Welcome back to Townhall, the newsletter for founders & tech employees from the creators of Frame, the all-in-one collaboration OS.

Today, we cover Auto-GPT, the slowdown in VC funding, our new growth advisor, the power law, and how to manage your co-founder relationship 🤝.

Hot In Founders World

Tech🧑‍💻 AI mania is continuing to reach new heights. This time, the innovation stirring imaginations are the autonomous agents Auto-GPT and BabyAGI. These autonomous agents generate a systemic sequence of tasks that the AI works on until it’s accomplished a predetermined goal. In simplest terms, they do work without your help. Obviously, this unlocks a wide-range of use-cases, with people using them for everything from building a website to doing research. It’s still very early days for autonomous agents, and the tech is far from perfect, but this is definitely a field worth experimenting with.

Venture Capital 💵 Venture capital fundraising slowed considerably in Q1, with US VC firms raising just $11.7 billion across 99 funds. If those numbers held steady for the rest of the year, it would be the lowest amount of capital raised since 2017 and a 73% drop from 2022. Unfortunately, this slowdown in funding is reflected in Q1’s VC investment numbers, which sat at just $76 billion, a 53% decline from Q1’22. The bottom line is: if you're a founder, you can no longer count on easy money from VCs.

Job Market 🏢 A recent Hacker News thread dove into how people who recently got laid-off or quit are doing. As is to be expected, the answers spanned a wide range from people doing amazingly well to people really struggling. However, one that was mildly surprising was the amount of experienced developers still looking for work. This represents a golden opportunity for founders to bootstrap their startups using fractional work.

What’s New At Frame

Whiteboard Templates: Whiteboard templates will come soon. From Scrum Retro to Business Model Canva, we got you covered!

Community Templates: We’re about to ship community-powered Templates. Get ready to get the best fundraising advice right on Frame from the likes of Episode 1 or hiring advice from the likes of Symmetrical!

New Growth Advisor: We are pleased to welcome Laura Schaffer as our new Growth Advisor! She’s currently VP of Growth at Amplitude and was previously Head of Product Growth at Twillio.

Product Tours - We’ve added a guided tour for new and existing users. Learn everything you need to know to use Frame!

Thinking We Baked

Since the last Townhall, we’ve released one article to help you build your startup.

The article is called “How To Manage The Co-Founder Relationship”, and dives into everything you need to know to have a successful co-founder partnership. You can check it out on both Substack and Medium.

Thinking We Loved

🎒 Nathan Baschez masterfully breaks down how narratives lead to network effects.

⚡️ Sam Blond breaks down Brex’s best outbound campaign.

💰 If you want to raise from VCs, you need to understand the power law.

Three Tools

✨ FormulaHive is here to supercharge your productivity in Excel and Google Sheets.

📰 The HustleFund VC blog for founders is a gold mine.

🚀 The Startup Equity Calculator is the equity guide you’ve been looking for.

Hustler’s Quote Of The Week

ra