In partnership with
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Not even an international AI summit could get OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei to hold hands for a photo op. AI is not only causing friction on a personal level: AWS admitted that last year's 13-hour outage was caused by its own AI bot Kiro, which tried to fix a bug by nuking an entire environment. We hope that won’t be its response to heal humanity’s problems. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
IQM becomes the first listed European quantum company
Finnish quantum computing company IQM went public on Nasdaq at a $1.8bn pre-money valuation. The deal will leave the company with over $450m in cash. IQM has delivered 15 quantum systems to 13 customers, including four of the world's top ten supercomputing centers. Revenue hit at least $35m in 2025.
Berlin's Sanity Group sells for 250 million euros
Cannabis startup Sanity Group is being acquired by Canada's Organigram Global for EUR 250m. One half flows immediately, the other half is tied to milestones. The cap table included HV Capital, Cherry Ventures, and Redalpine, alongside celebrity backers Snoop Dogg, and TV host Klaas Heufer-Umlauf. A welcome signal that mid-market exits in Europe are coming back.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
What is the 20x startup?
YC argues AI has changed what a startup needs to look like. The new north star: revenue per employee. Companies in the current YC batch are hitting $10m+ in revenue with fewer than 10 people, and roughly a quarter have 95% of their code written by AI. On that: Palle Broe highlights that ElevenLabs sets new-hire sales quotas at 20x base salary. A rep making $150K needs to bring in $3m. That kind of quota only works when insane product-market pull is doing the heavy lifting, not outbound.
Should VCs stop investing in "ruthless psychopaths"?
Harry Stebbings only invests in "ruthless psychopaths." Julian Teicke pushes back: childhood trauma may kickstart entrepreneurial ambition, but when wounded founders scale, they scale their pain across millions…
We talked to Adrian Locher about the link between scaling and mental health. His story is a powerful counterpoint.
Don't vibe-code your CRM?
Vibe coding your CRM? The LinkedIn bubble these days makes you believe this is the new world. As Roi Krakovski puts it: the dev time alone costs more than the subscription, and that is before you add maintenance, bugs, integrations, security, and upgrades. CRMs are commodity software. It is like growing tomatoes instead of buying them.
Smart hack
From our Partners
Want to get the most out of ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a superpower if you know how to use it correctly.
Discover how HubSpot's guide to AI can elevate both your productivity and creativity to get more things done.
Learn to automate tasks, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation with the power of AI.
From us
How do you actually get AI adoption to stick? Most companies try to raise the floor: prompt engineering workshops for 200 people, or lunch-and-learns about ChatGPT. We appreciated the advice of Jeroen Van Hautte. His company picked eight people from HR, marketing, product, finance, and customer success, gave them the best tools, and spent two full days re-engineering their actual workflows.
The key takeaways:
Go deep with a few, not shallow with everyone. Two focused days beat ten generic workshops.
Build real tools, not demos. Each person left with something they use on Monday: a document reviewer, a customer signal aggregator, a content research pipeline.
Let the multipliers pull. Those eight went back to their teams and started inspiring others. Raising the ceiling creates the multipliers who eventually lift the floor.
One good read
Join the entrepreneurial journey
Are you ready to take your first steps into the startup ecosystem or seeking an exciting new opportunity? Below is a curated list of startup job openings across Europe for you to explore.
💡💡 Show your future employer that you go the extra mile and let them know directly why you will be the perfect fit! We have added a link to the Hiring Manager’s LinkedIn where we think this helps. Do things differently - message them! 💡💡
Internships
Operations Intern [📍London], Industry, Fuse Energy [Apply, Hiring manager]
Startup Partnerships & Business Development Intern [📍Paris], Ecosystem, STATION F [Apply]
Customer Success
Customer Success Manager (m/f/d) [📍Berlin / Konstanz, Germany], Data Analytics, KNIME [Apply]
Marketing & Comms
Content Marketing Manager [📍Remote, Germany], Electronics Supply Chain, Luminovo [Apply]
Founding Growth Marketer [📍Berlin, Germany], AI Phone System, telli [Apply]
Founding GTM Operator [📍Berlin, Germany], stealth AI recruiting venture [Apply]
Brand Design Lead[📍Amsterdam or Zurich], BioTech, Cradle [Apply, Hiring manager] Check out our conversation with Cradle’s CEO & Co-founder Stef.
Sales
Head of Sales EMEA [📍Dublin, Ireland], Cloud Storage, Dropbox [Apply]
Sales Director DACH [📍Remote, Germany], AI Insurance, Shift Technology [Apply]
Sales & Partner Manager Startup Nights [📍Winterthur, Switzerland], Ecosystem, Swiss Startup Association [Apply, Hiring manager]
Account Executive [📍Berlin], Real Estate, Backbone [Apply, Hiring Manager]
Strategy & Ops
Expansion Lead [📍Munich, Germany], AI Procurement, Tacto [Apply]
Chief of Staff [📍London], VC, eka Ventures [Apply, Hiring manager]
Product & Tech
Senior Product Manager - Platform [📍Remote, Europe], PostgreSQL Database, TigerData [Apply]
Head of Product (m/f/d) [📍Munich, Germany], IT Management, deeploi [Apply]
AI Automation Engineer [📍Berlin, Germany], Construction Tech, Cosuno [Apply]
Final words — take what you need
Stay connected and spread the word! If you found this newsletter insightful, why not share it with your network? Thanks for reading, and we look forward to bringing you even more insights in the next edition!
Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.
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