Search the archive

👉Apply here

JEROME POWELL SAYS THE AI HIRING APOCALYPSE IS REAL: 'JOB CREATION IS PRETTY CLOSE TO ZERO.'

Jerome Powell warns that AI is significantly impacting job creation, with hiring near zero and major companies citing AI for layoffs. The Fed cut interest rates to address employment risks amid persistent inflation, as AI-driven investments and productivity gains benefit higher-income groups while leaving the broader labor market strained. This poses a complex policy dilemma for the Fed, balancing between employment support and controlling inflation.

ILYA SUTSKEVER'S DEPOSITION IN MUSK VS. ALTMAN

This transcript features portions of a videotaped deposition from October 1 involving Ilya Sutskever in a case titled Musk v. Altman et al. The testimony centers on Sutskever's involvement in the removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI, including his concerns about Altman's alleged pattern of dishonesty and undermining executives, which he documented in a memo for independent board members.

MERCOR QUINTUPLES VALUATION TO $10B WITH $350M SERIES C

Mercor secured $350 million in Series C funding, boosting its valuation to $10 billion. Felicis Ventures led this round with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Robinhood Ventures. The company, which specializes in providing specialized experts for AI model training, now plans to expand its talent network, refine its contractor-client matching systems, and develop new automation products.

THE BOARD MEETING BLUEPRINT

Your first board meeting decides whether you lead or get managed. This playbook turns updates into operating sessions. Send a tight board pack 72 hours ahead, frame decisions up front, and run a clear agenda that separates performance review from real strategy.

HOW FOUNDERS CAN NAVIGATE TODAY'S INTEREST RATE LANDSCAPE

Interest rate hikes have shifted VC focus from rapid growth to demands for profitability and cash flow. Founders should build resilience, diversify funding sources, and communicate how they're adapting to these financial conditions. Understanding economic cycles and timing fundraising can help navigate the current high-cost capital landscape.

HOW TO EVALUATE A FOUNDING TEAM

Investors assess founding teams by evaluating backgrounds for industry experience, complementary skills, and past achievements. They look for team dynamics that balance technical, operational, and commercial expertise. Strong teams show execution capability, adaptability to pivot, and the ability to recruit and retain talent.

22+ service areas. Claim your credit before it's gone

ASIDE

Aside helps you to answer technical questions during a sales call by showing real-time suggestions from your docs.

FASTSHOT

Create mobile apps with no code using AI.

MOSS

Real-time Semantic Search for Conversational AI.

TRAFFIC IS NO LONGER A RELIABLE GROWTH METRIC

Webflow is treating AI discovery like the new homepage, and the numbers hit hard. 10% of signups now come from LLMs, 91% from ChatGPT, and those visitors convert at 24%, which is six times Google. Rankings reshuffle daily so they measure visibility, comprehension, and conversion while refreshing content fast, mining Reddit, and structuring FAQs.

SERVICENOW'S UGLY UI KEEPS WINNING AND THAT'S THE TELL

Clunky screens keep winning because the real product lives underneath it. Years of ticket flows, approvals, SLAs, and audit trails are welded into one place. That weld traps data and habits. Forward deployed engineers keep closing the last mile customers cannot. Control Tower grows because nothing in enterprise AI ships without guardrails. If you try to attack this, do not chase the whole suite. Take one workflow where value is obvious in weeks, wire into their records, prove fewer escalations or faster MTTR, then expand sideways.

A STRANGE DELIGHT

Anthropic built its AI coding tool with white text on black background, arrow key navigation, and zero mouse support. Snowflake spent years perfecting animated menus that slide and unfurl. Everyone gravitates to the primitive one. The command line puts you close enough to feel the machine working - watching it tick through tasks, seeing its relentless speed without JavaScript bloat. dbt probably succeeded because it started this way too. Thousands of analysts got their first glimpse into computational power through printed logs instead of buttons. Comfort rarely creates emotional experiences. The internet doesn't need more polished minimalism, it needs tools that remind us computers are physical things we can actually feel.

RIGHT-SIZING YOUR STARTUP VISION

Founders should start with a tightly scoped problem that matches their team's resources instead of pursuing overly ambitious “maximum viable products.”

THE PIANO AND THE DJ SET

Building software was once akin to playing the piano—every note deliberate, every line of code your own.

ALPHABET'S GV BACKS SYNTHESIA IN $200M ROUND AT $4B VALUATION TO POWER THE NEXT WAVE OF AI VIDEO

Alphabet's GV led a $200 million funding round for Synthesia, valuing the AI video startup at $4 billion.

Save your seat

GRAMMARLY REBRANDS TO 'SUPERHUMAN,' LAUNCHES A NEW AI ASSISTANT

Grammarly has rebranded to "Superhuman" after acquiring the email client Superhuman and launching an AI assistant called Superhuman Go. The AI assistant, integrated with Grammarly's extension, connects with apps like Jira and Google Calendar, enhancing its functionality for tasks like scheduling and data fetching. With its transition to a productivity suite, Grammarly aims to compete with Notion and Google Workspace by offering enhanced AI features.

META'S AI PUSH WORKS, BUT WALL STREET ISN'T CONVINCED

Meta's stock dropped 8% after earnings, even though its AI improvements are clearly working. People spend 10% more time on Instagram because of better AI recommendations, and advertisers using Meta's AI tools pay 14% less per lead. The company now makes $60 billion from AI-powered ads. The problem is expenses - they jumped 32% as Zuckerberg pours money into AI research labs faster than revenue is growing. Meta grew revenue 26% and engagement is up across every app, but investors think it is spending too aggressively on AI when the current tools already deliver results.

$555B OF CLOUD SPEND

Microsoft and Google's latest earnings reveal the sheer scale of the AI boom. Together, they're sitting on $555 billion in cloud commitments. Both companies are doubling down on data centers, pushing toward a $100B annualized CapEx each. Microsoft plans to expand AI capacity by 80% and double its data center footprint within two years, while Google raised its 2025 CapEx forecast to $93B. Microsoft's commercial backlog has surged past $400B, and Google Cloud's hit $155B, signaling long-term demand strong enough to justify spending more than their entire cash reserves.

HOW TO KEEP WINNING

Replit's founder says winning is less about luck and more about surviving long enough to compound. The first rule is simple: don't die. Know your red lines, manage downside, and stay in the game even when things look bleak. The second is never quit, progress compounds slowly until it suddenly doesn't. Easy paths rarely lead to lasting advantage, so lean into hard problems that others avoid. Winning requires focus: lock in, study competitors, and learn from their mistakes. While shortcuts are tempting, playing by the rules forces innovation that becomes a moat. Finally, give back. Sharing ideas, open-sourcing work, and helping others doesn't weaken you, it builds goodwill and compounds success over time.

HOW TO FIND YOUR WEDGE

Startups die trying to build everything at once. Founders hear “go after a big market” and start designing the Maximum Viable Product, a sprawling vision that burns time, cash, and morale before it ever meets a customer. The smarter move is finding your wedge: one tightly scoped problem your small team can solve better than anyone else. Amazon started with books, and Facebook started with college photos. Each nailed a small problem and earned the right to expand.

WHEN TO HIRE YOUR FIRST PM

Every founder hits a moment when a product stops being the best use of their time. The roadmap fills with new features, customer feedback piles up, and you're juggling sprint planning while trying to close deals and hire your next engineer. That's when it's time to bring in your first PM. Before PMF, you should own product yourself, but once the feedback loops multiply and tactical decisions start eating into growth, you need someone who can synthesize, prioritize, and keep momentum.

See how it works →

Schedule a call →

UNICORN STUDIO

Create enchanting WebGL effects, motion, and interactivity.

ALLOY

Prototypes that look exactly like your product.

SKALA

Skala is an all-in-one legal platform for startups to incorporate, fundraise, manage IP, hire, and access legal services globally.

THE CULT OF BUSYNESS

If exhaustion is your status symbol, you are paying prestige with your life. This essay skewers our worship of constant doing, where packed calendars masquerade as meaning and self-care turns into another productivity hack. Busyness becomes a sedative for anxiety and a costume for relevance, rewarded with applause even as it erodes attention, intimacy, and art. The cure is not a better app but permission to be idle on purpose, to treat stillness as a practice rather than a failure, and to stop confusing motion with a life.

PIVOTS, PATHS, AND PROTOTYPES

You know it is time to pivot when perfecting the draft takes longer than saying what is true. A TEDx prep that would not click becomes the story of switching themes with a month to spare, proving that quitting one path can be the bravest way forward. The lesson is to build “beta” moments into work and life, test fits before committing, and judge effort by learning rate, not sunk cost. Some turns are not detours at all. They are the road revealing itself.

WILL AI SLOP KILL THE CREATOR ECONOMY?

Meta's Vibes and OpenAI's Sora 2 are AI tools that generate video content effortlessly, posing a threat to parts of the creator economy by replacing roles like fashion models and brand spokespeople. Despite this, genuine online creators that offer authenticity and unique insights remain valuable, as AI struggles to replicate these qualities. The proliferation of AI-generated content could threaten the media industry by oversaturating the market, but human-driven content retains its appeal due to its originality.

REPLICATION

Every startup begins as a copy of something that worked before, but survival depends on what you choose not to copy.

THE PERMISSION TO NOT KNOW

Every founder feels like a fraud the moment they start doing something that actually matters.

10 HABITS OF SUCCESSFUL EMPLOYEES

Top performers deliver on core priorities, only take on tasks they can finish, and keep commitments without fail.

Start building with WorkOS today →

ELON MUSK'S GROKIPEDIA LAUNCHES WITH AI-CLONED PAGES FROM WIKIPEDIA

Grokipedia, Elon Musk's new encyclopedia from xAI, just went live. Large parts of it appear to be straight from Wikipedia. Many pages include a note that the content is “adapted” under a Creative Commons license, but some are nearly word-for-word copies.

FIREWORKS AI RAISES $250M SERIES C TO POWER THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE AI

Fireworks AI raised $250 million in Series C funding at a $4 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed, Index Ventures, and Evantic, to expand its AI infrastructure offerings. The platform powers AI for clients like Samsung and Shopify, processing over 10 trillion tokens daily. Fireworks focuses on customizable AI with improved inference speed and cost, helping companies use specific data for tailored AI solutions.

OPENAI FORMS $25B FOUNDATION TO GUIDE $130B FOR-PROFIT ENTITY

OpenAI has recapitalized, simplifying its structure and forming the OpenAI Foundation, which controls the for-profit entity valued at $130 billion. The Foundation will commit $25 billion to health breakthroughs and AI resilience, leveraging its equity stake for philanthropic work. This move enhances OpenAI's ability to address AI's challenges and benefits, supported by mission-focused governance.

MERCURY'S PATH TO PRODUCT-MARKET FIT

Mercury's story shows that product-market fit doesn't come from iteration speed but from doing the hardest thing first. Before writing a line of code, founder Immad Akhund spent months talking to founders, lawyers, and investors to understand how fintech actually worked and where it broke. That homework revealed the real barrier wasn't product design but regulation and trust. So the team built slowly and deliberately: a fully digital business account that could replace a traditional bank from day one, not a lightweight fintech add-on. They rebuilt the product twice, swapped out an underperforming partner bank, and refused to launch until it worked end to end. When Mercury finally went live, 1,500 companies signed up in the first week, one depositing $1 million without ever speaking to the team.

A RESEARCH THINKING TOOLKIT TO SPEED UP THE DISCOVERY PHASE

Jeanette Mellinger urges founders to prioritize problem-solution fit over speed, using a research toolkit adapted from UX practices. This approach helps founders understand customer needs, behaviors, and workflows, ensuring a product-market fit and a resilient team foundation. Mellinger outlines three phases of research (Incubate, Immerse, and Integrate), providing methods to master each element of founder, problem, and solution fit, leading to sustainable and effective growth strategies.

ASSESSING OVEREMPHASIZED STARTUP METRICS

Startups often inflate sales and partnership metrics, so investors should check documentation for accuracy. Historical performance and meaningful metrics, such as CAC and LTV, reveal execution capability and business model efficiency. Patents are not enough in tech-driven startups. Assess commercialization and pilot program outcomes to gauge viability.

THE HOG

The “Google Maps” for customer acquisition.

FOLDERLY AI

Folderly AI generates high-performing, spam-checked cold email sequences with AI, tailored to your offer, audience, and goals.

PORTIA AI

Portia AI lets developers build safe, compliant AI agents with human-readable plans, execution tracking, and guardrails for regulated industries.