GM! It’s Brett again. I turned 35 last week.

This year, I was very heads down on the startup, but I came out of it with maybe the deepest understanding of myself I've ever had.
Startup guy. Bay Area kid. Lover. Pattern recognizer. Rational thinker. Artist. Jew. Challenge pursuer. That’s me.

A good life is just stacking as many hours as possible where you’re fully yourself. That starts with knowing who you are.

I'll always be discovering new things about myself, but 35 feels like the end of discovery and the beginning of truly living as who I am for the next 35 and beyond.

The New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. That’s old news. What’s new is that the NYT asked the court to force OpenAI to keep all user data - every single ChatGPT conversation, including the ones people delete or thought were temporary. And the court said yes.

So now, OpenAI is supposed to retain and store all ChatGPT and API logs, going forward. This affects anyone using Free, Plus, Pro, or regular API, unless you’re on Enterprise, Edu, or the Zero Data Retention API, in which case you’re safe.

OpenAI is pushing back hard, calling the order “sweeping, unprecedented,” and a violation of user trust. They’ve appealed, arguing that retaining this data not only breaks their privacy commitments but could put them in breach of GDPR and enterprise contracts.

NYT’s argument is that OpenAI might be “destroying evidence” of copyright violations - by deleting chats that could show copyright violations, so OpenAI needs to keep everything… just in case.

The big picture - This isn’t just about copyright anymore. It’s shaping up to be a precedent-setting battle between data privacy and legal discovery. And also how AI companies handle user data going forward.

Managing global payroll shouldn’t mean juggling vendors and compliance risks. Deel, recognized in the Gartner® Market Guide for Multicountry Payroll Solutions, helps finance teams automate payments, standardize reporting, and stay compliant in 100+ countries. Get key insights from industry experts to future-proof your payroll strategy.

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Raise: Anduril, a defense tech startup building autonomous weapons and control software, raised $2.5B in a Series G round to scale operations after doubling revenue to $1B in 2024 and securing a major US Army AR/VR headset contract.

Stat: 86 million. That’s the number of AT&T customer records resurfacing on the dark web, likely from a past data breach.

Rabbit Hole: AGI Is Not Multimodal (Benjamin A. Spiegel)

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

💥 Unusual figures out what your visitors vibe with, and tweaks your site in real time to move them down the funnel.

🔥 Here’s how you can vibe code a full stack app in 30 Min with AI.

🍎 Apple’s Latest: The Illusion of Thinking
Apple researchers find that large reasoning models break down on complex problems - revealing that more “thinking” doesn’t always mean better answers.

🧠 LLM-driven Data Annotation: Prompt, Then Distill
Instead of forcing a single label, this new ACL 2025 paper proposes letting LLMs output multiple possible labels when uncertain - then trains a smaller model to distill the final answer. Better accuracy, less noise.

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

Parkinson’s Law says work expands to fill the time you give it. So if you block 3 hours to finish something, it’ll take 3 hours - because you let it.

Instead, give yourself x minutes (say 45 minutes). Then schedule a meeting right after. You’ve got a hard stop. No buffer. No wiggle room.

It forces your brain to lock in. You’ll finish in 45 what would've dragged across a full afternoon, because you have a meeting right after that 45 minutes block. It’s like tricking your nervous system into urgency - without stress.

You can layer this trick with deep work sessions, Pomodoros, or writing sprints. The key is the deadline feels real because it is.

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

🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️ Yeah (~67%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nope (~33%)

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”