How to become more productive
Plus: The most underappreciated founder quality
· 717 words
Christian Woese & Melanie Gabriel
March 03, 2026 • Read time: 4 minutes
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Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Jack Dorsey just cut nearly half of Block's workforce, 4,000 people, and said most companies will do the same within a year. The stock jumped 25%. Meanwhile, German automakers were asked about autonomous driving and answered with a confident "only maybe". Are there other things in our beloved startupland than AI these days? Send us your thoughts. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
OpenAI raises $110bn in largest funding round in history
OpenAI closed a $110bn funding at a $730bn valuation, backed by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. The company is targeting $600bn in total compute spend by 2030 and projects $280bn in annual revenue by then. Its previous record round was $40bn just a year ago.
Pentagon blacklists Anthropic over AI safety guardrails
The US Department of War designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk" after the company refused to remove two safety limits: no mass domestic surveillance and no fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic responded: "We cannot in good conscience accede to their request." So good old Sam jumped in. Who would have thought?
Proxima Fusion eyes €1.2bn from the German government
Munich-based Proxima Fusion is building a €2bn fusion test facility. It expects more than half from the federal government, with Bavaria pledging €400m. Alongside RWE and Max Planck Institute, the company aims to build Europe's first commercial stellarator fusion power plant, operational in the 2030s.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
First dark factories, now dark companies?
“In a Dark Company, the AI isn't the copilot; it is the engine.” There is a lot of talk going on how AI will change the structure of a company. We appreciated the views of Henrik Grosse Hokamp of Revent VC on how an entirely new type of organization is about to emerge, inspired by the existing term of “dark factories” which run fully on robots.
Toughness as an underrated skill?
Are we overestimating how fast changes happen?
As a16z points out, it took roughly 100 years from Faraday's first electric current experiments to the industrial productivity wave of the 20th century. The AI economy might need more runway than the hype cycle suggests….
Where will AI companies draw the line?
Will Anthropic allow a version of Claude that can be used for mass surveillance and autonomous killing? These have been red lines for the company. The US government says they should have a model that is entirely unencumbered. As Nicholas Thompson of the Atlantic points out, this is only the beginning of major moral challenges ahead.
Smart hack
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From us
Block just fired 4,000 people because of AI. But before you restructure, ask yourself: is your team actually using AI yet? Lenny Rachitsky compiled 25 tactics from companies that cracked AI adoption. The ones that stood out:
Give a learning budget, not a mandate. Duolingo gave every employee $300 for AI tools and courses. Experimentation beats top-down directives.
Lead by example in real time. Managers who demo AI workflows in meetings create 10x more adoption than company-wide emails.
Embed with teams monthly. Intercom's CTO spends time with individual teams identifying "2x productivity opportunities." The insights compound.
Track adoption by team, not just company-wide. Publishing usage metrics creates accountability and surfaces what actually works.
The biggest barrier to AI adoption is not technology. It is organizational change.