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GM! It’s Brett again. I've somehow become the guy people turn to in their worst moments - cofounder breakups, shutting down companies, getting cancelled, even losing parents. I went through it all myself, roughly around the same time.

Here's what I keep telling people: treat your life like a movie. The best movies always put the main character through something terrible. Those tragic moments are blessings - opportunities for epic comebacks. Just find someone who's lived your storyline.

Someone was there for me when I went through it, and it’s no understatement to say they changed my life.

On that note - feel free to message me if you're dealing with any of this.

🏠 AI

Meta Just Raided OpenAI's Best Talent

Last week, Meta dealt some heavy blows in the AI talent wars - landing key researchers from OpenAI.

The big hire was Trapit Bansal, a foundational contributor to OpenAI’s first reasoning model, o1. He worked closely with co-founder Ilya Sutskever since 2022, significantly driving OpenAI’s reinforcement learning efforts.

But Meta didn’t stop there. They pulled another seven OpenAI researchers, including high-profile talent like Jiahui Yu - who led o3, o4-mini, and GPT-4.1 - and Hongyu Ren, the creator behind models o3-mini and o1-mini.

Meta was offering huge incentives - the $100K bonuses, which Sam mentioned on Jack Altman's podcast (though Meta internally disputes that number), causing major ripples internally at OpenAI.

Inside OpenAI, the impact was serious enough for Chief Research Officer Mark Chen to acknowledge feeling "as if someone has broken into our home," committing publicly to recalibrating compensation and aggressively fighting to retain talent.

The big picture - the AI arms race is heating up fast. OpenAI is feeling significant pressure from Meta’s aggressive recruiting, and Zuck's bold moves signal that he's fully committed to competing at the very top of frontier AI.

Global payroll complexity? Here’s the playbook.

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🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• US House bans WhatsApp on official devices over security issues.

• Bumble announces 30% job cuts.

• OpenAI designed a rival to MS Office and Google Workspace.

• Cyngn, a small robotics company, shot up over 300% after announcing a partnership with Nvidia.

AI

• Sam Altman took the ‘io’ trademark battle on X.

• Google launched Doppl, a new app that lets you visualize how an outfit might look on you.

• From July 7, 2025, Gemini can access Phone, Messages, & WhatsApp on your Android device even if you've disabled activity tracking.

• Xiaomi enters ‘smart glasses war’ with first AI-powered eyewear.

SCIENCE

• This AI tracks lung tumors as you breathe.

• Scientists found a sugar switch that protects your brain from Alzheimer's.

• DeepMind’s new AlphaGenome AI tackles the ‘dark matter’ in our DNA.

• Rocks in Canada are confirmed as World’s oldest.

CRYPTO

• Robinhood to offer tokenized shares of OpenAI, SpaceX to EU users.

• Kalshi closes $185M round as rival Polymarket reportedly seeks $200M.

• US Supreme Court decides not to review privacy case over IRS request for Coinbase user data.

• IRS quietly hits thousands of Bitcoin users with warning letters.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise, Mergers & Acquisitions: 

• In just 4 months, AI medical scribe startup Abridge doubled its valuation to $5.3B after raising $300M in a Series E.

• XBOW’s AI reached the top ranks on HackerOne, and now it has raised $75M in Series B round to scale up.

• Harvey AI, the legal AI startup, has raised $300M in Series E funding at a $5B valuation.

• Rubrik, a data cybersecurity company, acquired Predibase (a startup that helps companies train and fine-tune open-source AI models) to accelerate its push into AI agents.

Stat: 400,000. That’s how many monthly Spotify listeners an AI-generated band called The Velvet Sundown has racked up.

Rabbit Hole: The Monster Inside ChatGPT

🛠️ FOUNDERS CORNER

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

‼️ Byterover is a self-improving memory layer for your AI coding agents.

💥 A Vast number of well-funded startups haven’t raised new funding since 2021

⛑️ Health tech is hopping

🫂 How people use Claude for support, advice, and companionship

🦯 A guide For LLM-assisted web research

🚨 How stablecoins could fail?

👨‍⚕️ Here’s how you can build your personal AI assistant from scratch

🔥 Monday Motivation: Is the SaaS bubble finally bursting? (Chamath Palihapitiya)

😂 FROM THE FEED

🎯 THE 80 / 20

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

Build your AI cofounder stack

Here’s a stupidly high-leverage trick I stumbled into:
Give your ChatGPT projects titles like “CTO,” “CMO,” “CFO,” and “Exec Coach.” Then talk to each one like they are that person.

No fancy prompt engineering. Just frame your questions like you would to a real cofounder. Give these projects all the context they need about you and your business.

Need to scope a complex feature? Ask your CTO.
Need copy for a new release? Ask your CMO.
Stressed about burn? Ask your CFO.
Feeling stuck? Ask your Exec Coach.

That mental shift alone changed how I build and think. I now spend 2+ hours a day with these “AI cofounders.” Feels weird to say, but it’s been wildly effective.

❓️ AI GENERATED OR NOT

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

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yeah (~98%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nope (~2%)

You’ll saw the gemini logo there. 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.

Also please comment/reply with one thing we can add or improve to make Homescreen more useful for you?

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