The most expensive lie in startups
Plus: Big Tech quietly changed its mind about your job
· 659 words
Christian Woese & Melanie Gabriel
June 23, 2026 • Read time: 4 minutes
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Snap unveiled a $2’195 pair of AR glasses the internet decided had "absolutely zero style", sending the stock down around 17%. AI poster child Midjourney announced its next act: a full-body ultrasound scanner you enter through "a shallow pool of golden light", with a wellness spa in SF to follow. Seems like AI will give us many options spending money for things we don’t need. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
1Komma5° is racing Enpal to the stock market
Hamburg solar group 1Komma5° is lining up an IPO, having pulled in a €150m pre-IPO round and now sitting on close to €400m of equity, debt-free. Revenue reached €520m in 2024. A listing would sharpen its fight with rival Enpal for the top of Germany's home-energy market.
A Paris startup raised €32m to run the battlefield
Comand AI landed a €32m Series A led by Blossom Capital, with a strategic investment from Sweden's defence giant Saab. Its Prevail platform uses AI agents to turn battlefield data into decisions, and is already deployed with units in France, Germany and Ukraine.
Ex-Palantir founders raised €51m to untangle SAP
London-based Conduct raised a €51m ($60m) Series A co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ, with SAP itself investing. Founded by three ex-Palantir engineers, it uses AI to help giants like Daimler Truck, DHL and Fraport understand and modernise their tangled ERP systems, claiming 30% faster transformation work.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Big Tech changed its mind about your job
For two years the people building AI told us it was coming for our jobs. Now Jeff Bezos says it will cause "a labour shortage", not mass unemployment, and Sam Altman says he is "delighted to be wrong" about white-collar work vanishing. The timing is convenient, given they are all hiring. Will the honest answer probably be messier than either the panic or the relief?
It's not ready yet is the most expensive lie
The hardest lesson from YC: launch early, launch often. Every founder nods, almost nobody does it, because shipping means a real user might tell you your core assumption was wrong. He has watched founders polish onboarding flows for months, for users they have never spoken to. Sounds familiar?
How is “content” done right?
Beehiiv's Tyler Denk points to Ramp as the template: built on proprietary data nobody else has (SaaS spend rankings from 50k+ companies), owning a topic rather than pushing a product, and real editorial with named writers and a point of view. His test: would you subscribe even if the company sold you nothing?
Smart hack
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From us
Hiring the wrong person is the most expensive mistake a small team makes. Darren Bush lays out a hiring system, and most of the work happens before you ever post the role.
Write the success profile first. Define what great looks like, with evidence, before you source anyone.
Use work samples, not gameable tests. Assess on real job tasks, not trivia.
Score in writing before the debrief. Every interviewer commits a scorecard first, so the loudest voice does not win.
The debrief is where quality is decided. That structured conversation produces the real quality-of-hire call at offer time, not six months later.
Hire on evidence, not on vibes.