lulu

Lulu Cheng Meservey Is Betting on 'Narrative Alpha'

The future of PR is the founder speaking directly to the audience, and every company that understands this gains what I call 'narrative alpha' — a structural edge in how markets, employees, and regulators perceive them. Most PR is boring, and there's a lot of alpha in being… not boring.

a16z.simplecast.com

How Whatnot Built a Global Marketplace

Whatnot thinks less like a traditional e-commerce marketplace and more like a digital shopping mall, where discovery, entertainment, community, and commerce all happen at once.

brianlenahan

The Frontier Era Is Here

We have entered the 'Frontier Era' of quantum maturity, where the focus shifts from basic research to bridging the gap toward real-world deployment and security. This stage is defined by a sharper commercial and defensive edge, moving beyond the question of whether qubits can be engineered to how they will be integrated into existing global infrastructure.

radicalmoderatesguide

(3) Count No Man Happy: On the Tragedy of Lindsey Graham

Let every man in mankind’s frailty consider his last day; and let none presume on his good fortune until he find life, at his death, a memory without pain.

lennysnewsletter.com

A guide to advanced B2B positioning

There is a sharp distinction between investor positioning and customer positioning; confusing the two is one of the most common mistakes founders make. While the board wants a grand vision of the future, buyers simply want a reason to choose your product to solve a specific, painful problem today.

wildfirelabs

The Founder's Paradox: When Competence Becomes a Liability

A founder's greatest strength—personal competence—eventually becomes the company's biggest liability as it scales. To reach the next level of growth, you must evolve from an orchestrator of systems to a network node that distributes actual decision rights, not just repetitive tasks.

hypeyourself

How to write a press release (that doesn't get ignored)

Only write a press release for real news: launches, events, big partnerships, original research, awards, or crisis updates. Structure it like a news story with the key facts—Who, What, When, Where, Why—in the first 1–2 sentences. Avoid the 'look how great I am' trap; it's not an opinion piece or a blog.

aprildunford.com

Positioning vs Strategy vs Vision

Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at providing some value that your best-fit customers care a lot about right now. It is firmly rooted in the present and describes why a specific type of customer should choose your product over any other alternative today. Positioning changes over time as we follow our strategy on the journey to the vision.

zenkoh

The Exception Economy: Healthcare AI’s Real Market Is the Work That Refuses to Automate

The scarce asset is ownership of exception-heavy workflows where administrative burden, clinical ambiguity, reimbursement friction, and safety accountability intersect. A modest AI company embedded deeply into prior authorisation, post-acute coordination, or payer-clinician documentation may be more valuable than a technically impressive company floating above workflow reality.

robertwachter

Can AI Rescue Us from the Mess of Prior Auth?

The question is not, “Should prior auth go away completely?” It can’t and it won’t. Rather, the question should be, “Can prior auth be made more ethical and less infuriating?” I believe it can, and that AI can help. But it will require a rethinking of the entire process.

waseem

Delegate, don't abdicate

There is a big difference between delegating responsibility and abdicating responsibility. While you want to give new hires ownership and agency, you are still ultimately accountable for everything the business does; you must stay close enough to the details to understand if the work is succeeding or if you need to intervene.

wsj.com

The Era of the Tiger Mom Is Over. Enter the Beta Mom. - WSJ

In 1975, for example, women spent an average of 14 minutes a week helping their kids with their homework. By 2018, the most recent year for which the modern data is harmonized with historical, that amount had nearly quintupled (to an hour and nine minutes). The pattern holds across every child-centric category of adult time-use, including infant care (up from an hour and 40 minutes to nearly four hours) and playing with kids (from 36 minutes to nearly three hours).

honest-broker.com

Four Steps to Hell - by Ted Gioia - The Honest Broker

We must create islands of sanity and human flourishing in the flooded cultural zones. We need our own equivalents of Noah’s Ark.

bloomberg.com

The Rise and Fall of Peter Attia’s Longevity Empire

As part of his self-education, Attia read journalist Gary Taubes’ 2007 book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, and traveled up from San Diego in 2011 to meet him in San Francisco, armed with a 27-page list of questions, according to Taubes’ blog.

lbbonline.com

Larry Smith Became Margot Thomson’s Creative Hero with Six-Word Memoirs | LBBOnline

If the idea doesn’t make sense in one line, it’s not ready. If it can’t survive without the shiny bits, it’s not strong enough. Larry’s work is a constant reminder: when the idea is clear, it lasts. A sharp thought can hold everything together.

upstartsmedia.com

Meet The AI Ring Startup Taking On OpenAI And Meta In Wearables

The thing that gets me excited is the promise of technology as an augmentation of the individual, that places the human in control, makes the human more capable, more free. And I really don't see any other product making that the center of all of their design choices.

upstartsmedia.com

Flexport's Ryan Petersen On Tariff Refunds, AI Agents And How To Win Back Customers

“You have to remember that no one cares about your startup. I’m blessed that you’re asking me questions about my startup, and you seem to be interested in it, but in general, nobody cares about your startup. They care about things that are happening that are relevant in their world, and they’re only going to care about you to the extent that you are either providing perspective on that other thing, or are a good example of the thing.

axios.com

Trump to hit Anthropic with executive order to remove "woke" AI Claude

The administration has argued that Anthropic's "safeguards" pose a national security threat in the context of industry intervening during military operations.

a16z.com

The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps — 6th Edition | Andreessen Horowitz

For pure consumers, the most common standalone AI desktop applications are voice-related. Notetakers like Fireflies, Fathom, Otter, TL;DV, and Granola, have reached users via PLG and increasingly saturated enterprises — with a combined 20M visitors combined across the top five players. Workspace apps like Notion (debuting on this list), have also increasingly integrated AI via notetakers, research agents, and even task automation.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Tom Junod

“I told him to get as many copies as he can of Joe Brainard’s “I Remember.” It’s a slim book that consists of nothing but sentences that begin with the words “I remember.” They seem offhand and incredibly random: “I remember Dole pineapple rings on a bed of lettuce with cottage cheese on top and sometimes a cherry on top of that.” But they add up with incredible accumulative power..."

bloomberg.com

Apple to Expand Ultra Lines After $599 MacBook Neo; 3D-Printed Aluminum; iMacs - Bloomberg

Just a few years ago, it would have been nearly impossible for Apple to build a product like this. Several developments helped make it viable. New manufacturing technologies lowered the cost of producing aluminum enclosures. The Apple A18 Pro chip from the iPhone 16 became inexpensive enough to deploy at scale. And macOS has gradually been redesigned with more color and visual personality, making Macs potentially more appealing to a younger audience.

theconversation.com

GLP-1 drugs may fight addiction across every major substance, according to a study of 600,000 people

The consistency of GLP-1 effectiveness across alcohol, opioids, cocaine, nicotine and cannabis suggests these drugs may act on a shared vulnerability underlying addiction – not on any single substance pathway. If confirmed, that would represent a fundamental shift in how society understands addiction and how doctors treat it.

upstartsmedia.com

Flexport's Ryan Petersen On Tariff Refunds, AI Agents And How To Win Back Customers

It used to be a one-year strategic plan. You would lay out, 'Okay, we're going to do this, we're going to do that.' Now you're like, 'All right, let's go see if you can make this work, two days later. And it works.'

upstartsmedia.com

Exclusive: Column CEO William Hockey On Brex, Bootstrapping, China

"A natural introvert, Hockey prefers to spend his time at conferences answering engineers’ pull requests; at parties with more than four strangers, you’ll find him in the bathroom, coding on his Android phone."

upstartsmedia.com

Gamma's Launching A Fund With Its VCs. Will Other Startups Follow?

“Seeing how people at the earliest stages are thinking about how they build, I’m just personally energized by it. And I’m a sucker for trying something bold and new.”

upstartsmedia.com

6 Winning GTM Strategies From Startups Linear, Decagon And Browserbase

“It’s quite boring if you don’t engage in public debate,” a leading startup CEO is telling the crowd. “I think you have to be a little fearless, and especially shameless.”

upstartsmedia.com

Nothing CEO Carl Pei Shares Plans For Selling Smartphones In The U.S.

“In the beginning, you take everything personally. Now, it’s whatever – we know where we’re going.”

upstartsmedia.com

Designer VCs At Character Capital Raise $52 Million Fund

"There’s nothing more “agonizing” than laboring on a product nobody wants. It’s a tool for isolating and crystallizing your intuition about your business. It’s elementary stuff, but time and again since we started doing this, it’s proven remarkably useful, even for very sophisticated founders.”

upstartsmedia.com

Canva’s Melanie Perkins on scaling startup vision and values for global impact

“If you stop dreaming, then you stop growing and you become an old company.”

upstartsmedia.com

AI Startup Gamma Reaches $50 Million in ARR, Profitability

“Small teams can do amazing things.”

upstartsmedia.com

More Bangers, More Fun: 6 Upstarts Media Resolutions For 2026

But whether you’re sized more like a small business or an AI unicorn, the emotional rollercoaster of being a founder is probably the same. At Upstarts, I vacillate daily between the exuberance of empire-building, and questioning what it means to really exist.

upstartsmedia.com

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez Says New Agents Product Expands Enterprise Adoption Of AI

“Privacy is the most important and most underrated, under-appreciated bottleneck to adoption.”

upstartsmedia.com

Why Lyft's CEO Is Embracing Waymo And 'Falcon Mode' For Its Turnaround

“What stopped us growing at the rate we should be growing was too much competitive focus, and not enough true customer innovation.”

upstartsmedia.com

AI Lab poolside's Founders Talk The Model Race, Meta, And Bad Advice From VCs

"Your data moat is asymmetry of information. You’re on this call with us, getting asymmetric info. When you get a revenue number, only you have it. A journalistic scoop is something where human contact is critical, because as humans, we’re willing to share those things.”

upstartsmedia.com

Utah Legal Startup Filevine Raises $400 Million At $3 Billion Valuation

“He’s not in it to sell it, he’s in it to win it.”

upstartsmedia.com

OneChronos And Auctionomics Launch First Auction Market For GPU Compute

“GPUs are about to be the largest unhedged corporate asset class on the planet. These other markets are hedged down to the penny. And then you have GPUs, which everyone is treating like power and oil, but which fundamentally still is not.”

upstartsmedia.com

Startup Vivun Raised $131M And Nearly Died. A Hard Pivot To AI Has It Coming Back.

“I’m still here talking at this table. So we’re lucky.”

upstartsmedia.com

Exclusive Interview: Motive's CEO On AI, Pre-IPO Plans And His Biggest Startup Mistake

“There’s a fundamental lesson here, which is: don’t name your company after a Grateful Dead song.”

upstartsmedia.com

Loyal's Celine Halioua: From Defying Doubters To Pioneering Dog Longevity

“I just thought this was super unacceptable When you’re a kid you’re like, ‘Oh, adults can always fix everything. And the realization that that wasn’t the case, and we all have these ticking time bombs inside of us, and that one day you could just get this diagnosis and that’s it? I kind of had an existential breakdown, honestly.

upstartsmedia.com

Handshake's CEO Declares 'Re-Founding' Of His $3.5B Startup All Around AI

“Winners and losers are being defined right now. If we don’t go all-in, we are going to get lapped, because someone else will.”