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SAFE VS CONVERTIBLE NOTES

VCs act like SAFEs and convertible notes are the same thing - they're not.

WILL VS. SKILL

Sometimes the problem isn't the employee - it's you.

ANTHROPIC HIRED BACK TWO OF ITS EMPLOYEES — JUST TWO WEEKS AFTER THEY LEFT FOR A COMPETITOR

Boris Cherny and Cat Wu are reportedly back at Anthropic after departing for Anysphere, the developer of Cursor.

Secure your app now with WorkOS Radar.

MIRA MURATI'S THINKING MACHINES LAB RAISES $2B AT $12B VALUATION

With no revenue or products, the former OpenAI CTO's startup landed one of the largest seed rounds ever from Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, and others. Two-thirds of the team are former OpenAI employees.

COGNITION ACQUIRES WINDSURF

Cognition scooped up Windsurf's remaining 250-person team and $82 million ARR business after Google's $2.4 billion reverse-acquihire cherry-picked only the leadership, leaving employees behind without payouts. The acquisition gives Cognition both AI coding agents and IDE capabilities to compete with Cursor's $500 million ARR, and restores Windsurf's access to Claude models that Anthropic had cut off amid rumors of an OpenAI acquisition.

VOXTRAL: MISTRAL'S OPEN-SOURCE AUDIO MODEL

Mistral's Voxtral is the company's first open-source audio model suite. It features a 24B parameter model for large-scale use and a 3B variant for edge deployment.

EMAILS FOR HUMANS

People in the 1200s would think email is magic - instant messages to anyone, anywhere. What do we use it for? Work messages, ads, and password resets. We should send more thoughtful emails to strangers. Bad emails ask for general life advice or "30 minutes to Zoom." Good ones are specific - share an interesting essay, ask one focused question, or just say hello. Email B beats Email A because it's honest, specific, and includes something useful. Most people send zero cold emails to interesting strangers. Maybe you should send more.

DESIGN PARTNERSHIPS IN VERTICAL AI

Vertical AI founders gathered to share what works. Getting design partners? Just ask for advice - executives love giving it. The sweet spot is 5-10 partners, mixing cold and warm contacts. Pick big names in your field (Turner in construction turns heads). Be picky with early partners because they become your first referrals.

FROM MEMO TO MOVEMENT

Shopify's CEO told everyone to use AI. What happened next surprised them. Support staff, not engineers, became the biggest power users. The company gives everyone unlimited access to expensive models - no budgets, no limits. One person spent $10K in a month, and nobody blinked. It is hiring more interns because students already work with AI naturally. The wildest part? A sales rep built a tool in Cursor that changed how they sell. AI revealed that their whole process was backwards.

NIA

10x your coding agent context.

EXPLORIUM MCP

Explorium MCP is a data integration tool that connects live B2B company and contact data to AI agents, apps, and workflows.

CIRO

Ciro is an AI-powered prospecting tool that builds, enriches, and scores contact lists, syncing them to CRMs or CSVs.

BUILD, SELL, UNDERSTAND

Every startup job boils down to three things: building the product, selling to customers, or understanding what to do next. Engineers build, salespeople sell, analysts understand. Some roles blend them (growth does building plus selling). Here's what most people miss: everyone eventually becomes a seller. Managing, recruiting, and working cross-functionally all require convincing people.

UNIFY RAISES $40M TO TURN GROWTH INTO A SCIENCE

Unify just raised a $40M Series B from Battery, OpenAI, Thrive, Emergence, and others. The company is building an AI-powered system of action for go-to-market teams. It helps teams reach the right customers at the right time, with AI agents that research prospects, write personalized outbound, and act on intent data. It has grown 8x in the last year. Its customers include Airwallex, Perplexity, and Cursor.

NEUROTECH IS HAVING ITS 2017 AI MOMENT

Neurotech in 2025 mirrors AI's 2017 moment: high potential, low mainstream awareness, and a tight insider community. This post highlights a new market map detailing competing approaches, top projects, and tradeoffs to demystify the space.

SEQUOIA WANTS IT HARD

Two 23-year-olds thought they had Sequoia in the bag after pitching Roelof Botha at a Starbucks.

THE MAGIC MINIMUM FOR AI AGENTS

Good software used to need daily use - the toothbrush test.

DEQUITY

Private equity firms can't sell their companies and return cash to investors - the worst drought since 2009.

Read the full playbook on the Metronome blog

WINDSURF'S CEO GOES TO GOOGLE; OPENAI'S ACQUISITION FALLS APART

OpenAI's $3 billion deal to buy coding startup Windsurf collapsed Friday morning. By afternoon, Google hired Windsurf's CEO and top researchers for $2.4 billion, licensing their tech without buying the company. It's the latest reverse-acquihire where Big Tech gets talent and technology while dodging regulatory scrutiny. Now they're left with 250 employees and an interim CEO while their founders build competing tools at Google. Every AI startup that lost its leaders this way has struggled to maintain momentum.

SAAS 2.0

Every SaaS app is just an expert's playbook turned into software. Salesforce encodes how the best salespeople work into lists and rules, but it's a rough translation - like getting advice through a game of telephone. Now AI can skip the middleman. Instead of buying software that nudges you toward best practices, you get the actual expert managing your data directly. A new dating app already does this - it turns a matchmaker into an AI that manages compatibility data. Soon we won't need apps at all, just specialists who happen to be software.

SVB'S STATE OF THE MARKETS

AI ate half of all venture capital in 2024. While total VC investment hit $204 billion - the third-highest year ever - AI companies grabbed 50% of all deals and 61% of megadeal dollars. They're getting 100% valuation premiums over non-AI peers at late stage. Meanwhile, everyone else is playing defense. The typical Series A company now needs $2.5 million in revenue (up 75% from 2021), but growth has cooled to 70% annually. With only 7 tech IPOs last year and 640 unicorns trapped in private markets, the liquidity crisis continues - just 25% of unicorns even meet basic IPO requirements.

GOODBYE, MQLS. HELLO, QUALIFIED PIPELINE

This marketing VP bet everything on 100 target accounts instead of 10,000 leads - and pipeline exploded. The trick was launching messy ABM campaigns before they were ready, which exposed what actually worked. Now, BDRs report to marketing, and everyone's compensated on qualified pipeline, not lead volume. Turns out, companies buy differently at different sizes, so they tier their approach. However, the real shift was mental - stop thinking about capturing demand and start thinking about creating it.

FIXING MARKETING'S MISSING MIDDLE

Most teams focus on awareness and conversions while ignoring the messy middle where 80% of leads die. There's never enough content between "hey check us out" and "buy now" - that trust-building zone where buyers actually decide. This article breaks down how Ahrefs and HubSpot fixed this by becoming media companies. Weekly newsletters, teaching content, and showing up even when metrics look flat. The hard truth is that most companies won't do this because it takes months to see results.

RAMESH SRINIVASAN, SENIOR PARTNER AT MCKINSEY, SHARES HOW GREAT LEADERS BUILD EMPATHY, RESILIENCE, AND PURPOSE

Founders must focus on leadership skills such as fearless learning, empathy, resilience, and purpose. Great leaders adapt quickly, manage relationships, and maintain stability through challenges. Purpose-driven leadership and recognizing knowledge gaps further contribute to their effective company growth.

SUPEREXPERT.AI

Superexpert.AI is an open-source, web-based platform for deploying and managing enterprise AI agents.

PRESWALD

Preswald is an AI agent that helps users build and deploy data apps, dashboards, and internal tools with built-in UI components.

CREATIFY PRODUCT VIDEO

Creatify Product Video is an AI tool that converts product images into marketing videos for brands to produce content quickly and at scale.

MARK ZUCKERBERG: FACEBOOK'S STRATEGY TAX

Mark Zuckerberg saw it in 2018 - Instagram was eating Facebook alive. In this leaked email, he admits they'd been artificially pumping Instagram's growth by siphoning users from Facebook, and the data from Japan and Russia showed what happens next. When Instagram usage passes Facebook, the entire Facebook network collapses. His solution was radical - stop all promotion between apps, maybe even spin Instagram off entirely before regulators forced them to. He knew Kevin Systrom would never agree to slow Instagram's growth, writing "I am skeptical it is possible to both retain Kevin and do what it takes."

THE HOLDING COMPANIES OF OUR HEARTS

Constellation Software quietly turned $890M into $10.3B by buying 500 software companies since 2012 and never selling them. Now, AI entrepreneurs are copying this playbook - buying accounting firms and law offices to force AI adoption from the inside.

LOVABLE MAKES $75M IN 7 MONTHS—BUT IS IT NAILING PRICING?

Lovable hit $75M ARR in 7 months by letting anyone type English and get working apps. This unlocked a wave of non-technical founders building SaaS businesses, just like Shopify did for e-commerce. However, here's where it gets messy - it charges for AI credits that get consumed mostly upfront during building, then usage drops off. Worse, successful MVPs often graduate to "real" code and churn. Lovable is trying to be Shopify for SaaS while pricing like a construction tool.

SHOULD I MOVE MY START-UP TO THE SF BAY AREA?

The SF Bay Area remains a prime hub for tech, especially B2B and AI startups, due to its unmatched talent density, access to aggressive VC capital, and proximity to major tech partners.

AI STARTUPS TAKE TO THE STAGE TO PITCH THEIR COMPANIES TO A PANEL OF JUDGES

Fluix AI, Clicka, and Narada AI pitched their offerings at TechCrunch Sessions.

MOST-ACTIVE US INVESTORS: KHOSLA, ACCEL TOP MAY RANKING

Khosla Ventures and Accel topped May's activity, each involved in 12 funding rounds, with Accel backing large investments in Anysphere and Wonder.

proton.me/l/business/drive/tldr

THE "KILL CHROME OLYMPICS" HAS STARTED

Grok 4 just topped AI leaderboards. xAI now charges $300/month - the highest consumer AI subscription yet. Meanwhile, every AI company is building browsers to steal Chrome's lunch. Perplexity dropped Comet yesterday with agentic features that handle clicking and typing for you. OpenAI's browser is coming soon.

META'S REWRITING HIRING PLAYBOOKS: WINNING AI TALENT WITH BOLD COMPENSATION

Meta is challenging traditional hiring standards by offering top talent compensation packages significantly above market rates. This approach attracts both mission-driven individuals and mercenaries, blurring the lines between passion and profit. Meta's strategy disrupts compensation band structures and renders traditional acquihires less appealing, raising questions about long-term industry impact.

MUSK'S STARLINK RIVAL EUTELSAT RAISES €163M FROM UK GOVERNMENT

The UK government has invested €163m in Eutelsat to enhance Europe's technological sovereignty. Eutelsat, which merged with OneWeb in 2022, offers low orbit satellites for secure communication, challenging Starlink's dominance. The investment is part of a larger €1.5bn fundraise alongside the French government and Bharti Space.

DISTRIBUTION - THE ONLY MOAT LEFT?

Google used to send you 1 visitor for every 2 pages it scraped. Now it's 18 pages for 1 visitor. OpenAI scrapes 1,500 pages per visitor, Anthropic scrapes 60,000. AI is answering searches directly, keeping users from clicking through. HubSpot used to get 39% of customers from SEO - if that drops 80%, its acquisition costs explode. Companies are responding differently. Ramp sponsored the TBPN podcast where its audience lives. The winners own their distribution - newsletters, podcasts, controversial stunts - anything AI can't steal.

THE FOUNDER'S GUIDE TO BUILDING A V1 OF CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Spending half your day solving customer problems? Time for CS. Hire an IC first who's done customer-facing work (even waiting tables counts). Skip industry specialists unless your product needs deep workflow knowledge. Ask "Tell me about a time you saw a problem and fixed it" to test bias for action. Build two systems immediately - support tickets and a 10-step onboarding checklist. Track product usage as your main metric because if customers aren't using it, they're not getting value.

CLEAR THINKING

This engineering leader makes terrible decisions before morning coffee, so he created automatic rules to protect himself. When clients ask for timelines on calls, he says "I have a rule against estimating on the spot." Nobody questions rules, they just accept them. The same principle applies to bigger decisions - we're sabotaged by emotion, ego, and laziness. His solution is forcing structure: write the problem down first (you'll see gaps you missed), find three options instead of settling for two, and ask "and then what?" to think past the immediate outcome.

HERA

AI motion designer.

AGENTMAIL

Create powerful AI agents with email capabilities.

AI INTERVIEWER BY HYRING

AI Interviewer by Hyring is an AI-powered recruiting tool that conducts interviews and generates candidate reports on technical and communication skills.

GOLD MINES & SELF-TERMINATING BUSINESS MODELS

This founder built backyard houses until he realized his fatal flaw - customers only need one house. Silicon Valley trains you to worship recurring revenue, but his business was a "gold mine" where you sell once and never again. Worse, every sale depletes your market. First customers are eager early adopters, later ones need convincing. Casper discovered this by selling mattresses that lasted 10 years, Sunrun when solar got so cheap people stopped needing loans. Most founders don't realize they're mining gold until they've already subsidized growth like a SaaS company.