Search the archive

TO IMPROVE LLMS, COACH THEM LIKE ATHLETES IN AN ARENA

You can dramatically improve any LLM's performance by coaching it like an athlete.

👉 Start for free, Start building

THE STATE OF AI 2025

AI startups are growing like nothing we've ever seen - some hit $100M ARR in their first year. Bessemer studied 20 companies and found two types: Supernovas that explode to $125M by year two but have 25% gross margins and fragile retention, and Shooting Stars that quadruple yearly with 60% margins. The new benchmark isn't T2D3 anymore, it's Q2T3 (quadruple, quadruple, triple, triple, triple).

COHERE RAISES $500M AT $6.8B VALUATION

Cohere secured $500 million in an oversubscribed round led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, propelled to a $6.8 billion valuation. The company added Joelle Pineau (former Meta AI research lead) as Chief AI Officer and Francois Chadwick (ex-Uber) as CFO. Cohere will invest in agentic AI tools like North, designed to automate enterprise workflows, while maintaining a security-first, on-premises deployment approach.

JACK DORSEY: I THINK OF THE CEO ROLE AS "CHIEF EDITOR" OF THE COMPANY

Jack Dorsey runs Square like a magazine editor - thousands of ideas flood in from engineers, support, and designers, but only one or two really push the company forward. The CEO's job is to review everything and cut ruthlessly.

YOUR PLAYBOOK TO FORECASTING PIPELINE AT SCALE

Rubrik hit $1 billion ARR with a forecasting process that starts five days before executives see numbers. Wednesday: reps validate every deal with managers. Monday: the CRO digs into each opportunity. Friday: C-suite gets a forecast that's been pressure-tested multiple times. It marks deals as "in-path" (leadership believes it) or "out-of-path" (risky). When a rep commits a deal but their manager disagrees, that's an automatic investigation. Quotas come from actual data - Rubrik calculates exactly how many calls turn into meetings or deals, so reps believe their targets are achievable. The company forces sales, marketing, and finance into weekly accountability forums where nobody can dodge revenue questions.

TIME TO EXIT: ARE STARTUPS GETTING OLDER?

Startups are taking longer to exit, with the median age at IPO now at 13.5 years due to increased private capital availability, market pressures, and a focus on profitability. This trend results in longer holding periods for investors, a shift towards later-stage investing, and more emphasis on secondary sales for liquidity. Investors may adapt by extending fund lifecycles, diversifying investment stages, and prioritizing sustainable growth.

ALIGNING PRODUCT AND GO-TO-MARKET WITH METRICS

Dan Teodosiu and a fellow Balderton Capital EIR discuss aligning product and go-to-market teams using customer-value metrics. The article outlines historical examples where companies faltered by neglecting customer value. It encourages leaders to focus on why customers would repeatedly choose their product.

SHOR

Affordable payroll for global teams.

KNOWLIFY

Transform any content into explainer videos.

DOLPHIN

Turn your customer calls into short, ready-to-share highlight reels.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

We all use the same words, but mean completely different things. Your engineer says the feature is "done" (it's not deployed). Your designer says it's "done" (first draft). Your co-founder calls the new strategy "risky" (exciting!). You hear "risky" (we're gonna die). This stuff kills startups. One person's "by end of day" is 5 pm, another's is midnight. One founder's "love" for the company means 60-hour weeks, the other's means sustainable passion. The fix is stupidly simple: just define your terms. What does "shipped" mean at your company? What's "good enough"?

WHEN BUILDING GETS EASY, WINNING GETS HARD

Sam Altman says we're entering the "fast fashion era of SaaS," and he's right. AI split software into two camps - the hard builds like infrastructure and foundation models, and the easy builds you can ship in a weekend with Cursor. When building gets easy, winning gets exponentially harder because everyone has the same product. The margin reality is brutal. Replit swings between -14% and +36% gross margins, while OpenAI sits at 45% and Nvidia at 75%.

THE RED QUEEN EFFECT - MENTAL MODEL: WORK SMARTER, NOT FASTER

The Red Queen told Alice she must run twice as fast just to get anywhere because in Wonderland, running at full speed only keeps you in the same place. This perfectly describes startups that chase every AI update and framework just to avoid falling behind. Teams exhaust themselves implementing every new tool while competitors do the same, so nobody actually pulls ahead. We're so busy keeping up that we forget to ask if we're running in the right direction. Three questions cut through the panic: Are you making real progress or just matching competitors? Why are you moving in this direction? What would actually happen if you paused?

PROFOUND SECURES $35M TO CONNECT BRANDS WITH ONE NEW CUSTOMER: SUPERINTELLIGENCE

Profound secured $35M in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital to develop a platform that connects brands with AI (superintelligence) as a new customer base.

GOOGLE VET RAISES $8M FOR CONTINUA TO BRING AI AGENTS TO GROUP CHATS

Continua, founded by ex-Google engineer David Petrou, raised $8 million to integrate AI agents in group chats on platforms like SMS and Discord, enhancing collaboration with automated features like reminders and polls.

INDIA'S FIRST AI UNICORN FRACTAL FILES FOR $560 MILLION IPO: A STRATEGIC DEEP DIVE INTO AI'S EMERGING MARKET POTENTIAL

Fractal Analytics, India's first AI unicorn, is preparing for a $400-500 million IPO that will value the company at $3 billion, highlighting AI's growing importance in emerging markets.

AIRBNB: 2Q25 BUSINESS UPDATE

Airbnb's growth is slowing again - nights booked decelerated to 7% year-over-year, while competitor Booking grew 8% despite being twice Airbnb's size, with 309 million nights booked. Revenue grew 13% but the stock dropped 8% on weak guidance. The interesting part is CEO Brian Chesky's response. The company is pivoting to become more like Netflix than a search engine, with more bookings now coming from homepage recommendations than search. This lets it steer demand to markets with supply. After resisting for years, it is finally adding hotels and launching a loyalty program - plus authorizing $6 billion in buybacks on top of the $1 billion it just spent. The wildest bet is Services, where 60,000 people applied to offer everything from home chefs to yoga classes.

WHAT IS CHROME WORTH?

Perplexity just offered $34.5 billion for Chrome, betting on antitrust forcing Google to sell. The math reveals it is lowballing by hundreds of billions. Google pays Apple $20 billion yearly to be Safari's default search for 850 million users - that's $21 per user. Perplexity's offer values Chrome's 3.5 billion users at just $9 each. If Chrome users got Safari pricing, that's $73 billion in annual revenue. At typical tech multiples, Chrome is worth $172-$630 billion, not $34.5 billion.

THE NEXT PHASE OF B2B CONTENT MARKETING: INFLUENCER NODES

Lars Lofgren spent 15 years in B2B content and watched company blogs go from king to dead. SEO ruled from 2015 to 2022 until AI blew it all up. Right now, teams are crushing it by AI-ifying their workflows, but Lofgren calls BS - it's a race to the bottom where someone always trains their model better. His bet: when everyone's drowning in lukewarm AI slop, people will crave real stories from real humans. B2C already figured this out with creators. B2B is next. CMOs have three options: pay influencers, hire them, or become one.

WHY NAILING YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE IS HARD

Everyone knows they need an ICP, but most companies never actually nail one down. First, the data problem - you're stitching together multiple CRMs, enriching firmographic data, and slicing numbers endlessly to figure out where you win most, where deals are biggest, and where it's easiest to make money. It's part math, part art, and mostly grind. Most ICPs die here because companies lack an analytical go-to person. However, even if you crush the analysis, you hit problem two: opinions. Your fancy data now has to merge with perspectives from sales, marketing, product, and, most importantly, your CEO. Everyone has strong feelings about which customers are best. The goal isn't perfection, it's intention. Get just enough agreement to stop pondering and start executing.

THE STORY BEHIND OWNER'S PIVOTS TO A BILLION-DOLLAR BUSINESS

Adam Guild dropped out of 10th grade after his Minecraft server hit six figures. At 17, he saved his mom's failing dog grooming salon with SEO that worked so well, he built a $2,000/month website builder for restaurants. Then COVID wiped out everything overnight. He called panicked restaurant owners who all said the same thing: delivery apps were killing them with 30% fees. Six weeks later, he'd rebuilt everything for online ordering and changed his pricing to $1.50 per order. Demo requests went from zero to hundreds per week. He broke every rule - bundling multiple products early, copying competitors openly, and removing customization options. The owner just hit $1 billion because Guild learned SMBs don't want flexibility, they want something that just works.

THE NEW FUNDRAISING PLAYBOOK: SEED-STRAPPING

Seed-strapping involves startups raising a single early funding round and relying on revenue for growth, with AI making this approach more feasible by accelerating product-market fit and reducing scaling costs. Notable examples include Zapier and Calendly, with recent AI startups like Aragon and Jenni.ai also adopting this model. While seed-strapping offers founder control and operational discipline, risks include losing to better-funded competitors and limitations in hiring and liquidity.

MAINTOUCH

Full-stack organic marketing for B2B.

ARENA

Software vendor discovery, evaluation, and purchasing for the AI era.

SUPER

Super is an AI-powered enterprise search and assistant platform that connects all your company tools to turn data into actionable answers and custom workflows.

COVERD RAISES $7.8M TO GAMIFY PERSONAL FINANCE MANAGEMENT

Coverd secured $7.8 million to revamp personal finance management. The platform introduces a gamified experience with high rewards, including a planned credit card offering 100% cash back on purchases. This approach aims to transform mundane financial tasks into engaging and rewarding activities.

WHY AI CAN'T TOUCH YOUR TASTE

Everyone has access to the same AI tools now - your intern can create presentations as good as senior consultants. Technical execution itself may no longer be a competitive advantage. However, there's a paradox: as AI democratizes building, taste becomes everything. Research shows that labeling products "AI-powered" actually hurts trust and lowers expectations. We're hitting AI fatigue fast. The teams that win won't be the ones with the best AI - they'll be the ones who know what to build, not just how to build it. That judgment of what feels right versus what's technically possible? AI can't touch that.

REGION BETA PARADOX

People stay in mediocre relationships for years but thrive after brutal breakups. That's the Region Beta Paradox - we tolerate mild discomfort forever but spring into action when pain gets intense. Smart marketers use this by turning tolerable problems into unbearable ones. Chime shows your paycheck being held hostage for two weeks. Apple animates surveillance cameras hovering over your screen. Misfits Market exposes how Big Grocery wastes millions of pounds of "ugly" food. The lesson: buyers won't budge for mild discomfort. Show them why their status quo is secretly intolerable and switching becomes urgent relief, not risky change.

WHEN CREDITS MEET ARR

Everyone's adding credit-based pricing to their AI features and hitting the same wall - how do you report this in ARR without making a mess?

WHY MOST SDRS WILL BE AI SDRS IN 2026+

95% of human SDRs can't actually explain what they're selling.

LET'S TALK REFERENCE CHECKS

Wade Foster does 20 reference calls per executive hire at Zapier - 10 from the candidate's list, 10 he finds himself.

Claim your 50% startup discount and marketing exposure

visibility. OpenVPN [4] is offering both with Builder's Corner.

→ Get a 50% discount on Zero Trust VPN protection that secures your remote team.

IS THE IPO PROCESS A SCAM?

Figma's stock popped 250% on IPO day - the highest since 1999. For those who weren't following, this wasn't actually mispricing, but artificial scarcity at work. Only 3% of shares were available to trade because investment banks deliberately keep the float tiny. Long-term investors got their allocation and held tight while traders scrambled for the few shares available. Within days, the stock crashed 50% as reality set in. Now it's easy to call IPOs a scam, but this is exactly how the system is designed to work - banks manufacture these pops to make headlines and reward their best clients with instant profits.

META ACQUIRES AI AUDIO STARTUP WAVEFORMS

Meta has acquired AI startup WaveForms, bolstering its AI unit, Superintelligence Labs. Co-founders Alexis Conneau and Coralie Lemaitre have joined Meta. WaveForms focused on the "Speech Turing Test" and "Emotional General Intelligence."

CHATGPT IS BRINGING BACK 4O AS AN OPTION BECAUSE PEOPLE MISSED IT

OpenAI has reinstated GPT-4o as an option in ChatGPT following backlash from users mourning its replacement with GPT-5. Users missed GPT-4o's perceived personality and flexibility for various tasks. OpenAI indicated that Plus users could choose between models. CEO Sam Altman also stated OpenAI aims to address concerns over GPT-5's performance and transparency.

HOW TO 'TEST' YOUR MESSAGING TO FIND MESSAGE-MARKET FIT

Message-Market Fit means your ideal buyers immediately "get it". You see high response rates on outbound, better click-through rates, and prospects understand your value before you explain it. To test properly, run 2-3 meaningfully different messaging angles across channels you're already using, aim for at least 8-12 qualified leads per variant over two weeks, then debrief with sales to see which message got people talking with fewer objections - if one variant improves conversion by 15%+, double down and bake it into all your GTM assets.

MILLIONS IN REVENUE WITH A <15 PERSON TEAM

Most startups die because they build what they think customers want, not what customers actually need. Vitalize Care's founders slept in hospitals for eight months watching nurses work - and discovered their mental health app was solving the wrong problem. Nurses didn't need therapy, they needed someone to fix their staffing nightmare. After throwing out their entire product and selling hospitals on Figma mockups, they hit millions in ARR with just 15 people. Now, every engineer flies to hospitals monthly because that extreme customer proximity is their superpower.

SHOULD WE OFFER PILOTS?

A Chief Procurement Officer insists that not offering pilots is a "major red flag." However, the best sales teams do something counterintuitive - they default to no pilots and make buyers pay to prove they're serious. If you must offer one, take a page from CJ Edmonds at Conversion Logix, who structures pilots with continuation clauses that auto-convert to paid contracts unless cancelled within 120 days. Most buyers requesting pilots aren't actually testing functionality - they're testing whether you're enterprise-grade. So if you must offer one, define success metrics upfront, charge for it, and remember that pilots should be your last resort.

ENTELLEGENCE.AI

Entelligence.ai delivers AI-powered code reviews with full codebase context, catching issues early and boosting team productivity with auto-generated docs and engineering insights.

OVERLAP AI

Overlap AI is a multimodal video marketing agent that edits, captions, and auto-posts content to TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and X through a simple agentic workflow.

ALGEBRAS AI

Algebras AI is an open-source platform for quickly building and scaling AI apps in any language with instant outputs and no proofreading delays.

THE PRIVATE MARKET TRAP

Money is flowing into private companies but can't get out - there's $13 trillion trapped. You should care because startups convince people to work for less money by giving them stock. That deal only makes sense if the stock can turn into cash someday. No IPOs means that stock is just paper, which means talented people may be less inclined to join startups.

EUROPE'S GREAT FOUNDERS MUST UNRETIRE

European entrepreneurs tend to retire early, missing potential decades of innovation and productivity. This contrasts with the US, where cultural norms push founders to create continually, contributing significantly to technological advancements. Europe must encourage its most successful entrepreneurs to keep building, or it risks falling behind the US and China in technology and innovation.

HOW DEBT TO EBITDA RATIOS ARE IMPACTING DEALS IN 2025

Everyone obsesses over valuation multiples, but the metric that actually controls private equity deals is simpler: how much debt you can pile on. In 2021, PE firms were loading companies with 7.5x EBITDA in debt, and someone would always fund it. Today, you're lucky to get 5x, and junior debt has essentially vanished. The entire PE model depends on leverage to juice returns - when debt dries up, so do the deals. That's why take-privates of companies like PagerDuty and Olo are suddenly everywhere. With rates high and lenders spooked, PE firms can only make the math work on deeply discounted public companies.