Search the archive

PHONELY

Phonely AI offers AI-powered answering services for businesses.

IS CHATGPT REALLY ROTTING OUR BRAINS?

MIT researchers found that students using ChatGPT showed less brain activity and couldn't remember a single sentence from essays they'd just written, while those writing without AI remembered 89% correctly. However, the study had major flaws: just 54 students writing 20-minute essays in a lab doesn't reflect real-world AI use. The key is staying mentally engaged - use AI to challenge your ideas, not replace your thinking entirely.

STOP RUSHING TO RESOLVE TWO COMPETING OBJECTIVES

WOULD YOU REGRET LEAVING BEFORE A MASSIVE EXIT?

Jason Oakley left Verafin in 2015 for a friend's startup, walking away from stock options that became worth millions when the company sold to Nasdaq for $2.75 billion in 2021. When friends asked if he regretted missing out on life-changing money, he said no - learning and growing mattered more than waiting around for something that might never happen.

MARC RANDOLPH ON HOW IT TOOK NETFLIX A YEAR AND A HALF TO FIND PRODUCT/MARKET FIT

Netflix failed for 18 months with mail-order DVDs until it changed one thing: no more late fees.

MOONLIGHTING AT MULTIPLE STARTUPS

A founder discovered that a new hire was secretly working at 3-4 startups simultaneously with fake credentials.

WHY INVESTING IN GROWTH-STAGE AI STARTUPS IS GETTING RISKIER AND MORE COMPLICATED

Investing in growth-stage AI startups is becoming riskier as established companies rapidly scale and new startups quickly reach significant valuations.

FIGMA FILES REGISTRATION STATEMENT FOR PROPOSED INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING

After confidentially submitting its S-1 to the SEC in April, Figma has now made it public and will list on NYSE under ticker "FIG"—marking the first major design tool IPO. Figma hasn't revealed share price or offering size yet, but the move signals confidence in the market for collaborative design software after years of speculation about when it would go public.

GRAMMARLY ACQUIRES AI EMAIL CLIENT SUPERHUMAN

Grammarly acquired the AI email client Superhuman to enhance its productivity suite. Superhuman's team, including CEO Rahul Vohra, will join Grammarly to integrate AI agents into email functionalities. The acquisition follows Grammarly's recent $1 billion funding boost from General Catalyst.

THE GREAT DIFFERENTIATION

When AI made it trivially easy to copy any website design or marketing campaign, many companies started doing things that can't be copied—like Robinhood filming product announcements at French châteaus or Stripe building an actual Irish pub for its podcast. The lesson is counterintuitive but powerful: in an age where digital copying is free, the only way to stand out is to create experiences so physical, so expensive, or so authentically weird that competitors can't fake them even if they tried.

THE BRAND THAT TURNED WATER INTO $1.4 BILLION

Mike Cessario watched musicians at Warped Tour refilling Monster Energy cans with water to stay hydrated - they wanted to look cool, not healthy. So he asked, 'What's the dumbest name for water?' Liquid Death. Now people crack open "Mango Chainsaw" and "Berry It Alive" because holding that skull-covered can makes them feel badass. Turns out making water feel rebellious is worth $1.4 billion - who knew boring products just needed better packaging?

HOW GRANOLA AI GROWS

You look at Granola and think "another AI meeting notebook," then see 10% weekly growth and get confused. How did it win in a market with 20+ competitors? Granola realized everyone was solving the wrong problem. Competitors assumed people wanted perfect AI transcripts, but Granola noticed something: people actually like taking notes - it helps them pay attention. They just miss stuff. So instead of replacing note-taking, the company enhanced it. VCs loved it because it worked invisibly (no embarrassing bot joining calls) and made their scattered notes actually useful.

DO YOU NEED A CAIO? THE RISE OF THE CHIEF AI OFFICER IN 2025

Organizations are increasingly appointing Chief AI Officers (CAIOs) to lead cross-functional AI strategy. This role requires bridging technology with business, overseeing governance, and managing AI-related risks and innovations. Companies benefit from a CAIO to ensure AI efforts align with broader business goals and compliance standards.

CLADO

Deep Research for people.

HELIXDB

Get more relevant context for AI with a graph-vector database.

DAYTONA

Daytona is a secure, high-performance cloud platform built for running and scaling AI-generated code with sub-90ms startup times.

NO MORE PAINTING BY NUMBERS

Building with AI is hard because it breaks every mental model we have about software—you can't assume it will work consistently, design paradigms don't exist yet, and users don't understand what it can do. The end result is that the decade-old "SaaS playbook" is dead, leaving both startups and incumbents with a blank sheet of paper instead of the familiar coloring book they've been painting by numbers in for years.

WHY INVESTORS DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS

VCs keep passing on profitable businesses because they're not looking for good companies - they need potential 100x returns. Since IPOs dried up, everyone's chasing AI startups and hyping valuations through secondary sales. If you take VC money, their moonshot business model becomes yours, whether you like it or not.

HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU INVEST IN CUSTOMER SUCCESS?

The Customer Success Ratio, defined as CS investment divided by net expansion dollars, helps gauge appropriate CS investment levels relative to expected growth.

SHOULD YOU “RENT” AN EXEC FOR YOUR STARTUP? A FRACTIONAL COO WEIGHS IN

Hiring fractional executives provides startups with temporary, specialized leadership without long-term commitment.

HOW AI STARTUPS USE CHANGELOGS TO WIN DEVELOPER TRUST

AI startups use engaging changelogs to build developer trust by signaling progress and fostering transparency.

SHOULD CHINA'S 996 WORK CULTURE BE THE NEW NORMAL FOR STARTUP FOUNDERS?

The debate over 996 work culture (9am-9pm, 6 days/week) intensifies as VCs like Index Ventures' Martin Mignot argue it's becoming the startup standard, while studies show 72% of founders report mental health impacts and productivity drops after 50-hour weeks.

THE SHRINKING PUBLIC MARKETS, AND RISE OF PRIVATE LIQUIDITY LOOPS

Half of U.S. public companies have vanished in 30 years because staying private got way easier. Companies can now raise billions without IPOing and investors can still cash out through private deals. The wild part is that companies are getting bought and sold between private investors like trading cards, creating "fake liquidity" where you think you're getting your money out but you're really just owning the same company through a different fund.

HEALTH TECH IS HOPPING

Hinge Health's IPO delivered gains for early-stage investors while disappointing late-stage backers, fueling cautious optimism for other healthtech IPOs. Health tech AI investments surged, with startups like OpenEvidence and Hippocratic AI attracting significant funding as they develop AI tools to assist in healthcare tasks. Meanwhile, new VC fund launches by first-time managers have sharply declined, highlighting challenges for emerging investors.

HOW TO NAVIGATE THE AI DISTRIBUTION SHIFT

Every major tech platform follows the same playbook: open the gates to developers, let them build value, then squeeze them out once dominance is achieved—and AI platforms are about to enter this cycle. The brutal reality is you have months (not years) to pick your platform, bet, and build something defensible before the gates close, because as Cursor's demolition of GitHub Copilot shows, the innovation replication cycle has compressed from 24 months to just 3-6 months.

HOW TO USE WIKIPEDIA TO BOOST LLM VISIBILITY

LLMs heavily weight Wikipedia as a trusted source. Having a presence there can significantly boost your company's visibility in AI-generated responses, but only if you follow the strict rules. Success requires writing neutral, factual content like a journalist while building an ecosystem of interconnected pages for your company, founders, and frameworks. Avoid any marketing language that Wikipedia's 50 million editors will instantly flag.

THE HIDDEN COST OF BEING FIRST: A TALE OF TWO PYTHON TOOLS

Founders often face "unavoidable complexity" when pioneering a solution, as seen with pip in Python, which initially thrived but became cumbersome over time. New entrants like uv learned from these pioneers, offering streamlined alternatives by addressing known pain points. First movers use their established position as a moat, while successors exploit market learnings to outmaneuver incumbents.

👉 MEET VENN

POND

Connect personal data to LLMs.

EDGEDIVE

Turn scattered customer feedback into a single source of truth.

LLMREFS

LLMrefs is an AI SEO rank tracker that monitors keyword rankings and brand visibility across AI search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

VCS BEYOND THE MEME

Most VCs are more interested in the investment than the person. Building genuine relationships through hundreds of conversations creates a network effect where you can actually connect with the right people, making sincerity a competitive advantage in an increasingly transactional industry.

THE RISE OF THE AI-NATIVE EMPLOYEE

The hidden superpower of AI-native employees isn't just speed, it's that failures become so cheap you can take 10x more bets with 1/10th the mess. At Lovable ($80M ARR in 7 months with 35 people), young employees who never learned "corporate bs" are defaulting to building with AI instead of requesting headcount while operations roles that only coordinate chaos and managers without vertical expertise are heading to extinction.

1000X INCREASE IN AI DEMAND

NVIDIA's earnings reveal a shift from simple AI to more compute-intensive reasoning, significantly increasing token usage. Major companies like Microsoft and Google are experiencing massive demand spikes and deploying thousands of GPUs weekly. To meet AI demand, hyperscalers have planned over $300 billion in capex for new data centers termed "AI factories."

A VAST NUMBER OF WELL-FUNDED STARTUPS HAVEN'T RAISED NEW FUNDING SINCE 2021

Many well-funded U.S. startups, including former unicorns, haven't raised new funding since 2021.

NETIC: THE AI REVENUE ENGINE FOR AMERICA'S ESSENTIAL SERVICES

Netic, led by Melisa Tokmak, has developed an autonomous AI revenue engine that targets essential service industries like HVAC and plumbing, enhancing lead capture and revenue.

5 INTERESTING LEARNINGS FROM CHIME AT $2 BILLION IN ARR

Chime's success at $2 billion ARR illustrates key lessons: word-of-mouth as the primary customer acquisition channel, a steady increase in ARPU, achieving profitability before IPO, and heavy reliance on interchange fees.

WHAT DID META BUY? A PERSON? A DATASET? A CAPABILITY?

Meta's $14 billion quasi-acquisition of Scale AI raises questions about what it actually purchased, as Scale missed revenue targets and lost major customers like OpenAI before the deal.

ANTHROPIC'S CLAUDE CAN NOW BUILD AI APPS

Anthropic is rolling out a beta feature that lets Claude users build, host, and share AI-powered apps directly within the Claude app without separate API costs. The feature allows Claude to write real code and handle technical tasks, though it has limitations like restricted external API access and no persistent data storage.

DON'T KICKOFF A FUNDRAISE IN LATE SUMMER

While fundraising data shows steady deal volume through summer months, the real impact of VCs vacationing appears 1-2 months later as September/October deal volume drops 15-30% from peaks. Launching a fundraise between July 15 and August 31 means slower VC response times, less momentum, and worse terms, so founders should either start early summer or wait until September unless runway demands immediate action.

THE GREAT AI TALENT GRAB: THE LATEST 20VC WITH JASON, HARRY, AND RORY

Silicon Valley's AI talent wars signify a major shift, with Meta spending defensively to protect its platform by acquiring AI talent. The success of companies like Harvey and Cluely highlights a strategy of securing market position and customer relationships before perfecting their technology, emphasizing speed over initial product quality. B2B SaaS companies face crucial strategic decisions between protecting existing revenue and embracing new AI-driven business models to thrive in this rapidly evolving landscape.

SAM ALTMAN: "NO MATTER HOW GREAT YOUR IDEA IS, NO ONE CARES."

Sam Altman tells founders worried about idea theft that everyone is too distracted to steal your concept anyway and proves it by openly sharing YC's exact playbook with potential competitors who never execute on the advice.

HOW TO FIND SUPERSTAR TALENT

Marc Lore shares strategies for identifying and hiring top 5% talent, emphasizing consistent company culture and early hiring of a Chief People Officer. He highlights the rarity of "superstars" and the importance of assessing tenure, trajectory, and cultural fit over experience alone. Lore advocates for systematic performance management and transparency as tools for fostering employee engagement and trust.

Meet Venn

SONA

Your always-on-call AI agent, by the OpenPhone team.

CORA

AI Chief of Staff that lives in your inbox.

COMPETELY AI AGENT

Competely is an AI agent that instantly finds, analyzes, and tracks your competitors with automated reports and updates.