presentation layer” is getting easier for everyone.

The same Insight Global report says 40% of job candidates use AI to draft application materials, and 31% use AI to prepare for interviews. It also says 88% of hiring managers can tell when applicants used AI, and 54% are concerned when they see it.

So what do you do with that?

You don’t panic. You don’t turn hiring into an interrogation. You verify.

Verification is simple. You dig into what the person actually owned. You ask how they made decisions. You get specific about outcomes, tradeoffs, and what went wrong. You look for consistency across the resume, the conversation, and references.

AI is going to make “vibes hiring” even riskier. You need signal.

If you’re a startup, this is good news. Big companies often struggle to adapt. You can move faster with a tighter, more focused approach.

Trend 3: AI matching will improve, but your inputs still have to be real

A lot of founders want AI to solve the hardest part of hiring: “Tell me who’s perfect.”

That’s not how it works.

AI is a mirror. If you feed it a confused role, you get confused output.

Insight Global says 74% of hiring managers believe AI helps assess how well an applicant’s skills match job requirements. I believe that too. Matching is getting better.

But the keyword is “requirements.”

Most startups don’t define requirements. They write wishlists. They try to combine three roles into one because they’re scared of missing something.

Then they wonder why nobody fits.

Stop hiring for a “Frankenstein role”

If your job description reads like, “We need a senior engineer who also does DevOps, security, data, product strategy, and can mentor the whole team,” the problem isn’t sourcing.

The problem is realism.

AI won’t fix that. It will just screen harder for something that barely exists.

Start with the business problem. Hiring is just business problems that need to be solved. If the problem is “ship product in 30 days,” your solution might be contract. It might be fractional. It might be a full-time hire plus a temporary bridge. You don’t know until you define the problem clearly.

Give AI a scorecard, not a vibe

In 2026, the teams that win will run hiring like adults. They’ll define what “good” looks like in plain language.

What outcomes do you need in the first 90 days? What does success look like by month 12? What are the true non-negotiables? What can you train?

When you have that clarity, AI becomes useful. It can help you sort, prioritize, and move fast. Without that clarity, it’s noise.

Trend 4: AI literacy becomes a baseline requirement across roles

This isn’t just about hiring engineers who build AI. It’s about hiring people who can work in an AI-shaped workplace.

In 2026, your marketer is using AI. Your SDR is using AI. Your operations lead is using AI. Your finance team is using AI. Your recruiters are definitely using AI.

If you’re not assessing AI literacy at least a little bit, you’re guessing.

Gartner predicts that by 2027, 75% of hiring processes will include certifications or assessments of AI-related skills. That’s not a random stat. That’s the direction we’re heading.

For startups, the practical move is to decide what “AI capable” means inside your company. Do you need people who can write prompts? Use AI responsibly with customer data? Automate workflows? Spot hallucinations? Explain their work clearly even when AI helped?

You don’t need a fancy test. You need a clear expectation.

Trend 5: Interviewing gets tighter, faster, and more structured

AI will keep removing admin from hiring. Scheduling gets easier. Transcripts get cleaner. Notes get auto-summarized. Interviewers get nudged to fill out scorecards.

That’s all helpful.

The trap is what founders do next. They add more rounds because it’s easier to manage.

More rounds don’t automatically reduce risk. They often increase it, because you lose the candidate.

I use sports analogies for a reason. Hiring is like signing a free agent. If you hesitate, the other team gets them. Time can kill all deals.

If you’re serious about 2026 hiring, tighten the process. Keep it focused. Make sure every conversation has a purpose. And pick a decision-maker who can actually decide.

You can hire a top engineer in a day if you wanted to. You just need to set the expectation, know what you’re looking for, and move.

Trend 6: Offer strategy gets more data-driven, but founders still need courage

AI is going to make comp data easier to access. Candidates will benchmark faster. Founders will benchmark faster.

Insight Global says 8% of candidates use AI to determine salary expectations today. That number is going up. Candidates are getting smarter, faster.

So here’s what matters in 2026. Stop negotiating against yourself, and stop losing great hires over small gaps.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it. When a founder hesitates over something like a $5,000 difference, the opportunity cost usually destroys them. Restarting the search costs time. It costs momentum. It costs revenue. It costs your team’s energy.

Great hires should generate three to five times their salary. That’s the mindset. If you believe the person is a 9 or a 10 for your business, act like it.

And if you can’t afford the role, be honest about that too. Adjust the scope. Go fractional. Change the timeline. Just don’t pretend you can buy a Ferrari for Honda money.

Trend 7: AI moves into onboarding, and that’s where startups will win or lose

I’m going to repeat this because it’s the most underrated part of hiring: 90% of recruiting is the onboarding process.

Startups lose great people because they “close” the candidate and then disappear. No plan. No ramp. No clarity. Then they act surprised when the person struggles or leaves.

AI is going to help here in 2026. It’ll help managers create 30-60-90 day plans faster. It’ll help document processes. It’ll help new hires find answers without interrupting the whole team.

That’s good. But it doesn’t replace leadership.

Onboarding still needs a manager who shows up. It needs clear expectations. It needs feedback early. It needs honesty when something isn’t working.

We spend 90,000 hours of our time at work. If someone’s first month feels like confusion and radio silence, they’re going to remember that. They’re also going to tell their friends.

Trend 8: Transparency about AI becomes a recruiting advantage

Candidates are already suspicious. They’re wondering if they’re getting screened out by a robot. They’re wondering if anyone read their application. They’re wondering if your process is fair.

In 2026, the companies that win will just tell the truth.

Tell candidates if you use AI for scheduling. Tell them if you use AI to summarize interviews. Tell them if AI helps screen, and explain what humans look at next.

This ties back to trust. Without honesty and transparency, there’s no trust. Without trust, you don’t have a strong relationship. It’s that simple.

And if you want to stand out in a market where every startup looks the same, this is one of the few levers you fully control.

My practical 2026 playbook for startup hiring

If you want to use AI well in 2026, keep the strategy simple.

1. Start by defining the business problem in one sentence.

Not the job title. The problem. If you can’t explain why this hire matters, you’re going to hire the wrong person no matter what tools you use.

2. Next, get clear on what “good” looks like.

Talk outcomes, not adjectives. “Fast-paced environment” doesn’t mean anything. “Own onboarding for 20 customers per month and cut time-to-value” means something.

3. Then build a process you can actually run.

Keep the steps tight. Make sure each step reveals new signal. Make sure the decision-maker is present early, because waiting until the end creates delays and second-guessing.

4. Use AI to reduce admin and noise.

Use it to help you source smarter, write clearer outreach, summarize conversations, and keep your pipeline organized. Keep humans responsible for the final call, because humans own judgment and accountability.

5. Be radically transparent with candidates.

Talk about the good, bad, and ugly. It repels the wrong people and attracts the right ones. Surprises kill retention.

6. Treat onboarding like part of recruiting.

Build the ramp before the person starts. Check in early. Make sure your team is ready for the hire, not just excited about the hire.

If you do that, AI becomes a real advantage. If you don’t, AI becomes a faster way to make the same mistakes.

Where a high-touch partner helps in an AI-heavy world

AI makes it easier to do “more.” It doesn’t make it easier to do “better.”

This is where a high-touch partner matters. At Linkus Group, we stay selective because we want long-term partnerships. We want to understand your business. We want to understand the market. We want to tell you the truth even when it’s uncomfortable.

Founders don’t need another tool. They need clarity, speed, and a process that produces hires who stick.

The bottom line

AI is going to be part of hiring in 2026. That’s done. The question is how you use it.

Use AI to cut noise. Use it to move faster. Use it to stay organized. Then do the human parts better than everyone else: alignment, honesty, decision-making, and onboarding.

Hiring is the most underrated way to excel a business. In 2026, the startups that treat it that way will pull ahead fast.

FAQs

Should startups use AI video screening tools to replace first-round interviews?

Don’t outsource your first impression. While 93% of hiring managers emphasize human involvement despite widespread AI adoption, passing initial screens to a bot kills the candidate experience. Startups win on culture and speed. Use AI to schedule the call, but a human must own the conversation and assess true alignment.

How do we evaluate candidates when everyone uses AI to write their application?

It is the new normal. Research shows 40% of candidates use AI to draft resumes. Stop penalizing them and start verifying. You need to dig into specific tradeoffs they made on past projects. AI writes perfect cover letters, but it cannot fake real-world problem-solving during a structured interview.

Can AI actually evaluate if a candidate has the right skills for our technical roles?

Yes, but only if you define the role correctly. Currently, 74% of hiring managers believe AI helps assess skill fit. However, AI is just a mirror. If you feed it a messy wishlist instead of clear 90-day outcomes, it will just confidently recommend the wrong person faster.

Are candidates using AI to negotiate higher startup salaries and equity?

Yes, and they are getting faster at it. Right now, 8% of job candidates use AI to determine salary expectations, and that is climbing. You cannot lowball anymore. Benchmark your compensation accurately and stop losing top-tier talent over minor gaps. Great hires easily generate multiples of their salary.

Will we need to test every new hire for artificial intelligence proficiency?

Absolutely. AI literacy is no longer just for engineers. Gartner predicts 75% of hiring will test AI skills by 2027. For any role, set clear expectations on using AI to automate workflows and spot hallucinations.

About the Author

Adam Gellert is a hiring expert and a founder at Linkus Group, a high-touch recruitment agency for mission-critical hires. With extensive experience in team building and a deep understanding of organizational growth, Adam is dedicated to helping startups and SMBs find their most passionate teammates. His innovative approach and commitment to improving candidate experience have made him a respected figure in the tech and startup community.

The post The Future of AI in Hiring: 2026 Trends for Startups appeared first on BYVI.

When I was 14, I was sketching an old opera house with my art tutor. That was the moment I realized a space can hold emotion the way a sponge holds water. I still carry that with me today.

I have worked across Guangdong, Shanghai, Singapore, and Canada, and I have seen the same truth in every market. People feel a space before they judge the product. They notice the mood first. They read the story very quickly.

If you are opening your first cafe, bakery, salon, or specialty shop, your interior has a serious job to do. It has to express your brand. It has to support your daily operations. It has to help people remember you. When it also makes them stop, take a photo, and share it, that gives your business even more power.

I always come back to one belief. A good design is the perfect solution to a problem. In retail and hospitality, that means your space has to look good, work hard, and help the business grow.

Instagrammable only matters when it supports the business

Many first-time founders come to me and say they want an Instagrammable space. I understand why. Research shows that 62% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product if they first see photos or videos posted by other customers. Social sharing influences buying.

The space also shapes how people judge your brand. Retail research shows that an interior influences customer perceptions of any brand. People read quality through materials, lighting, layout, and detail. They do this consciously and subconsciously.

This matters even more when your customer is younger and visually driven. In one UK study, people aged 18 to 34 were spending £419.6 million per month on live-event experiences. The same study points to millennials controlling $1.3 trillion in annual spending. They value experience. They value atmosphere. They want places that feel worth sharing.

So when you say you want an Instagrammable space, I hear something bigger. You want a space that creates attention, builds memory, and supports sales. That is a very smart goal.

Start with the spirit of the project

I enjoy curating spaces, dressing up walls and adding finishes, but I never start there. I start with the spirit of the project. This is the most important part of my process.

At Dexign Matter Studio, the conceptual development stage is where we unlock the design possibilities. This is where we establish the core narrative. I need to know what your brand stands for, what your customer should feel, and what kind of experience you want to create. Without that clarity, the design can become expensive noise.

A strong concept helps people understand the space quickly. In one survey, 81% of shoppers said a themed store design was more attractive than a non-themed layout. Here, theme does not mean costume. It means a clear point of view. It means the space has one voice.

At The Cube Nail Lab, the concept came from the Rubik’s Cube. We proposed the name “The Cube,” then carried that idea into the logo, the tiled grid, the feature wall, and the reception counter. The project had a very tight budget and the client was starting their first business. A clear concept gave them identity right away. It also helped the space become naturally photo-friendly.

Yuan Chinese Cuisine followed a different path. The client wanted a modern Chinese fusion restaurant that would connect with a younger demographic. I drew from Chinese ink and wash painting, then translated that into a neutral grey and walnut palette, a monochromatic mural, and a custom black marble counter with a green leaf silhouette. The result felt modern, but it still carried cultural depth. The refreshed interior generated social media buzz and increased foot traffic.

I grew up in Guang Dong, and now I live in Toronto. That background shaped how I see design. Culture leaves a mark on how we read color, material, and symbolism. In a city shaped by many cultures, people can feel when a space has real intention.

Design the whole customer journey

A lot of business owners focus on one photo wall. I look at the full journey. The storefront matters. The waiting area matters. The cashier, the display, the seating, and even the washroom matter. Customers experience your business as a sequence.

If the first five feet look strong and the rest of the space falls apart, people feel that break right away. The design loses its power. The brand starts to feel less believable.

H3 Matrix Restaurant & Bar is a good example of this. It was Toronto’s first space-themed entertainment concept, and it combined dining, bar, performance, and entertainment in one venue. The project had to support multiple functions at once, while keeping one clear identity. The meteor-shower entrance, the “Back to the Future” dining walls, the metallic bar, and the blue-lit details all belonged to the same story. That continuity helped turn the venue into a popular city destination.

The same idea works in a smaller space. At Fuwa Fuwa Dessert Cafe, the curved booth seating, soft yellow upholstery, red oak, and glowing dessert counter all support one playful narrative inspired by Japanese souffle pancakes. Customers feel the brand before they sit down.

When the journey is cohesive, people relax into it. They stay longer. They notice more. They are more likely to share what they see. This is how interiors begin to support sales in a very practical way.

Give the space one strong hero moment

Every successful commercial space needs one memorable move. This is the detail that catches the eye quickly and gives people a reason to take out their phone.

At Holo Tea & Cafe, the hero moment was the ceiling. Large interlocking discs in champagne metal, wood, and acrylic created movement and volume overhead. That sculptural feature became the signature image of the cafe. It gave the business a strong visual identity in a very competitive market.

At Cuckoo Cakery, I used a wavy wall inspired by icing knife patterns. The gesture was distinctive, but still restrained. I wanted the cakes and pastries to remain the true heart of the space. That balance matters. The hero moment should support the product, not overpower it.

For first-time entrepreneurs, this point is very important. You do not need visual drama in every corner. One strong feature is often enough. When it is tied to the brand story and placed in the right area, it can carry the whole space.

Use materials, color, and light to create feeling

I love exploring the juxtaposition of materials, colors, forms and patterns. This is where design becomes expressive. This is also where the emotional power of a space really starts to build.

These choices affect mood more than many people realize. Research shows that 46% of shoppers said an appealing color scheme creates a positive mood. Same study found that 54% of consumers would not hesitate to enter a store with a luxurious design and atmosphere. People react to visual comfort. They react to richness. They react to harmony.

At Yuan Chinese Cuisine, black marble, walnut, neutral greys, and soft backlighting created warmth and sophistication. At Brewin Teaware, ink-wash bamboo wallpaper, softly lit metallic gold accents, and handmade wood details were used to slow people down and invite them to breathe.

At New Century Head Spa, muted beiges, warm wood tones, textured plaster, and curved forms created a calm, immersive wellness experience.

Lighting is part of this story too. The right light gives depth to material. It shapes the mood. It helps products, food, and finishes read properly in person and in photos. A feature wall under poor lighting can disappear. A dessert counter under the wrong light can feel cold.

When I talk about creating a multi-layered, stimulating sensory experience, this is what I mean. Materials, color, and lighting should work together. Every space should sing & dance, but it needs rhythm and control.

Solve the operational puzzle early

This is the part many first-time founders underestimate. They focus on aesthetics first because that is the exciting part. I understand that. But sales begin in the floor plan.

Design is open ended. Sometimes it is about building a palette of finishes. Sometimes it means shifting walls, reworking circulation, or improving space efficiency. In commercial work, that problem-solving side is critical.

Research shows that about 25% of store sales can be attributed to the way products are designed and displayed. That is a major number. Layout and merchandising directly affect business performance.

Even simple visual cues can drive action. One study found that 42% of shoppers said sale signage led to unplanned purchases. So if your sightlines are blocked, your product display is weak, or your counter creates congestion, you are making sales harder than they need to be.

Cuckoo Cakery had only 700 square feet, still it needed production, sales, seating, and display. Every inch had to work. New Century Head Spa had to fit four private treatment rooms, six shampoo stations, reception, waiting, a foot spa, staff facilities, and an accessible washroom into 900 square feet. Those are very tight conditions. Strong space planning is what made both projects function well.

A beautiful space that frustrates staff or slows service will hurt the business. A well-planned space improves movement, comfort, and efficiency. Customers feel that immediately, even if they cannot explain why.

Keep branding and interiors connected

Many first-time entrepreneurs separate branding from interior design. I see them as one conversation. Your name, logo, signage, color palette, packaging, and space should all speak the same language.

This is especially important in the early stages of a business. Many of my clients are highly involved at the beginning, and I welcome that. Early brainstorming is where the project spirit shows up. Once we define the direction clearly, the design becomes much stronger.

The Cube Nail Lab is a clear example. We did not simply design a pink nail space. We built the concept from the brand itself, then extended it through the interior. The result felt cohesive, playful, and memorable.

Noodle Legend followed a similar pattern. We worked closely with the client on branding and positioning at the start. Once the brand direction was clear, the restaurant could stand out as a destination rather than blend in with the typical noodle shop around it. For a new business, that kind of clarity has real value.

Spend with intention

People often assume that an Instagrammable space has to be expensive. I do not see it that way. Good design comes from smart decisions, clear priorities, and careful detailing.

I usually advise clients to invest in the places customers notice first and remember most. That often means the storefront, the reception or cashier counter, a signature feature, key lighting, and the strongest display moments. Those areas shape the first impression and the photo memory.

Cuckoo Cakery is a good example of how to do this well. The original wavy wall product was costly and had to be shipped from the U.S. We redesigned it in-house and had it CNC-cut locally, which reduced the cost by nearly half. The space kept its signature feature and the client stayed in control of the budget.

At The Cube Nail Lab, the budget was very limited, so we prioritized the branded moments that would carry the most visual impact. At Noodle Legend Richmond Hill, coordinating custom production from China helped achieve 30 to 40% cost savings while maintaining quality. At H3 Matrix, overseas sourcing also helped manage cost without losing the effect the client wanted.

Budget discipline is part of design. I love concept design and the freedom it brings, but real projects always have limits. Working creatively within those limits is where strong design proves itself.

Protect the concept during execution

A beautiful rendering is only the beginning. If the idea is not protected through drawings, details, scheduling, and construction coordination, it can lose strength very quickly.

At Dexign Matter Studio, I work through a five-phase process. It begins with the initial brief, moves into schematic design and design development, then into construction documentation and construction coordination. Every stage matters. I give equal importance to each one because the end result depends on all of them.

We also use a custom in-house drawing system to streamline documentation and reduce turnaround time. For a first-time founder paying rent on an unopened space, speed and clarity matter a lot.

Yuan Chinese Cuisine was completed during COVID, so timing was a major challenge. Materials, fixtures, and furniture were sourced early to reduce delays. Holo Tea & Cafe required very precise detailing because of the large suspended ceiling elements. H3 Matrix needed detailed production schedules and close coordination across multiple specialized trades. This is the side of design people do not always see, but it is what gets the project built properly.

Let the space market itself

When the concept is clear and the experience feels strong, customers will often market the space for you. That kind of visibility is powerful because it feels genuine.

I have seen this happen many times. At The Cube Nail Lab, clients naturally took photos in front of the feature wall and pink tiled reception. Yuan Chinese Cuisine generated social media buzz after the redesign. Holo Tea & Cafe created a memorable image through its sculptural ceiling. Charmed Aroma’s “Vault” jewelry corner drew customer attention strongly enough that the concept was later developed for additional locations.

This kind of response does not come from random decoration. It comes from a space that has a clear idea, strong continuity, and an emotional hook. People share what feels memorable.

Measure what really matters

I do not measure success by style alone. I look at the end result. Did the design solve the problem on hand? Did it support the client’s goals? Did it improve the customer experience? Did it help the business stand out?

The strongest projects create results you can feel. H3 Matrix became a popular destination in the city. Noodle Legend attracted strong customer interest quickly. Charmed Aroma’s Vault helped drive jewelry sales and proved the shop-in-shop idea. Those outcomes tell me the design is working in real life.

If you are opening your first physical business, keep your focus clear. Build a concept with a real story behind it. Plan the layout carefully. Create one memorable feature. Use materials and lighting to shape emotion. Spend with discipline. Then carry the idea all the way through construction without losing it.

I believe great designs change the way how people live, dine, play, love and even change the world we live in. In retail and hospitality, that change can begin with one well-designed space that people remember the moment they walk in. When that happens, your interior starts working as hard as you do.

FAQs

How do I make a tiny 700-square-foot commercial space Instagrammable without creating clutter?

I always say sales begin in the floor plan. In tight footprints, do not decorate every wall. Choose one hero moment, like a custom architectural seating nook, and keep the rest minimal. Clean sightlines make your signature feature stand out more in photos and dramatically improve your daily staff operations.

Can a very low startup budget still produce a luxurious, shareable interior?

Yes. Luxury is about visual harmony, not just expensive materials. Research shows 54% of consumers are drawn to luxurious atmospheres. We achieve this on strict budgets by using an appealing color scheme and clever local CNC fabrication to mimic high-end, bespoke architectural details where it counts most.

What lighting strategy works best for generating organic social media photos?

The right light shapes the mood and the photo. Avoid harsh, direct overhead lights that cast ugly shadows. Instead, use soft backlighting, warm diffused pendants, and layered ambient light. This creates the visual comfort people react to, ensuring your food, products, and customers look beautiful both in person and on camera.

How do we encourage user-generated content without relying on generic neon photo signs?

Build the photo opportunity directly into the customer journey. Millennials command $1.3 trillion in spending and value authentic experiences over forced photo props. A striking product display, a wavy feature wall, or a unique tiled floor will naturally prompt photos because it feels like a genuine discovery.

How do I design a themed experience that attracts customers but avoids looking tacky?

Theme does not mean costume. It means a clear point of view. A study notes 81% of shoppers prefer themed designs. To avoid looking tacky, abstract the concept. Use cohesive color palettes, customized geometric shapes, and thoughtful material juxtapositions to tell your brand story subtly and elegantly.

About the Author

Zoe Lee is the founder of Dexign Matter Studio, an award-winning Toronto interior design firm. With over two decades of experience across North America and Asia, she takes a story-led, detail-driven approach, blending contemporary and organic elements into refined, emotive spaces. She has collaborated with global firms on iconic restaurants, luxury hotels, and residences, each reflecting a pursuit of beauty, balance, and meaning.

The post How to Create Instagrammable Interiors That Drive Sales appeared first on BYVI.

A lot of people want to open a cafe because they love coffee, design, and the idea of community. I get it. I opened my first cafe for many of the same reasons.

I also know how quickly the romance can get expensive. A beautiful cafe still lives or dies by daily operations. If you do not understand the machine behind the counter, the pretty parts will not save you.

If you are reading this from a 9-to-5 and wondering whether you are allowed to try, yes, you are. Just do not confuse inspiration with preparation.

When I opened The Blend in Cape Town, I did it with around $10,000. Important disclaimer: that was in 2011, in South Africa, and that money stretched much further than it would in North America today. I am not sharing that number so you can copy it. I am sharing it because the mindset still matters.

The space was tiny, around 30 square meters, and I took it over from a scooter workshop. I met the landlords and promised I would build a really cute space for the community and for the offices upstairs. They gave me several rent-free months, which gave me time to pull the place together.

We were scrappy in every direction. The bar counters were made from swimming pool edges. We used cheap white tiles. I found fun chandeliers in an antique store. I negotiated with local roasters to each give me their own grinder, which saved me from buying several expensive ones and helped avoid cross-contamination. Espresso machines and grinders are usually among the biggest costs in a cafe, so that mattered. It is also part of why the shop was called The Blend.

The money went into the build-out, handymen, an espresso machine lease, opening staff, signage, rent once it kicked in, and the first food inventory. I kept the menu tight. We served breakfast and lunch, but no dinners. That discipline matters more than people think.

Through The Coffee Dispatch, I keep hearing the same lesson from founders. It is all about trying to do with as little as possible and be extremely creative. That part has not changed.

What has changed is the market. By mid-2025, 46% of American adults drank specialty coffee the previous day. The same report says specialty consumption is up 84% since 2011. Traditional coffee sat at 42%. Specialty is now mass market. You are not opening into a niche anymore.

Build-outs can also run into hundreds of thousands now, especially in cities. So if you are serious about opening a shop in 2026, you need a clear head. These are the 5 trends I would watch most closely.

Trend 1: Automation should reduce stress and improve the customer experience

I changed my mind on automation.

When I first saw more automation creeping into cafes, I was one of the people complaining that the craft was vanishing. I felt that especially around milk. It seemed like one of the skills that made a barista a barista was being pushed aside.

Then I looked at what happens in real shops. One day you get an amazing flat white. The next day the milk is burnt because the team is slammed and someone is tired. That is not craft. That is just inconsistency under pressure.

So today I look at automation much more practically. If a tool removes friction, keeps quality steady, and gives the barista time to connect with customers, I think it can be a very good investment. The goal is simple: deliver on quality, but also connection quality.

This matters even more in shops with high foot traffic. If your team is stressed, customers feel it. A calmer barista usually gives a better experience. A remembered order, a short conversation, and a warm room still matter hugely. That is one of the main reasons people become regulars.

I would not buy automation for theatre. A lot of founders want the newest equipment because it looks advanced. You need to know exactly what problem the machine is solving. Is it saving time during rush hour? Is it fixing a consistency issue? Is it helping a small team keep up without burning out?

And this is the part many founders skip. You need to know the floor before you automate the floor. If you have never worked the bar, you will make expensive guesses about where the bottlenecks are.

Trend 2: The specialty obsession is real, but profit still has to lead

This is the trend I think a lot of first-time founders underestimate.

Fifteen years ago, great specialty coffee could still feel new in many places. Today, people know they can get specialty coffee pretty much anywhere. So switching is easy. Regulars are harder to get, especially in cities.

So yes, your coffee has to be good. Very good. But that alone will not keep you in business.

You need to be brutally honest about location, rent, staffing, and daily volume. If the space is not adapted to what you want to do, if foot traffic is weak, and if you have no clue how to bring people there, maybe you should not open there. It is much cheaper to admit that before the lease is signed.

I often think in terms of reversible and irreversible decisions. A big build-out and a heavy lease are hard to reverse. A smaller concept, a hole in the wall, or a test format inside another business gives you much more room to learn. Start small enough that you can learn without breaking yourself.

Rent deserves special attention. One retail lease guide puts healthy cafe rent at about 6% to 8% of gross sales. Once you drift toward 10%, life gets tight very quickly. Coffee shops do not have big margins. High rent can quietly kill a good concept.

I also think you need to choose your ambition early. Some people want one neighborhood cafe and want to run it for years. I genuinely respect that. Others want to build something repeatable and open several locations.

Both are valid. But you cannot scale if you have not planned to scale. A lot of the operators winning this game are either VC-backed or entering with a very clear multi-location plan. You do not need VC to start. You do need that same clarity about format, costs, and pace.

Hakone Coffee in Oslo is one of the clearest examples I have seen. They opened four stores within a year because the locations were chosen carefully and the design was streamlined enough to repeat. That kind of planning is what scaling actually looks like.

And even if you only want one shop, build it so it is healthy. One day you may want to sell, step back, or do something else. A cafe that is barely making it is very hard to pass on.

Trend 3: Robusta is back, and founders should pay attention

I think the old Robusta snobbery is getting tired.

For a long time, a lot of people in specialty coffee treated Robusta like the enemy. That makes less and less sense to me now. There is real curiosity in the market. People have developed their palates. They are more open than many founders assume.

There is also a hard business reason to pay attention. The FAO reported that global coffee prices jumped 38.8% in 2024. By late 2024, Robusta prices were about 70% higher year on year. Coffee buying is getting more volatile, and the old assumptions around bean economics are shifting fast.

The supply chain itself is fragile. Roughly 80% of the world’s coffee is produced by smallholder farmers. When climate events or trade disruptions hit, the effects move quickly.

So if you are opening in 2026, treat bean strategy as business strategy. Robusta can help protect margins. It can also open up a broader drinks conversation. Vietnamese coffee culture has shown for a long time that Robusta can sit inside drinks people genuinely love. And there are some incredible Robusta coffees out there now.

I would not sneak it onto a menu like a reason to make more money, or hide it in a crazy drink where its flavour would be dismissed. I would be intentional. Know what your regulars love. Notice what they are curious about. Talk to the people who come back for coffee and nothing else. Then build from there.

Trend 4: Asian cafe culture is pushing the market toward smaller, cozier spaces

If you are in North America, this is one thing I would steal right now.

In Paris, I have seen a clear rise in very small, cozy cafes. A lot of that is tied to the influence of Asian cafe culture. The spaces are tighter. The design is more intentional. The whole experience feels more intimate.

I like this trend because it solves several problems at once. A smaller space usually means less rent pressure, fewer staffing headaches, and a clearer service flow. It also forces you to get specific. You cannot hide behind a huge room and a vague concept.

This is where a lot of founders get trapped by ego. They want the big flagship before they have proof that people care. I would much rather see you run a tiny room brilliantly. A small, well-edited cafe can build identity much faster than a larger one with too many ideas.

And if your long-term goal is growth, small formats are easier to repeat. Again, this comes back to planning. A compact footprint often gives you a much more realistic path to a second or third location.

Trend 5: The rise of non-coffee alternatives is really about resilience

I do not think this trend is only about adding another drink to the menu. I think it is about resilience.

The strongest cafes I am watching are not relying only on coffee sales. Some are opening inside beauty salons. Some sit inside clothing stores. Some are built from the start as concept spaces with two different revenue streams. That can sound risky, and in some cases it is. But it can also reduce risk because not everything depends on selling one more flat white.

I have always believed in portfolio careers. Depending on one employer is risky. In 2026, I would say the same about retail. A cafe needs a portfolio mindset too.

That does not mean you should cram 10 business ideas into one small space. Boundaries matter. At The Blend, we served breakfast and lunch, and catered to offices around our café,  but I deliberately did not go into dinner. I wanted enough range to bring people in and create revenue, but not so much complexity that the operation collapsed.

That is the balance to find now. If someone comes in and does not want coffee, what else makes sense for them? If a group walks in with mixed preferences, can your menu still work? If coffee costs move against you again, do you have any cushion at all?

The answer might be food. It might be a tight non-coffee menu. It might be a concept partnership with another retail business. I do not think there is one perfect answer. I do think a coffee-only shop is getting harder to defend.

So how would I actually start a coffee shop in 2026?

1. Do the boring work before the branding. I would start with the smallest version of the idea that still lets me test whether people care. I would spend time in the neighborhood at different hours and watch what happens. Morning flow, lunch, weekends, nearby offices, nearby schools, nearby retail. Then I would ask a very boring but very important question: can this location realistically pay for itself?
2. After that, I would get painfully clear on fixed costs. Rent first. Equipment next. Labor after that. Founders often obsess over branding before they understand their cost base. I love branding. I also know branding cannot rescue a broken model.
3. I would also get on the floor early. If I could work shifts, shadow a team, or train behind a machine before opening, I would. The biggest bottleneck in my own cafe was staff turnover. Cafe work often pays modestly, customer expectations are high, and tips do not always close the gap. Teaching myself to make flat whites, lattes, and our regulars’ favorite drinks changed the way I built the operation.

I see this mindset all the time. We want to create the systems for everything to be highly efficient, but we do not want to do the work. Your systems cannot work if you have not gone through them yourself.

I would negotiate hard with suppliers too. I saved money at The Blend because roasters supplied their own grinders. That was a practical decision, and it shaped the whole concept. New founders often assume every major cost is fixed. Very often, it is not.

A lot of people freeze because they compare their first idea to a polished multi-location brand. Forget looking big at the start. Build something coherent, healthy, and real.

Coffee still has room for new founders. I really believe that. But the founders who win in 2026 will be the ones who stay creative with money, keep fixed costs under control, know when to automate, know when to stay small, and know how to widen the revenue model without losing the soul of the place.

Open the shop if you mean it. Just do the unglamorous work first. That is usually where the good ideas prove themselves.

FAQs

Is the specialty coffee market too saturated for a new founder?

It is crowded, but not closed. By mid-2025, 46% of U.S. adults drank specialty coffee daily, officially surpassing traditional coffee. You no longer win by simply introducing specialty beans. You win through tighter operations, authentic community connection, and flawless daily execution.

How can I test my cafe idea without quitting my 9-to-5 job?

Start with reversible decisions. Do not sign a 10-year lease immediately. Try a weekend pop-up, a tiny cart, or a tight format inside an existing retail store. This allows you to learn the actual mechanics of serving customers and iterate your concept without breaking yourself financially.

How much of my revenue should go toward coffee shop rent?

Keep it fiercely low. Industry guidance suggests your rent should sit between 6% and 8% of gross sales. Once you drift toward 10%, life gets incredibly tight. High rent will quietly kill a great concept, so prioritize a smaller, efficient footprint over unnecessary square footage.

Can a coffee shop survive the recent spike in bean prices?

Yes, but you must be strategic. In 2024, global coffee prices jumped 38.8%. Surviving this volatility requires widening your revenue model with non-coffee items, negotiating creatively with suppliers, and intentionally exploring high-quality Robusta to protect margins while maintaining a great cup.

Do I need to raise venture capital to start a coffee shop?

Absolutely not. Many aspiring founders get paralyzed comparing their first idea to a polished, VC-backed chain. Start small and focus on organic traction. By keeping fixed costs low and getting scrappy with your initial build-out, you can launch a healthy, independent business without answering to investors.

Julie Hanell is a EU based sales & copywriter consultant for coffee businesses and a creator of The Coffee Dispatch, a publication born from her obsession with how specialty coffee culture reflects community, identity, and creative energy. A serial entrepreneur who successfully exited her first cafe at age 22, Julie helps coffee & hospitality companies generate revenue through copy & sales systems. She specializes in GTM strategies for companies in the coffee industry.

The post How to Start a Coffee Shop in 2026: 5 Trends to Watch appeared first on BYVI.

I hear founders talk about burnout all the time. Some say it openly. Some hide it inside polished updates. Some do not say it at all. I went through founder burnout myself, and looking back, it wasn’t just about stress. It happened because I lost my connection to my true self.

If you are VC-backed, the pressure can get louder after the raise. You have more resources, yes. You also have more people watching, more expectations, and less room to look uncertain. The dark side of entrepreneurship does not disappear because the company got funded.

A Startup Snapshot report found that 72% of startup founders said starting a company hurt their mental health. In that same study, 36% reported burnout. Those numbers feel very real to me.

Burnout gets louder after the headline

You face more pressure once the world knows you have raised capital.

Success creates a trap

A funding round gives you fuel. It also creates a story around you. People act like you made it. You know the truth. The real work starts after the announcement.

A Balderton Capital survey found that 89% of founders see the startup ecosystem as naturally competitive and high-pressure, 84% feel long hours are expected, and 71% feel work comes before wellbeing. That is the environment you are operating in. No wonder so many founders feel burnout.

I think burnout grows in silence too. At BYVI, I pay close attention to what founders are not saying. The best insight often sits there. Burnout hides there as well, in the skipped details, the forced optimism, and the pressure to always look like you are crushing it for the board, your team, and the market.

Black and white thinking makes it worse

A lot of founders fear they will not make it. They think in black and white colors. Every missed target feels final. Every pivot feels like proof that something is wrong.

Startup life happens in the gray area. One thing leads to another. Then that thing leads to something else. Pivots and iterations are part of the journey, and the faster you accept that, the less personal every hard moment feels.

What actually helps when you feel burned out

When things get tough, I do two things: I return to my purpose by connecting with customers, and I stop listening to distractions to focus only on what drives growth.

Reconnect with your purpose and customers

When I feel founder energy dropping, I always go back to customers. As founders, we build companies to solve their problems, and remembering that purpose is the best way to regain focus.

I ask what changed for them. I ask what problem still hurts. I ask how the product fits into their real life.

I also save screenshots of kind notes from customers in “Customer Love” folder. On tough days, I look through this folder to remember why our work matters.

Regardless of the company stage, I believe founders need to stay close to the people they are helping. Reminding yourself why you dedicated your life to solving their pain points is a powerful reset. And that resets me fast.

Purpose protects you. Distance from purpose drains you. When the company starts to feel like a spreadsheet, burnout grows much faster.

And even when you fail, your work remains worthwhile if it aligns with your purpose. Stay close to your users, and you will eventually figure it all out and find your way.

Cut noise before it drains the team

After a raise, it is very easy to confuse motion with progress. More channels. More features. More meetings. More experiments. Suddenly everyone is busy and no one feels clear.

This is also why I care so much about organic growth. Every company grows differently, but the best growth usually comes from going deep on what already works. Go by what is already happening under the hood. Do more of the things that create traction. Cut the rest faster.

Be honest about work-life blend

A KPMG report found that 70% of founders spent nothing on improving their mental wellbeing, and only 1 in 5 felt satisfied with their mental health and stress levels. Founders keep postponing this because there is always another fire. Later comes very late.

My view here is probably not the trendy one. I do not believe in some perfect work-life balance, especially in the early stage or in a high-growth stage. There is more like work-life blend. Your brain is 100% on, and if you are truly building something ambitious, ideas will follow you into dinner, vacations, and weekends.

Still, I think it is important to take care of yourself. You need enough energy to keep leading. The goal is to make the work feel connected to your life and values. If every day feels like pure sacrifice, something is off. When you can turn your work into play, you build with more energy and less resentment.

Build founder support system that changes outcomes

Burnout gets heavier when support stays vague. Founders need practical help.

I once built a founder community around board games. The games gave people a reason to meet. In reality, we just needed to be around each other, because only other founders really understand the exhaustion of building a company and the true meaning of startup burnout.

I stopped hosting board game nights, but the community we built sparked genuine connections. Founders began collaborating on deals, and one even secured his first 10 clients through those introductions.

That is why I often say we should buy from our friends and never ask for discounts. In founder communities, buying from each other is actually showing the highest form of empathy. A real founder community helps people get customers, intros, hires, partnerships, and traction. That kind of support changes how heavy the journey feels.

Final thought

Startup burnout is real, and it is common. It shows up in funded companies too. Sometimes even more.

If you feel it creeping in, go back to customers. Narrow the problem. Find founders who will support you in a practical way. The founder journey is undeniably hard. Still the hardest moments often reveal that you are building something truly meaningful. Whatever you are going through, keep creating, keep iterating, and do not give up.

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Overcoming Startup Burnout: A Founder-to-Founder Guide appeared first on BYVI.