How to avoid a burnout
Plus: Is Europe losing the AI race?
· 700 words
Christian Woese & Melanie Gabriel
February 10, 2026 • Read time: 3 minutes
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Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Anthropic roasted its arch enemy OpenAI in Super Bowl ads. If that wasn’t awkward enough, Sam Altman’s reply made it worse. Surely, the Tech world needed a laugh after first signs of the AI bubble bursting send markets spiralling. Meanwhile, Elon Musk was unimpressed executing a mega merger inside his own empire. Tech never gets boring. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
ElevenLabs lands $500m to scale conversational AI
Text-to-speech unicorn ElevenLabs raised a $500m Series D at an $11bn valuation, led by Sequoia, with a16z and ICONIQ doubling down. The company claims it’s on track for $330m+ ARR by end of 2025, fueled by its ElevenAgents platform, already used by Revolut, Deliveroo, and Square. A new emotionally expressive conversational model launches this week.
Fractile cofounder leaves over links to China
Fractile CTO Yuhang Song quietly left the UK chip startup in 2024 after internal concerns over his ties to China, including past attendance at a university linked to the Chinese military. The company, which is building Nvidia rivals, confirmed his departure but framed it as a personal decision.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
The real gap between Europe and the US?
What separates European founders from their American counterparts? Talent, capital, access? Steven Bartlett shared his thoughts after meeting 600+ founders in SF:
Founders pitching in bathrooms, listing their failures like credentials, sleeping on sofas to fund their dream. The difference is not resources. It is one word: permission. Permission to be obsessed, to look stupid, to fail without collective ridicule.
"We often think the difference between Europe is talent, access, capital. But honestly... the real gap is something else entirely."
For first-hand perspectives on what Europe's startup ecosystem needs to compete, we talked to Andreas Klinger on Europe's next moonshots and checked in with Kitty Mayo of Project Europe
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The Go-to board for any marketeer
Is the AI SDR wave already over?
Ramp shut down their AI SDRs, despite VCs having poured $154m+ into AI SDR startups in the last year. As Jack Porter breaks down the world is experiencing cold-outbound fatigue.
The pivot of Ramp: unique data, things that don't scale, and letting sellers be storytellers again. Is the rest of the market doubling down on a sinking ship, or is Ramp the outlier?
Will Europe build its own AI future, or watch from the sidelines?
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues that Europe is choosing to stand still in the global AI race: The US is moving toward closed-source proprietary models, China is pushing open-weight models for global adoption. Europe still regulates.
Without massive investments, the continent risks permanent technological dependence.
We recently talked to Proton founder Andy Yen about this. He made strong arguments about the importance of Tech sovereignty.
Smart hack
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From us
"I do not know a single successful person who was not struggling with mental health." This is what serial founder Adrian Locher told us in our latest conversation.
We have built a framework in order to help you navigate challenging situations in your work-life: The Energy Audit. It forces you to look at
where your energy actually goes
which areas of your life are draining and
what the warning signs are before it's too late
No scoring system, no gamification, just honest questions.