Hey — It’s Charlie.

Welcome to the latest edition of Great Startups! Here’s what’s in store:

• The Collapse Equation: Why Great Ideas Die at Scale

• State of the product job market in 2025: There’s a lot to be optimistic about

• Vibe Coding: How to get most of it.

• The $500 Hack: Your Startup Doesn’t Need a Fancy Name—Just a Working Credit Card Limit

• Targeting Made Simple: A step-by-step guide to finding your perfect customer.

• Hidden Startup Debt: The silent killer that’s slowing growth.

Get ready to dive into these power-packed insights for founders and growth enthusiasts!

Resources

• State of the product job market in 2025. (LINK)

• How founders should think about runway. (LINK)

• How to get the most out of Vibe Coding. (LINK)

• David Politis on doing whatever it takes to stay in the game (LINK)

• Sam Blond on how to generate more demand. (LINK)

ICYMI

• OpenAI agrees to buy Windsurf for about $3 billion. (LINK)

• Netflix is getting into short videos with a new vertical feed for mobile. (LINK)

• Anthropic’s Claude can now read your Gmail. (LINK)

• The WordPress vs. WP Engine drama, explained. (LINK)

• 1X will test humanoid robots in ‘a few hundred’ homes in 2025. (LINK)

Quick Links

• Ray Dalio built a $14B empire by following core success principles that took him from humble beginnings to founding the world’s largest hedge fund.

• Iman Gadzhi and Pierre de Preux launched a SaaS and hit 7-figure ARR in 9 months by moving fast, using Iman’s audience, and solving a real problem.

• Lenny Rachitsky and Jen Abel on how to approach founder-led sales.

• Carta shares 50 slides packed with insights for founders from 45,000 startups.

• How One AI App Founder Makes $20K+ Monthly—and How You Can Too!

Alexander's Empire Failed at Growth Hacking - Are You?

Alexander the Great’s empire stretched from Greece to India, but it wasn’t enemy armies that brought it down—it was the brutal math of scaling. His supply lines required moving 50 tons of grain and 11,000 gallons of water every single day for his army, and each extra mile didn’t just add cost—it multiplied it. Transport animals ate their own cargo, spoilage piled up, and coordination became impossible. Sound familiar? Modern startups face the same traps: faster growth doesn’t mean linear costs, it means exponential complexity. Amazon discovered this when halving delivery times meant quadrupling warehouses.

The deeper lesson? Scaling breaks systems in predictable ways, whether you’re running an ancient empire or a SaaS company. Alexander’s generals couldn’t communicate fast enough across 3,000 miles, so local leaders had to make decisions—just like modern distributed teams. And when he died, critical knowledge vanished because no system could transfer it fast enough. Today, companies like Boeing and NASA still wrestle with the same problem: coordination overhead, knowledge decay, and the fact that some scaling limits aren’t about effort—they’re baked into the equations. The real question isn’t can we grow? but how do we grow without the system snapping?  (LINK)

Ok that’s it for this week, We keep refining our newsletter content, just hit reply to let us know what you think about this issue.