How to know which prospects are worth a call
Plus: Lovable is now worth $13.3bn
· 624 words
Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese
August 18, 2026 • Read time: 4 minutes
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Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Forbes fired its chief content officer over a $6m gift he never disclosed, from the founder of a research firm whose rankings Forbes publishes. The same man invented the 30 Under 30 list, which itself has been starring some troublesome characters. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Lovable doubled its valuation in eight months
Lovable raised $400m at a $13.3bn valuation, double the $6.6bn it was worth in December. Menlo Ventures led again, co-led by the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund, the EU's €5bn vehicle, in one of its first bets after ICEYE. The Stockholm company hit $500m annualised revenue in June and says it is heading for $600m by the end of August.
Neura is buying a robot line from Bosch
Neura Robotics is acquiring the ACTIVE Shuttle from Bosch Rexroth. The German company gets the autonomous transport platform plus its fleet manager and ROKIT navigation stack, folded into its Hamburg mobile-robots subsidiary. Last month Bosch was the contract manufacturer behind Europe's newest humanoid unicorn. This time a startup is buying the product line.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Is it the stress, or is it the powerlessness?
Daniel Dippold, founder of EWOR, argues that stress itself is not the enemy. What breaks people is chronic distress, which he traces to two ingredients: social-evaluative threat, and the sense that you cannot control the outcome. His protocol is to name the response, breathe to reset the nervous system, then sort each stressor into controllable or not, and either act or accept.
We talked to Adrian Locher about burnout and what recovery actually took (Youtube / Spotify / Apple)
What if a markdown file is your next hire?
Is Europe becoming a technology colony?
Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser calls AI real and a rollercoaster at the same time, with some valuations clearly ahead of themselves. His European worry is narrower than the bubble: companies here start well, then cannot make the jump to global scale. Stay dependent on foreign models, chips and design software, and Europe ends up a technology colony?
Smart hack
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From us
Sending cold emails nobody answers? Patrick Trümpi ran the test: a fully AI-written campaign to 800 contacts booked zero meetings. Rewritten from his own templates, 500 contacts booked three. His conclusion was not about the copy.
Stop trying to book the meeting in the email. For senior buyers that stopped working years ago.
Score the behaviour instead. Ten points for an open, ten for a click, ten for a website visit, more for every repeat.
Call the moment someone crosses the score of 50. Every prospect above that line has turned into a booked meeting for him.