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Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

ChatGPT turns three this week and what a time it’s had so far. It seems to write every other social media post, which is definitely more than a kindergarten kid pulls off. We wonder: will it turn an adult eventually or always stay the Intern you wish you had? Or will we be the children and the AI our adult master? Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

Btw: We hit an incredible milestone this week - 50 released podcast episodes! This is truly just scratching the surface, if you want to join our venture, we are hiring!

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Revolut sells employee shares at $75bn valuation

Revolut is letting employees cash out shares, at a bold $75bn valuation. Investors piling in include a16z, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, and Nvidia’s NVentures, eyeing deeper AI collaboration. Despite the fintech downturn, Revolut shows rare valuation resilience and continues its breakneck growth.

Black Forest Labs raises $450m to challenge AI giants

German image-gen startup Black Forest Labs has surged to a $3.25bn valuation, pulling in over $450m to compete with Google and ByteDance. Co-founded by latent diffusion pioneer Robin Rombach, the 50-person team already counts Meta, Adobe, and Canva as partners. Its Flux model, praised for quality and efficiency, is winning over developers with open-source options and lower costs.

OpenAI’s partners take on $100bn debt for AI arms race

OpenAI is driving a $100bn borrowing spree. SoftBank, Oracle and others are financing massive data centre builds tied to OpenAI’s sky-high compute needs. Oracle alone may borrow $100bn over four years to fulfill contracts. With a $20bn in revenue forecast, OpenAI is leveraging others' balance sheets to fund its AGI ambitions at industrial scale.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

User safety or user growth?

Social media platforms have long been targeted for their negative effects on minors. This highly insightful read exposes how Meta tolerated lose policies on serious charges such as sex trafficking: “They don’t meaningfully care about user safety.”

Typically European? Loveable called out for not paying VAT

Loveable got called out for not paying VAT globally. Startupland reacted with immediate pushback:
“The focus of the OP is whether a European tech company is compliant with outdated and excessive regulations, and not on the outdated and excessive regulations themselves, and how they handicap Europe’s high growth potential companies.”

We cheerlead Anton Osika’s perspective:
“I appreciate it, but that's not my takeaway. We can build a generational company from Europe, and I want to prove it. I'm not asking Europe to stop being Europe. I don’t know the perfect solution, but there are advantages to a high trust society and systems that don't bankrupt people when they get sick.”

In times of crisis: what are we building?

Entrepreneurship is all about building something new and daring. We live in turbulent times, times which feel we are at a crossroad, does building have a moral obligation in such periods? We appreciated the perspective of VC Fred Destin questioning what type of company these times actually need: Do we need another social shopping app? Another short form media app? Another fast delivery service?

The rise of the Founding Designer?

Founding Engineer, Founding AE - now: Founding Designer? Felix Haas makes a strong case for this new type of founding role: “Here’s what I notice in startups with founding designers: the product does fewer things, but each thing makes more sense.”

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:

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From us

Media coverage of your funding round is key, but has been becoming harder. We loved the perspective of Larissa Holzki arguing that journalist resources may have become scarcer, but expectations of founders ever more extreme.
Her advice: do not think of journalists as your outsourced Marketing department, but help them obtain context and relevance:

• Think about which audience your story is truly relevant to, and then choose the right outlet and reporter accordingly.

• Reach out early. Give reporters the chance to understand your business model and speak with customers or experts.

• Ask the outlet when the best release time is. Newsrooms want to publish when they can reach the largest audience.

• You don’t need a PR agency for this. Reaching out yourself gives you the chance to understand why your story may not have been important enough for that outlet on that particular day.

Check out our conversation with Amy Lewin on how to master media as a startup

One good read

The Industry that Taught Me Not to Fear Should Start Being Afraid

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.

Featured job*

Join Follow the Gradient as a team member:

Working Student(s): Growth & Content: Track A - Content & Research (Podcast + Newsletter) or Track B - Growth & Social Media (Clips + Distribution) | You can apply for one track or for both. [📍Zurich or Europe-remote], Media, Follow the Gradient [Apply]

Internships

Business Operations Associate [📍Zurich], Manufacturing, Manukai [Apply]
Internship Growth Investments [📍Berlin], VC, HV Capital [Apply, Hiring manager]
Balderton Investment Associate- Early Stage - DACH focused [📍London], VC, Balderton [Apply, Hiring manager]
Working Student, FP&A [📍Berlin], Fintech, Moss [Apply]

Customer Success

Senior Customer Success Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Life Sciences, Qualio [Apply]
Customer Success Engineer [📍London], Compensation Platform, Pave [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

EMEA Marketing Lead [📍Remote, France], Cybersecurity, Lookout [Apply]

Sales

Vice President Sales [📍Frankfurt], Ops SaaS, Operations1 [Apply]
Sales Manager [📍Munich], Real Estate SaaS, Matera [Apply]

Product & Tech

Founding Forward Deployed Engineer [📍Stockholm or London], AI, Lovable [Apply, Hiring manager]
Head of Product Analytics [📍London], Healthtech, Manual [Apply]
Director of Product (Mobile Apps) [📍Remote, Germany], Healthtech, Oviva [Apply] Listen to our podcast to get to know Oviva Co-Founder Kai Eberhardt

*want to feature your job as well? Then reach out to us on [email protected]

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!