Sreenath Pillai

Weather delays. Compliance gaps. Lost days and lost dollars. Every contractor knows the pain. Pavewise, based in North Dakota and built by operators who’ve lived it, has just raised a $2.5M seed round led by C2 Ventures Fund II, alongside Connetic Ventures, Service Provider Capital, M25, gener8tor 1889, and Broadwater Capital. Their platform brings real-time compliance, weather, and production tracking to road construction, helping crews make better calls, cut rework, and keep projects on time. This is exactly what we mean when we talk about our thesis, Dirty, Dull, and Dangerous innovation: solving real operational problems in essential industries with durable tech. https://lnkd.in/eecPMHdN

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It’s time for cannabis brands and retailers to make up with their software providers. Software is not the enemy. When leveraged properly, a cannabis operator's technology stack should be an ally. Your software should save you time, help you make smarter decisions and, most importantly, help you sell more weed. The best cannabis businesses aren’t just good at growing, processing or selling product. They’re also operationally excellent. Not good, excellent. And a huge part of that is using technology to unlock efficiencies, improve compliance and maximize customer lifetime value. Read more on MJBiz here: https://lnkd.in/eZF8zhqV

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An update on behalf of the .NET Foundation Project Committee... The most active Community projects for January 2026 were: Pull Requests: Bootstrap Blazor (69), Orchard Core (65) Commits: .NEXT (1349), Stride (217) New Contributors: .NEXT (7) Downloads: Polly (45.9M), Fluent Validation (22.3M) Full list: https://lnkd.in/ea2UB3st The most active Microsoft projects for January 2026 were: Pull Requests: .NET Runtime (622), Azure SDK for .NET (474), .NET Aspire (329) Commits: Roslyn (698), .NET Runtime (413)  New Contributors: .NET Runtime (16), .NET Aspire (15) Full list: https://lnkd.in/eCXKbiTx #opensource #dotnet .NET Foundation

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"Context is the bottleneck for coding agents"....this is why you should be so bullish on vertical SaaS right now. Vertical systems of record actually have the complete picture of what is happening in a given workflow. We can provide sufficient constraints, access, and more subtle forms of context to the models in way that general coding tools can't. Qualia Clear, Augment, ExaCare AI, EvenUp and other similar systems are constrained enough problems to actually achieve high levels of automation. Many investors are still skeptics on where the real business returns to LLMs are going to come from. Keep an eye on these niche workflows because they are driving extreme customer value today. https://lnkd.in/gCqz2UfH

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If you're looking for a new docs framework for your dev tool, I can't recommend Docusaurus enough. 1. You can change the appearance of any component—no matter how big or small—by ejecting its raw React code into your source tree. I've ejected almost all of its major components and restyled them with Tailwind. 2. It supports content written with MDX, which is like Markdown but better. MDX lets you write JSX tags so you can render React components (like badges and banners) directly inline your content. No more messy templating. 3. It bundles Prism for code snippet highlighting. So you if you want to change how each and every token of your language gets styled—which I do—you can override it with a simple centralized map—which I have. 4. You can swap out its on-site search engine with Algolia, now widely considered the best option for developer sites. It is, in other words, the perfect tool for people like me who are obsessed with every pixel.

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Modern AI tools make it much easier for non-technical people to create workflows, automations and even entire applications. The Laravel framework is ideally suited for these types of internal business applications. We've been using Laravel from the start at the core of the Icehouse Ventures investor portal. I wrote down a few of the things we've learned along the way a couple of months ago. And last week I managed to grab a few minutes to record a podcast episode based on the article. Link in comments.

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Who is buying devshop services? For sub 100k builds, founders are likely better served by vibe coding Most industries have pretty good enterprise software to cover large old school companies looking to spend 100k-2m a year If you want something game changing and truly bespoke, you likely have to hire the developers so you can maintain yourself after But the dev shops clearly continue to exist (in huge numbers). Which means someone must be paying them. But who? #shipsandshipping #maritime #growth #startup #inhouseonly

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“Never ever use fundraising advisors. Period.” @ Harry Stebbings I rarely agree with absolutist takes but this one is so correct. I’ve never been in a late-stage venture — maybe, advisors are helpful to structure a 100M round — but the entire concept is laughable in early-stage VC-funded startups. We’re not in 1983 when you’d raise from family offices and you needed someone in a tailored suit to bring you to a soirée where the checks are written. You can literally text people on LinkedIn and most would respond. This entire industry rests on exploiting first-time founders without a network.

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LEAN MEAN FIGHTING MACHINE! A friend who is a co-founder of a software startup responded yesterday to the most recent edition of my newsletter with... "We think a lot about AVOIDING BLOAT, particularly through the lens of hiring developers. It's my strong view that no company should hire a single additional developer until they're sure their current team is fully AI-coding enabled." He hit on both of the main topics from this week's edition. Join 1,700+ subscribers to read it and future editions - https://lnkd.in/eyZvmVAA

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We spent months trying to sell debt repayment companies on debit card rails. Zero traction. Complete waste of time. Then we interviewed target customers more deeply. Turns out debt repayment companies didn't need new payment rails. They needed ACH that actually worked for their specific workflows. Custom scheduling. Exception reporting. Data elements that matched their existing systems. So we rebuilt our ACH processing from the ground up. Made it work exactly how debt repayment operations needed it to work. The volume doubled on ACH alone. Only then did those same companies start asking about modern payment options. Once we'd solved their real operational problems, they trusted us with the new stuff. The pattern holds across every vertical we've entered. Fix the boring, critical stuff first. Make their existing processes work better. Earn the right to introduce innovation.

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