For AI founders and operators

Building AI differently

AI has rewritten startup physics — unit economics, hiring, how you price, how you sell, how you scale. Most of the playbooks founders are working from were built for a different era. Building Differently is a systems update. Monthly vault drops of quick reads for founders and operators building AI products. Frameworks and deep dives from the companies doing it right. Field notes from the teams figuring it out in real time.

What's in the vault

We drop new vaults of content often for subscribers only. Click in to preview what you'll get each month — snappy reads helping operators and teams stay on the cutting edge.

The AI Pricing Playbook

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The Vertical AI Playbook

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AI-first Engineering Playbook

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Learn from AI experts

Like strategic consulting at scale — our deep dive guides help leaders solve real problems, hire the right people, and future-proof your team.

ai pilled engineering teams
Article

Inside AI-pilled engineering teams: Five lessons for scaling without losing the plot

Speed is the moat. Tokenmaxxing is high. Comprehension debt is the new tax. Here’s how engineering leaders are shipping faster, experimenting without chaos, and building the organizational infrastructure to do so.

Playbook

Driving seven-figure deals: How Recall.ai’s Amanda Zhu went from founder-led sales to building out GTM

A COO’s guide to enterprise sales—including blueprints for building processes, tips for overcoming stall-outs, how to hire your first VP of Sales, and beyond.

Playbook

Building a growth engine from zero: How one COO boosted ARR 38% using Claude Code

Most founders treat growth as a hiring problem. Build the function first, figure out the channels second. Omar Ismail of Ascend did it in the opposite order, and built a better engine for it.

working with AI
Article

Data trends: How companies are using AI today

We surveyed 173 leaders across the Bessemer portfolio on how high-growth technology companies are leveraging AI. Here’s what we learned, unfiltered and by function.

design partners how to get an edge
Playbook

Design partners: The pre-launch edge most AI founders ignore

Early stage teams gain an edge in the market by building their product with their first cohort of paying customers.

Article

Securing AI agents: the defining cybersecurity challenge of 2026

The rise of the agentic workforce is pushing CISOs to reimagine the security stack—and rethink the questions they need to ask—as they navigate an evolving threat landscape.

Go inside AI products that win

Explore real case studies, pricing strategies, and GTM lessons from industry leaders.

Case Study

Ada: Architecting fanatical CX loops that power AI agents

Founders Mike Murchison and David Hariri spent months as customer service agents working support desks before writing a single line of code.

Strella founder custom graphic
Case Study

Strella: Transforming qualitative research from a bottleneck into an AI superpower

How founders Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan started with a ‘Wizard of Oz’ MVP and built a full-fledged AI-powered customer research platform.

Case Study

Recall.ai: Building the infrastructure behind AI tools and products for video conference recording

How Recall.ai turned the most painful part of AI products — building the infrastructure — into a business, and why conversation data is the missing piece in AI automation.

Build a solid foundation

The rules that built the last generation of tech giants won't build the next. We release the foundational playbooks that set growing teams up for success.

Finding Product Market Fit

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Generating demand from scratch

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Pricing your AI product

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Overseeing AI risk

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