Elon bought Cursor for $60 billion, Dario got Trump to call off the dogs, and Tim Cook says iPhones are about to cost more. Whose week was worse?
Hi,
Next week, I’m opening the doors and showing off what this community is building.
If you’ve got a project, company, product, side quest, weird invention, or beautiful internet contraption that deserves some eyeballs, hit reply and send me the link. I’ll be featuring a handful of them.
Bonus points if you’re raising right now. Send me the details on your round and I’ll pass it along to our syndicate.
May you flourish.
Let’s go.
This week from the AI for Founders podcast on Spotify :
The lawyer who quit big law to compete with Claude and ChatGPT — LINK
Logan Brown of Soxton built an AI-powered outside counsel for startups, charging $100 for a contract instead of big law's $900-an-hour rate, with a human lawyer reviewing every AI draft before it ships.
He analyzed millions of calls. The move that closed deals was a laugh — LINK
Nick Deveau of Grotto AI found the strongest predictor of a signed apartment lease wasn't price or amenities, it was whether the leasing agent laughed on the phone, so his AI coaches humans on warmth instead of replacing them.
Your AI bill is a tax on what you don't know — LINK
Eugene Cheah of Featherless raised $25M to host tens of thousands of open source models behind one API key, arguing the best model for most startup tasks is open, cheap, and often built in China.
You spent on the camera and the mic, and you still showed up in a college shirt — LINK
Zoher Karu of Taelor built the AI matching engine behind an AI-powered menswear rental service, treating "looking put together" as a data problem and turning every rental into a B2B data product for brands.
The white coat problem is breaking healthcare, and AI is the fix — LINK
Amir Dolev of Hello Heart helped launch Nia, the world's first AI heart health assistant, built to absorb the administrative friction of a doctor's visit so the human moment can stay human.
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Investor Corner
Are you raising? Reply here, and we’ll feature your deck.
DiningOut unites restaurants, food lovers, industry suppliers, and brands through a self-reinforcing ecosystem of live events, targeted media, and proprietary technology.
First and only American-manufactured vape cartridge.
Rare, Pristine, Protected drinking water.
The only platform that can authenticate human-made content. Using patented algorithms that analyze how content is made, not just the output.
Cora is building a self-optimizing website platform that uses AI to continuously test, learn, and improve your site so it converts better without you babysitting it.
AI-powered training simulations to help healthcare learners practice complex interpersonal and communication skills. We focus on realism, repeatability, and scalability—making soft-skills training more accessible and measurable.
Voyager is an AI-native Web3 ecosystem and multi-asset exchange. Trade digital assets and commodities in one seamless interface.
RoboReliance is building autonomous robotic systems designed to handle real-world industrial work so humans don’t have to stand next to dangerous, repetitive machines all day.
Tip of the spear:
SpaceX buys Cursor for $60B days after its blockbuster IPO — LINK
SpaceX agreed to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion in stock, just days after going public and briefly hitting a $2.6 trillion valuation that passed Amazon's. The company told IPO investors it sees a $26 trillion addressable market in AI.
The US banned Anthropic's best models, then Trump had lunch with Dario Amodei and un-banned them — LINK
Washington forced Anthropic to pull Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 over an alleged jailbreak, dozens of cybersecurity experts called the ban dangerous, and Trump now says Anthropic is no longer a national security threat after a G7 sit-down with Amodei.
Trump signs two executive orders to win the quantum race against China — LINK
The orders direct the Department of Energy to build a research-grade quantum computer by 2028 and push federal agencies to adopt quantum-resistant cryptography by 2030, framed explicitly as a bid to out-build China.
China's LineShine becomes the world's fastest supercomputer, without a single GPU — LINK
LineShine hit 2.198 exaflops on an all-CPU, fully domestic design, dethroning the US Department of Energy's El Capitan and reclaiming the Top500 crown for China for the first time since 2017.
Nvidia joins the AI debt boom with a $20 billion bond sale — LINK
The chipmaker is raising at least $20 billion through its first bond sale since 2021, joining a wave of AI infrastructure debt as the industry's capital needs outgrow even its own cash piles.
AI data centers just got a government-mandated fast lane to the grid — LINK
A new FERC directive orders grid operators to fast-track interconnection for data centers, but stops short of addressing the underlying electricity supply shortage, a gap founders in power-hungry industries should watch closely.
ChatGPT's market share slips below 50% for the first time — LINK
OpenAI's chatbot still leads with 1.1 billion monthly users, but Gemini (662 million) and Claude (245 million) are eating into a market that, for the first time, has a real second and third place.
Rivian cuts hundreds of workers right after its biggest launch yet — LINK
The EV maker laid off staff as part of a restructuring meant to speed its path to profitability, just as deliveries of its long-awaited R2 model began.
The AI layoff wave is becoming a "powder keg" — LINK
At the exact moment tens of thousands of workers are being shown the door, a small cohort of AI insiders is becoming wealthy on a scale that's hard to comprehend, a gap founders building in this moment can't ignore.
Framework:
Voice of the Customer Go-To-Market
If you're selling into a tight, relationship-driven vertical, real estate, healthcare, insurance, cold outbound is already dead on arrival. The deals get made in conference hallways and on stage, between people who already trust each other.
01 — Find the room before you find the customer.
Map the two or three industry events where your buyers already gather every year, then show up as a sponsor or panelist instead of a cold-emailer. Book the table six months out, not the week before.
02 — Put real operators on your advisory board.
Recruit two or three respected, still-active people in the industry with small equity grants, not for the logo on your deck, but because they can open doors and vouch for you in rooms you can't get into yet. Ask each advisor for one warm introduction per quarter, and track it.
03 — Let your best customer do the selling.
Get your strongest early customer to share results on a panel or in a case study. Nothing moves a skeptical buyer like a peer in their own niche saying it worked. Build the case study before a prospect asks for one, not after.
04 — Replace your demo with a story.
Lead every pitch with "here's what this did for someone exactly like you," not a feature tour. Rewrite your deck so the first slide is a customer outcome, not your product.
05 — Work the room backwards.
After every event, map who you met and who they can introduce you to, then follow up within 48 hours while the conversation is still warm. Build this into your CRM as a mandatory step, not an afterthought.
Agentic partnership acquisition for the world’s top podcasts. —> gethowdi.com
Keep it moving
Meta pauses an employee AI-tracking program after it leaked sensitive data company-wide — LINK
The controversial program, built to gather data for AI training, let the whole company see information that should have stayed private.
Half of US shoppers now fact-check AI on Reddit before buying, and REI just found out why — LINK
A Reddit survey found 50% of US shoppers verify AI product recommendations before purchasing, the same week REI got mocked for an AI-generated bike ad with handlebars sprouting from the seat.
Pinterest launches an experimental AI shopping app called "Ask Pinterest" — LINK
The conversational app lets users ask for recommendations and inspiration directly, pushing Pinterest further into an AI-commerce race already crowded with Amazon, Google, and OpenAI.
The UK's CMA orders Google to make search rankings fairer and more transparent — LINK
The new rules require Google to rank organic results, including AI Overviews, using objective criteria and give publishers advance notice before major algorithm changes.
Apple's next AirPods may pack a camera for Siri, alongside a 2027 foldable iPhone — LINK
The camera-equipped AirPods are reportedly designed to help Siri understand a user's surroundings, part of a broader 2027 hardware push that also includes a second folding iPhone.
NASA picks Eric Schmidt's rocket company to fly to Mars, setting up a race with SpaceX — LINK
Relativity Space will build and launch a 2028 Mars orbiter for NASA, giving the former Google CEO a shot at beating Elon Musk's SpaceX to the Red Planet.
"RAMageddon" is forcing Apple to raise iPhone prices — LINK
AI's demand for memory chips has driven DRAM costs up roughly fourfold in a year, and Tim Cook says price increases are now "unavoidable."
Anthropic becomes the first pure AI startup to join the Frontier carbon removal coalition — LINK
The company joined a $915 million funding round for the Stripe-and-Google-founded climate group, its first public climate commitment to date.
ASML faces US pressure over claims one of its banned chipmaking machines reached China — LINK
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick raised the concern directly with ASML's leadership; the Dutch chipmaker says it has never shipped an EUV machine to China and has a tracking log to prove it.
Microsoft may tap rival AWS as AI coding demand strains GitHub's servers — LINK
GitHub's traffic is reportedly outpacing Microsoft's own Azure capacity, pushing the company to consider borrowing cloud muscle from its biggest competitor.
Nobel laureate John Jumper leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic — LINK
The AlphaFold creator is joining Anthropic's push into computational biology, the same week Google also lost Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI.
Norway bans generative AI for elementary schoolers — LINK
Kids aged 6 to 13 won't be allowed to use AI tools in class starting this fall, with the government citing risks that students skip essential steps in learning.
Meta lobbies to attach a lawsuit shield to the Kids Online Safety Act — LINK
The proposed language would grant platforms immunity from state-level child-harm claims, a move critics call a backdoor escape from thousands of pending lawsuits.
The VLC creator raised $5M to control "hundreds of millions" of robots — LINK
Jean-Baptiste Kempf, who built the video player behind 6 billion downloads, is now building Kyber, a low-latency SDK for controlling robots, drones, and remote devices at scale.
iOS 27 buries its best AI features outside of Siri — LINK
Think automatic restaurant-bill splitting via Apple Cash, AI-driven password upgrades after a breach, and Safari tabs that organize themselves by topic, all quietly outside the Siri headlines.
Adobe expands Firefly with AI brand kits and agentic creative workflows — LINK
The update lets users generate a full brand identity, logo, and color palette from a text prompt, plus an AI assistant that can execute multi-step edits across Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator.
Anthropic's new privacy policy may ask some Claude users for a government ID — LINK
The policy, effective July 8, lets Anthropic require ID and selfie verification for flagged accounts, using a Peter Thiel-backed vendor that has drawn criticism before.
An unpatchable flaw in old Apple chips opens the door to a fresh iPhone jailbreak — LINK
The "usbliter8" exploit hits A12 and A13 chips at the hardware level, meaning no software update can ever fix it for affected iPhone XS, XR, and 11 models.
A breach at Klue exposed customer data at HackerOne, Huntress, Tanium, and other security firms — LINK
Hackers used a single compromised credential to steal Salesforce data from at least nine of Klue's corporate customers, a reminder that your vendor's weakest link is now yours too.
Microsoft and Chevron are building one of the largest gas-powered data centers in the US — LINK
The 2.67-gigawatt Texas project will run almost entirely on natural gas, the same week Nvidia claimed its new liquid-cooling design has "largely solved" AI's water problem, just not its power problem.
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What I’m thinking about:
The real motive behind AI job panic is not what most people are saying out loud. Breakdown in under a minute. — Clip
AI isn't just an engineering problem but a human one. This short reframes what founders actually need to solve for. — Clip
Uncover the AI tools (here) you didn’t ask for, but now you’re weirdly into.
Thanks for being here.
-Ryan
p.s. I write about Revops, Product, and Founder-led marketing on Linkedin , X , and my blog .
