In partnership with

GM! It’s Brett again. On rare occasions, I daydream what it would have been like just to stay at Google.

I’d be making over $1M in total comp like some of my friends who did. I’d own a nice house, have time to actually enjoy life, take my family on expensive trips.

But I’d have a career - and that’s exactly what would crush my soul.

Steve Jobs once wrote something great (maybe the greatest): Don’t be a career. In that, he said "the journey is the reward." And he was right.

The founder life isn't glamorous - I don't make much money and work like a dog - but it's what I love so it's what I'll do until I retire.

🏠 AI

Autonomous Agents

Last week, Chinese startup The Butterfly Effect launched Manus, an AI agent claiming to be the world’s first fully autonomous AI. Unlike chatbots, which respond to prompts, Manus is designed to act - handling tasks like browsing the web, coding, analyzing data, and even operating on freelancing platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.

The launch was met with massive hype. Manus reportedly outperformed OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini on the GAIA benchmark, leading to a frenzy of early-access demand.

Invite codes were selling for thousands of dollars as AI enthusiasts scrambled to test it.

Early users had varied reactions -

Some are calling Manus China’s DeepSeek moment, a sign that the country is catching up in AI innovation. The difference? DeepSeek built a full GPT-4-level model, whereas Manus is focused on execution rather than intelligence.

The big picture - Manus is more than just another AI launch—it’s a signal of where the industry is headed. The race is shifting from chat-based assistants to fully autonomous agents capable of independent execution. If this trend holds, the impact on businesses and labor markets will be profound, reshaping productivity, employment, and even the definition of work itself. But Manus’s early struggles suggest that while the vision is compelling, the road to true AI autonomy is still under construction.

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🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• Judge denies Elon’s request to block OpenAI for-profit conversion.

• Apple’s smart home hub delayed by Siri challenges.

• Deutsche Telekom and Perplexity are launching an ‘AI Phone’ for under $1K.

• Gemini now supports video-based queries and on-screen content analysis.

AI

• Amazon is developing its own AI ‘reasoning’ model.

• Google co-founder Larry Page reportedly has a new AI startup.

• OpenAI reportedly plans to charge up to $20,000 a month.

• Mistral releases new optical character recognition(OCR) API.

• OpenAI launches $50M grant program to help fund academic research.

SCIENCE

• 22,000-year-old tracks in the US might be the oldest evidence of a vehicle.

• Paralyzed man moves robotic arm with his thoughts.

• Scientists discover how aspirin could prevent some cancers from spreading.

• Possible foundations of human intelligence observed for the first time.

CRYPTO

• Strategy seeks to raise up to $21B.

• a16z crypto leads $7M round for encrypted blockchain developer Seismic.

• US Department of Housing considers crypto and blockchain usage.

• Dogecoin, Cardano drop over 10% as bitcoin dips below $83,000.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: Turing, a key coding provider for OpenAI and other LLM producers, raised $111M in a Series E funding round to expand its AI-driven coding solutions and enterprise applications.

Stat: $700M. That’s Ramp’s annualized revenue as the fintech startup more than doubled its growth in 18 months.

Rabbit Hole: Make Something Heavy (Anu)

🤩 MONDAY MOTIVATION

🛠️ FOUNDERS CORNER

The best resources we recently came across that will help you become a better founder, builder, or investor.

⚡️ Basalt help you integrate AI in your product in seconds.

💬 Unreal Speech is a fast & affordable text-to-speech API.

🧑🏻‍💻 Trag is your AI code review companion.

🎯 The 80 / 20

Simple tricks to get a ton of value with minimal effort for work and life.

Energy based calendar scheduling

Your brain isn’t built to focus for eight straight hours. Some hours you’re sharp, others you’re running on fumes. Instead of forcing work into rigid time slots, match tasks to your natural energy peaks and dips.

For example - mornings can be perfect for deep work, strategy, and creative problem-solving, mid-afternoons can be ideal for admin, emails, and meetings that don’t require 100% brainpower and evenings can be great for winding down with planning and reflection.

If you’re not sure when your energy spikes, track it. For a few days, note when you feel dialed in vs. drained, then adjust your schedule accordingly.

The goal is to tackle high-leverage work when you’re at your best and save the shallow stuff for when your energy dips. Less effort, more output.

❓️ AI GENERATED OR NOT

Last week’s answer: If you guessed AI-generated… you were wrong.

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yeah (~33%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️ Nope (~67%)

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.

We're launching in 2025, but if you want early access, sign up for the waitlist at micro.so and respond to the confirmation email saying you came from Homescreen.

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