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Startup and founder newsletters: The Hyped Up and The Underdogs
Written by Glorp's AI writer · Published October 11, 2026 by Tineessa Nelson
Written by AI. Glorp's AI writer (built on Claude, by Anthropic) researched and wrote this article, and it was published automatically without a person reviewing it first. It can contain mistakes, so check anything important against the sources listed at the end.
How this blog works.
Startup and founder newsletters cover the work of turning an idea into a company: finding the first customers, raising a round, hiring, picking partners and learning from the people who have done it before. They are read by founders at every stage, by the operators who join them early, and by the angels and venture investors who back them. Some of these newsletters reach well over a hundred thousand readers, and some are written for a few thousand people who want one good story at a time. Glorp features big and small newsletters side by side, for free, because useful founder writing comes in every size. Here are five worth a place in your inbox.
The Hyped Up
Established newsletters with big audiences, and the reasons they earned them.
Long interviews and company breakdowns with founders and tech leaders, written by Bill Kerr · beehiiv · @bill_kerrrrr
| Metric | As published |
|---|
| Subscribers | 425K (source) |
| Open rate | 51% (source) |
| Price per placement | $5,000 for a featured placement, $2,500 for a secondary placement (source) |
| Audience | Founders, c-level executives, managers and investors; newsletter readers 76% United States, 14% Australia, 10% Europe (source) |
| Publishing schedule | Weekly on Sunday and Thursday (GMT), and on some Tuesdays as well (source) |
What they do well
- The October 4 issue on Granola interviews three of its leaders separately, so readers hear the CEO on the problem, the designer on why users left other note-takers, and the COO on building sales from product usage signals.
- Interviews include the parts that went wrong, such as Granola's real-time note-taking interface that was dropped after six months and the data rebuilds that came later.
- The September 17 conversation with Mercury's Ryan Wiggins gives concrete operating detail, like expecting a 30 to 40 percent hit rate on growth bets and reviving the Mercury API because customers kept creating tokens for it.
- Each issue closes with short extras, including recommended tools, a video and tweets of the week, so the main interview is not the only thing worth reading.
Who should read it: Founders and senior operators who learn best from long, candid interviews with people running well-known companies.
Read Open Source CEO →
#founder interviews#leadership#company breakdowns#go-to-market
Fundraising guides, investor lists, templates and venture news for founders, by Ruben Dominguez · Substack
| Metric | As published |
|---|
| Subscribers | 130,000+ (source) |
| Subscribers | Over 146,000 (source) |
| Audience | Startup founders from pre-seed to Series C, venture capital investors and angels, and senior operators (source) |
| Publishing schedule | Free subscribers get 2-3 posts per month (source) |
What they do well
- The October 10 issue turns a raw list of 973 venture funds under $200M into something founders can use, after checking the 148 firms that raised since 2024 against each fund's own announcement and catching errors such as a $100M fund listed as $4,100M.
- Its free Founder OS shares 58 Notion templates arranged by stage, from idea and launch to fundraising and scaling, together with a list of more than 10,000 investors.
- The guide to a16z speedrun, written up from a live session with partner Ryan Rigney, spells out the terms, who is too late to apply, and the three signals the program looks for, with traction first.
Who should read it: Founders who are preparing to raise and want investor lists, templates and step-by-step fundraising guides in one place.
Read The VC Corner →
#fundraising#venture capital#investor lists#templates
A weekly guide to Bay Area startup, AI and investor events, plus founder interviews, from a Silicon Valley founders community · Substack · @BFC_Global
| Metric | As published |
|---|
| Subscribers | 30,000+ (source) |
| Subscribers | Over 116,000 (source) |
| Open rate | 51.26% (source) |
| Price per placement | $500 for one ad spot (source) |
| Audience | 80% of readers in the United States, read in 48 US states and 117 countries (source) |
| Publishing schedule | Weekly (source) |
What they do well
- Its weekly events issue lays the week out day by day, giving each event its host, city, time and a registration link, so a founder can plan the week in a few minutes.
- The October 4 issue, built around SF Tech Week, picked one featured event, an AI pitch night in Palo Alto, and gave its agenda in full.
- The listings mix serious and social: the August 30 issue ran from an agent-builder breakfast and a deep tech founder and investor mixer to a soccer game for AI founders.
- Recent issues lean into what Bay Area founders are building now, with many sessions on AI agents, MCP, physical AI and robotics.
Who should read it: Founders and operators in or visiting the Bay Area who want one weekly list of the startup and AI events worth attending.
Read Bay Area Founders Club →
#bay area#startup events#ai#networking
The Underdogs
Smaller newsletters doing great work. Good writing matters more than list size, and these deserve more readers.
Stories, people, decisions and ideas from the startup world, with lessons founders can use, by Gracie Van · Substack
| Metric | As published |
|---|
| Subscribers | Over 7,000 (source) |
| Subscribers | 8,000+ early-stage founders, operators and investors (source) |
| Price per placement | $200 (source) |
| Publishing schedule | Around 3 to 5 posts each week (source) |
What they do well
- The September 19 issue gives founders a simple way to keep their own judgment when using AI: write the rough version first, ask AI to attack it, and only then polish.
- Company stories end with steps a reader can apply, like the four lessons drawn from a laid-off retail executive who grew a home bagel experiment into a franchise of more than 100 stores.
- It finds the general idea inside a single company, as in the March issue that uses Bevel to argue that many good startups organize tools people already have rather than invent new ones.
Who should read it: Early-stage founders and aspiring founders who like to learn from one well-told company story at a time.
Read What A Startup →
#founder stories#startup lessons#case studies
The Wolfcast: in-depth profiles of young startups, many from Y Combinator, and the founders behind them · beehiiv · @thefounderspack
| Metric | As published |
|---|
| Subscribers | 4000+ to 4500+ (the page gives both) (source) |
| Subscribers | 4.7K (source) |
| Open rate | 35% (source) |
| Price per placement | $70 for a weekly sponsored ad (source) |
| Publishing schedule | Every week (source) |
What they do well
- It profiles companies early, often before most readers have heard of them, such as Atomarine, a YC Summer 2026 startup planning floating data centers built on barges.
- Its profiles include a section that questions the plan, noting for example that commercial marine reactors do not exist yet, so Atomarine's first pilot would run on gas.
- It explains hard technical ideas in plain words, as in the September 9 issue on a 19-year-old founder growing neurons for computing, which walks through why cultured neurons die at scale.
- Each profile ends with a short founder bio and links, so readers can follow the company after they finish reading.
Who should read it: Founders, early employees and angels who want to meet promising young startups and their founders before the rest of the market does.
Read Founders Pack →
#startup profiles#y combinator#deep tech#early-stage
Fundraising lists, candid interviews, a weekly events calendar, well-told company stories and early looks at new startups: together these five newsletters cover a good share of what a founder needs to know in a week. They are all free to start reading. Subscribe to every one of them, and if one helps you, reply to the writer or pass it on to a founder friend.
Run a newsletter? Glorp features newsletters for free, big and small. It also finds and books sponsors for newsletters about AI, tech and B2B software, and keeps 20% only when a deal books.
Scan your newsletter free. Glorp is our own product, and we mention it because we run it.
Sources
- Open Source CEO homepage and archive
- Open Source CEO: Sponsorship
- Open Source CEO on Passionfroot
- Open Source CEO: Unfiltered: Granola Ate The Competition
- Open Source CEO: Piloting Mercury Through The AI Era
- The VC Corner homepage
- The VC Corner: About
- The VC Corner: Sponsorships
- The VC Corner: 973 VC Funds Under $200M
- The VC Corner: The Free Founder OS
- The VC Corner: a16z speedrun guide
- Bay Area Founders Club homepage
- Bay Area Founders Club: About
- Bay Area Founders Club: Newsletter sponsorship
- Bay Area Founders Club: This Week in the Bay Area: 44 Curated Events
- Bay Area Founders Club: Bay Area Events For The Week Of August 31
- What A Startup homepage
- What A Startup: About
- What A Startup: Sponsorship
- What A Startup: Use AI without losing your brain
- What A Startup: Innovation means organizing what already exists
- What A Startup: Laid off? Baked a startup
- Founders Pack homepage and archive
- Founders Pack on Passionfroot
- Founders Pack: They Sunk the Cloud. Now It Floats on Atoms.
- Founders Pack: A Nineteen-Year-Old Is Growing Brains to Replace Your GPUs
- Founders Pack: Weapons of Mass Production
No newsletter paid to be featured. Subscriber counts, open rates and prices are as each newsletter published them on its own pages when this post was written; Glorp has not verified them. If you run a featured newsletter and want something corrected or removed, reply to @tineessanelson on X and it will be fixed.