Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Summer has arrived and it’s time for a wardrobe check, even in Tech. For starters, the Patagonia vest got competition: Carhartt is the new uniform in startup land. Down-to-earth is the new posh. Meanwhile, as people crawl out of their winter caves, weird things are happening: after a hacking attack, traffic signals on the US West Coast now bark in the voices of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It remains to be seen whether people are crossing faster. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Revolut’s growth is skyrocketing

Revolut’s 2024 profits surged to £1.1bn (2023: £438m) with revenue rising 72%, driven by card fees and interest products. Customer balances grew 66% to £30.2bn as the fintech gained 15 million users. After getting a UK banking licence in July, Revolut is preparing to launch full UK banking services in 2025, hiring hundreds of new staff.

Europe’s AI darling launches its version 2.0

Swedish Loveable - Europe’s fasting growing SaaS company - announced its product version 2.0, significantly upgrading the capabilities of its text-to-app editor. The move comes in the midst of a highly competitive race to cover coding tasks fully by AI. Lovable 2.0 is smarter, multiplayer, and more secure, helping to build production-ready apps through AI chat.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

The end of marketeers?

Marketing activities have been at the forefront of being vulnerable to AI. Now, the first AI CMO is out (see here). While companies are racing to replace coding work with AI, and Marketing is being automated - how will a future SaaS organization look like?

Is deal activity heating up?

Venture funding deal value is back at 2021 peak levels, although deal count is at long-term averages. AI seems to be driving huge funding rounds. Will it bring the expected returns?

Europe at the next frontier: Quantum computing

Quantum computing is the next frontier in Tech. Europe has strong quantum research but must invest in an independent supply chain. Without building a full, self-sufficient quantum stack, it risks long-term dependence on foreign suppliers, argues this insightful piece. Let’s act soon enough!

Mark your calendar

Are you ready for the May-Event-Marathon? We added all events in Europe here:

Check it out and let us know which one is missing!

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

LLM chatbots capture increasingly more traffic, taking over search and decision-making steps traditionally performed by humans browsing the web. Bain & Company wrote this valuable assessment on how to drive traffic to your brand in an LLM-first world and noted the following guidelines:

• Language: LLMs prefer rich conversational text (e.g. blogs) over webinars or embedded images.

• Agent-friendly structure: LLMs can more easily summarize information in ordered lists, definitions, and guides.

• Clean, scrapable sites: Accurate, fully indexed sites work better than keyword stuffing or years-old pages designed to build site authority.

• Off-site earned authority: Publications cited prominently in external media and expert commentary confirm and triangulate value propositions.

• Off-site deep customer conversations: A large presence in external reviews and forums generates mentions, backlinks, and credibility.

One good read

We’ve been covering a lot of Doom’s Day visions on AI recently. Here’s an interesting read on an alternative more positive vision: AI as a normal Technology

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.

Internships

(Intern) Entrepreneur in Residence - People and Organizational Development [📍Munich], Supply Chain, Tacto [Apply]
AI & Beyond Internship Incubator [📍Vienna], Video, bitmovin [Apply]
Applied AI Engineer [📍Paris], AI, Mistral [Apply]
People & Office Internship [📍Ghent, Belgium], FinTech, Silferfin [Apply]

Customer Success

Customer Success Manager - Europe [📍Remote, Europe], Brockerage Infrastucture, Alpaca [Apply]
Head of Customer Success [📍Munich], Governance SaaS, Rencore [Apply]

HR & Finance

People Ops Manager [📍Remote, EU], Crypto, CoW DAO [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Entrepreneurship & Community Coordinator [📍Zurich], AI, ETH AI Center [Apply, Hiring manager] — get to work directly with Melanie for the next few months.
Social Media & Community Specialist [📍Vienna], B2C Adventure Platform, Tourradar [Apply]

Sales

Head of Sales DACH [📍Remote, Germany], ERP SaaS, Xentral [Apply]
Sales Director [📍Amsterdam], Audit and Finance, Datasnipper [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Strategy & Operations Manager [📍Berlin, London, Remote], Fintech, Finmid [Apply]
Head of Distribution [📍Remote, Germany], Hospitality, Numa [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!