AI gets physical. Bots get social | Newsletter

Quick Hits

Addictive tech?: Instagram boss calls usage ‘problematic.’

App duopoly: Apple and Google revamp app stores.

Beast mode: MrBeast acquires youth money app Step.

Design dilemma: ‘Addictive’ TikTok faces EU scrutiny.

Future Galaxy: Samsung unveils first AI phone.

Google groans: Workers urge divestment from ICE.

Health bets: Ant Group dives into AI healthcare.

Lunar launch: Musk envisions moon-based factory.

Satellite surge: Amazon plans to launch 4.5k Leo satellites.

Suite pursuit: AI execs spend big on Delhi AI summit.

Company Spotlight:

Founder Tip: Most startups promise you'll learn the business. Then they hand you bug fixes.

Nicholas Moschopoulos joined two startups before founding Junior. Both times, founders sold him on seeing how the business actually works. Both times, he got buried in bug fixes instead.

That bait-and-switch isn't just bad recruiting. It's a signal about who you actually want. Engineers who join for business exposure don't just want to ship features. They want to sit on sales calls. Understand why customers churn. See the P&L. Learn how founders make trade-offs between growth and runway. They're treating your startup like their business school.

If that sounds exhausting to manage, hire people who don't care. But don't promise transparency and deliver tickets.

Junior runs differently: engineers lead customer conversations, get feedback on how they showed up, see the financials that drive decisions. The work still gets done. But it's not the ceiling.

Watch the full interview here.

Startups Hiring Now

Unlearn.AI

Transforming clinical development by making every trial smarter with AI

See 5 open roles

PeakMetrics

PeakMetrics extracts insights from millions of unstructured media datasets in real-time

See 3 open roles

HealthVerity

Synchronizing the Science

See 10 open roles

Lithic

We're making digital payments safer and easier for everyone

See 12 open roles

Job Search Tip

Job Search Tip: Work with AI. Push back and forth with it.

Most people paste a job post into ChatGPT, hit generate, and send whatever comes out. It sounds tidy. It also sounds exactly like everyone else.

Chase Johnson from Primer (formerly WRITER & Replit) says the smarter move is to treat AI like a sparring partner.

Feed it the job post and your resume. See where the two line up — and where they don't. Notice what it gets wrong, what it overplays, what it misses entirely.

Then close the tab and write your own version.

Watch the full ‘Ask a Recruiter' interview here.

What We’re Reading

AI gets physical

Alibaba launched its RynnBrain AI model designed to power robotics. Physical AI is a “multitrillion-dollar growth opportunity,” Nvidia’s CEO says.

Bots get social

Moltbook is the talk of SF as the first AI-only social media platform. Bots are doing things like creating a religion with prophets and holy texts.

Study: AI leads to burnout

AI boosts productivity of tech workers and also burns them out, according to a UC Berkeley study. “You don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more,” one study participant reported.

Accelerator targets college students

Two Stanford students launched Breakthrough to bridge the funding gap for aspiring student entrepreneurs nationwide.

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