Humans as Luxury Goods in the Age of AI🍷, The Art of Cold-Emailing a Billionaire📬, How to Split Equity With Co-Founders 👥
If you're building, investing, or just trying to stay ahead of the curve, you're in the right place. Every week, we break down the latest insights, funding news, and founder-friendly gems—no fluff, just what matters. Plus, we track the freshest VC funds deploying capital so you know where the money’s moving.
Let’s get into it 👇
In-Depth Insights 🔍
198 Unfiltered Founder Lessons You Won’t Find on Google 🔍
Raw, real, and weirdly specific advice that cuts through the fluff and gets tactical. From boardroom traps to SAFEs gone wild - this is founder bootcamp in bullet form. [Cup of Zhou]The Parallel Scaling Law for Language Models ⚙️
Alibaba’s Qwen team introduces PARSCALE - a new approach that scales test-time compute via parallel streams, slashing memory and latency without sacrificing performance. [Akash Bajwa]
Humans as Luxury Goods in the Age of AI 🍷
As AI commodifies knowledge, value shifts to traits that can't be mass-produced - curiosity, curation, and judgment become the new economic premium. [Sangeet Paul Choudary]The Art of Cold-Emailing a Billionaire 📬
Cold emails work if you offer a genuine win-win. Nail four principles - competency, clarity, transparency, and effort - and you just might land a billionaire’s reply. [Andy]
How to Split Equity With Co-Founders 👥
Define roles, quantify risk, and use vesting. Skip assumptions and get everything in writing from day one. [Majd ALAILY]
The Agentic Web and Original Sin 🌐
The real mistake wasn’t ad-based content, it’s failing to build payments into the AI-powered web. Native micro-transactions could reboot creator economics at scale. [Stratechery]
AI 2027: A Scenario Forecast of Superintelligence 🤖
A detailed forecast of AI’s acceleration into superhuman territory, covering research automation, geopolitical risk, model alignment, and a fragile global equilibrium. [AI 2027]
The Startup Survival Guide 💡
Execution beats ideas. Chaos is the environment - adapt fast, stay customer-focused, and remember: sales fixes everything. [Guy Kawasaki]
Trending News ⚡
OpenAI Acquires Jony Ive’s Startup in $6.5B Deal 🎨
The design legend will lead OpenAI’s hardware vision - think AI-native devices that ditch the screen entirely. [Tech Crunch]
Andy Murray Joins Redrice Ventures as Associate Partner 🎾
The tennis legend doubles down on VC, bringing his sharp investing game to sport, wellness, and performance-driven startups.Lunar Ventures raises €50M Fund II for pre-seed DeepTech bets 🧠
Backed by top institutions, the Berlin VC is doubling down on technical founders building the future of AI, robotics, and infra. [EU-Startups]Builder.ai enters insolvency despite $450M in funding 📉
Once a Microsoft-backed unicorn, Builder.ai collapses under financial missteps, leadership churn, and inflated sales allegations. [Tech Crunch]Anthropic unveils Claude 4 models with step-by-step reasoning 🧠
Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 target deeper code execution, safer reasoning, and AI memory - with hybrid tooling and IDE integrations built in.
OpenAI building screenless AI companion 📱
Altman says it could rival the iPhone in impact - if his team can keep it under wraps. Ive’s $6.5B acquisition is just the start. [Tech Crunch]
Tesla shows off Optimus' biggest leap yet 🤖
The robot now learns chores from human videos and runs it all through one neural net - no teleop needed. Musk says it could be Tesla’s biggest product. [TeslaRati]
DOGE used Meta’s Llama 2 AI to vet federal worker emails 🔍
The Department of Government Efficiency ran Meta’s model to classify replies to its “Fork in the Road” memo. [Wired[
Social Media Gems 💎
AI agents raise $10M with no product or users 🫠
TradedVC mocks the 2026 startup scene where even founders don’t know what their AI agents are doing. [Traded VC]Top 1% VC exits grew 7x in 20 years 📈
VenCap’s deep dive shows 99th percentile US exits hit $10.2B in 2020–24 - up from $1.4B in 2005–09. The power law just keeps getting louder.
Free Investment Banking Excel Templates 📊
Bulletproof your internship prep with 18 downloadable models - LBOs, DCFs, IPOs, and more. Built by pros, free for you.
Stop Building Startups Without a Strategy 🧠
A tactical 5-step roadmap to help founders stop guessing and start scaling with intent.5 Questions Every Founder Should Ask About Their ICP 🎯
A dead-simple framework to identify who really wants your product. Miss these, and you’re selling blind. [a16z]
New Funds 💰
Munich Re Ventures $125M aimed at startups tackling risk, resilience, and maybe the next insurance disruptor.
Google search giant rolls out the AI Futures Fund - big bets on AI research with an ethical backbone.
Adaptation Ventures a new angel group with a clear mission: fund accessible tech and empower disability innovation.
United Effects Ventures new kid on the block, focused on startups that actually move the needle in impact and sustainability.
Creator Ventures $45M for influencers with a business plan - still proving the creator economy is more than hype.
Redpoint Ventures 10th fund, $650M strong. Redpoint's still got the checkbook - and it’s ready for another startup safari.
Abundant Venture Partners debuting a growth platform for purpose-driven startups - think money meets mission.
Invictus Growth Partners $574M Fund II in the books. Target: capital-efficient tech cos with scale potential and discipline.
That’s a wrap for this week.
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I actually did find the yahoo email address of a billionaire and he actually replied. That said, most of the billionaires I cold emailed never replied :)