Stop Hiring People🛑, 15000+ VCs List💼, Product Evals in 3 Simple Steps✅

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. 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 👇

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In-Depth Insights 🔍

• Private Equity: The New Distribution Channel for AI Startups 🤖
  Buyout portfolios now dwarf public listings and centralize thousands of mid‑market buyers under one roof. This creates a fast lane for automation vendors to prove value in a few holdings and scale across entire portfolios. [Tomasz Tunguz]

• 15,000+ VCs, Angels & the Glassdoor of Venture Capital 💼
  A mega‑compilation of investor lists by region and thesis, plus founder review tools, promises faster targeting and better diligence. It’s built to cut search time and reduce misalignment by adding transparency to reputation.

• Inside Salesforce’s Big Bet on AI Agents 🧠
  Despite splashy demos, paid usage and real conversation volume remain modest while setup complexity is high. Investors and analysts see a long road to ROI as rivals press advantages and the core franchise decelerates. [Business Insider]

• If You’re an Early‑Stage Founder, Read This 👣
  A candid build‑in‑public update from Meet‑Ting shares traction, setbacks, and how investor conversations actually evolve. Practical takeaways cover storytelling, market positioning, and surviving the emotional swings. [

  Chief Ting
  ]

• The UK Now Leads on Startup Stock Options 📜
  Budget changes raise headcount and asset thresholds, extend plan duration, and improve treatment, pushing the country to the top of ESOP rankings. The shift signals fierce competition among ecosystems to attract operators with real ownership. [Vojtech Horna]

• The Strange Case Of Meta 💸
  A joint‑venture financing for a massive Louisiana data center can keep billions in assets and related debt off the parent’s balance sheet. The analysis breaks down VIE, lease, and guarantee mechanics and why optics may cost roughly 100 bps annually. [Forbes]

• Stop Hiring People 🛑
  Start from mission‑outcomes‑competencies before you even write a JD, then hire to the work rather than to profiles. Cautionary vignettes show how role‑first and empire‑building approaches waste time and burn cash. [

  Gaurav Vohra
  ]

• The Most Valuable VC‑Backed Startups in the World 🦄
  A snapshot of $10B+ private leaders shows how late‑stage companies are staying private longer as capital pools deepen. From AI to fintech and defense, the map highlights where power and liquidity are concentrating.

• Product Evals in Three Simple Steps ✅
  A pragmatic blueprint focuses on a small labeled set, aligned LLM judges per dimension, and an automated harness. The goal is faster iteration with consistent judgments at scale, not chasing illusory perfection. [eugeneyan]

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Trending News ⚡

• AI Pioneer Urges UK to Be Bold and Different in the Global Tech Race 🤖
  A co-author of the Transformer paper argues Britain shouldn’t try to outscale US and China, but instead back distinctive research and the infrastructure to support it. He says current assistants are too agreeable and need to learn to challenge users constructively. [BBC]

• OpenAI’s Mounting Legal Fights Put Its Playbook on Trial ⚖️

  Copyright, trademark, and wrongful-death cases are converging to test how models are trained and deployed. Outcomes could reshape data access, fair-use boundaries, and the governance of fast-growing AI platforms. [Business Insider]

• From Dry Cleaner to World Models: The ‘Godmother of AI’ Builds a New Lab 🧠
  A Stanford AI pioneer recounts years spent running her family’s shop and managing it through graduate school. That grit now fuels an ambitious push into spatially aware systems designed for perception, reasoning, and real-world interaction. [Business Insider]

• Revolut Hits $75 Billion Valuation in Secondary Share Sale 💳
  Investors from Coatue to Fidelity backed a transaction that lifts Europe’s top fintech above several legacy banks by market worth. The company is expanding products while it continues to pursue a full UK banking license. [Reuters]

• Jensen Huang Wants Every Automatable Task Done by AI 🤖
  In an all-hands meeting, the chipmaker’s leader pressed teams to lean into automation across workflows without fear of job loss. He also signaled aggressive hiring and expanding global offices to sustain momentum. [Business Insider]

  

• Nadella Reboots Microsoft’s Economics for the AI Era 📊
  An internal memo taps a veteran strategist to reframe costs, pricing, and platform design around agents and Copilots. The move mirrors the company’s early cloud shift, aligning culture and capital to a new compute cycle. [Business Insider]

  

• Nvidia Says It’s a Generation Ahead Despite Google’s Chip Push ⚡
  After reports of rival talks, the company emphasized platform breadth and compatibility across model workloads. Google countered that demand is rising for both its TPUs and the GPU leader’s systems. [Business Insider]

  

• Mark Cuban Warns AI Wars May End in a Winner‑Take‑All Shakeout 🏆
  The investor draws parallels to the 1990s search race, cautioning that outsized infrastructure bets could overshoot. He expects a disruptive turn rather than incremental gains to decide long-run leadership. [Business Insider]

  

• Michael Burry Bets Against Nvidia and Palantir After a ‘Disappointing’ Memo 🐻
  The “Big Short” investor criticized a rebuttal addressing concerns about valuation, cash flows, and circular deal structures. He disclosed ongoing bearish positions while comparing today’s cycle to past tech booms. [Business Insider]

  

• Nvidia’s Rocky November: Competition, Critiques, and Volatility 📉
  The market weighed blockbuster earnings against rising rivals, high expectations, and bubble chatter. Management pushed back on skeptics, highlighting demand for next‑gen accelerators and long‑dated order strength. [Business Insider]

  

• AI Shopping Agents Could Add $115B to US E‑Commerce by 2030 🛒

  Analysts see agentic tools driving product discovery, comparisons, and order management across grocery and everyday goods. Retailers are racing to embed assistants as platforms expand shopping features and voice outreach. [Business Insider]

  

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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! 🚀

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Social Media Gems 💎

• 50 Real Pitch Decks From Startups That Raised $380M+ 🚀
  A curated library of successful fundraising presentations reveals how winning teams structure narrative, traction, and design to earn investor confidence. Use these examples to benchmark story flow, slide pacing, and the signals investors actually scan.

• Palmer Luckey’s advice for every ambitious 20-something 💡
  A quick mindset shift that could seriously change how you approach opportunity. One of the most underrated advantages no one’s really talking about. [a16z]
  

• AI Roles Matrix: Planning Skills for Real-World GenAI 🤖
  The post maps key functions and capabilities across modern AI jobs while noting that prompting, retrieval-augmented generation, and agent orchestration are distinct competencies. It also highlights production realities like evaluation, observability, guardrails, and compliance that shape effective teams. [Alex Wang]

  

• Sam Altman’s First-Ever Startup Pitch (Age 19) 🎥
  A look back at an early founder moment before leadership roles at YC and a later co-founding of OpenAI. The clip traces the journey from building Loopt and exiting to shaping the ecosystem that accelerated AI innovation.

• 11 Founder Resources You Shouldn’t Rebuild From Scratch 📚
  A curated toolkit spanning real fundraising materials, investor lists, and templates helps operators move faster without reinventing common workflows. From financial models to outreach playbooks, the collection focuses on actionable assets that compound execution speed.

  

• Hyperliquid: $1.2B Net Income With an 11‑Person Team
  An extreme case of software leverage shows how small, elite teams can ship global-scale products with extraordinary margins. The breakdown contrasts headcount and profitability with incumbents, underscoring a model that may remain rare but is increasingly feasible.

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New Funds 💰

• Firgun Ventures just dropped a $250M quantum tech fund to back the next wave of deeptech breakthroughs.

• Future Energy Ventures locked in €205M for Fund II, doubling down on climate-forward energytech plays across Europe.

• Flashpoint sealed a $67M close for its second growth debt fund, fueling scale-ups from Europe to Israel.

• Propeller launched a $50M AI-focused fund connecting top-tier MENA talent with global markets.

• Disruptive AI raised $40M for Fund II to back Israel’s sharpest minds building in AI and ML.

• Chui Ventures debuted with a $17.3M fund led by powerhouse African women betting on local brilliance.

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That’s a wrap for this week.

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