In partnership with

GM! It’s Brett again. We spent $100K+ on our landing page. It’s won design awards, but it’s actually filled with terrible design.

The team was under a tight deadline and had to make some concessions that only the best designers would notice. Still, it drove tons of investor inbound, word of mouth with prospective customers, and good vibes for the team.

Had we tried to make it perfect, we would have spent $200K & 6 more months and most people wouldn’t notice the difference.

The real lesson here is that done is better than perfect. We got more than our money's worth from the website despite the fact that it doesn't hit our design standards.

🏠 AI

Bots that text you first

Meta is testing proactive messaging in its custom AI chatbots built with AI Studio, its no-code platform launched last year. Basically, these bots can now slide into your DMs unprompted, but only after you've initiated a conversation yourself. You also need to have sent at least five messages in the last 14 days - so it's not entirely out of nowhere.

Meta’s angle here is boosting engagement and user retention. Court documents from earlier this year show Meta expects its generative AI products to pull $2-$3 billion in revenue by the end of 2025.

To give you a feel, one example bot named "The Maestro of Movie Magic" might send you follow-up messages checking if you need soundtrack recommendations. Meta says these interactions should always match the bot's personality & previous conversations.

Proactive messaging treads close to privacy boundaries. Meta even warned users not to share personal info in its AI’s public feed after many did so unknowingly.

The big picture: Meta is betting that proactive chatbots can become sticky enough to build something substantial to tackle the loneliness epidemic. But balancing personalization and privacy will be key.

Stay up-to-date with AI

The Rundown is the most trusted AI newsletter in the world, with 1,000,000+ readers and exclusive interviews with AI leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Demis Hassibis, Mustafa Suleyman, and more.

Their expert research team spends all day learning what’s new in AI and talking with industry experts, then distills the most important developments into one free email every morning.

Plus, complete the quiz after signing up and they’ll recommend the best AI tools, guides, and courses – tailored to your needs.

Sign up to start learning.

🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• xAI’s buying a foreign power plant & relocating it to US.

• TikTok building new version of app ahead of expected US sale.

• Xbox producer tells staff to use AI to ease job loss pain.

• OpenAI’s Head of Recruiting called out Meta for “exploding offers” that force hires before they can even talk to their manager.

AI

• OpenAI’s offering AI consulting services at $10M+.

• Ilya is now the CEO of Safe Superintelligence.

• Perplexity rolled out a $200/month plan.

• A new, faster DeepSeek R1-0528 variant appears from German lab.

• Grok 4 benchmarks leak with 45% score on Humanity Last Exam

SCIENCE

• A couple tried for 18 years to get pregnant. AI made it happen.

• Breakthrough battery lets physicists reverse entanglement, & rewrite quantum law.

• OpenAI has hired a forensic psychiatrist to tackle rising mental‑health crises linked to AI use.

• Chronic low back pain may be less likely if you walk - a lot.

CRYPTO

• Robinhood pays $5 in transaction fees to deploy 213 tokenized stock contracts on Arbitrum.

• OpenAI does not 'endorse' Robinhood tokenizing its private shares.

• Ripple applies for US banking license following Circle.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

• Raise, Mergers & Acquisitions: 
  
  • Grammarly acquired Superhuman to accelerate its AI productivity platform.
  • Lovable on track to raise $150M at $2B valuation.
  • xAI raised $10M in debt and equity.
  • Hypersonic weapons startup Castelion is raising $350M in Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Altimeter Capital.

Stat: 9,000. That’s the number of Microsoft employees being laid off.

Rabbit Hole: The American DeepSeek Project (Nathan Lambert)

🛠️ FOUNDERS CORNER

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

😳 Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI

🧠 Context is the new prompt.
Prompt engineering is evolving into something bigger - a full-stack discipline called context engineering.

❌ Chain-of-Thought Is Not Explainability
This paper argues that while CoT makes LLMs look more transparent, it often misleads, and shouldn’t be mistaken for actual interpretability without deeper validation.

😎 Agentic Retrieval Augmented Generation for Personalized Recommendation
ARAG adds agent-based reasoning to RAG for personalized recommendations, using four LLM agents to model user intent—boosting ranking performance by up to 42%.

🤑 How Oracle Is Winning the AI Compute Market?

🔥 Monday Motivation: Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story.

😂 FROM THE FEED

🎯 THE 80 / 20

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

The L / N / O Filter

It’s a simple method from Shreyas Doshi, a former Stripe and Twitter PM, that helps you stop wasting time on low-impact work.

Every task is either: L = Leverage (moves the needle), N = Necessary (keeps the lights on), O = Optional (nice but whatever)

Once you start tagging your to-dos with L / N / O, something clicks. You stop wasting prime energy on optional admin junk and start protecting your mornings for high-leverage thinking. Strategy, deep work, hard decisions - those are L tasks. Do them when your brain is fresh. Status updates, admin, small bugs? N or O. Batch them. Delegate if you can.

The goal is to spend less time on things that don’t matter & way more on the few that do.

❓️ AI GENERATED OR NOT

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

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️ Yeah (~85%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nope (~15%)

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.

REACH 40K+ FOUNDERS, INVESTORS & OPERATORS

If you’re interested in advertising with us, send an email over to [email protected] with the subject “Homescreen Ads”