Latest edition: 25 September 2026London — published continuously since 2026Free forever
The Founder Gazette
Startup news, held to newspaper standards

Filed under: automation

6 stories

The archive, indexed. Every story carries its tags at the foot of the page.

Sales tactics

Vercel cut its inbound SDR team from 10 to 1.25

The company's COO says home-built agents now handle 90% of inbound sales development and 93% of support cases, on an infrastructure bill in the single-digit thousands a year.

№ 272 · 25 September 2026
Founder tips

Sort the job into four buckets before you approve the hire

Write down the ten things the new person would actually do, then split them into judgment, relationship, repetition and coordination. Three of those buckets are not a hiring problem.

№ 265 · 23 September 2026
Operating practice

SaaStr runs on three people and 20 agents. Here is where they broke

Jason Lemkin has published an account of every AI agent SaaStr runs, including the one that emailed 1,000 founders from a banned address. The useful part is the failures.

№ 234 · 13 September 2026
Founder practice

Zapier's CEO says AI agents save him two hours a day

Wade Foster has handed his briefings, his email drafts and part of his hiring process to software. The claimed return is two hours daily, on his own account.

№ 197 · 7 September 2026
Startup news

Picnic's collapse leaves Moto Pizza with two idle $160,000 robots

A supplier shutting down in May turned a Seattle restaurant's pizza machines into cabinets. It is the latest in a run of robotic-pizza failures that includes Zume, Pazzi and Basil Street.

№ 158 · 28 August 2026
Founder tips

How one consultant cut 20 hours of weekly admin with Claude

Grace Clarke says she now runs her service business on tools she built herself: an hourly pipeline, a proposal maker and a replacement inbox. The method is copyable; the price tag is not stated.

№ 57 · 11 August 2026