Haje Jan Kamps
We were blessed (cursed?) with the mother of all startup drama this week when Sam Altman was ousted from the top of multi-billion-dollar startup OpenAI. How do we know there was dramaaaa? Even Vanity Fair piled in.
Look, I haven’t been in any of the OpenAI board meetings, so God...
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One of the most interesting stories on the site this week — both to me personally as a hardware and AI nerd and according to our “how many people read this story” tools — is...
For many startups, getting a spot in an accelerator program like Y Combinator or TechStars is like winning the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Accelerators offer a wealth of opportunities that can make the difference between a great idea that doesn’t achieve its potential and one...
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If you’ve been following along with this newsletter, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been a little bit curious about AI — especially generative AI. I’m likely not the first person to make this observation,...
I haven’t seen a lot of agriculture tech startups submit their pitch decks for this series, so I was delighted to get one from Phospholutions, which just closed a $10 million round, bringing its total funds raised to $32 million.
The team initially said they used the deck to...
In one of my past startups, I had a co-founder who had a pretty clear goal for himself: he wanted to make $1 million for every year that he worked on this startup, and he wanted to leave a positive impact on the world.
I was struck by the...
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Startups exist to solve complex problems, not to be a quick moneymaking scheme, and their success lies in their unique value proposition. The harder the problem a startup is tackling, the stronger their competitive...
Mediocre founders aren’t able to articulate what’s hard about the problem they’re solving
I’m spotting a worrying trend among startup founders who seem to think that running a startup is effectively a get-rich-quick scheme. Apart from that mindset being wrong and naive, I suspect there’s something a lot more...
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For my column this week, I told the story of how an ex-colleague was impersonated by an AI-powered spambot and almost tricked me. It a nutshell: AI is often used for good, but it...
Aether’s pitch deck is a real head-scratcher. The company says that it raised almost $50 million to “extract lithium from previously inaccessible reserves.” That makes sense: Lithium is a valuable, hard-to-get resource that is being used by the bucketload in batteries and other electronics. But, the pitch deck...
