How to spot a top 5% early hire
Plus: will the next $1tn company sell work, not software?
· 505 words
Christian Woese & Melanie Gabriel
June 02, 2026 • Read time: 3 minutes
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Amazon just killed its internal AI leaderboard after staff started "tokenmaxxing", assigning AI agents pointless tasks to climb the rankings and quietly running up the company's own compute bill. An excerpt from the internal memo: "please don't use AI just for the sake of using AI." Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.
Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Berlin's Stark doubles to a €2.5bn valuation in months
Berlin defence startup Stark is raising €300m at a €2.5bn valuation, more than double its mark from earlier this year. Founded in 2024, it builds loitering munitions, the so-called kamikaze drones, and counts Peter Thiel among its backers. Co-founder Florian Seibel also started drone-maker Quantum Systems.
Ex-DeepMind team raises $50m to pick better science questions
London's Inherent came out of stealth with a $50m seed co-led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures, with Nvidia's NVentures joining. Its platform, Faraday, pairs researchers with AI agents that decide which scientific questions are worth asking, not just answer them faster.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Will the next $1tn company sell work, not software?
A widely-shared post points back to Sequoia's "Services as the New Software" thesis: the next trillion-dollar company won't sell a tool, it will sell the work itself, AI-delivered and packaged like a traditional services firm. A fundamentally different approach to product building.
We dug into service-as-software and the move from selling tools to selling outcomes with Andreas Goeldi (Youtube / Spotify / Apple).
The hardest skill in the job is managing your own head
We talked to VARA founder Jonas Muff (Youtube / Spotify / Apple) about fear versus purpose and the founder's inner game.
Smart hack
From our Partners
Cap table tools founders and finance teams love
As you grow, you need a cap table management platform that you can trust to keep up.
From issuing grants to 409A valuations or ASC 718 reporting, Pulley gives you the tools to manage equity. Experience a platform built for you: transparent, reliable, and designed to put your company first.
From us
Your first hires define the company more than any deck. David Politis, who has hired hundreds of people at early-stage companies, says the top 5%, the ones who actually move the needle, all share three traits.
Work ethic and stamina. They outwork the room and execute without a process to lean on.
Hunger to learn. They go and research the product, market and customer themselves instead of waiting to be trained.
Sharp EQ. They genuinely read the person across the table, teammate or customer.
Hire for these before the CV. People with all three are rare, roughly 1 in 20.