GM! It’s Brett again. In 2016, I missed out on $100M+.

I was researching startups to join or invest in, and hopped on a call with a guy in YC building an “API for human labor.” Seemed cool, but he didn’t seem to know what he was doing - so I forgot about it.

That guy was Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI now valued at $29B.
His story’s a blueprint: stumble on an idea, launch on Product Hunt, raise, find the real use case, scale up.

Bottom line - tell the world what you're building, solve a problem in a tiny market at first, expand into larger markets & become a billionaire.

Apple is internally discussing a possible acquisition of Perplexity, valued at about $14B - its biggest-ever acquisition, only if it happens.

Why Perplexity though?

It’s simple. Apple badly needs an AI search engine and a smarter Siri - especially as its cozy $20 billion/year search deal with Google faces major antitrust pressure.

Meta was already sniffing around Perplexity but settled instead on a massive $14.3B bet in Scale AI after negotiations stalled. And if you remember, Samsung is also closing in on a deep partnership with Perplexity.

Also, Perplexity positions itself as the new-gen search engine using AI to directly challenge Google's dominance. Selling out now could mean Perplexity risks losing that aggressive, "anti-Google" brand narrative they've carefully built.

The bigger picture - Selling to Apple could mean big money and reach, but Perplexity risks sacrificing its bold, disruptive narrative. Staying independent, or carefully choosing partnerships (like the Samsung’s deal), might better serve its original mission: reshaping how the world searches.

AdQuick unlocks the benefits of Out Of Home (OOH) advertising in a way no one else has. Approaching the problem with eyes to performance, created for marketers and creatives with the engineering excellence you’ve come to expect for the internet.

You can learn more at www.AdQuick.com

Raise, Mergers & Acquisitions:

Stat: 83.3%. That’s the share of ChatGPT users who couldn’t recall quotes from essays they wrote just minutes earlier.

Rabbit Hole: Levered beta is all you need (Ethan Ding)

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

🙋‍♂️ Genspark Super Agent is your all-in-one AI sidekick for your everyday tasks with 80+ tools, & rich data.

📑 MiniMax open-sources the world’s longest context window reasoning AI model called M1.

💯 YC shares how the top AI startups prompt LLMs.

⚡️ Why investing in growth-stage AI startups is getting riskier and more complicated?

🤑 24 US AI startups that have raised $100M or more in 2025.

‼️ Founders and execs from Apple, Rippling, and Carta break down how to micromanage - the “right” way.

💸 VC Fund Performance Q1 2025 (Carta)

🔥 Monday Motivation: Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)

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

Everyone’s chasing new tools and hacks to get more done. But the real productivity hack is good sleep. Everything else like focus, energy, decision-making runs on it.

Not the “I’ll catch up on the weekend” kind. I’m talking deep, high-quality, consistent sleep. Here’s the low-lift stack for that:

Keep it simple. The less sleep debt you carry, the better you perform.

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

🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️ Yeah (~54%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nope (~46%)

Here’s the original.

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.

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