How to reduce your frustration working in sales
Plus: Does less self-promotion on LinkedIn get better results?
· 726 words
Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese
October 21, 2025 • Read time: 3 minutes
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
AWS servers were down across wide regions of the globe yesterday. When you’re supposed to work and your CRM, recruiting system and Slack are off, it kind of felt like these days back in school when the teacher was sick: free class and no homework. A shame Snapchat and Facebook were also disrupted. Time to to go back to real life. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Oura doubles valuation with $900M raise
Smart ring maker Oura closed a $900m round led by Fidelity, valuing the Finnish smart ring maker at $11bn. Revenue hit $500m in 2024 and is on track to top $1bn this year, with 5.5m rings sold, half in the past year alone. The new funding will fuel AI features, distribution, and a push into blood testing.
Project A’s Uwe Horstmann takes the helm at weapons startup STARK
VC veteran Uwe Horstmann has become CEO of German kamikaze drone maker STARK. The move is highly unusual as he is still tied to Project A as an investor. Investors approved the unusual dual role, but questions on governance, conflicts of interest and portfolio loyalty are already surfacing.
Germany calls for unified EU stock exchange to stop NYSE drain
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called for a pan-European stock exchange to keep high-growth firms from fleeing to New York. Backing deeper capital markets union with France, Berlin is now open to handing oversight to the European level. The shift could fast-track Mario Draghi’s vision of EU capital market consolidation and tackle investor fragmentation.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Less self-promotion on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn becomes ever more important to build your own brand. The risk is self-promoting posts get cringe. Christina Farr’s “9-to-1 rule” aims to solve this: for every post about your accomplishment, have nine posts with actual contributions. Do you let your story do the talking?
Founder Sales first?
Agree?
We agree!
“Convince me” shifts to “prove it”
B2B Sales today is full of obstacles and inefficiencies: complex demos, costly implementations, adoption hurdles. As Micheal Shields points out, this “convince me” model will be replaced by AI with a “prove it” model: deployment will become quicker and have to show results, pilots will be replaced by sandboxes.
Who will win? Providers, customers - or both?
The founder journey
The founder journey is one marked by pain, setbacks - and huge potential for development. We loved this post of Lemlist founder Guillaume Moubeche who talks about being first a founder, then evolving into a CEO and then into an owner. It is all about realizing the demands a business has on you as a founder - and stepping into the right role…
Events happening this week
We constantly update this quarter’s must-attend events for startups in Europe list.
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From our Partners
How Canva, Perplexity and Notion turn feedback chaos into actionable customer intelligence
You’re sitting on a goldmine of feedback: tickets, surveys, reviews, but can’t mine it.
Manual tagging doesn’t scale, and insights fall through the cracks.
Enterpret’s AI unifies all feedback, auto‑tags themes, and ties them to revenue/CSAT, surfacing what matters to customers.
The result: faster decisions, clearer priorities, and stronger retention.
From us
Being in a Sales team is not easy. Benefitting from good sales leadership is even rarer. Meredith Chandler calls out how often both Leadership and AEs are frustrated and stuck in pipeline reviews and CRM checks. In this post, she describes how AEs can take things into their own hands and manage up:
Come prepared to your 1:1’s, and focus on points growing your skills
Be specific in your goals
Send call recordings in advance - self-assess first, then review together live
Ask for direct, targeted feedback - “What’s the biggest gap in my skill set right now?”