Gm. A new Launch House cohort kicked off over the weekend—30 founders living together in a luxury house in NYC, working on their companies.

If that sounds like your jam, toss your name into the mix for a potential spot in an upcoming house.

FRESH POWDER

Looking at three funds that recently topped up their coffers.

PRIVACY

Your VPN probably isn’t as private as you think

Anyone who’s watched a YouTube ad or listened to a podcast from Tim Ferries in the last year has no doubt been advertised the services of a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The ads get annoying after a while, but now lawmakers think they also might be illegal. Last week, congress placed the VPN industry in its crosshairs writing a letter to the FTC urging it to crack down on deceptive advertising practices from VPN companies.

The privacy tea

VPN ads usually promise some degree of untraceable internet usage by establishing an encrypted connection between a user's device and a private server. But oftentimes, you’re more vulnerable than the companies may have you believe.

• A BuzzFeed report from last year found that analytics firm Sensor Tower secretly collected user data from several VPN apps that it owns.

• And a Consumer Reports review of the top VPNs found that 75% of them misrepresented the protection they offer in their marketing materials.

But why the sudden attention from lawmakers?

After the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, digital privacy is at the forefront of lawmakers' minds. For many, a VPN is an important part in protecting themselves when searching for information on abortion in states where it has been outlawed or criminalized.

If companies are promising a greater level of privacy than they can deliver, it puts those people at risk.

Zoom out: The FTC has already pledged to crack down on companies that illegally share health and location data while President Biden has signed an executive order to help protect patient privacy. And private companies like Google are promising to automatically delete location data from visits to abortion clinics. If congress has its way, VPNs also need to step up to the plate.

STARTUP

You get a new search engine

From time to time we like to call out a specific startup that catches our attention. You.com, an AI search engine founded by a former Salesforce exec, is one of those companies.

On the surface, You.com looks pretty similar to Google—a big search box on an otherwise sparse screen—but under the hood is where the magic happens. It lets users personalize their search by adding apps that they can use to filter results. So instead of searching for “Best headphones Reddit”, you can toggle You.com to just show results from Reddit without having to leave the browser.

• People seem to be liking it so far: ​​50% of people who set You as their default search engine continue to use it after the fact.

The Google problem

The age-old startup critique of “What if Google just builds this?” applies double to You.com. But Google’s monolithic size and the regulatory pressure it’s facing are two factors that You founder Richard Socher thinks can make the search giant vulnerable to competitors.

Zoom out: It’s not very often that a new search engine pops up to challenge the all-powerful goog, so check it out here if you’re curious.

QUICK HITS

Seed Round

Stat: Images from the James Webb Space Telescope took over the internet last week with side-by-side comparisons to its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, among the most popular. But other than the JWST making the Hubble look like an old Nokia, there is one other way to tell which telescope produced a given image: the number of spikes a star has. The spikes are “diffraction spikes” which are patterns produced as light bends around the sharp edges of a telescope. The JSWT has hexagonal mirrors that produce eight spikes (two of the spikes are often hard to see) while the Hubble uses a round mirror that only produces four. The more you know.

Story we’re watching: Elon does a lot of things fast, namely, make fast cars and rocket ships. But when it comes to Twitter he is slooooowing things down. Over the weekend, he filed a motion to block Twitter’s request for an expedited trial. Twitter is pushing for a 4-day trial in September, but Musk’s lawyers countered saying Twitter is trying to “railroad defendants into closing,” by demanding an unreasonably fast timeline.

Rabbit hole: A review of the new, Nothing Phone 1 (The Verge)

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• Amazon has started reducing the number of white label items it sells due to poor performance.

• Amazon also said it sold over 300 million items during its biggest ever Prime Day.

• TikTok named a new head of security amidst increased security from US officials.

• Vladimir Putin amended an already strict Russian law regulating crypto currencies to ban most forms of digital payment.

PICK THAT PITCH DECK

Below is an early pitch deck for a company that went public in 2017.

Can you guess what the company is?

MONDAY MUSING

Asking you one thorny question a week about an issue in the startup and tech world:

LAYOFFS TRACKER

Notable layoffs this week

Alibaba: 40 people (N/A)

The Mom Project: 54 people (15%)

BRYTER: 100 people (30%)

FOUNDERS CORNER

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

🌐 A Chrome extension that blocks any site that you can be “productive on.” It was conceived as a joke, but it's actually great for work-life balance

♻️ Did you know that Amazon will recycle your small electronics for free?

☣️ The perils of sitting—or standing—too much when you work

PICK THAT PITCH DECK ANSWER

Snapchat.