everything to read instead of doomscroll this week by @stephthefounder (June 1)
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
what i’m thinking about this week: the SpaceX IPO is such an interesting/inspiring (and rare) story about equity (and frankly the best possible scenario, but still one to pay extra attention to!):
the IPO is expected to create a ton of not only millionaires, but also ~400 centi-millionaires 🤯
considering that’s a top .1% outcome for even founders at a startup, let alone 400 employees/founders/execs from a single company, that’s incrediblegiven the nature of the co, a lot of people who received equity were not traditional tech folks but instead talented “Tube Benders, Orbital Tube Welders, Cleanroom Technicians”
a reminder that there is never a free lunch - although SpaceX is an obvious mega-winner now, the company was founded in 2002 (!!). employees that joined early experienced many high profile failures from ‘06-’08 and were in a company that looked like it may go out of business. employees that held through that are now likely very happy 😏 but it took a lot of uncertainty/risk at the time that i find people forget in hindsight
choosing the right company is so important, hence why we’re building shortlist (and a new product to be released soon 🤫) to help you do just that. (and if in or recently in the startup/tech job market and interested in giving feedback, i’ve loved talking to many of you / hope to continue doing so! please sign up here)
💰 Companies that will make you a millionaire
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.
And now you can easily earn some cold hard cash 💰: you can now use Shortlist (a fun product my company has been building) to earn $$ (anywhere from $5K to $30K) for successfully referring people to top startups. The brilliant part about this is:
you don’t even need to know the person who’s ultimately hired - if you post a link on LinkedIn and the algorithm shows it to someone who ultimately clicks the link and is hired, you get the $$$ 😏
all of these companies are great and highly respected, so your friend (or random person who saw your post) will also thank you 😉 win win
(PS are you a founder or do you work at a cool startup that’s hiring? reply back with the name so we can give you guys a shout!)
This week’s featured companies:
NavigateAI: an AI copilot platform for construction and field workers, founded by Opendoor co-founder Eric Wu. The company raised a $25 million seed round at a $225 million valuation led by Elad Gil
Job openings can be found here
OpenRouter: a well-named unified inference routing platform that lets developers and enterprises manage model selection, usage, reliability, and spending across proprietary and open-source language models through a single interface. The company raised a $113 million round at a $1.3 billion post-money valuation led by CapitalG.
Job openings can be found here
Pax: an AI-powered public safety platform that connects camera feeds, police records, and criminal databases. The São Paulo-based company raised a $40 million seed round co-led by Greenoaks and Benchmark
Job openings can be found here
Some bonus companies that were also funded last week:
Cognition (AI coding agents) 👨💻 → $1B+ Round (Job openings here)
Moment (AI wealth management) 📊 → $78M Series C (Job openings here)
Quartermaster (maritime sensing) 🚢 → $43M Series A (Job openings here)
Pace (AI insurance automation) ⛈️ → $46M Series B (Job openings here)
Reactor (real-time AI video) 🎬 → $59M Series A (Job openings here)
Waypoint Bio (AI cancer therapies) 🧬 → $20M Series A (Job openings here)
Fireworks AI (LLM cloud infra) 🔥 → $15B valuation round (Job openings here)
Picogrid (military sensor systems) 📡 → $45M Series A (Job openings here)
Garner Health (AI doctor matching) 🏥 → $100M Series E (Job openings here)
Didit (identity verification) 🪪 → $6M Seed (Job openings here)
📱 Everything you may have missed in tech/startup news
All the most important things that happened last week, from intellectual to guilty pleasure and optimistic to cringe:
Anthropic filed for IPO!! (notably beating OpenAI to the punch)
This is after Anthropic raised $65B in a Series H at a $965B valuation announced this past Thursday
Claude Opus 4.8 also dropped
Nerd drama over GitHub Copilot switching to token-based billing on June 1, drawing developer backlash (reminiscent of Anthropic cutting off OpenClaw from using their Max plan and instead making people pay for tokens - spoiler alert: as someone who did that it’s gotten a lot more expensive hence why people are upset 😬)
‘Trump accounts’ app launches to manage $1,000 federal investment per child by The Washington Post: 🚨 PSA If you have a kid born Jan 2025 or later (through 2028): you can get $1000 via Trump Accounts. (And if you have a kid 10 or under, born before Jan 2025: you could get $250 (funded from the Dell family) if you live in a ZIP code with median income under $150K)
🤝 Cool things from this community
[new experiment!] every week I want to highlight cool projects, opportunities, fundings, etc from this community! these are free and are curated for things that are the most helpful/inspiring/interesting for other members of this group. for more context and to submit any cool projects etc, please see here! (they’ll be reviewed on a rolling basis every Sunday(ish))
(Please note a feature here is not an explicit endorsement unless specifically stated — I do light diligence but given time/resource constraints, am not doing rigorous diligence (so please do your own research before spending lots of time and money, etc.)
The politics of owning a tech company: an article submitted by Heather Sliwinski. “This one’s a little different from the typical funding round or product launch. It’s a story about a rare win for tech workers when the social contract between employer and employees has been shattered. Hustle is a 10-year-old progressive tech startup that was acquired by investor Social Capital in 2020, ran into a serious values conflict, and this week, the employees bought the company back using company profits. Every employee now holds equity, and the spread between the most senior person and the newest hire is less than 4-to-1 (compared to 500-to-1 at most tech companies). For founders and operators thinking about cap tables, ownership structures and what it actually means to build a company with the people in it, this feels like a new blueprint for the future.”
Why the AI Age Belongs to the Teen Generalist by Lara Jeetley: a TEDx talk that explores why adaptability, curiosity, and interdisciplinary thinking is more valuable than early specialisation in an AI-driven world. Generalists could be uniquely equipped for the future (!)
🤪 Just because / for fun
aka random things that I found interesting enough to screenshot or take a picture of last week
i’m embarrassed to admit i’m very late to the news that martha stewart co-founded an ai company (the documentary on netflix about her is genuinely amazing, btw)
everlane shockingly sold to shein for $100m and michael preysman (its founder) came back to say he’s doing it again (notably with no VC or PE)
more and more repeat, formerly vc-backed founders are having their second chapter be completely self-funded/bootstrapped 👀 and i think this will become increasingly true for all founders given 1) consumer/cpg notoriously is a hard category for vc given tension between growth/quality/expensive CAC and 2) AI lowering starting costs for new businesses (yay)
was excited to join the ordinary launching a free bus in nyc! (kind of… i sadly discovered it was shut down…) but as someone who greatly misses the days of deeply subsidized uber/doordash, i’m all for brands using more of their money to pay for public goods 😉 like polymarket’s free supermarket and corgi insurance’s 24/7 coffee shops? keep em coming
i love everything by patrick radden keefe and after loving the snakehead/empire of pain i finally got around this weekend to starting say nothing and am loving it so far
(also shoutout to raku, one of my favorite udon places in the city)
i’m 8+ years late but i discovered this this weekend and binged almost 20 episodes. if you’re a fan of investigative journalism, good storytelling, true crime(ish), liked ‘making a murderer’ / ‘serial’ you’ll likely really like this
(i haven’t listened to other seasons yet - if you have, would you recommend?? and if so, which? or what others? pls tell)
<3 until next week!