The growth hack to leverage your CEO
Plus: Reality vs. LinkedIn
· 625 words
Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese
August 26, 2025 • Read time: 3 minutes
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Saudi Arabia’s 2029 Asian Winter Games - yes, winter - are at risk of delay in building its snow mountain. Leaders are weighing a handoff to another host. For lessons in pivots, they could ask Mark Zuckerberg: Meta just reshuffled its AI unit for the fourth time in six months, announcing a tie-up with Midjourney. One of their team’s new goals: bring beauty to billions. Who can compete with that? 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
VCs pour into European drone defence
With governments alarmed on security and eyeing “Iron Dome”–style tech, Europe’s air defence startup scene is heating up fast. Cambridge Aerospace raised $100m at a $400m valuation to build fast, smart interceptors for drones and cruise missiles. Germany’s Tytan and Sweden’s Nordic Air Defence also closed new rounds as investors bet on low-cost alternatives to expensive missiles.
Too small to scale, too big to be nimble
Peter Thiel–backed SNÖ Ventures is shutting down after nearly a decade, with partners Magne Uppman, Teodor Bjerrang and Max Samuel launching their own solo funds. Despite strong returns from its early funds, they felt SNÖ risked being stuck between too small and too big to compete. The portfolio – including Sky Mavis, Nordic Air Defence and Aris Machina – will still be supported.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Less traffic for websites?
AI summaries in search engines like Google or chatbots like ChatGPT eliminate the need for the human user to visit a website. Traffic is dropping significantly. As Tomasz Tunguz writes, users click just 8% of AI search results vs. 15% on classic search results. How will website owners handle this?
Recommendation: check out the yesterday’s Financial Times article on the effects on the media business.
Are Marketing budgets being wasted?
The questions of all questions: where do you allocate your Marketing budget? Ideally where your revenue comes from. As Jack Saper of Emergence Capital writes, the mismatch is highest on the referral channel for B2B SaaS. Instead of pushing events, focus on building customer advocacy?
What is an attractive offer?
Thoughts?
Events happening this week
We constantly update this quarter’s must-attend events for startups in Europe list.
Do you like what we do at Follow the Gradient? Help us grow this community and share a like and add a comment to our LinkedIn post that just went live:
Smart hack
From our partners
The Only AI That Knows All Your Work
Most AI tools start from scratch every time. ClickUp Brain already knows the answers.
It has full context of all your work—docs, tasks, chats, files, and more. No uploading. No explaining. No repetitive prompting.
It's not just another AI tool. It's the first AI that actually understands your workflow because it lives where your work happens.
Join 150,000+ teams and save 1 day per week.
From us
We wrote about how the personal CEO brand is key in your growth efforts. But how to best capture the knowledge they have, given that CEOs rarely have time?
Carilu Dietrich posted this beautiful hack of creating a CEO GPT, as exemplified with the AntonGPT of the Founder of Loveable. Capture the content of your CEO’s messages, quotes from All Hands, customer conversations and interviews in one GPT - and have it churn out content for your social media whenever you need it.
