How to hire at the right moment
Plus: Should you build in Europe, and sell in the US?
· 773 words
Christian Woese & Melanie Gabriel
January 27, 2026 • Read time: 3 minutes
In partnership with
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
For those of you who spent the weekend setting up Clawdbot, we hope it hasn’t bankrupted you yet. Managing agents can surely go both ways. Nvidia Founder Jensen Huang predicted that knowing how to manage an AI will be as important a leadership skill as managing humans. We can’t wait for HR to make us peer-review our own Slack bot. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
EU commission announced EU Inc
In a sweeping Davos speech, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for a permanent reset in Europe’s economic and geopolitical posture. She pushed for “EU Inc.” to unify business rules, a capital markets union to unlock investment, and new energy and defence strategies. The announcement was received extremely positively by the startup community.
Oviva raises €200m to scale digital chronic care across Europe
Oviva closed a €200m Series D to expand its fully reimbursed digital therapy programs for obesity, diabetes, and hypertension across Europe. Already embedded in the UK’s NHS, Germany’s DiGA, and Switzerland’s public system, the platform has treated over 1m patients. Backers include Kinnevik and A.P. Moller Holding.
Listen to our conversation with Oviva Co-Founder Kai Eberhardt on his lessons from scaling across multiple countries and to hundreds of employees.
Synthesia lands $200M to lead AI video training revolution
UK-based Synthesia raised a $200m Series E at a $4bn valuation, led by GV with backing from Nvidia’s NVentures, and Kleiner Perkins. The AI video firm is betting on agent-powered learning tools to replace static corporate training, already used by 90% of the Fortune 100. It also enabled a secondary sale to offer early employee liquidity.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
AI and its long-term consequences
Language models might as well be the most powerful tech every created. How will it change humanity? Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari gave this thoughtful view on the future: AI may be more consequential than the industrial revolution, if we know one thing it is that we don’t understand its long-term implications as nearly as good as we think.
Don’t work on those ideas
Do you agree?
Why do you celebrate your reactive heroes?
What is good Customer Success? More often than not, what gets celebrated is the “big fire at a critical account which gets put out in an overnight emergency”. Jeff Breunsbach offers this refreshing perspective: shouldn’t we celebrate the silent heroes, who proactively spot at-risk accounts and engage them before something happens?
Build in Europe, sell in the US?
Martin Mignot of Index Ventures raised this point in the currently heated geopolitical environment:
“no matter what you think of the current administration, the US is and will remain the most important software market in the world so you should spend more time here, not less.”
Do you need deeper and more tangible insights than this weekly rundown? Visit us on Youtube or Spotify and listen to our conversations on scaling a business from Europe with people who have “been there, done that”.
Smart hack
From our Partners
Ship the message as fast as you think
Founders spend too much time drafting the same kinds of messages. Wispr Flow turns spoken thinking into final-draft writing so you can record investor updates, product briefs, and run-of-the-mill status notes by voice. Use saved snippets for recurring intros, insert calendar links by voice, and keep comms consistent across the team. It preserves your tone, fixes punctuation, and formats lists so you send confident messages fast. Works on Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Try Wispr Flow for founders.
From us
When should you hire an additional team member? Determining the right role and the right time of a new hire often appears equal to a fight you can only lose - too many moving parts. We loved the simple advice Garry Tan of Y Combinator layed out:
Hire out of pain.
Hire at the point when you or your team are bleeding, this is the strongest signal that it needs a new joiner
If you hire when it seems slightly too late, you will know the scope of the new role, you will know what good looks like and you will understand what is expected of this new role, because you have done the work yourself