The best succinct + fun weekly newsletter to learn about all the best things you need to know across tech, startups, VC, AI, etc, sent out every Monday. (and at the minimum, it will include the links I post about every week on instagram!). Feedback? Things I should add? Respond back here or comment below x
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 featured companies:
Base Power: installs/operates residential batteries to support grid reliability. Base Power raised a $1 billion Series D at a reported $13 billion post-money valuation led by Ribbit Capital (!)
Job openings can be found here
Windborne Systems: weather intelligence powered by long-duration smart balloons and AI forecasting. They raised a $37 million Series B at a reported $250 million post-money valuation co-led by Khosla Ventures and Galvanize
Job openings can be found here
Some bonus companies that were also funded last week:
Mitti Labs (cleaner rice farming) 🌾 → $9.5M Series A (Job openings here)
Decade (AI wealth adviser) 💸 → $85M Seed (No job openings but stay tuned!)
Sapiom (buying tools for AI agents) 🛒 → $35M Series A (Job openings here)
Maximum (core banking software) 🏦 → $30M Seed (No job openings but stay tuned!)
Expedition Therapeutics (oral disease drugs) 💊 → $115M Series B (No job openings but stay tuned!)
Hadrian (automated defense factories) 🏭 → $1.37B Series D (Job openings here)
Volta Infra (AI cloud infrastructure) ☁️ → $300M Equity (Job openings here)
All the best things I’ve read this week
North Americans have depressing relationships: haven’t loved and resonated something I read so much in a long time. and no summary i make will do it justice because it’s just so beautifully written 🙃
if you’ve seen the “everyone wants to be in a village, but no one wants to be a villager” chatter on tiktok and resonated with it, you’ll likely like this essay too.
on how an obsession with individualism & never being inconvenienced/changed (a dominant focus of American society/mental health/relationships) actually hurts relationships/community (and also creates a world where we can no longer disagree with each other respectfully, vs avoiding the subjects all together)
”She messages three friends. One is overwhelmed with work. Another has plans with her partner. The third is protecting her energy after a difficult week. Every person responds compassionately. Every person has a reasonable boundary.
Nobody comes. This is the North American idea of community.”
Spotify’s AI Problem Is So Bad Random People Are Stepping In to Track the Slop by Emanuel Maiberg (404): probably my most agreed-upon poll yet. Shoudl AI music be labeled? 89% of you said yes:
‘So destructive’: women are paying for face scans that tell them what cosmetic procedures to get by Laura O’Connor (The Guardian): would you let AI analyze your face and suggest procedures? 42% of you said no!
I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I. by Bret Stephens (NYT): 🙋♀️ I’m guilty of this, especially for mundane things and meeting summaries (and 43% of you also do!)
All the most important things that happened last week, from intellectual to guilty pleasure and optimistic to cringe:
People are leaving Google and the stock market wasn’t happy about it: Demis Hassabis moved from DeepMind CEO to chairman and iconic Google engineer Jeff Dean left after 27 years (with three elite colleagues to… ✨launch an AI startup✨ and yes Google plans to invest). Alphabet shares fell more than 4% on announcement
Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable for $1.29B cash: I talk about it as a case study in understanding the true value of equity here. Airtable had raised roughly $1.35B and was valued at $11B pre-money in 2021, so although the team deserves a lot of credit for building an iconic company, it’s considered a disappointing headline number by many.
OpenAI slowed work on Astra because it may have “critical” cyber capabilities: adding onto the chatter about AI agents hacking systems + mixed POVs about whether there should be more/less restriction on AI releases… OpenAI’s preliminary tests suggest Astra could potentially discover serious zero-days or execute sophisticated cyberattacks without human help. It therefore paused Astra work that doesn’t meet its new security requirements (not a full development freeze, but “our model might be too powerful for normal controls” is quite the product teaser) 👀
Scientists turned AI-generated genomes into functioning viruses: AI’s promise of accelerated drug discovery + breakthroughs is getting more tangible (!).
Disney is bringing TikTok creators and their fan videos inside Disney+: Selected creators will get access to assets from hundreds of Disney films and series, with some videos appearing in Disney+’s TikTok-style Verts feed. Disney initially imagined Sora-generated videos filling it (RIP Sora) but now real creators will supply the ideas, production, personality, and free marketing 🫡 unsurprising given Netflix has been doing this too
OpenAI’s Jony Ive device resurfaced (it’s a doughnut-shaped speaker priced at $300-400): The pitch: an AI that understands your life without constant prompting. The tradeoff: letting an OpenAI camera and microphone observe enough of your life to become useful.
aka random things that I found interesting enough to screenshot or take a picture of last week
i’m amused by this viral (on Twitter) attraction quiz that’ll tell/show you a) who it thinks you’re type is, b) how picky you are, c) how unique your taste is
Spencer Greenberg 🔍@SpencrGreenberg
Is your taste in people basic or one-of-a-kind? How picky are you compared to others? Please participate in our study on attraction by rating faces and get a custom (optional) report at the end with your 'type' and metrics about your attraction! Link below 🔽 Thanks!
12:34 PM · Jul 30, 2026 · 5.64M Views
239 Replies · 139 Reposts · 4.42K Likes
(side note - if you like personality tests and psychology, you’ll love spencer’s other quizzes and his podcast (this is one of my favorite episodes where he interviews a sociopath)
TG for fun friends who keep me young: not to brag, but i played laser tag for the first time in 15 years this weekend and came in 2nd* (!)
*for one of the rounds, out of 3. the other two in which i came in much much lower than that lol
this was actually so fun. i am also still sore. 🫠 (shout out area 53, and apparently laser tag is $5 (are you kidding me) on tuesdays, lol)
<3 until next week!
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.