How to give great interviews
Plus: Series A rounds are picking up again
· 625 words
Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese
December 09, 2025 • Read time: 3 minutes
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Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Bidding wars around Warner Bros. are heating up. After Netflix proposed to buy the incumbent for $83bn, legacy business is fighting back with Paramount now offering an investment of over $100bn. Remember when Netflix was still “new”? Meanwhile, others are divesting. Mark Zuckerberg announced cuts to Reality Labs, the division responsible for building the Metaverse. With AI, he seems to have found a new pet project. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
OpenAI buys Neptune to deepen model training insights
OpenAI is acquiring EU-based AI metrics startup Neptune in a stock deal reportedly worth under $400m. Already a customer, OpenAI will now fully absorb Neptune’s tools to better monitor and debug its GPT training workflows. Neptune’s client list includes Samsung, Roche, and HP.
EU fines Musk’s X €120m in landmark digital crackdown
The EU hit Elon Musk’s X with a €120m fine for systemic violations of the Digital Services Act, citing rampant hate speech, election disinformation, and refusal to provide transparency. Next, regulators are already considering daily fines, forced operational changes, or banning X in Europe altogether.
Aleph Alpha sheds staff amid strategy shift
Germany’s top AI startup Aleph Alpha is undergoing a deep overhaul under new leadership from the Schwarz Group and ex-Accenture execs. Around 10% of staff (about 30 people) have exited, including at least 10 senior figures, sources told Handelsblatt. The company may pivot away from building large language models, sparking concern it’s abandoning its core research mission in favor of enterprise contracts.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Series A’s are picking up again
Data from Carta shows startups having raised Seed rounds in 2024 are moving to Series A faster than their counterparts in the years before. Are the AI-native cohorts of the ChatGPT era more likely to build successful businesses?
VC case or profitability?
Your take?
The competitive advantage of the Nordics
We loved the kind-of-true, if mostly ironic perspective of Santtu Koivumäki:
“The Nordic winter is an entirely free, annual 5-month training camp for the character. All the money we save on sunscreen and beach gear goes straight into bad, light-roasted coffee that fuels our innovations.”
Move to the Nordics for startup training?
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From us
Doing interviews is hard for most people, yet in times of podcasts, short form videos and Youtube they become ever more important for founders and operators alike. Harry Stebbings outlined these five tips to become better at them:
The best guests have art and science: The art is the story. It brings the listener into your world and makes them resonate. The science is the framework. The lessons learned from this experience.
Number your thoughts: By numbering thoughts, you provide a structure which makes it much easier for the listener to follow and remember.
Tone is everything: You have to sound excited to be there.
Time to value: The first 3 minutes is the most important.
Repeat the question: Short form video drives so much content today.