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ATLAS

AI-generated pricing pages with market analysis and customer engagement tools.

MERLIO

Unified interface for using multiple AI models to generate text, images, and ideas.

HOW TO MAKE AI WRITE LESS LIKE AI

A copywriter outsourced 100 blog posts to look like an agency, got paid in full, and then a week later, the client demanded every dollar back. The posts were grammatically perfect but strategically worthless. That failure taught him what most founders miss about AI - prompts don't matter if you're feeding it nothing. The fix is context engineering. Before writing anything, gather customer interviews, support tickets, and competitor messaging. Distill those into strategy documents like positioning canvases and messaging frameworks. Only after loading those as context do you start prompting. This works beyond copywriting - a founder prepping for a board meeting shouldn't ask AI for a deck but should first load market research and competitive analysis, then let AI build the narrative.

THE BEAUTY OF CONSTRAINTS

Give your time unlimited time and resources and watch them build nothing useful. An engineering leader kept seeing projects die not from bad planning but from too much freedom - teams would list requirements, estimate timelines, then stumble along optimizing features that shouldn't exist. The counterintuitive fix is deliberately limiting scope, resources, and time.

ALL EYES ON INFLATION

xAI launched grok-code-fast-1, expanding its tech demand due to its quick, cost-effective coding model. Microsoft introduced MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview to develop proprietary AI models, showing advancements beyond OpenAI's tech influence. Intel faces financial strain with a $3.2 billion quarterly loss as it retains its foundry business under government pressure. Alibaba's Cloud Intelligence Group grew 26% in Q2, with AI-related revenues soaring. Fusion tech is gaining traction with Commonwealth's $863 million Series B2 funding, backed by notable investors like Google and Nvidia.

EMPATHY FOR DUMMIES

Empathy is one of those qualities everyone tells you to have, but nobody can explain why.

WHAT WILL YOU REINVENT TODAY?

Workflows are shifting as automation and AI tools enable reimagined processes, such as AI-managed inboxes and transcription-based podcast listening.

REVE LAUNCHES AI-POWERED PLATFORM FOR PRECISE IMAGE CREATION

Reve has launched a new image creation platform that combines an image creator, a drag-and-drop editor, a creative assistant, and an API.

Get a video out today

TRUMP PAVES WAY FOR $14B TIKTOK DEAL THAT PUTS US INVESTORS IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT

Trump just approved a TikTok deal where American investors, including Oracle, Michael Dell, and Rupert Murdoch, will control 80% of a new US entity valued at $14 billion, with ByteDance keeping 20%. The new structure means the US company will control TikTok's algorithm and content, technically complying with the 2024 law requiring ByteDance's divestiture while keeping the app running.

YC EARLY DECISION FOR STUDENTS

YC's Early Decision allows students to apply while in school, securing a future spot in a batch post-graduation. Successful applicants receive immediate funding, ensuring they can complete their studies before starting with YC.

HUMANOID ROBOTS ARE META'S NEXT ‘AR-SIZE BET'

Meta is investing heavily in humanoid robots, focusing on software rather than hardware, according to CTO Andrew Bosworth. The company plans to develop a licensing software platform for other manufacturers, similar to Google's strategy in the mobile industry. Meta's new Superintelligence AI lab aims to create a "world model" for dexterous robotics, with key talent hired to lead this effort.

THE RIGHT WAY TO PITCH VCS AND ACCELERATORS (AND WHY MOST FOUNDERS GET IT WRONG)

Venture capital funding is rising, with North American startups securing $184 billion, yet competition remains intense. Investors seek differentiation and scalability, and VCs require early market validation, while accelerators focus on the founder's problem-solving insights. Successful pitches emphasize clear, jargon-free communication, a distinctive future vision, and proof of traction to convert investors from skeptics to believers.

WHAT WE'VE LEARNED ABOUT BUILDING AI-POWERED FEATURES

PostHog founders waited until 2024 to add AI, seeing most features as "fool's gold" - bolted on, rarely used, quick to tarnish. After a year of building Max AI, the team shares three hard lessons learned.

EFFORT-OUTCOME ASYMMETRY

Effort and outcomes often don't align. Cheaper celebrity podcasts now out-earn costly narrative shows. Business degrees provide higher starting salaries than counseling degrees, despite the same time investment. Entrepreneurs should evaluate ideas and existing projects to ensure efforts yield substantial returns, focusing on projects that compound input effectively.

a demo today.

KLING AI

KLING AI is a next-gen creative studio for generating high-quality images and videos from text prompts built for rich detail and diverse visual styles.

INDIEMERGER

IndieMerger is an all-in-one platform where co-founders can match, chat, and build startups together with shared workspaces, Kanban boards, and AI-powered skill matching.

WEGIC

Wegic is the first AI website team that builds, optimizes, and updates your site automatically while collecting leads and boosting sales.

PERSONAL CONTEXT SEARCH IS THE REAL SEO APOCALYPSE

Google will launch a personal context search that adds everything it knows about you to queries. It would turn a search like "coffee" into "oat milk latte near my 2 pm meeting that won't make me late" automatically. This fragments SEO because profitable generic searches are split into millions of hyper-specific queries nobody can optimize for - sites dominating "best laptop" lose traffic to niche players matching individual contexts. The shift means SEO moves from keywords to being genuinely useful for specific moments, while Google's data moat makes this advantage permanent.

THE ART OF PROTOTYPING

Just because AI lets anyone spin up an app in minutes doesn't mean they understand prototyping - real prototyping is about asking the right questions, not just building things. The best prototypes are disposable tools designed to answer one specific question: does this solve a real problem (Role), does it feel right to use (Look and Feel), or can we actually build it (Implementation)? Pick one lens, build just enough to learn something, then throw it away.

WHY EXPERTS WRITING AI EVALS ARE CREATING THE FASTEST-GROWING COMPANIES IN HISTORY

Experts writing AI evaluations have transformed them into essential sales tools and technical benchmarks for AI companies, driving rapid growth. Mercor leveraged this opportunity and reached $500M revenue in 17 months by partnering with top AI labs to provide expert evaluations that improve model performance. Brendan Foody, Mercor's CEO, highlights the importance of evaluations in addressing AI bottlenecks and shaping the future AI-driven economy.

WHAT IS YOUR OPERATING PHILOSOPHY?

How you spend your time reveals your operating philosophy - your unstated beliefs about how the world works.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO FOOL MOTHER NATURE

The real test isn't what other people think, but what nature and free markets tell you.

WHAT'S THE SECRET TO GROWING FASTER?

It comes down to just making sure people who should pay you know who you are, get what you do, and trust you enough to call you first when they're ready.

Discover Rocket.new

ORACLE APPOINTS NEW CO-CEOS

Oracle has promoted Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia to co-CEO roles, signaling a leadership transition as it focuses on scaling its AI infrastructure capabilities. Former CEO Safra Catz has moved into the role of executive vice chair of the board.

META'S OPEN LLM FOR CODE AND WORLD MODELING

Meta's CWM is a 32B decoder-only LLM trained on code execution traces and reasoning tasks to explore world models in code generation.

COHERE'S $7B VALUATION

Cohere secured another $100 million in funding, raising its valuation to $7 billion, and announced a strategic partnership with AMD.

WHAT KILLS MOTIVATION?

Lack of belief in a payoff leads to burnout and loss of motivation, not just hard work itself. It's crucial to distinguish between a "Dip," where persistence might lead to success, and a "Cul-De-Sac," where effort yields no progress. Assess your work's potential for progress and pivot if the path forward lacks hope to avoid burnout.

RAISE INSTITUTIONAL CAPITAL OR MAKE DO WITHOUT

A startup weighing institutional capital knows it aids growth and visibility through limitless funds, but pressures short-term decision-making. Conversely, forgoing such capital allows strategic flexibility and long-term planning but limits growth potential. Entrepreneurs must carefully weigh these options according to their goals and aspirations.

SKIPPING FROM PRE-SEED TO SERIES A WITH DREADNODE

Dreadnode secured a $14M Series A from Decibel by skipping interim funding rounds, leveraging growing customer demand and strategic angel investments. Founded by former NVIDIA AI security lead Will Pearce, Dreadnode rapidly gained traction with major research labs and tech firms. The funding enables it to expand resources to meet increasing market demand.

DISTILLED INTELLIGENCE FOUNDERS SUMMIT – OCT. 14 - 16 (RESOURCE)

Distilled Intelligence gathers exceptional founders, investors, and operators for 3 days of inspired conversations, intentional fundraising, and lasting relationships. The multi-day summit at Lansdowne Resort in Virginia is free for founders and includes complimentary hotel accommodations, investor introductions, and meals during the event.

WALDO

Waldo transforms audience, trend, and competitor signals into real-time strategies that keep your brand ahead.

AMPLITUDE PRODUCT BENCHMARK (REPORT)

Based on data from over 2,600 companies, Amplitude reveals what separates the top 10% from the rest.

AGENT + HUMAN OPS: HOW AI IS CHANGING ROLES AND WORKFLOWS AT BREX

Brex's CTO built an internal AI platform that lets any employee spin up agents in minutes, turning the company's COO's operations team from people managers into agent managers. The shift is radical - disputes that took 3 hours now take 3 seconds, AI does 100% of quality assurance on all interactions, and over 50% of customer support is fully automated. Most L1 roles managing basic tasks are gone, replaced by L2s who now prompt engineers and coach AI instead of coaching humans. Brex even changed its hiring to test AI fluency with case studies where candidates must show their prompts, not just results, because it believes operations can be 5-10x more efficient when teams have their own automation.

THE MATH OF HYPERGROWTH: TWO PATHS TO THE SAME GOAL

Slack and Atlassian were worth the same $27 billion when Salesforce bought Slack, but Slack got there in 7 years while Atlassian took 17. The difference illustrates two paths to massive value - hypergrowth or steady compounding over decades. OpenAI is growing 400% at $1 billion revenue, while Atlassian grew 30% at that scale, yet Snowflake's 124% growth path built a $75 billion company versus Atlassian's $42 billion. The lesson is that reaching $1 billion revenue faster creates significantly more value due to time value of money - hypergrowth beats slow and steady even if you eventually hit the same revenue, though most companies can't optimize growth, margin, and retention simultaneously.

WHY GEORGIAN INVESTED IN REPLIT

Georgian invested in Replit's $250 million Series C round as Replit launched its AI-driven Agent 3, enhancing cloud-based software development. Replit democratizes coding by enabling users to create applications via natural language prompts, supporting over 50 languages and featuring AI assistance, real-time collaboration, and one-click deployment. With rapid revenue growth, strategic partnerships, and a versatile platform, Replit is poised to disrupt traditional SaaS markets and expand the AI-powered app creation landscape.

WHAT TO DO WITH $2M?

Jason Fried just gave counterintuitive advice to a 26-year-old who sold his business for a couple million.

996

Tech founders are pushing 996 - working 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week - claiming it's the only way to build billion-dollar companies, but there's a catch they don't mention.

EVERYTHING YOU'VE BEEN TOLD ABOUT BURNOUT IS WRONG

People have a "gratification window," the time they can work before needing tangible results.

Join live: _How Snowflake built its Monetization Operating Model_

STARTUP SALARIES, EQUITY, AND THEIR IMPACT ON EMPLOYEE RETENTION

Startup pay shifted again this year. Salaries are up about 5%, with product and engineering around $189k, while equity grants are roughly 26% below pre-2022, and only 32% of vested in-the-money options got exercised. Early hires still get about 1.5% and employee five near 0.3%. Turnover fell 31% yet churn stays high. Retention improves when pay is competitive, refreshes hit year three to four, and bands are transparent.

VCBENCH: BENCHMARKING LLMS IN VENTURE CAPITAL

Startup investing has long been guesswork, with even top VCs picking winners less than 6% of the time. VCBench is trying to change that: a dataset of 9,000 anonymized founder profiles built to test whether models can predict success better than humans. After scrubbing names, dates, and company info to prevent leakage, researchers ran nine LLMs. GPT-4o delivered 3.2× baseline precision, edging past tier-1 firms.

GREPTILE SERIES A AND GREPTILE V3

Greptile raised $25M Series A led by Benchmark Capital to advance its AI code review agent, Greptile v3, which addresses scale issues in code validation. The revamped agent detects 3x more critical bugs than its predecessor and has reviewed over 500M lines of code for top firms, preventing 180,000+ bugs. Greptile integrates with tools like Jira and Notion for context-aware feedback and learns team practices from PR comments to enhance code reviews.