Opportunity → Perfect Course Finder
Framework → DARCI
Tool → Sentrial
Trend → Agents are Eating SaaS
Quote → Get Creative
🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Growth
ICYMI
Get up to 6 months free of Notion Business with Notion AI for your startup (Link)*
Ben Kelly on the 5 businesses with the highest failure rates (Link)
Oliver Brocato on three questions he asks his team every week (Link)
The Boring Marketer on who you should be building for (Link)
Mario Joos on the misconception about competition (Link)
Opportunity: Perfect Course Finder
Maybe a hot take but I believe someone can learn more relevant information for navigating the world today from online courses than a traditional college education.
Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of low quality courses out there.
And there’s no easy way to find the right one for you when you want to learn something specific.
But LLMs can solve this.
A service that talks to you about what you want to learn, understands your request in detail, and then scours the internet to find the most up to date and well regarded course on it.
It would increase course completion rates and, more importantly, help people learn more of what they’re curious about.
Spotted on Ideabrowser
🧠 Framework: DARCI
Projects get more complex as your startup grows.
Imagine you’re in hypergrowth. Half the people on the team are brand new and haven’t established working rhythms with each other.
Systems fail and ownership gets murky. Things start falling through the cracks.
That’s where the DARCI framework can help.
It assigns each person a specific level of ownership and involvement in a project and helps avoid issues around who’s making the final calls.
We used it pretty regularly when I was at Airbnb, but you don’t need to be a unicorn yet for it to be useful.
🛠 Tool: Sentrial
ChatGPT hallucinates. Agents “drift”.
You can give your agent explicit instructions in its .md files but it still might stray from its guidelines or primary tasks in certain situations.
It’s hard to predict when or where this will happen in advance, so a monitoring tool like Sentrial is probably a necessity.
You can see full interactions with session playback, understand patterns, and set flags for the future.
📈 Trend: Agents are Eating SaaS
The SaaS-mageddon may be starting. Have you seen Figma’s stock price since IPO-ing?
Billions wiped out. Tragic for employees who had to wait until after a lockup period to cash out, after years at the company.
And this isn’t isolated, SaaS company market caps have decreased by over $1 trillion in 2026 already.
Safe to say that sentiment around SaaS is at an all time low.
And there’s a strong case for why it’s right to be concerned:
The per-seat model pricing structure makes less relative to usage-based
It’s easier to replicate software and price it more cheaply
Custom software solutions are now considerably easier to create that better solve customers’ specific problems
Gartner and Goldman Sachs predict we’ll see this shift continue indefinitely, with agentic software eating into traditional SaaS’s TAM by over 33% in the next few years (while expanding the overall TAM for software solutions by 67%+).
💬 Quote: Get Creative
Most people misunderstand creativity.
They hear the word and think of the paintings, music, and film.
But creativity is not reserved for the painter, the musician, or the actor.
Painting, etc are not even inherently more “creative” than other things.
In the same way that Bob Ross proved you can paint without an artistic or creative impulse (and there’s nothing wrong with that), people in more traditionally robotic fields can be truly creative and novel with their approaches.
Are you really going to tell me that the Airbnb founders were not being creative when they made over $30,000 selling custom Obama and McCain re-branded cereal boxes to keep the company alive?
The story goes that when they showed the boxes to Paul Graham, it’s what tipped the scales in favor of letting them into YC.
As founders we have the ability to bend the universe towards the vision we see for the future… so be creative about it.