everything you need to read this week by @stephthefounder (August 11th)

The goal is to be the best weekly newsletter to be the most succinct + fun way to learn about all the best things you need to know across tech, startups, VC, etc, sent out every Monday. (and at the minimum, it will include the links I post about every week on instagram!). Feedback (and a better/more creative newsletter name than the boring one I have now) always welcome!

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are we in an ai bubble?? maybe a topic for a video this week once i’ve had more time to read/think about it some more, but all over twitter the last few days is articles on articles about how a lot of AI companies (but particularly the coding assistants - my beloved Windsurf, Cursor, Lovable, Replit, etc etc) are low to negative gross margin (aka, for non-finance folks, they’re very unprofitable because of how much they’re paying to openai/claude for LLMs, let alone all the $ spent on salaries, marketing, etc…)

at first i thought it was an overreaction - a stereotypical social media takedown of a hot market that’s been all over the news lately & a misunderstanding of the VC-subsidizing-until-scale playbook (aka the Uber playbook). but after digging in a bit more, i think this is something more to scrutinize than i originally thought 🙈 .

unlike the Uber VC subsidy days (the good days of $6 Ubers, am i right??), these companies have no network effects/lock-in and there is a technology ‘risk’ (i.e. will cost of inference ever go down to make this a feasible business?). more to think about, but this is a good post of the concerns:

in other news, at least more ai companies (including openai at a $500b valuation) are letting employees sell secondaries early 😬 (this is not financial advice)

💰 Companies that will make you a millionaire

Every week I highlight a few of my favorite startups that I personally think are really promising. They’ve typically received funding that week + are hiring, and occasionally I’ll include some special bonus ones.

And now you can easily earn some cold hard cash 💰: you can now use PINpoint (a fun product my company has been building) to earn $$ (anywhere from $5K to $30K) for successfully referring people to top startups. The brilliant part about this is:

1) you don’t even need to know the person who’s ultimately hired - if you post a link on LinkedIn and the algorithm shows it to someone who ultimately clicks the link and is hired, you get the $$$ 😏 

2) all of these companies are great and highly respected, so your friend (or random person who saw your post) will also thank you 😉 win win

(PS are you a founder or do you work at a cool startup that’s hiring? reply back with the name so we can give you guys a shout!)

This week’s featured companies:

1. Decart: backed by both Sequoia and Benchmark (iykyk), they have a model that makes real-time video transformation possible (and cheap). Raised a $100M Series B at a $3.1B valuation (and have only ever used ~$10M of the capital they’ve already raised - yay for capital efficiency)

   • Job openings can be found here

2. Clay: an AI-powered GTM platform that personalizes sales and marketing workflows at scale that I’ve been hearing about ~everywhere~. Also raised a $100M round at a $3.1B valuation (led by CapitalG alongside Sequoia, Meritech, and others—doubling its valuation since a recent tender offer)

   • Job openings can be found here

3. Rillet: an AI-native ERP to replace clunky legacy accounting systems, helping finance teams close books in days instead of weeks. In under a year, they’ve raised over $100M, signed 200+ customers, and doubled ARR in just 12 weeks. They just raised a $70M Series B, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ

   • Job openings can be found here

Some bonus companies that were also funded last week:

• Chai Discovery (AI drug discovery) 🧪 → $70M Series A (Job openings here)

• Lyric (AI supply chain optimization) 🚚 → $43.5M Series B (Job openings here)

• Pantomath (AI agents for enterprise data pipelines) 🖥️ → $30M Series B (Job openings here)

• Fundamental Research Labs (AI workflow agents) 🤖 → $33M Series A (Job openings here)

• Tavily (safe live web browsing for AI agents) 🌐 → $20M Series A (Job openings here)

• OpenMind (OS for humanoid robots) 🦾 → $20M Seed (Job openings here)

• OffDeal (AI-native investment bank) → $12M Series A (Job openings here)

• Orbital Operations (hydrogen orbital cargo) 🚀 → $8.8M Seed (Job openings here)

• Kontext (AI-powered contextual advertising) 📜 → $10M Seed (Job openings here)

🤓 Best things to read instead of doomscrolling

The best things I’ve read every week, listed and summarized here:

1. the quiet thrill of not being for everyone by Stepfanie Tyler – on why you should be yourself, articulated so so well. “The quiet thrill isn’t about being misunderstood or being deliberately difficult; it’s about the recognition that your understanding of yourself is finally sufficient.”

2. The Troubling Decline in Conscientiousness by John Burn-Murdoch (FT) – this is his tweet thread summarizing his full article on FT about how our society’s collective personality (examining traits of the Big Five - more accurate / science-backed than MBTI btw!) has changed 🫠 the chart is striking. Culprits: distraction culture, ghosting, the frictionless online world. Good news: personality is malleable, so we can rebuild it

3. How to Read so that you Retain Information by Jeffrey Kaplan — a helpful video re a summarization technique that helps you retain more info as you read. (tldr - summarize every paragraph with 2 sentences - 1 about the paragraph and another linking it to all that precede it)

4. The Discourse Is Broken by Charlie Warzel (The Atlantic) – perfectly articulates the frustration I’ve been feeling about social media lately (especially now that I’m spending more time on it this year because of this creator journey - a blessing, but also a minor curse). About how every issue (in this case - the Sydney Sweeney campaign) seems to be fodder for feeding the social media machine + making us all upset (under the guise of “discourse”). no summary will do this justice - read the whole thing because every paragraph is 🤌

📱 Everything you may have missed in tech/startup news

1. Non-stop AI launches this past week: GPT-5 (OpenAI), Genie (Google), Claude Opus 4.1 (Anthropic) and Grok 2 will be open-sourced 🔥 

2. GPT-5 launch was underwhelming (incremental improvement vs substantial progress towards AGI): The much-hyped release is getting mixed reviews — praised for sharper coding skills and better multi-step reasoning, but dinged for hallucinations, quirks, and what some call an “overworked secretary” vibe. People were eagerly asking for 4o back and OpenAI has since done so!!

3. OpenAI in talks for $500B valuation via secondary share sale 🚀: up from its previous $300B valuation (!!) (some quick stats on ChatzGPT: 700 million weekly users, projected $20 billion ARR by year-end)

4. IPO alert: Firefly Aerospace, the largest space-tech IPO of 2025. Priced $45, popped to open at ~$70, and now trading closer to $50. From the WSJ:

🤪 Just because / for fun

aka random things that I found interesting enough to screenshot or take a picture of last week

• realized this week i had done a really embarrassing thing. a professional contact messages me about rescheduling, and i had accidentally (somehow??) reacted with the chill guy middle finger meme 😭 reminds me of the time in investment banking when i found out months later that i had a newer version of our messaging system than everyone else so when i was using emojis like 💪 they were just seeing “(flex)” and thought i weird 🫠 (they’re not wrong)

  
  

• marketplaces continue to amaze me and be my favorite kind of business ever. this one came on my radar this week, and it reminded me of gems like this college kid selling restaurant reservations or leasebreak (a hidden gem if you live in NYC that allows you to take over or give up leases - saved me during my breakup 💔 forever indebted)

• prediction markets have continued to fascinate me ever since they “called” trump’s victory. you can see the exact day that gpt-5 came out to very underwhelming reception (lol)

• i ran into neil patrick harris at the gym and my dad had the most dad reaction ever 🤪 

• a pretty pic of grand central xo

<3 until next week!

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