everything you need to read this week by @stephthefounder (August 4th)

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!

The biggest tech news of last week: Figma IPO’d!! Some very viral TikToks are calling it a “scam” — as a former investment banker, this is my soapbox rant about why it isn’t and why people are sensationalizing a fairly normal situation 🤓 

• what happened: Figma popped massively on IPO day (250%+). Normal pops are closer to the 20-40% range, so people were criticizing Figma/the banks leading its IPO for massive under-pricing (i.e. instead of pricing it at ~$33/share, they could’ve priced it higher and closer to the ~$140 it popped to, and the company (vs institutions or retail investors) would’ve gotten more $$). The argument is that banks did this on purpose to reward institutional investors (aka their clients that they have ongoing relationships with) and therefore fall into a massive conflict of interest

• why it’s not a “scam”

  • the general consensus is that you want an IPO price to pop (rather than fall) because of optics — you’d rather have a company seem in extremely high demand vs not — so in general investment bankers are (generally) more conservative with pricing a stock

  • although IPOs have started to make a slow comeback, Figma is still one of just a few massive tech companies (also not considered an AI native company, which is the hot topic of the moment) to go public this year. I could imagine that played into a more conservative pricing

  • direct listings (when a company goes direct, and price is set via open auction) is an option and something companies can do if they felt strongly about underpricing. there’s a reason why not every company does this (less price stability & less marketing aka roadshow support -- 2 major perks of working with a large bank in a traditional IPO process). spotify & coinbase (two companies well known to have done this) had initial successes but their prices declined over time… (can’t say this was entirely due to direct listing vs a traditional IPO, but just a datapoint to consider that underpricing risk is not the only consideration in an IPO)

~rant over~ — yes this wasn’t ideal from a company money-raising perspective, but there is no scam, and if anything, retail investors also had a bigger opportunity to benefit (congrats to the people who got allocated 1 figma share via robinhood 🤪 )

In other news, on most dimensions it was wildly successful!! Like everyone else I’m excited about this, but particularly because Figma defies so many stereotypes of the “right” way to build a startup:

• the company built in stealth for ~4 years before launching

• the company was founded in 2012 🤯 it feels rare to see such strong focus over such a long period of time these days

• people have nothing but amazing things to say about the founder (dylan field) who seems to be incredibly kind but also very effective (in a world of steve jobs worshipping - which let’s be real is well deserved, even though it’s well known that he was a bit of a jerk - it’s refreshing to hear of examples of people who are both wildly successful and kind).

  • related, thought this was interesting: (will be honest, taking with a grain of salt because there’s no publicly cited data so who knows, but think it’s an interesting data point)

💰 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.

This week’s companies:

1. Nudge: building non-invasive (aka no surgery) brain interfaces using focused ultrasound to map and stimulate neural circuits. Their tech is already in human trials, targeting conditions like chronic pain, tinnitus, and PTSD. Co-founded by Fred Ehrsam (co-founder of Coinbase), they just raised a $100M Series A led by Thrive and Greenoaks to bring brain-computer interfaces to the masses

   1. Job openings can be found here

2. Mariana Minerals: Bringing mining into the software age with MarianaOS, an AI-driven platform streamlining how lithium, copper, and nickel are discovered and refined. Just raised an $85M Series A led by a16z. I thought their company’s Series A announcement was very well done (and almost reads like a VC memo about why they invested in this very cool co 😉 )

   1. Job openings can be found here

3. Salient: AI agents for loan agencies (consumer, auto, etc) that handle collections, compliance, and customer comms across channels. They just raised a $60M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz alongside Matrix Partners, Y Combinator, and Michael Ovitz to expand into complex workflows like dispute resolution and title management—all while already processing over $1B in transactions and cutting handle times by ~60%

   1. Job openings can be found here

Some bonus companies that were also funded last week:

• Julius (AI data analyst) 📊 → $10M Seed (Job openings here)

• Prophet Security (agentic AI for SOCs) 🛡️ → $30M Series A (Job openings here)

• Fable Security (human risk AI platform) 🧠 → $31M raise (Job openings here)

• E2B (cloud infra for AI agents) ☁️ → $21M Series A (Job openings here)

• lakeFS (Git-for-data platform) 🧬 → $20M growth round (Job openings here)

• Promptfoo (AI red-teaming & testing) 🧪 → $18.4M Series A (Job openings here)

• Cambridge Terahertz (AI threat detection tech) 🔍 → $12M Seed (Job openings here)

🤓 Best things to read instead of doomscrolling

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

1. Learn to Love the Moat of Low Status by Cate Hall – why we avoid doing anything new or hard: because we’re afraid of looking dumb. this essay perfectly articulates the invisible tax of low status, and why the fastest way to learn is to stop caring and just doing the thing. (related - a chapter from Meditations for Mortals, and especially the opening quote, that I love on this topic)

2. The Cognition Crisis by Adam Gazzaley – “We are becoming information-saturated and wisdom-deprived.” — an essay about how all of our minds are degrading because of things like information overload, constant doomscrolling / dopamine hits, and screen addiction. and how we need to regain creativity, wisdom, reasoning, etc if we ever want to be able to solve our world’s existential crises

3. The Jackpot Age by thiccyth0t on X – a really interesting read about how society (especially in vc and crypto) have increasingly become obsessed with jackpots (i.e. chasing extreme, exponential wealth, even though most people lose everything). also talks about how this behavior is essentially gambling disguised as ambition, and how it comes at the cost of meaning and stability

4. The Age of We Need Each Other by Charles Eisenstein – especially given everything going on in the world and how helpless i’ve felt, i’ve been thinking a lot about impact lately. this essay came to mind - about how true service lies in small sincere acts of everyday people (“the dolphin rescuers, the hospice workers,… the peace witnesses, the humble grandfathers taking a cold berry-picking…”) 1d

📱 Everything you may have missed in tech/startup news

1. Figma went public at $33/share, popped 250%, and is now trading at ~$122/share: Figma made waves on Wall Street after pricing its IPO at $33 per share and debuting on the NYSE as FIG, then rocketing nearly 250%—closing around $115–116 on day one and valuing the company at roughly $61 billion, powered by strong momentum in its AI-enabled design tools

2. Meta will now let candidates use AI in coding interviews (a major signal that prompt skills now rival pure coding skill in tech hiring): Meta is piloting “AI‑enabled” coding interviews where candidates can use AI assistants—reflecting the real-world developer workflows and making LLM-based cheating less effective. They've even tapped internal volunteers for mock interviews to refine the format, positioning prompt‑engineering skill as vital as traditional coding chops. An interesting sign that also shows how AI aptitude (not just raw skill) will be a consideration in hiring going forward 👀 

3. Ramp (corporate cards & more) raises $500M at $22.5B valuation (up from $13B just 5 months ago in March 🤯): The corporate spend startup just raised a massive $500M Series E-2 led by ICONIQ, bumping its valuation to $22.5B. Ramp’s doubling down on AI—rolling out tools for fraud detection, finance automation, and even autonomous workflows as it moves well beyond expense tracking

🤪 Just because / for fun

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

• what an interesting experience of scrolling tiktok and randomly stumbling upon a video about… yourself 🤪 this meant more than i can express - thank you conor!!! 🥺 

@conorharrington3

Proud member of the @stephthefounder fan club 🙋‍♂️ #jobsearch #career

• my new favorite meme:

• petition for penguin to bring these to the US!!!! (they’re only in the UK) these are so so cool:

<3 until next week!