Femi Brinson

This YC cohort leaned hard into enterprise AI tooling and automation, with 95% of teams enabling AI workflows rather than chasing viral consumer apps—reflecting the intense, two-sided competition between founders and investors. The result is a market of soaring pre-seed valuations and look-alike offerings where only startups solving real, painful problems will break out from the “me-too” pack. See more details in this post… Harvard Business School Harvard Innovation Labs Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard (D^3) #founder #funding #business #investing #vc #entrepreneur #startup #YC #MTLC #BostonTech #BoardReadyBootcamp #TechTop50 #TechHotTopicSeries

10

“Vibe coding skills have also become a recruiting priority across the tech industry. Firms like Reddit and DoorDash now list experience with AI coding tools like Cursor and Bolt as desired skills” https://lnkd.in/eyREp4HB

21

Are your product managers building dashboards instead of building strategy? I’ve seen PMs quietly becoming the "operating system" of their organizations. They're reconciling data, inventing processes, building alignment from scratch, and holding everything together with spreadsheets and Slack threads. This work burns people out because it's infrastructure work disguised as leadership responsibilities. When your most strategic talent is stuck doing operational heavy lifting, something is broken. At scale, this creates chaos, slows decisions, and forces PMs into tactical survival mode instead of focusing on customers and strategy. Product Ops is more critical than ever in 2026, especially for bigger organizations. Well-designed Product Ops acts as a force multiplier, clearing the path so PMs can do what they're actually hired for: drive outcomes. Tomorrow, I'm publishing the first newsletter of the year diving deep into why Product Ops isn't going anywhere, despite what the skeptics say. If you're not subscribed yet, head to my website to get the full breakdown: 👉 https://melissaperri.com/ What's taking up most of your PM team's time right now? Is it strategy or infrastructure?

281

33 Comments

I recently joined Alex Shevelenko, CEO of RELAYTO AI, on the podcast to discuss how leaders can navigate the intersection of AI and shifting business landscapes. We discussed the challenges CEOs face with two jobs: running the current business model and designing the next one. If you aren’t auditing your business model with the same rigor as your financial statements, you’re at risk. And the biggest hurdle to innovation isn't technical; it's a culture that fears failure. To succeed with AI, organizations must move away from "gut feelings" and toward a structured, mathematical process of experimentation. Listen to the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gBfTNRY3 #AI #BusinessModels #Innovation The Wharton School #Amazon #Leadership #FutureOfWork

22

Big news from Wipfli: We just launched PolicyConnect, a game changer for insurance finance teams. If you’ve ever wrestled with manual data entry or siloed systems, this one’s for you. Built on Sage Intacct, PolicyConnect automates the flow between policy admin systems and the GL — giving teams real-time insights and freeing up time for strategic work. Proud to be part of a team that’s helping #insurance orgs move from complexity to clarity. https://lnkd.in/erz4EXiE

3

Two weeks ago, Brex and Capital One announced an agreement for Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15 billion. This is the largest bank-fintech deal in recent history. I've spent the last two weeks thinking about what this means for the PE firms and portfolio companies I work with. The short answer is that everything just changed in terms of what's possible. Brex and Ramp combined had about 3% of the corporate card market. The real fight was never between us and other fintechs. It was always against American Express, JP Morgan and the big banks who control 90%+ of the market. We've been building great products, but we've been doing it with a fraction of their resources and balance sheet capacity. That constraint just disappeared. On day one, we become the #3 corporate card issuer in the US. We gain access to $700 billion in assets, a $6 billion R&D budget, and the ability to offer credit limits that are 10-20x higher than what we could do before. Our AI roadmap just accelerated by 2-3 years because we now have the infrastructure and capital to move faster than anyone else in the market. What makes this work is that Capital One understands how to acquire without destroying what made the company valuable in the first place – or as Pedro has repeated over the last two weeks, “don’t crush the butterfly.” They did this after acquiring ING Direct and they're doing it with us. Pedro stays as CEO, the team stays intact, the culture stays unchanged. Rich Fairbank built Capital One in the 90s by using data and technology to disrupt credit cards. He sees the same DNA in Brex. This isn't about cost cuts. It's about giving us the resources to win the market outright. For the PE firms I work with, this changes the equation significantly. You now get institutional-grade underwriting capacity with the product innovation and service model you've come to expect from us, all backed by a top-10 bank. Same team, same partnership approach, just with Fortune 50 resources behind every relationship. The future of corporate finance isn't American Express or JP Morgan with a better app. It's AI-powered corporate cards from the people who invented it, spend management, real-time compliance, and embedded banking built on infrastructure that can actually support it at scale. That's what we're building now, and we just got a 50x multiplier on our ability to execute. If you're a PE firm interested in how this impacts your portfolio companies, let's talk.

105

2 Comments

🚨 The AI shift isn’t just about integration — it’s about reimagining what’s possible. I spent the past few days in Birmingham, Alabama where I participated in a strategy session with one of our amazing portfolio companies, Croux, an AI native on-demand hospitality staffing platform. Their use of AI sparked a bigger question I’ve been considering across our portfolio: 👉 There’s a massive difference between founders who are “adding AI features” and those building businesses that simply couldn’t exist without AI. It reminds me of the early days of the iPhone. Most companies made their sites “mobile-friendly” — but the winners (Uber, Instagram, WhatsApp) were born mobile. Today, the same playbook is repeating with AI. In our newsletter this week, I explore: -Why “AI-native” companies will define the next wave of category winners -How founders can design around AI’s current limitations while harnessing its superpowers -The high-stakes implications for healthcare, climate, and fintech 📖 Read the full piece here: https://lnkd.in/eqHpQ37f I’d love to hear your perspective: Are the best founders you know simply integrating AI, or building something that couldn’t exist without it? #AI #startups #venturecapital #platformshift #innovation

50

11 Comments