Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Taylor Swift grossed over 4m copies in album sales in her first week after her new release, the largest volume since tracking began. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg poached Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Co-Founder for a compensation package potentially worth $1.5bn. For one its The Life of a Showgirl, for the other one its: hiring season. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Aleph Alpha quietly sidelines its visionary CEO

Aleph Alpha founder Jonas Andrulis is out as CEO, replaced immediately by Reto Spörri and Ilhan Scheer. Insiders expected the shift, but not the speed - or the silence. Andrulis gave no public statement, and the company declined comment. The abrupt move signals a new, tougher leadership style at Germany’s top AI startup.

Iceye eyes $2.5bn valuation amid defence tech boom

Satellite startup Iceye is weighing fresh funding at a $2.5bn valuation, up from “significantly above” $1bn earlier this year. Known for tracking Russian troop movements, the company is riding a surge in European defence spending. Iceye has launched 54 satellites and aims to triple annual production.

Berlin’s n8n hits $2.5bn valuation

Workflow automation startup n8n raised $180m in a Series C, bringing total funding to $240m and pushing its valuation to $2.5bn. The open-source-focused platform blends AI orchestration with user-friendly design. With $40M+ ARR and 10x user growth, n8n aims to make AI-driven automation a business staple.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

How to make a business defensible against AI?

With the release of OpenAI’s Agent Builder last week, many business models got killed. The entire product was built in 6 weeks, with 80% of code written by AI. Andreas Goeldi points out, it is unprecedented that an incumbent breaks innovation in this pace. As he writes, defensibility for startups will lie in niches and cross-platform offerings.

From prompt engineering to context engineering?

Nearly every software product will use AI in the future, but which ones will win? We loved this post of Aditya Naganath of VC firm Kleiner Perkins who makes that case that context engineering will matter the most, ie. the ability of how to best model, enrich and retrieve domain specific context.

Place your ideas at the right time

Founders often have an abundance of new ideas, yet these are hard to process for an organisation. In this clip of the Italian Tech week, Jeff Bezos recounts as he reduced the number of new ideas he brought into Amazon to give the company a chance to adapt to them.

Find the full conversation here.

Don’t sell for $100m, aim for $100bn

Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt had one message for European founders:
“Please don’t sell for $100m. Aim for $100bn. I’ve spent a fair amount of time with UK entrepreneurs. They tend to make $100m and then sell. In Silicon Valley, people say, I started there.” Your take?

Events happening this week

We constantly update this quarter’s must-attend events for startups in Europe list.

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Smart hack

From our Partners

Build a smarter HR budget for global teams

Deel’s free HR Budget Planning Guide helps you plan smarter, scalable HR budgets with benchmarks, best practices, and a global-ready checklist.

Build a Smarter HR Budget

From us

Most B2B brands still think “reach” means paid ads. But as Grace Andrews points out the most powerful distribution channel is already inside your company: your people.

In this post, she makes the case for the potential of Employee Ambassadors:
Your brand account tells the story. Your people make it believable.

To build Employee Ambassadors, treat it like any marketing program:

• Create a brief: define your message and guardrails

• Provide guidelines: tone, do’s and don’ts

• Share a strategy: how personal content amplifies brand content

One good read

The Ugly Truth About Performative Euro-Optimism

More on the path towards Europe’s success:
Europe needs to act more like a single body to compete with US

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

Praktikum Founders Associate [📍Berlin], Real Estate SaaS, Matera [Apply]
Research Internship (Winter 2026) [📍London], AI, Cohere [Apply]
Customer Support Internship [📍Ghent], FinTech, Silverfin [Apply]
Payment & Fraud Management - Internship [📍Paris], Retail, Ankorstore [Apply]
Growth & Sales Intern [📍Berlin], AI Energy, Stealth [Apply]

Customer Success

Director of Customer Success & Services, EMEA [📍Remote, Europe], Cybersecurity, Cyera [Apply]
Strategic Customer Success Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Mechanical Design Platform, CoLab [Apply]

HR & Finance

Talent Acquisition Specialist [📍Berlin], IT Operation System, deeploi [Apply]
Head of Talent Acquisition & People Operations [📍Munich], SpaceTech, The Exploration Company [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Growth Lead [📍Zurich], Robotics, mimic [Apply]
Entreprise Marketing Manager [📍Europe Remote], AI, Linear [Apply]

Sales

Account Executive, Mid-Market [📍Berlin], Design SaaS, Figma [Apply]
Strategic Sales Lead [📍Berlin], Transportation, Via [Apply]

Product & Tech

Senior AI Engineer [📍Lucerne], AI, docpier [Apply, Hiring manager]
Director, Product Management [📍Remote], Search Engine, DuckDuckGo [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!