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GM! It’s Brett again. Today would have been Steve Jobs' 70th birthday.

The most important piece of advice he ever gave, and Silicon Valley hates it was 'The greatest people don't need to be managed.'

He believed a leader’s job isn’t to micromanage - it’s to hire the right people and align them around a vision. But the "founder mode" philosophy gaining steam in tech says the opposite: if you want something done right, you as the founder need to step in and manage it directly.

In my experience, both are true. At Micro, I focused on performance and a vision for being the fastest product on the market, and the team naturally optimized for it.

On the flip side, the more I got into the technical details (despite not being very technical), the better the outcome and the faster we moved.

🏠 AI

AI - Chapter 2

Mira Murati, OpenAI's former CTO, finally announced what she's been working on - Thinking Machines Lab. And she's brought along some serious firepower, including John Schulman as Chief Scientist and Barret Zoph as CTO.

First Sutskever with SSI (who, by the way, is about to raise $1B at a wild $30B valuation), and now Murati. OpenAI's original crew keeps spinning out to build their own shops.

The tech pitch is interesting - they're not just building another foundation model company. TML is going hard on multimodal systems and human-AI collaboration, with a focus on science and programming. They plan to regularly publish technical blog posts, papers, and code.

The team includes 29 people from various top AI companies - like ChatGPT, Character.ai, Mistral, PyTorch, and other widely-used AI tools.

The big picture - Between Murati's move, Sutskever's massive raise, and the overall exodus from established players, we're watching the next phase of AI development unfold. The original pioneers are splitting up to pursue their own visions of what AI should be. And that's probably good for the industry - more competition, more approaches, more innovation.

There’s a reason 400,000 professionals read this daily.

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🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• Microsoft built a quantum chip with a new kind of matter, uses 'topoconductors' to make qubits ultra-stable - bringing real quantum computing closer than ever.

• Amazon is shutting down its app store on Android.

• Duolingo ‘killed’ its mascot with a Cybertruck, and it’s going weirdly well

AI

• Spotify teams up with ElevenLabs for AI-narrated audiobooks.

• 1X just dropped NEO Gamma - a humanoid built to walk, talk, and even vacuum like a pro at home.

• Humane’s AI Pin is dead as HP scooped up its assets for $116M, and the device goes dark on Feb 28.

• xAI released Grok 3 and also increased the price of its Premium+ plan.

SCIENCE

• Some audiologists think noise-cancelling headphones are messing with our brain’s ability to process sound.

• The brain perceives unexpected pain more strongly.

• Static electricity isn’t just random - it remembers past contacts.

• Future Family's new IVF insurance promises a baby—or your money back.

CRYPTO

• Raydium’s token drops 28%.

• Bybit hit by the biggest crypto attack ever, losing $1.4B.

• Bitgo and Copper introduce off-exchange settlement model.

• Doodles NFT soars to $16M weekly volume.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: Saronic, an Austin-based defense startup, raised $600M in a Series C round to build an autonomous ship factory called “Port Alpha.”

Stat: 91%. That’s how much Rednote’s downloads dropped after TikTok returned to US app stores.

Rabbit Hole: White Walls (Brian Chesky)

🤩 MONDAY MOTIVATION

🛠️ FOUNDERS CORNER

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

📞 Talo is your real-time AI voice translator for video-calls.

📍 Graphy turns your Notion notes into an interactive knowledge map.

📉 Explo lets you embed customer-facing analytics in your product.

🎯 The 80 / 20

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

The Stop Doing List

Here's a counterintuitive productivity hack - instead of making a to-do list, make a stop-doing list. Yeah, you heard that right.

Look, we're all obsessed with adding more stuff to our plates. But here's the thing - what if cutting things out is actually the secret sauce to getting more done?

Pull up your calendar and Slack right now. See those status update meetings that could be async? Those "quick syncs" that turn into hour-long discussions? The Slack channels where you're tag-teaming support issues that should be in Jira? That's the stuff silently eating your deep work time.

The move is to flag these time-sinks. Some you can straight up drop (bye, redundant standups). Others you can delegate or automate (hello, Zapier). And some just need a reset - like turning those daily syncs into weekly updates.

Here's what's wild - you'll probably notice zero negative impact. But suddenly you've got hours of your week back. Hours you can spend on stuff that actually moves the needle.

❓️ AI GENERATED OR NOT

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

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yeah (~16%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️ Nope (~84%)

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.

REACH 40K+ FOUNDERS, INVESTORS & OPERATORS

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