Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
TikTok creator Khabane “Khaby” Lane entered into a $900m agreement to sell his company. Though the actual story is complicated, it certainly shows how the creator economy is the next Hollywood. AI creators might one day catch up. They have started scheming against their human overlords: the AI bot-only (social) network Moltbook has agents talking about suing their human masters for overwork. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.
Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Europe’s top tech universities back new elite founder network
ETH Zurich, Oxford, TUM, and others have launched the Relativity Collective, a pan-European student network targeting future startup founders. Backed by Rise Europe and endorsed by founders from Deliveroo, GetYourGuide, Black Forest Labs and Personio, the group will gather 30 top students for an intensive March retreat. Applications are now open.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
ARR ≠ ARR
You could get the impression every revenue nowadays is ARR or MRR. We appreciated Christoph Jost calling out the inflation of ARR: a services business or an agency should not simply label its revenue as recurring because its looks better on Fundraising decks…
Does outcome-based pricing make sense?
Outcome-based pricing is the new kid on the block of SaaS pricing structures. Carles Reina of ElevenLabs points out some fundamental questions on it:
