The skip-level questions you never asked
Plus: Is the SaaS firm of the future just six people?
· 799 words
Christian Woese & Melanie Gabriel
March 11, 2025 • Read time: 3 minutes
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
If you watched the (kind of cringe) from-prison-interview of fallen crypto legend Sam Bankman-Fried on X, you may have noticed the platform’s disruptions yesterday. Hopefully, Elon Musk’s cost-cutting spree left some cybersecurity staff around. If not, OpenAI’s PhD-level agents might soon step in - at only $20k/ month. Do actual human Phd students even earn that much? Then again, AI neither needs sleep, vacation nor a daily coffee. Who will we share our latest office gossip with? Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
300M exit for IDNow
Corsair Capital acquired a majority stake in Munich-based IDnow for around $300M. The identity verification startup, exploring a sale since 2022, recently hit €80M in revenue and profitability. IDnow grew through acquisitions, and co-founder Armin Berghaus will stay in management, while others' roles remain uncertain.
Checkout.com’s links to the adult industry
Swiss payment giant Checkout.com is being sued by Israeli fintech Uswipe, claiming it introduced Checkout to a company named Renderwison but never received commission. The lawsuit seeks full revenue disclosure from Checkout on the partnership. The catch: Renderwison has intense ties to the adult industry as a high-risk sector - an industry Checkout has long downplayed its ties to.
Reddit co-founder joins TikTok bidding committee
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has been enlisted as an adviser for his bid to buy TikTok's U.S. operations. Ohanian will help promote "Project Liberty", which aims to give users more control over their data. The sale, overseen by US Vice President JD Vance, has drawn multiple bidders, but ByteDance may shut down TikTok in the U.S. instead of selling.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
The “compressed” 21st century?
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei coined the idea of a compressed 21st century - an Einstein-like idea being produced every five to ten years, instead of every 50. Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf challenges this idea, asking if LLMs will ever be able to produce genuine innovation: innovation requires different thinking, not more of the same as the scaled up cognitive skills of LLMs often do…
SaaS of the future: a six person powerhouse?
Machines have replaced physical labor, AI is taking on cognitive labor. Many jobs now present in software companies stand to question. Will the future software company just be a small team of tech and commercial roles, enhanced and fully enabled by a powerful AI?
AI and no safeguards?
Two AI pioneers just won the Turing Award - and warned that companies are rushing AI out without proper safeguards. Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, who developed reinforcement learning, say business incentives are overriding safety: If we wouldn’t test bridges by making people walk on them, why are we doing it with AI?
Mark your calendar
📢 Starting from Q2 we will switch our weekly events list to a quarterly one, if you have Q2-must-go-events in mind: Share them with us by replying to this email! 🙏🏼
France
Hello Tomorrow in Paris, 13-14 March [Program]
Deep Tech Days in Paris [part of Hellow Tomorrow], 11-14 March [Program]
Germany
Women in Finance & Tech – Celebrating International Women’s Day in Berlin, 11 March [Register]
Switzerland
Founders Drinks in Lausanne, 12 March [Register here]
UK
Big Data & AI World in London, 12-13 March [Program]
Cloud & AI Infrastructure in London 12-13 March [Program]
SuperReturn in London, 10-12 March [Program]
Online
SSA: Webinar: Exploring the UK FinTech Sector: Market Opportunities for Startups, 11 March 12pm CEST [Register here]
SSA: Webinar: Navigating Data Protection – Key Regulations and Best Practices for Startups, 12 March 12 pm CEST [Register here]
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Smart hack
Skip-level meetings can be your direct line into the organization, to hear insights you otherwise never get. The questions you ask are key, though. Julie Lepique of femtasy has shared her questions to ask in skip-level coffee chats surfacing deep insights.
Her top three questions:
If you were me, what changes would you make?
What’s the No. 1 problem with our organization? Why?
If you had to leave the company tomorrow, what’s the main reason why?
For the full list, see here.