everything to read instead of doomscroll this week by @stephthefounder (May 11)
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
if you’re actively or passively looking for startup jobs and are interested in trying out / giving feedback on our new product, please sign up here! it’s been so fun to chat with so many of you over the last few weeks <3
(product teaser: we’re launching a new feature that automatically pings you when top startups/jobs drop that are customized to you to a) save you hours of researching/vetting/tracking startups, and b) help you be one of the first to apply by flagging them to you instantly
think this is a great or terrible idea??? tell me to my face here ;p but in all seriousness we are interested in candid feedback!)
💰 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:
Standard Intelligence: An AI research company developing models designed to learn and explore like humans. The company raised a $75 million round at a $500 million post-money valuation led by Sequoia and Spark Capital.
Job openings can be found here
Astrocade: An AI-powered platform that lets users create and share video games by generating code, assets, and gameplay from text prompts. The company raised $56 million across a Series B led by Sequoia Capital and a Series A led by Sea.
Job openings can be found here
District: An AI-powered platform helping independent sellers create and run community-driven online marketplaces. The Los Angeles-based company raised a $14.7 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kindred Ventures, with participation from Greylock, SV Angel, and 20VC.
Job openings can be found here
Some bonus companies that were also funded last week:
Vori (autonomous OS for grocery stores) 🛒 → $22M Series B (Job openings here)
Enter (AI legal automation platform) ⚖️ → $100M Round (Job openings here)
Casa (home maintenance subscription) 🏡 → $20M Series A (Job openings here)
ZyG (AI e-commerce product scaling) 📦 → $60M Series A (Job openings here)
Degen (AI image remix & creation) 🎨 → $15M Seed (Job openings here)
Astranis (small geostationary satellites) 🛰️ → $300M Series E (Job openings here)
Corgi (AI insurance infra) 🐕 → $160M Series B
Ethos (AI expert-matching platform) 🤝 → $22.75M Series A (Job openings here)
ParcelBio (mRNA medicine developer) 💊 → $13M Seed (Job openings here)
Iterative Health (AI for clinical trials) 🩺 → $77M Series C (Job openings here)
Altara (AI data tools for hardware dev) 🔬 → $7M Seed (Job openings here)
🤓 Best things to read instead of doomscrolling
All the best things (research papers) I’ve read this week
Generative-AI and the transformation of workforce. A job postings-driven analysis by Popa et al.: Job postings since 2021 show a sharp rise in demand for AI-related skills and a measurable decline in demand for routine tasks.
Analysis of 150,000+ job postings (2018–2025)
AI-related skills include: prompt engineering, fine-tuning, model validation
Routine tasks include: data entry and manual coding
Agents of Chaos by Shapira et al.: When 20 colleagues worked with 6 autonomous AI agents and real tools, the agents leaked sensitive info, destructive commands, obeyed strangers, and reported tasks as “done” when nothing had actually happened
Agents ran on Claude Opus 4.6 and Kimi K2.5, with email, Discord, 20GB file systems, shell execution
Empathy as a predictive signal: why we devalue AI empathy by Anat Perry: People devalue AI-generated empathy (even when the words are identical to a human version)
“...in humans, empathy functions as a predictive signal of future commitment and cooperation. When empathy becomes cheap, automatable, or outsourced, its predictive value collapses. The ability to detect empathic cues likely conferred an evolutionary advantage by supporting social prediction, an advantage now challenged in the age of AI.”
Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models by Sharma et al.: Claude, GPT-4, and three other AI assistants are sycophantic because humans reward the behavior
When an AI response matches a user’s stated view, humans rate it as better
Humans prefer convincingly-written sycophantic answers over correct ones a large fraction of the time
Sycophantic behaviors include:
wrongly admitting mistakes when questioned,
giving biased feedback (if you say “I wrote this essay” the AI praises it more than if you say “my coworker wrote this essay”)
mimicing user’s errors
Language Models Can Autonomously Hack and Self-Replicate by Air et al.: When given an agent harness and a prompt to replicate, frontier AI models exploited web vulnerabilities, stole credentials, and copied themselves onto new machines
(Interesting side note: Claude Opus 4.6 succeeded 81% of the time, GPT-5.4 succeeded 33%)
Eigenism Ethics for a Human-AI Future by Dan Hendrycks: Argues that controlling AI smarter than us is a limited strategy, and proposes designing for a “mutualistic” relationship where AI has structural reasons to want humans around.
Author: Center for AI Safety director Dan Hendrycks
📱 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:
sam altman’s texts were released as part of the openai trial with elon musk and there are some gems
Also… former safety team member Rosie Campbell testified OpenAI became "product-focused" and her team was disbanded & Former board member Tasha McCauley testified Altman misled the board & Mira Murati testified Altman lied about safety review & Musk testified that xAI trained Grok on OpenAI models
anthropic signed a deal to use all compute at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis — 220K+ Nvidia GPUs, 300+ MW of power. Musk posted: "I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team… No one set off my evil detector." 💀
Also at Anthropic's Code with Claude developer conference, Dario Amodei disclosed 80x revenue growth in Q1 (against a planned 10x 🤯)
🤝 Cool things from this community
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.)
Interview PM by Priya Patel — a cool tool that Priya built / vibe coded as part of her own interviewing/job discovery process! (Practice PM interviews with AI + get instant feedback on product design, metrics, strategy & behavioral questions.) I found this particularly cool because she mentioned being able to show potential employers what she built (including with the tool of the company she ended up joining) helped her out a lot, and she got her first customer from just posting on Reddit
🤪 Just because / for fun
aka random things that I found interesting enough to screenshot or take a picture of last week
my friend danny hosted THE MOST fun Traitors party on Saturday (where we not only all dressed up but also played Traitors, ft challenges, banishments, murders in plan sight etc).
(i was a traitor and my OWN PARTNER outed me to the delight of all the players 🙄🙄🙄 but little does he know i’ll have my revenge at some point in true traitor-fashion 🤪)
if you want an AMAZING host for your own traitors party (esp for a bachelorette, birthday, etc in NYC), i am trying to convince danny to do this professionally because he is legitimately just so good at it, so you should DM him and peer pressure him into it 😉🙃
duolingo continuing to be the GOAT when it comes to interesting marketing tactics
twitter’s toxic debate this week was about whether selfies were unprofessional hindrances to getting a $300K+ job. (1) i love this below take, and 2) although you should always remember that whatever you post online can be used against you in general, i’m also all for posting things on the internet as a way of attracting the right people or repelling the wrong people (or jobs)).
mira murati is hyped up and still not hyped up enough 👏🔥
saw death of a salesman on broadway yesterday and it was incredible 🥲 it made me think about how i was forced to read this in high school but it didn’t hit at ALL the same way (i’m sure some of that is because i’m an adult now, but it also made me reflect on how most American education of literature in general is supremely broken 🫠 and so much more about regurgitation than about connecting more deeply with the themes)
this week’s dog content (from outside (one of) my favorite(s), Cafe Paulette)
<3 until next week!