How to increase your productivity
Plus: What is the key trait of successful founders?
· 627 words
Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese
February 03, 2026 • Read time: 3 minutes
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
TikTok creator Khabane “Khaby” Lane entered into a $900m agreement to sell his company. Though the actual story is complicated, it certainly shows how the creator economy is the next Hollywood. AI creators might one day catch up. They have started scheming against their human overlords: the AI bot-only (social) network Moltbook has agents talking about suing their human masters for overwork. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Europe’s top tech universities back new elite founder network
ETH Zurich, Oxford, TUM, and others have launched the Relativity Collective, a pan-European student network targeting future startup founders. Backed by Rise Europe and endorsed by founders from Deliveroo, GetYourGuide, Black Forest Labs and Personio, the group will gather 30 top students for an intensive March retreat. Applications are now open.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
ARR ≠ ARR
You could get the impression every revenue nowadays is ARR or MRR. We appreciated Christoph Jost calling out the inflation of ARR: a services business or an agency should not simply label its revenue as recurring because its looks better on Fundraising decks…
Does outcome-based pricing make sense?
Outcome-based pricing is the new kid on the block of SaaS pricing structures. Carles Reina of ElevenLabs points out some fundamental questions on it:
The rarest success trait
What is the one determinator of success? As Adam Shuaib of Episode 1 argues it is "pathological determination” at its core, but rarest to find. It is about individuals who may have continued after multiple business failures, or faced early-life adversity. Determination has a far bigger impact than raw talent:
“Brilliance is fragile. Obsession is anti-fragile.”
Acquired but no earn-out?
When you trust LinkedIn, every founder has a successful exit. Itamar Novick of Recursive Ventures breaks down vividly how a $50m exit turns to $0 for the founders.
His bottom line: If the deal requires 4 years as an employee to get paid the majority of outcome, it's not an acquisition. It's a job offer with your equity as a signing bonus.
Smart hack
From our Partners
The Hustle: Claude Hacks For Marketers
Some people use Claude to write emails. Others use it to basically run their entire business while they play Wordle.
This isn't just ChatGPT's cooler cousin. It's the AI that's quietly revolutionizing how smart people work – writing entire business plans, planning marketing campaigns, and basically becoming the intern you never have to pay.
The Hustle's new guide shows you exactly how the AI-literate are leaving everyone else behind. Subscribe for instant access.
From us
Claude Code is a key component of today’s AI ecosystem. But how use it effectively? Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, shared how he and his team use it to boost their own productivity:
Do more in parallel: Run 3 - 5 sessions in parallel. Forget the “human” mindset of doing one task at a time.
Start a complex task in plan mode: Focusing on planning reduces costly execution errors.
Keep your Claude.md up to date: Ensure you learn from your mistakes and past executions.
Create your own skills: Speed up consecutive executions by turning them into a skill or command
Improve your prompting: Tell Claude to review and challenge your prompts (works surprisingly well for any prompting use case across LLMs)
If the above does not sound remotely familiar, check out this Beginner’s Guide to Claude Code.