Listen : Watch : Read #30
🎙️Listen 🎙️
I mentioned Base 44 last week and the solo founder (not quite) exit of $80m to Wix and much more. Join Lenny Rachitsky with Maor Shlomo for deep insights and growth from 0 - 80m. Some great insights including his productivity stack, his original goal of just $1.5m, his first 3 clients, The story of signing the $80M acquisition deal while war broke out with Iran and much more!. It's hard to hide Lenny's excitement on this one! The key question now is is, is this a one of or the start of something others will follow.
A good listen here in TechCrunch on why AI companies should pay for content with Cloudflares latest release! More insights below from Saanya Ojha of Bain & Company on what this means!. Congrats Chirantan "CJ" Desai, Farooq Sheikh and entire Cloudflare team!
📺 Watch 📺
A fascinating discussion with Benjamin Horowitz and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, hosted by Erik Torenberg, General Partner. From teaching GP's to culture - both fascinating to hear, 7 mini funds they have created, mission orientated VC, founders mindset vs professional CEO's and of course AI and Crypto - plus a lot more.
📚 Read 📚
A cheeky request before you get stuck in to this weeks reading list! Oscar Walsh, Daniel Bankover Ashley Beale and I are all taking on the Action Medical Research Race the Sun Challenge at Cheddar Gorge next weekend. A great charity that for 70+ years has looked after children, from premature babies to ground breaking research.
🏃🏻Find out more below and sponsor our triathlon for this great cause! 🚴🏻 🛶
A great summary from Saanya Ojha, Partner at Bain & Company - Yesterday, the open internet got its first toll booth. Not from courts or Congress, but from Cloudflare. The company, whose infrastructure touches roughly 20% of all global internet traffic, announced a significant shift: All new customer domains will now block AI bots by default.
For 30 years, we assumed the internet had no gatekeepers. But it did. We just didn’t notice them until they started saying no.
With rumours of Meta offering up to $100m to secure new talent, OpenAI respond. Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer responds
“I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Chen wrote. “Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by.”
And by all accounts some of this is working, Ilya Sutskever returns to CEO of Safe Superintelligence Inc. after Daniel Gross leaves the firm
Given the importance of Agents and AgenticAI, this is a great move from Google in donating the Agent2Agent interoperability protocol to the The Linux Foundation. Google will also form the Agent2Agent project along with Amazon Web Services (AWS) , Salesforce , SAP, Cisco, Microsoft and I'm delighted to say - ServiceNow. With this news, all hyperscalers and more than 100 other companies now support A2A.
Andreas Schierenbeck, chief executive of Hitachi Energy, told the Financial Times in an interview that no other industry would be allowed as volatile a use of power as the AI sector.
Tech’s spiking electricity use as it trains artificial intelligence must be reined in by governments in order to maintain stable supplies, the head of the world’s largest transformer maker has warned,
An insurance fight like no other, in which a Cumbrian Family Wins fight for no snow!. Weve seen other insurance like this recently for guaranteed weather
👀 Quick bites 👀
Which country has the best government–startup relationship in the world? - Brent Hoberman shares all!
ChatGPT is ruining your critical thinking. - Chris Donnelly explains more!
Allianz flags climate-driven GDP hit as British tourists evacuated in Crete - Allianz
And thats It! See you next week!