Elon Musk’s Advice to Founders💡, Highest‑Paid CEOs💰, The Year of Rebrandings🪄
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In-Depth Insights 🔍
The Year of Rebrandings: What’s Missing? 🪄
Trends are being relabeled with shinier language as teams seek momentum through narrative instead of fundamentals. The question is which shifts reflect real strategy versus cosmetic repositioning that masks the same problems.
How to Get Your Whole Team Excited About AI (and Actually Using It) 🤝
A practical playbook shows how rapid tool trials, hands-on workshops, and clear “golden paths” convert curiosity into real adoption. Becoming the internal champion can accelerate your career while unlocking compounding productivity across roles. [Lenny Rachitsky]FREE Founder Operating System: 58 Templates + 10k Investor List 🚀
A complete Notion workspace helps teams reduce decision friction across idea, launch, fundraising, and scale. Founders also get a contactable database of 10,000+ investors and up to six months of Notion Business + AI.
The Venture Capital Method: How Investors Really Value Startups 📊
Investors work backward from expected exits and required returns to determine today’s price and required ownership. A multi-round spreadsheet models dilution, MOIC, and IRR so founders can negotiate with numbers instead of vibes.
Stanford Publishes Full AI Lecture Series on YouTube 🎓
Core courses spanning deep learning, transformer architectures, RLHF, and evaluation are now open to anyone willing to do the work. This makes professional-grade foundations accessible while raising the bar for self-taught practitioners.
Google’s Prompt Engineering Whitepaper (Free ~70 pages) 🧩
Practical guidance covers zero/few-shot strategies, system and contextual prompts, and step-back techniques to improve output reliability. Clear intent, structured formats, and iterative prompts often outperform chasing the latest model.Elon Musk’s Advice to Founders: Create More Than You Take 💡
Focus on building things people truly value and let financial outcomes follow usefulness. Expect intense effort, accept real risk, and orient every action toward being a net contributor.The Cost Curve Nobody Shows You in AI 🧮📉🧠
When usage-based model costs sit inside your value, growth becomes a negotiation among customer demand, workflow depth, and unit economics. Design for control with routing, governors, outcome pricing, and contribution-margin tracking per workflow. [Chris Tottman]
OpenAI Is Paying Employees More Than Any Major Tech Startup in History 💵
Internal figures indicate average stock-based compensation reached roughly $1.5 million per employee in 2025. Exceptional pay packages signal intense competition for frontier AI talent and shifting norms in private tech compensation. [WSJ]
The Efficiency Paradox: Easier Software → Exponentially More Software 🧠
Lowering the activation energy of building reveals latent demand, expanding the feasible surface area across internal tools and adjacent ecosystems. The constraint shifts from implementation capacity to judgment about what’s actually worth creating. [Addy Osmani]
Trending News ⚡
Meta buys Manus for $2–3B, shifting the AI race to agents 🤖
The move signals a land grab for agentic systems that execute complex tasks with minimal prompting. Expect these capabilities to surface across consumer and enterprise products, reshaping everyday workflows.
Nvidia takes $5 billion stake in Intel under September agreement 🤝
The deal delivers fresh capital as the chipmaker pushes costly manufacturing plans. Regulators cleared the investment, and more than 214 million shares changed hands at a preset price. [Business Insider]
China targets ‘emotional influence’ by AI chatbots ⚖️
Draft rules would curb manipulative interactions, require human escalation for self-harm risks, and set youth protections. The proposal reflects a shift from content safety to emotional safety amid rapid growth of anthropomorphic services. [CNBC]
Neuralink plans ‘high-volume’ brain implant production by 2026 🩺
The company plans automated surgeries and broader deployment after early users controlled devices by thought. Human trials began after addressing FDA concerns, with dozens implanted to date. [Reuters]
SoftBank to buy DigitalBridge for $4B in AI infrastructure push 🏗️
The purchase expands control over data centers, connectivity and power to support compute-hungry applications. The platform will operate separately as the buyer reallocates capital from chip equities toward AI ecosystems. [Business Insider]
Coupang offers $1.18B in vouchers after massive data leak 🔐
Tens of millions of account holders will receive credits, drawing criticism that remedies are locked to the platform. Lawmakers plan hearings while the company defends its approach. [Reuters]Instagram chief: Polished grid is over as AI saturates feeds 📷
The executive argues creators must lean into a raw, candid style as synthetic media becomes ubiquitous. Labeling, provenance, and new creative controls are priorities to sustain trust. [Business Insider]
Fundraising?
If you’re raising a round, Luis Llorens and The Founders Corner can help. We gather startup fundraising data and share it with our audience of 300k+ investors and startup operators. Fill out this form and we’ll will do our best to connect you with the right investors! 🚀
Social Media Gems 💎
Tech Turned the Seven Deadly Sins into Subscriptions 📱
Consumer platforms have productized timeless human impulses into habitual, always‑on engagement loops. The result is behavior engineered at scale, where UX and incentives quietly shape daily routines.
AI Is Making the Miraculous Feel Ordinary ✨
Capabilities that once seemed impossible are quickly becoming baseline expectations in products and workflows. As novelty fades, the bar for differentiation moves to usefulness, trust, and integration.
America’s Highest‑Paid CEOs: Coherent’s Jim Anderson Leads 2024 💰
A lesser‑known industrial tech leader tops marquee names as stock awards propel total compensation to nine figures. The ranking underscores how equity-heavy packages and enterprise scale can elevate pay beyond household brands. [Boardroom]
The 2025 News Cycle, in One Chart (Axios) 🗺️
A single visualization maps the year’s spikes in public attention across politics, culture, and global events. It’s a concise reminder that collective focus is volatile and often driven by shock, spectacle, and virality. [axios]
Blame Shield: The Fake Cloudflare Outage Generator 😅
A tongue‑in‑cheek tool mimics a vendor error page so teams can deflect heat when deployments go sideways. It’s humorous but also a cautionary tale about accountability and incident culture. [Islam Midov]
Six Signs It’s Time to Leave Your Job 💼
From stalled growth to chronic friction, subtle patterns often reveal when a role is no longer serving your trajectory. Treat the new year as a prompt to assess fit, renew momentum, and design your next step. [Andrew Yeung]
New Funds 💰
Lightspeed Venture Partners raised a record $9B+ across multiple funds to double down on global early- to growth-stage tech investing.
Dragoneer closed a $4.3B venture fund to back high-growth, category-defining technology companies.
Viola Ventures raised $250M across two new funds to invest in Israeli startups spanning AI, cyber, fintech, and defense tech.
PSV Hafnium closed a €60M debut fund to support Nordic deeptech spinouts emerging from leading research institutions.
Cloudberry launched a €30M fund focused on early-stage European semiconductor and chip-tech startups.
Factorial Capital raised a $25M Fund II to back frontier AI founders at the angel and seed stages.
Belief Capital closed a $20M debut fund targeting early-stage tech founders across Europe and the U.S.
makesense launched a €15M fund to support circular economy and socially inclusive ventures.
That’s a wrap for this week.
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It feels like fuelling the engine that actually moves the vehicle, rather than polishing the bonnet.
Performance follows where attention is placed.
Founders carry pressure from all sides, and money easily becomes a proxy for worth rather than work.
This advice lands differently across the voices:
Nurturers might feel the relational tension it creates.
Guardians focus on fairness and sustainability.
Creatives might question how value is really measured.
Connectors might sense how pay signals culture and trust.
Pioneers might resonate with reward matching risk and ownership.
Naming these perspectives helps teams talk about pay without it becoming personal or polarising.
I stopped taking meetings with "Visionaries" three years ago.
I realized I was sitting across from men who were experts at capturing value but amateurs at creating it. They were building elaborate traps for capital, not engines for progress.
Here in the sanctuary, I have a simple filter for everything—investments, friends, tools: Does this add energy to the system, or does it drain it?
Musk calls it being "useful." I call it being a generator. In a world drowning in entropy, the only safe harbor is around the people who are actually building the fire, not just warming their hands by it.