GM! It’s Brett again. Here’s something wild: Jack Dorsey, the billionaire who built Twitter and Square, almost became a massage therapist. Seriously.
At one point, his idea was to give massages to engineers while helping them with their code.
It’s a humbling reminder for a few things:
Everyone has terrible ideas
Your career path can be confusing and still work out
Who you surround yourself with matters more than anything
When Dorsey moved back to SF, he decided to get back into programming and start Twitter. Wouldn’t have happened if he stayed in St. Louis.
Anyway, let’s get to it.

🏠 AI
First up, OpenAI dropped $6.5B to acquire Jony Ive’s AI hardware startup, io. Sam described this as the biggest thing OpenAI’s ever pursued.
Rumours are that they're developing products that moves the consumers ‘beyond screens’, would be pocket-sized, and contextually aware. Importantly, it’s not eyewear or a phone. Sam ambitiously plans to ship 100M units faster than any new consumer tech product before. Jony Ive is personally leading the design vision.
Apple’s stock slipped ~2% immediately following the announcement, reflecting investor concern over renewed hardware competition.
Meanwhile, Google didn’t sit idle. At Google I/O, they revealed Gemini 2.5 Pro’s new "Deep Think" mode, an experimental reasoning feature that significantly boosts problem-solving capabilities. But the headline-grabber was Veo 3, Google’s latest video-generation AI.
Veo 3 doesn't just generate video - it creates audio, including realistic dialogue, sound effects, and ambient noise, fully synced with visuals. Check some crazy examples here:
The big picture - These developments highlight an accelerating AI arms race. OpenAI and Google are pushing tech beyond screens into ambient computing and hyper-realistic media creation. And With Apple & Google both bullish on smart glasses, consumer tech could soon feel entirely different, creative tools will be radically transformed, and the boundary between reality & AI-gen content will rapidly dissolve.

You’re doing breakfast wrong
Let’s face it—most breakfast options just don’t cut it.
Toast? Too light. Cereal? Mostly sugar. Skipping it altogether? Not ideal.
If you want real fuel to power your day, it’s time to upgrade to Huel Black Edition. This ready-in-seconds shake is packed with 40g of plant-based protein, 27 essential vitamins & minerals, and 0 artificial sweeteners—just science-backed nutrition to support your muscles, digestion, and more.
Oh, and did we mention? It’s delicious.
Right now, first-time customers get 15% off, plus a free t-shirt and shaker with code HUELSPRING, for orders over $75.

🤝 THE LATEST IN…
TECH
Oracle to buy $40B of Nvidia chips for OpenAI's US data center.
xAI launched live search API for real-time data access.
Shopify launched an AI-powered store builder.
Apple plans to bring out AI smart glasses next year & Google has officially re-entered the smart glasses market after a decade.
AI
Capgemini & SAP partner with Mistral to deploy AI for sectors like finance, aerospace and defence.
Microsoft announced ~50 AI tools to build the ‘agentic web’ at Build 2025.
Anthropic launched 2 new AI models: Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4.
Apple to open up its local AI models to third-party apps.
Mistral released Document AI, an enterprise tool for extracting text from documents & images with 99% accuracy.
SCIENCE
This new approach could fractionate crude oil using much less energy.
Accidentally discovered class of material passively harvests water from air.
New mechanism rewires cellular energy processing for drastic weight loss.
Next-gen semiconductors could supercharge 6G delivery.
CRYPTO
Alchemy acquires HeyMint to expand its smart wallet services.
Synthetix and Derive call off $27M merger proposal.
Strategy now holds 580,250 BTC.
Kalshi now accepts Solana after adding Bitcoin, USDC, & WLD.

🏃♀️ QUICKIES
Raise: LMArena, a crowdsourced AI benchmarking platform, raised $100M in a seed funding round to scale its model evaluation ecosystem used by top AI labs.
Stat: $575,000. That was Klarna’s revenue per employee last year - now it’s nearly $1M, thanks to an aggressive AI efficiency push.
Rabbit Hole: Attention Wasn't All We Needed (Stephen Diehl)

🤩 MONDAY MOTIVATION

🛠️ FOUNDERS CORNER
The best resources we recently came across that will help you become a better founder, builder, or investor.
🤑 FormStory will never let you lose any lead.
🧠 Pieces is a Long-Term memory agent that remembers everything you work on.
🗣️ Vapi helps developers build, test, and scale voice AI agents with ease.

🎯 The 80 / 20
Simple tricks to get a ton of value with minimal effort for work and life.
Context Dependent Memory
Here’s a surprisingly powerful trick: don’t do different types of work in the same space.
Your brain builds associations with physical environments. If you brainstorm, write, and take Zoom calls all from your bed - your brain doesn’t know what mode it’s supposed to be in. You end up half-working, half-scrolling, fully distracted.
Jerry Seinfeld, famously obsessive about his process, uses different rooms for different creative tasks. One space to write. Another to revise. Another to rehearse. Why? Because context matters. Your environment primes your mind.
It’s based on a psychology concept “context-dependent memory.” Basically, your brain recalls and performs better when the environment matches the task you trained it for.
Just carve out zones: a corner for deep work, a chair for calls, a table for planning. Even changing lighting or scent can help.

❓ AI GENERATED OR NOT

Last week’s answer: If you guessed AI-generated… you were wrong.
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️ Yeah (~58%)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nope (~42%)
Here’s the original.

👋 A Quick Note About Micro
Micro is a CRM that doesn't feel like homework and an email client that knows what matters. Simply put, it's an all-in-one productivity tool that organizes itself so you don't have to.
I built Micro with some friends because I was tired of getting guilt tripped for not hitting inbox 0 and having to bounce around between so many tools to do my job.
That said, Homescreen subscribers can cut the line - go to micro.so/waitlist, join the waitlist, and write in “Homescreen” for Other in the “How did you hear about us” question to get early access.

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