Tech and startups

• Defense tech startups are raising massive funding rounds, with Epirus securing $250M and Shield AI raising $240M at a $5.3B valuation for autonomous drone and counter-drone technologies.

• AI startup valuations continue to soar, with Cursor seeking funding at a $10B valuation and numerous startups raising $100M+, while Anthropic reached a staggering $61.5B valuation.

• Enterprise AI security is attracting significant investment, with Knostic raising $11M, Crogl securing $25M, and SpecterOps raising $75M to protect organizations implementing AI solutions.

• Revenue prediction startup Gong surpassed $300M in ARR, showcasing strong growth with generative AI integration while positioning for a potential IPO path.

• Foundation Capital raised a $600M fund to continue its focus on early-stage investing in emerging markets like AI, fintech, and crypto.

• Healthcare AI is advancing with personalized treatment solutions, as Ataraxis AI raised $20M to predict cancer treatment outcomes and potentially reduce unnecessary chemotherapy.

• No-code AI tools are expanding creative possibilities, with Intangible raising $4M for its text-to-3D creation platform for filmmakers and game designers.

• SpaceWERX awarded $440M in public-private partnerships to eight companies enhancing military satellite communication, radar technologies, and space-based services.

Types of software engineers as football players (mensurdurakovic.com, 2025-03-05). Highlights various types of software engineers, likening them to famous football players, showcasing personalities like 'Gianluigi Buffon' for stability and 'Zinedine Zidane' for extraordinary problem-solving skills

Escaping the Desert: Software Teams Thrive in the Forest (nikoheikkila.fi, 2025-03-08). Niko Heikkilä explores the journey from a stressful 'Desert' environment to a collaborative 'Forest' where software teams thrive, emphasizing qualities such as continuous testing, humility, and kindness

What Special Forces Can Teach Us About High-Impact Engineering Teams (codecapsule.com, 2025-03-04). Exploring the operational similarities between French Special Forces and high-impact tech teams, focusing on agility, hierarchy bypassing, and the use of dedicated engineering teams like the Web Core team at adidas and Booking.com

Hard Stop to Big Teams (belowwaterlevel.com, 2025-03-05). Effective growth at Airbase was achieved through maintaining small team sizes despite pressures from company expansion and product demands, emphasizing strategic alignment to support this structure

Diversity, equity and inclusion (roe.dev, 2025-03-08). Daniel Roe advocates for diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source, emphasizing values over politics, the importance of empathy in product development, and creating a level playing field for contributors

Your Leadership Crutches (avivbenyosef.com, 2025-03-06). Tech leaders are often hindered by crutches like rigid processes, focus on team happiness, and unnecessary metrics. Emphasizing outcomes over outputs and business objectives facilitates genuine leadership and organizational growth

Getting Airbnb’s Platform team to drive more impact: Reorganizing, defining strategy, and selecting metrics (newsletter.getdx.com, 2025-03-09). Anna Sulkina details how Airbnb's Platform team restructured to improve developer productivity, focusing on clear roles, enhanced stakeholder engagement, and a problem-centric strategy, leading to measurable enhancements in developer experience

Why You Should Be A Mentor (softwarepragmatism.com, 2025-03-05). Senior engineers are encouraged to mentor others, utilizing methods like problem-solving collaboration and knowledge-sharing to enhance both mentor and mentee understanding, alongside maintaining professional development records in engineering

Enterprise Software Sales Lessons (kinduff.com, 2025-03-04). Insights on enterprise software sales emphasize the importance of tangible concepts, meaningful discussions, and collaboration through iterative processes and follow-ups, utilizing tools like Google Docs for visualizing ideas

Toward a proper IT funding approval process. (waldo.jaquith.org, 2025-03-06). A proposed IT funding approval process emphasizes increased scrutiny based on project value, user research for verifying needs and solutions, established product ownership, and standardized solicitation templates to improve software project success rates

“Why now?”: a single question that decides what security startups succeed, and which fail (ventureinsecurity.net, 2025-03-04). Exploring 'Why now?' in security startups: How new technologies, infrastructure shifts, and changing adversary behaviors drive innovation in cybersecurity solutions

When Software Eats the World, Vulnerable Populations – Like Kids – Can Get Exposed to Venture Risk Without Knowing It (hunterwalk.com, 2025-03-11). Vulnerable populations, particularly children, risk exposure to venture capital failures without awareness, highlighting the need for responsible growth in startups, particularly in mental health and addiction services powered by AI tools

Business as a platform (proofofconcept.pub, 2025-03-09). Understanding business as a platform emphasizes critical thinking and crafting solutions without sacrificing quality, with insights on design trade-offs, endpoint identification, and developing business acumen through innovation and team experiences

Metric-Driven Development and The Claude Effect (read.engineerscodex.com, 2025-03-09). Engineers Codex explores Metric-Driven Development, highlighting the Claude Effect in AI coding tools. Developers favor Claude 3.5 for its real-world performance over benchmark scores, emphasizing human feedback over mere metrics

Debts, Tech and Otherwise (blogs.newardassociates.com, 2025-03-09). Scott Porad's exploration of various software development debts, including financial, product, ops, process, org debt, and their implications challenges the common view of tech debt as strictly negative

I Measured How Fast I Ship (mccormick.cx, 2025-03-06). Chris McCormick analyzes the speed of his software development across 36 projects, utilizing tools like git summary, ClojureScript, and Piku for efficient deployment and improved decision-making

When worse is better (bitecode.dev, 2025-03-10). Explores the philosophy of 'worse is better' in software development, emphasizing pragmatic choices over perfectionism, discussing tools like Docker, NoSQL databases, and the challenge of balancing quality with real-world constraints

The Best Code is the Code You Don’t Write: Avoiding Overcomplication in Critical Systems (levelup.gitconnected.com, 2025-03-07). Avoid unnecessary complication in software development by questioning problems before coding. Emphasize simplicity through effective strategies like Domain-Driven Design, Hexagonal architecture, and prioritize existing tools over new complex implementations

Tech debt is an outdated concept (leaddev.com, 2025-03-06). The concept of tech debt is criticized as outdated, urging a shift towards 'optionality,' which emphasizes flexibility, collaborative software design, and better communication between engineering and business amid a rapidly evolving landscape

Software Falsehoods: you can build it cheap, fast, and good - pick two (aaronstannard.com, 2025-03-08). The article discusses the trade-offs in software development regarding price, speed, and quality, emphasizing methodology and the challenges of accurately measuring software quality and combining expertise for better outcomes

Blog (jtarchie.com, 2025-03-05). JT Archie shares insights on efficient API design, Golang performance optimization, and transitioning in the labor force, among other topics, showcasing a variety of programming tools like SQLite, AWS Copilot, and CGO

Sowing the Seed Data (dillonshook.com, 2025-03-06). Dillon Shook discusses the importance of seeding data in applications, using tools like Astro and Cloudinary, to enhance user experience and identify edge cases while preparing for the Cat Search launch

I Tried Vibe Coding, and I Don’t Think I’m Going to Tab ⇥ My Way to a Million-Dollar Startup (navendu.me, 2025-03-07). Exploring vibe coding, Navendu Pottekkat examines the effectiveness of AI tools like Cursor and Claude for software development, highlighting the blend of creativity and technology while acknowledging the limitations of AI-generated code

Vibe Coding and Vibe Design (jakobnielsenphd.substack.com, 2025-03-07). AI enhances software development and UX design through vibe coding, enabling natural language intent specification for quicker prototyping and broader participation, while emphasizing the necessity of human expertise in ensuring quality outcomes

How Multiply went from Datomic to XTDB to Rama (blog.redplanetlabs.com, 2025-03-04). Multiply transitioned from Datomic to XTDB, and finally to Rama, embracing a platform that supports infinite data models, enhancing scalability, performance, and allowing a product-first approach in AI-driven collaboration

Why I left Microsoft (neelc.org, 2025-03-06). Neel Chauhan discusses his transition from a Microsoft employee due to a conflict with personal values around privacy and surveillance, influenced by his experiences with Big Data and a preference for open-source tools like FreeBSD

I feel a little pathetic admitting this (sublimeinternet.substack.com, 2025-03-08). Sari Azout shares her struggle with seeking validation through constant email checks while discussing the behind-the-scenes of building sublime.app, a personal knowledge management tool, in her podcast 'In the Weeds.'

Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (CEO and co-founder) (lennysnewsletter.com, 2025-03-09). Anton Osika's Lovable achieved $10M ARR in 60 days with just 15 staff, using AI to convert natural language descriptions into production-ready code, including their CLI tool GPT-Engineer gaining 52K stars on GitHub

Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) (lennysnewsletter.com, 2025-03-06). Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion, shares the journey of overcoming early struggles, navigating the challenges of Covid, and achieving product-market fit through community engagement, user feedback, and a commitment to keeping a lean, focused team

How Much Is A Venture Firm Worth? (tomtunguz.com, 2025-03-09). Venture capital's growth reflects private equity's evolution, forecasting valuation models based on return on equity, cash flow margin, and revenue growth, estimating a potential worth of $5.5 billion for successful firms

The rise of Lenny (therebooting.com, 2025-03-06). Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter reaches 1 million subscribers, emphasizing the potential shifts in B2B media dynamics and the effectiveness of building a personal brand without traditional employment structures

Spotlight: Morgan Beller - General Partner @ NFX (spaceambition.substack.com, 2025-03-07). Morgan Beller, NFX General Partner, discusses her venture capital journey, her focus on space tech investments like Stoke and Starfish, and the impact of gender diversity on VC performance

Trimodal Nature of Tech Compensation in the US, UK and India (newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com, 2025-03-04). An analysis of software engineering compensation across the US, UK, and India reveals a trimodal distribution based on over 20,000 data points, highlighting significant disparities by tier and region among tech firms

Design-first software engineering: Craft – with Balint Orosz (newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com, 2025-03-05). Balint Orosz of Craft discusses his transition from backend to frontend design, addressing tools like SwiftUI, the importance of a shared codebase, and the resurgence of local-first computing in modern software engineering

On the role of design documents (ayende.com, 2025-03-11). Oren Eini explores the role of design documents in RavenDB's feature development, examining their importance for planning and historical record-keeping amidst a complex implementation process of features like sharding and vector search

The labor of little decisions (benn.substack.com, 2025-03-07). The text explores how the choice of fonts and minute design aspects, such as buttons and colors, reflects broader decisions in software development using tools like Microsoft Word and HTML, amidst the rise of AI coding agents

Exclusive: Inside the Best AI Model for Coding and Writing | Scott White (Anthropic) (creatoreconomy.so, 2025-03-09). Scott White discusses Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic's hybrid reasoning AI model excelling in coding, product development, and effective collaboration through tight feedback loops and innovative features like Styles for tailored output

The AI-Native Revolution: How Model Context Protocol is Radically Changing Software (medium.com/intuitionmachine, 2025-03-08). The rise of Model Context Protocols (MCP) enables AI to assist in software development, revolutionizing workflows by allowing frameworks to be AI-native, exemplified by a startup's successful app rebuild using established frameworks

You shouldn't build fully autonomous agent. (yacinemahdid.com, 2025-03-10). HuggingFace warns against developing fully autonomous agents, citing risks and an unclear definition of 'agent', urging engineers to use precise terminology in AI workflows instead of vague classifications