Rami Suliman

Co-Founder of @trybynow 🔸a B2B fintech startup | مؤسس شركة ناشئة في مجال التقنيه الماليه لقطاع الاعمال @trybynow

[Akshay Kothari @akothari]

We're finally shedding the .so (thank you Somalia!), and using the .com for @NotionHQ. And for this beautiful moment, I want to share a fun story:

Back in 2018, I had just joined Notion, and one of the first things @ivan asked me to do was figure out how we could own https://t.co/BxoFvc83VG. I had never done a big domain purchase before, so I reached out to a few domain brokers to understand the landscape. We tried different brokers, kept things anonymous, and attempted to surface a price the seller might consider.

A year went by… nothing. Meanwhile, it was pretty clear this was only going to get more expensive as we grew. We needed a different approach. A fellow founder connected me to a broker who took a very different tack. Less transactional, more long-term relationship builder. He spent months getting to know the domain owner. Turns out owner was a fellow entrepreneur in the west coast… and a huge Grateful Dead fan.

So we figured, why not get creative? Something beyond just price. So I called up our investor Ronny Conway and asked if there was any way he could help set up a private meeting between the domain owner and the Grateful Dead. Ronny is one of those people who somehow makes impossible things possible. A week later he calls me back: “New York City. Halloween. 15 minutes after the concert. Done.”

The broker went back to the owner with an offer: some cash, some equity, and a private meeting with the Grateful Dead. That got his attention. He didn’t take the band meeting in the end, but he did lean into the equity (great call, in hindsight). We shook hands, and a few weeks later, the deal was done.

I’ve been waiting years for the day we move our product to https://t.co/BxoFvc83VG. Looks like 2026 is finally the year. Safe to say I’m unreasonably excited about this update!

[Jon Xu @xuster]

Your startup's growth rate is also its learning rate.

Setting an ambitious growth goal and trying to hit it is the fastest way to find out what's broken and how to fix it.

Not just the obvious stuff. Wrong customer, wrong problem, product nobody wants. It also stresses the founding team. You find out fast whether you can handle hard problems under pressure.

Bottlenecks only show up when you push.

If you're not having uncomfortable discoveries early, you're not pushing hard enough.

[Nicolas Dessaigne @dessaigne]

My advice to founders in 2026: spend tokens, not headcount.

Record everything. Make your company queryable. Build self-improving loops.

Before long, AI won’t just help you operate your company. It will make it self improving.
Don't think AI adoption, think AI transformation.

This is the biggest shift in how startups get built since cloud computing.

[Alexander Klöpping @AlexanderNL]

black mirror

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

My biggest takeaways from @danshipper:

1. The future of work will happen inside Codex or Claude Code. Instead of putting AI into your SaaS tool, you’ll use your SaaS tools inside your favorite AI agents' in-app browser. Dan spends all his time in Codex now—writing documents, managing email, doing research, everything. He's using Google Docs, PostHog, and everything he needs within the agent's in-app browser. The agent can see what he’s doing, and has all of his context, so he and his agent collaborate quickly and super effectively.

2. Automation is a lie—every automation needs a human. Dan's company doubled in size this year despite being incredibly AI-forward. Why? Because in order to make automation work well, you need humans making sure everything keeps working. This is why benchmarks are misleading—they measure AI on problems we’ve already framed and can score, but there’s always a higher frame.

3. PMs will win the AI era. Marcus, a former PM who previously ran Axios’s writing product, joined Every after getting super AI-pilled. Now he runs their product Spiral, and ships faster than anyone on the team. He pairs technical knowledge with spiky product sense, deep user empathy, and an eye for what matters. Dan thinks any PM who gets really AI-native will be incredibly dangerous because the building is done for you—what matters is figuring out what to build and if it’s great.

4. Full-stack designers are becoming superheroes. Designers used to make beautiful interactions that engineers didn’t want to build or couldn’t execute properly. Now designers don’t need to hand things off; they can build it themselves. Designers are naturally creative people, and AI is the perfect tool for them because it lets them bring their vision to life without the traditional bottlenecks.

5. SaaS is not dead. In fact, Dan is bullish on SaaS stocks. When users bring their own AI (via Codex or Claude Code) to use SaaS products, the user—not the SaaS company—pays for tokens. This saves SaaS company’s margins. Since the agents need their own seats, Dan predicts that agents will create massive new demand for SaaS because there will be tons of agents using these products at high volume.

6. Every company will have one “super-agent” inside their Slack that every employee will use. Dan initially thought every employee would have their personal work agent, like a shadow AI org chart, but he’s completely flipped his view. He realized agents need humans who care about them. When someone gets tired of maintaining their personal agent, it becomes useless. The winning model is one forward-deployed engineer or AI-savvy person who maintains a company-wide agent (like Shopify’s River or Viktor), and then it trickles down to more specialized team agents as models improve and become less fiddly.

7. The AI job apocalypse is not happening, but you do need to evolve to stay relevant. Models make yesterday’s human competence cheap. But because everyone uses the same models, it all looks the same if you use it the default way; it becomes commoditized slop. Humans then take that frozen competence and use it to make something new and interesting for their specific situation. The key: “ride the models”—use them for everything you do, try new models when they drop, keep turning over rocks.

8. We will read way more AI-generated writing, and we will like it. Human writing is incredibly important for things that matter, but for internal docs, planning, and email, AI-generated is often better because most people are bad at writing strategy documents.

9. Build software for humans and agents to use together. The current model is building a CLI that an agent uses independently. Instead, you and your agent should be using the app together. This creates new design challenges—agents can make a billion requests in three seconds, so you need approval flows, inboxes that summarize what happened, logs, and easy rollback.

10. Forward-deployed engineers are the new most essential role. The big model companies have teams of people managing their internal agents, and those teams aren’t going away. It’s different from traditional software building, and certain engineers love it. As models get better, this role will evolve—you’ll be managing more agents doing more things.

[Ibrahim Ajami @IbrahimAjami]

A brilliant one from @jaminball

DC delays are about to explode so this category is about scarcity and intellectual property

[Reuters @Reuters]

Delivery Hero confirms takeover offer from Uber https://t.co/unIco434FR https://t.co/unIco434FR

[Luke Sophinos @lukesophinos]

https://t.co/9JEEPjtdnw

[Jay Yang @Jayyanginspires]

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe’s advice to ambitious people:

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

You will know that the AI labs believe in ASI when they disband their newly formed consulting (sorry “forward deployed engineering”) groups. As long as people are required to figure out how AI is useful & do organizational change & systems integration, jobs seem to be pretty safe

[Paul Graham @paulg]

It's an unimpressive-sounding word, but one of the most powerful motivations is the motivation of the hobbyist. That's what keeps successful founders working on their companies long past the point when they've made enough to quit. It's their beloved project.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

"Your lack of urgency is wasting your potential."

[Sam Boboev @samboboev]

There’s a tension in fintech that most companies avoid addressing directly, but @scott_shannon, CPO of @Airwallex, leaned into it.

If you are building infrastructure and applications at the same time, aren’t you inevitably competing with your own customers?

That assumption only holds if you believe the value sits in the product layer, but what became clear in this conversation is that the real leverage is shifting underneath, into the infrastructure itself.

If your infrastructure is truly differentiated, then restricting access to protect your own applications becomes a limiting strategy, because no single company can build the full range of products that an open ecosystem can create on top of the same foundation.

This is the AWS analogy playing out in fintech.

Amazon did not weaken itself by opening AWS; it expanded the market by turning internal capabilities into external infrastructure, allowing thousands of companies to build on top of it while still continuing to build its own products.

The same logic applies here.

Airwallex offering expense management does not eliminate partners like Brex; it establishes a baseline while enabling others to go further, faster, and in more specialized directions.

The real shift is from vertical control to horizontal enablement, where the goal is no longer to own every use case, but to become the layer others rely on to build theirs.

And that changes the surface area of fintech entirely.

Because once financial infrastructure becomes as accessible as cloud infrastructure, every software company can embed financial services without becoming one, which is where the next wave of expansion actually begins.

That’s why this conversation matters 👇

https://t.co/fuJKbQpGUK

[dharmesh @dharmesh]

Love this approach from @tobi.

A system that compounds learning and spreads it through the organization.

Transparency and openness is key.

[Deirdre Bosa @dee_bosa]

"Three years in AI is actually like three decades of pre-AI"

AI roll-ups have hit Wall Street (Amex GBT, Janus). New playbook & exit for public companies that can't make the AI transition on their own.

Long Lake CEO @alextaubman on what it takes to win at this still-new strategy

"To be successful at this strategy, you need three things. A world-class applied AI engineering team. A world-class change management function. World-class M&A."

[Amit Gupta | Compliance That Closes Deals @amitpgupta]

a CTO has three jobs.
everything else is noise.

1. create clarity.
in the AI era, code is cheap. coherence is expensive.
your job is to make the system understandable — clear architecture, clean interfaces, predictable infra, documented decisions. humans and AI both build better when the environment makes sense.

2. prevent chaos before it compounds.
AI can generate thousands of lines overnight. it can also generate thousands of future problems overnight.
great CTOs obsess over reliability, security, monitoring, testing, and deployment discipline because every inconsistency becomes future confusion at scale.

3. make engineering predictable.
the best engineering teams are not the fastest. they are the most dependable.
when every deploy is calm, every service behaves as expected, and every engineer knows the patterns — velocity becomes automatic. predictability is leverage.
this is the entire job.

- not chasing every framework.
- not attending endless meetings.
- not pretending complexity is sophistication.

the modern CTO is no longer the best programmer in the room.

they are the person who designs an environment where humans and AI can ship great software safely, repeatedly, and without drama.

[Nathan Lambert @natolambert]

Visiting most of the leading Chinese AI labs, I'm struck by a culture that's extremely well suited to building LLMs with fewer resources, but one happening in a very different ecosystem, more companies at play, almost no data industry, etc.

Full report: https://t.co/ibmtMWnfTc

[JR Farr @jrfarr]

Distribution is no longer optional.

Everyone wants a growth hack or a viral loop, but most of the growth at Lemon Squeezy came from doing a lot of small things for years.

Some practical things that worked for us:

1. Shipping constantly

We created “Lemon Drops” and every Friday, we shipped something. Sometimes big, sometimes tiny. But every single week we had:

>tweets
>a blog post
>a product release
>a changelog update
>screenshots/videos
>customer conversations

This mattered way more than trying to engineer one giant launch every 6 months.

2. Turning product work into distribution

Every feature became content. Every integration became content. Every customer problem became content.

We stopped thinking: “How do we market this?”

And started thinking: “How do we package the work we’re already doing into something discoverable?”

3. Building evergreen content loops

We built “Wedges” and gave it away for free (open source). It wasn’t directly monetized, but it gave us something useful to share constantly.

And designers and developers loved it. People tweeted it. It ranked on Google, and it introduced people to the brand. Over time, it became a flywheel.

A lot of good distribution is just creating assets that keep working long after you publish them.

4. Obsessing over onboarding

I think founders massively underestimate this. Reducing friction is distribution. Every extra step in onboarding kills word of mouth.

We spent a huge amount of time improving signup flow, activation, dashboards, copywriting, error states, emails, and all the boring stuff.

Growth gets easier when people actually make it through the front door.

5. Making docs part of the product

Our docs drove an insane amount of traffic. Not because we “did SEO” but because we answered real questions developers were searching for.

Most company docs sound vanilla. We tried to make ours actually helpful.

Distribution increasingly comes from being useful at scale.

6. Integrations everywhere

Every integration unlocked another ecosystem. Another search surface. Another community.

Integrations are underrated forms of distribution because they borrow trust from existing platforms.

7. Founder-led content

I think I had <1,000 followers when I started Lemon Squeezy, but people trust people more than logos. Especially now.

I posted constantly.

>lessons
>launches
>podcasts
>screenshots
>customer stories
>product thoughts

Founders underestimate how much simply showing up every day matters.

8. Customer support as marketing

Early on, support was one of our biggest growth channels. Answering fast and being human matter. People remember how you make them feel when something breaks.

If you follow me, you know I still live by this, and I've carried this mentality into my role(s) at Stripe.

Support builds trust faster than ads ever will.

9. Screenshots matter more than people think

It sounds silly, but it’s true. Products that look good spread easier. People tweet screenshots, and good design is distribution.

10. Launching over and over again

We never really stopped launching.

>every feature = launch
>every milestone = launch
>every integration = launch
>every partnership = launch

Not in an annoying way. We just consistently stayed in motion. The internet rewards momentum.

11. Building in public before it was cool

We talked openly about numbers, growth, problems, product decisions, and lessons learned.

Transparency created trust, and that trust created distribution.

12. Creating systems instead of random bursts of marketing

This is probably the biggest thing. Most startups market in bursts. They build towards one big launch and then disappear for 3 months.

We built systems:

>weekly emails
>weekly content
>weekly launches
>weekly improvements
>weekly customer conversations

Consistency compounds harder than intensity.

Product still matters deeply, but a good product alone is rarely enough anymore.

Looking back, almost none of this was one giant breakthrough moment.

It was thousands of small reps stacked on top of each other for years.

That’s what compounds.

[Bloomberg @business]

Saudi startup Ninja has picked a roster of banks to work on a potential initial public offering in Riyadh, according to people familiar with the matter https://t.co/pvzJS4Dv75

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

https://t.co/67rAGZE7X3