Here's What I Know: A Field Guide for Tech Founders in the Agentic Era
Endara C., Martín
Synopsis "Here's What I Know: A Field Guide for Tech Founders in the Agentic Era"
I built a working software company in five weeks. Then absolutely nobody arrived. The product ran in production. It did something genuinely useful. And there was no mechanism by which a single human being could have found it. That is the problem this book is about, and it is new. The cost of building software has collapsed toward zero — ninety percent of professional developers now work with AI coding agents every week. The cost of being found has gone the other way: sixty-eight percent of US searches now end without a click on anything at all. Almost every piece of startup advice in circulation, including the first edition of this book, is still sequenced for the opposite world. What this isA field guide for one person, or a very small number of people, trying to start a technology company with more judgment than capital. Eighteen chapters on validation, agent-native development, pricing, funding without delusion, and — at four chapters, the largest part of the book — distribution, including how to be cited by an AI assistant when it answers a question about your category. Who wrote itSomeone who has closed two businesses and watched a third close. I founded the first mobile game studio in Ecuador in 2008 and could not write a line of code. I ran a decade of agency work with Samsung, Audi and Telefónica. I sold direct-to-consumer for eight years in a category where advertising was illegal. I taught marketing at graduate level for ten years. I now build a platform that measures whether AI assistants name a company when someone asks about its category. Two promises about how it is writtenEvery figure has a source you can check, and the book says when a number is a measurement and when it is an estimate — including for my own company's unflattering data. And the failures get as much room as the wins, because they are the only thing here that a model could not have generated on request. There is a story in chapter 13 about a foot powder that got elected to public office in Ecuador in 1967. It is my grandfather's, it was reported by The New York Times, and it is the best argument I know that creative reach and budget are different variables.
