upstartsmedia.com

Growth Numbers That Can Tell Whether Your Startup Is Elite Or Cooked

And while startups that aren't trending in the direction of category champion have time to change course, the window to do so is generally shrinking, Edmonds says. "There is still time for evolution, but we are seeing how quickly the divergence is happening between these profiles. That window is compressing, and shortening, and will continue to do so."

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: How two SpaceXAI designers use Grok Bot to do their jobs

AI is making previously inaccessible creative skills available to more people. Claire could not illustrate. John wanted to create motion he could only describe with his hands. Peng wanted to produce 3D renders. In the past, each of those gaps would have required a specialist or years of practice. Now they can begin with a prompt.

notboring.co

An Ode to Counter-Positioning

Incumbents have bigger businesses and more resources, and it is those advantages startups use to attack them. Their business is too good to mess with.

honest-broker.com

The Last 24 Hours Are the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie

What's happening here is obvious—eight different people building this technology are afraid of what they're seeing. But they don't have the power individually to stop the insanity. Trillions of dollars are getting pumped into a runaway technology, and the public already hates it intensely.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: Apple’s new CEO & The financier who wants to save America

Seventeen years ago, Elizabeth Stein started making muffin mix in her Upper West Side kitchen for a handful of nutrition clients. She had no business plan, bootstrapped, and waited years to take outside money. Last month, she sold Purely Elizabeth to Ferrero for an estimated $850 million while also remaining CEO.

fs.blog

Steve Jobs in Exile

NeXT spent years losing money. His co-founders left. His investors lost faith. His fortune nearly disappeared. At one point, he was a weekend away from shutting the company down. Somewhere in those failures, Jobs learned how to become the leader Apple would eventually need.

25iq.com

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Jenny Lee about Investing and Business

customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.

dwarkesh.com

Dylan Patel – Anthropic & OpenAI will have most of the world’s compute by 2028

In the case of Anthropic, the revenue has gone as high as $50 million per megawatt. What that now enables them to do is: 'Hey, if I spend 10 bucks on inference capacity, I actually generate 50 bucks of revenue, and then I can turn around and incrementally spend all of that profit on training.'

notboring.co

An American Engineer in China

The China of 2036 will be vastly different than the China of 2026. Companies that used to manufacture luxury handbags are now becoming the brands themselves. Investors who used to copy American VCs are now running their own state-backed deeptech playbooks.

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: Grok Bot + Grok 4.6—what’s great (and what’s still hype) & Lessons from spending $20,000 on Devin in one month

Producing more with AI does not automatically lead to a better product. Both Ryan and Claire are skeptical of letting agents work without constraints overnight. Frontier models can generate an enormous amount of output, but they do not know what customers actually need. Product ideas, priorities, and market judgment still have to come from a human who talks to users.

upstartsmedia.com

‘Maybe I’m Psycho’: Why Tech Founders And VCs Are So Online

"Anyone who has PMF [product market fit] has it for max six to 12 months, and is required to continuously keep releasing bangers," Ding argues. "Versus before, you could have dominance for three to five years, and rely on that."

ai-supremacy.com

We’ve never seen an Anthropic before

Anthropic's revenue for the second quarter surged to $11.5 billion, up from $787 million a year ago. Nobody grows 14x at this scale, nobody. By the time OpenAI goes IPO, Anthropic won't be a comparable company — it won't have a peer competitor, do you understand what that means?

honest-broker.com

Stanford's Secret Course on How to Rule the World

"When I was at Stanford," Justin explained, "I learned that the only people who understood the world were the literal children of billionaires." Now he had figured out those secrets for himself…."By learning them, a huge amount of latent talent and potential in the most promising people can be unlocked."

lennysnewsletter.com

I tested Grok Bot, Grok 4.6, and Cursor Origin - here’s my honest take

I set up five Grok Bots, ran Grok 4.6 through my Claire Weighted Index against GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Sonnet 5, and Opus 5, and spent time actually using Origin as a GitHub replacement. Here's what's worth your attention, what's overhyped, and where I'm personally putting my time.

lennysnewsletter.com

Announcing Lenny’s Jobs: The best place in the world to find, vet, and land your dream job

But all that advice doesn't mean much if you don't actually have a job—or work you're excited about.

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: How a solo founder used Codex and ChatGPT to launch a fashion brand without engineers

AI agents can make specialized software accessible without years of training. Yana used Codex to operate CLO, a professional 3D fashion design tool, and create the CAD files she needed for 3D printing, even though she had never learned to use the software herself. This points to a much bigger shift: people may no longer need to master every complicated tool before they can produce professional work with it.

lennysnewsletter.com

How a solo founder used Codex and ChatGPT to launch a fashion brand without engineers | Yana Welinder

Her 'fashion prompt' is a detailed spec covering silhouette, volume, fabric behavior, movement, and sound, and watching her use Codex plus computer use to navigate 3D design software that's entirely new to her is a clarifying demo of what today's toolset actually makes possible.

upstartsmedia.com

How Fintech Clair Hit A $100M Run Rate By Offering Workers The 'Fairest' Early Access To Wages

"At the end of the day, I believe that this is a product that you should graduate from," he says.

lennysnewsletter.com

How to make people care about your startup

Starting a company is a life-altering pursuit with a famously high failure rate. Whatever reason sent you down that path, it was once compelling enough to rearrange your whole life around and recruit others to do the same. Founder communications work because people care about and root for other humans, not entities or widgets.

upstartsmedia.com

They Knew He Was A Scammer, So They Offered Him A Job

So in a plot twist of a decision that went all the way up to co-founder and CEO Daniel Yanisse, the Checkr team did something a little crazy. "Let's continue playing the game with him," Yanisse told the team. They decided to offer Ulysses a job.

fs.blog

The Mindset Behind Building Billion-Dollar Companies | Brad Jacobs

Brad Jacobs has built eight billion-dollar companies, completed more than 500 acquisitions, and created extraordinary returns for shareholders over four decades. Brad explains how he spots trends before they become obvious, why psychology matters as much as strategy, and how he thinks about acquisitions, hiring, capital allocation, decision-making, and building organizations that consistently outperform.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #205

All of which means that Elon seems to be going after ASML and TSMC at the same time by building a particle accelerator. Now that's vertical integration.

platformer.news

Replit’s CEO on building a company that can run itself

Net net, there's going to be more jobs, but also there's going to be more companies. But companies will get smaller, and they will do layoffs — 100 percent sure.

upstartsmedia.com

Ambrook, A QuickBooks Killer For Farms, Raises $30M To Go After More Of The 'Real Economy'

"Really big, multi-million dollar businesses run on paper in America still, and I don't think people realize that," she says.

lennysnewsletter.com

What if you’re not supposed to have a long-term plan?

In an emergent career, you are both the individual bird and the whole murmuration—the one following the rules and the one becoming something those rules couldn't have predicted. Every decision you make, every person you work with, every risk you take or don't take—those are your local rules in action. You can't see the pattern they're creating from inside it. You can only see the next step.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 115

Fourteen layers of advice from fourteen years of watching where the bodies are buried, from the founder of Skift.

ai-supremacy.com

The Genius of Leopold Aschenbrenner

He essentially turned $200 million into $45 billion in two years, given back in a month and I'm not even clear what's left or what's next.

lennysnewsletter.com

Anthropic’s first technical PM on token maxing, the jagged edge, and living in the future | Dianne Penn

I joined in 2023 as Anthropic's first technical product manager, when the entire product team was five engineers, and has since helped ship every model from Claude 2 through Fable, and helped incubate Claude Code, MCP, Skills, computer use, tool use, and reasoning.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: America’s favorite capitalist villain & the investor betting on the rebels

By the end of several days together, I found myself wondering whether Mr. Wonderful was the real Kevin O'Leary — or simply the most successful role he ever played.

notboring.co

AI is Oil, Not God

I think it comes down to whether you think AI is more Oil or God, more 'an economically useful commodity that can be scaled and refined to act as a multiplier on everything we do' or 'supremely intelligent and powerful being that's going to wake up and make humanity subservient (if we're lucky).'

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #203

Kalanick's unifying idea for Atoms (and Uber before it) is that physical industries can be built like computers. In Kalanick's model, manufacturing is the CPU that transforms atoms, real estate is the storage layer, and transportation is the network that moves atoms from one place to another.

fs.blog

Truth Over Feelings: Inside Opendoor’s Turnaround

Most turnaround stories are told years later, by the winner, after the ending is already known. That's why they always sound clean and polished. This one doesn't have an ending yet, and it's anything but clean and polished.

upstartsmedia.com

Bell-Ringer To Bug-Hunter: Zoom CEO Eric Yuan Pushes Startup Speed, 15 Years In

'I'll write a summary: "Guys, I only have 24 hours to myself. You have so many engineers, add up how much time you guys have. Why don't you guys find those bugs? Why have only me find those issues?"'

platformer.news

The case for making your own apps

"What started as a little tool suddenly becomes this glorious massive app that wants to do everything," he said — and "sometimes those apps get more in the way than they actually help."

whyisthisinteresting

The Dubai Creek Edition

In 1958, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed, then Ruler of Dubai, borrowed around a half a million dollars from the Emir of Kuwait to dredge the creek. Dubai had no meaningful oil wealth at the time. What Sheikh Rashid had was a conviction that trade would define the city, and that the creek needed to be deep enough for modern ships.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The teenager who took on Meta (and won) & the modern athlete-turned-entrepreneur

Most companies are bolting AI onto old products. Notion did something much harder. It rebuilt itself from the inside out.

upstartsmedia.com

Pigment’s Eléonore Crespo: The French Founder Helping CFOs Ditch Spreadsheets For AI

"You have lobster, and you have, whatever, let's say a good steak, and then you have the noodles, and then you have the rice. And so you come, and Anthropic and OpenAI, they take the lobster and the good steak. And there are only some noodles left, and you're like, 'Oh my God.' That's what happens today, and it's very, very, very hard not only to compete, but to retain the talent. So for us, building in Europe has been an incredible strength."

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #202

A system built by a four-year-old startup went from prototype to a live combat mission, a month after another Corsair performed the first known rescue of downed pilots by an autonomous boat. Proving that a startup can build autonomous boats that are useful in combat is huge, but proving that they can build a great American shipyard again might be even bigger.