The Founder’s Sixth Sense

Why Great Founders See Red Flags Before Anyone Else Does

October 01, 2025

Hey — It’s Charlie.

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

  • The Founder’s Sixth Sense: How to Spot Startup Trouble Before It Exists

  • Why winners win: The $75 Billion Selective Listening Strategy

  • The Physics of Sales: 11 Ways You’re Breaking the Laws

  • No AI, No Job: The Future Is Already Here

  • 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

  • Building pipeline: pre-PMF and post-PMF (LINK)

  • The $75 Billion Selective Listening Strategy. (LINK)

  • Six lessons after one year of Agentic AI. (LINK)

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

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

ICYMI

  • Atlassian acquires DX, a developer productivity platform, for $1B. (LINK)

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

  • Cloudflare launches a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping. (LINK)

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

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

  • 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!

Capital Weekly

  • Cohere raised $1.71B (Series D) to scale enterprise-ready LLMs with secure, private deployments across regulated industries.

  • Inspiren locked in $143M (Series B) to bring AI-driven care management and fall detection to senior living facilities.

  • Corintis scored $28.5M (Series A) for liquid cooling systems that keep AI data center chips from overheating.

  • Factory raised $70M (Series B) to unleash its AI “Droids” that automate software refactoring and migrations.

  • Valence secured $75M (Series B) to grow Nadia, its AI-powered workplace coach for employee development.

  • Bastion landed $39.6M (Seed) to merge web2 and web3 tools for businesses and customers.

  • Revyve grabbed €32.5M (~$37.7M) (Series B) to turn yeast into animal-free texturizing ingredients for food.

  • Wellgistics Health raised $56.3M (Post-IPO Equity) to streamline prescription logistics for independent pharmacies.

  • RedotPay bagged $87M (Venture) to bridge stablecoin payments with real-world cards and wallets.

  • TRIVER secured $120M (Debt Financing) to embed instant capital access for small businesses via Open Banking.

  • Genstore raised $10M (Seed) to build AI-powered chat platforms for online store creation and management.

  • Burnt cooked up $4.3M (Seed) for its AI-driven meal planning and recipe recommendation app.

  • Energy Vault landed $826M (Post-IPO Debt) to expand its gravity-based renewable energy storage systems.

  • Greptile scored $30.3M (Series A) to scale its AI-powered code reviewer for GitHub and GitLab.

  • Leo Cancer Care raised $65.3M (Venture) to revolutionize radiation therapy with upright positioning tech.

  • Daymark Health secured $57.5M (Series A) to provide in-home and virtual supportive cancer care.

  • Thyme Care raised $274M (Series D) to expand personalized oncology care management services.

Like these? Get the complete funded startups list (1,000–2,000 each month, with emails) for only $99 → https://leadbites.com/funded-startups-list/

The Scan → Signal → Solve Method

Most founders miss problems not because they don’t care, but because they’re either stuck too deep in the weeds or floating too far above the details. The smartest ones build “early warning systems” to spot smoke before the fire. Think dashboards that track leading indicators—metrics that shift before your big north star numbers tank. Airbnb’s Brian Chesky caught a discrimination issue in Barcelona by zooming in on a single anomaly, while Discord’s Jason Citron built a “Smoke Dashboard” to track things like second-day returns and support ticket clusters. The key is setting up a weekly 30-minute scan with your core team to flag odd patterns, not to solve them right away.

Once you’ve spotted smoke, the trick is to log it, track it, and investigate before it turns into a blaze. Figma did this by treating rage clicks as a legit signal, while tiny teams like Savvy Calendar used a simple Notion log to keep anomalies from getting lost in Slack. The process is straightforward: SCAN weekly, SIGNAL ongoing, and SOLVE with focused 45-minute root cause huddles using tools like 5 Whys and Fishbone diagrams. The real win? Faster problem detection, less churn, and a team that catches small cracks before they become gaping holes. It’s like switching between a satellite view, a smoke alarm, and a scalpel—all at the right time. (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.