How to take control of your day
Plus: Why you are handing out too many advisory shares
· 741 words
Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese
August 12, 2025 • Read time: 3 minutes
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
OpenAI introduced its new flagship model GPT-5 and humanity is torn apart. While one side is proclaiming the beginning of the end of SaaS - anyone can now build anything - the other one is flooding Reddit forums with cancellation announcements: they want their previous models back. Wasn’t Marketing playbook rule number one that any publicity is good publicity? Mission accomplished. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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US battery start-up takes over Northvolt assets
US-based Lyten is buying Northvolt’s bankrupt gigafactory, R&D site, and planned German facility at a steep discount. The firm aims to revive operations and expand into drones and data centres. Lyten bets on cheaper, higher-density lithium-sulphur tech to avoid Northvolt’s missteps. The deal still needs Swedish and German approval, with plans to rehire staff and win back former customers.
Destinus makes $225m move for Swiss AI pilot firm
Hypersonic drone maker Destinus is buying Zurich’s Daedalean for $225m, one of Europe’s biggest defence tech deals. Backed by over €200m in funding and fresh from supplying weapons to Ukraine, Destinus aims to boost AI for strike drones and aircraft. The buy caps a surge in European defence tech M&A, with giants like Helsing and Quantum Systems also on acquisition sprees.
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Food for thought
Are you handing out too many advisory shares?
Equity can evaporate quickly: handing out too many shares to advisors or giving them to early employees without vesting schedules. As Wael Jabir writes, Carta’s founder report benchmarks the median founding team at 36% ownership after the Series A, only. Is this worth the hustling?
The AI-leveraged agency?
How will the next AI unicorn be built? An AI-native B2B SaaS company? As Greg Isenberg points out in this thoughtful post, it may rather be an AI-leveraged agency. The playbook: provide classic services to your clients, deliver them by doing them manually at first, then build AI agents around you later on.
USA - a better place for a startup?
Which country is the best place for entrepreneurship? As Ilya Strebulaev of Stanford University writes, a relocation to the US significantly increases the chances to obtain unicorn status. These numbers confirm what we’ve long known. Are you a founder outside the US? Email us and let us know your thoughts.
Big things start small
With Figma just IPOing and the tendency in startupland to create a narrative of the one-day-rocketship-success, it’s refreshing to read back Figma founder Dylan Field’s first application - they wanted to be a drone startup… Remember: you can do it too!
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From us
In times of constant availability and always-on tools like Slack, Discord or MS Teams, average working days can feel like responding to a relentless bombardment of messages.
In this all-time classic, Sifted outlines how to block time in your day for uninterrupted work. Key take-aways:
Set clear goals and intentions to counteract urgent overrides of your blockers
Create the right environment - a long-form strategy memo cannot be written with 30 tabs open
Consciously plan your week: time blockers are not made up spontaneously, they are planned ahead