Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

AWS servers were down across wide regions of the globe yesterday. When you’re supposed to work and your CRM, recruiting system and Slack are off, it kind of felt like these days back in school when the teacher was sick: free class and no homework. A shame Snapchat and Facebook were also disrupted. Time to to go back to real life. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Oura doubles valuation with $900M raise

Smart ring maker Oura closed a $900m round led by Fidelity, valuing the Finnish smart ring maker at $11bn. Revenue hit $500m in 2024 and is on track to top $1bn this year, with 5.5m rings sold, half in the past year alone. The new funding will fuel AI features, distribution, and a push into blood testing.

Project A’s Uwe Horstmann takes the helm at weapons startup STARK

VC veteran Uwe Horstmann has become CEO of German kamikaze drone maker STARK. The move is highly unusual as he is still tied to Project A as an investor. Investors approved the unusual dual role, but questions on governance, conflicts of interest and portfolio loyalty are already surfacing.

Germany calls for unified EU stock exchange to stop NYSE drain

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called for a pan-European stock exchange to keep high-growth firms from fleeing to New York. Backing deeper capital markets union with France, Berlin is now open to handing oversight to the European level. The shift could fast-track Mario Draghi’s vision of EU capital market consolidation and tackle investor fragmentation.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

Less self-promotion on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn becomes ever more important to build your own brand. The risk is self-promoting posts get cringe. Christina Farr’s “9-to-1 rule” aims to solve this: for every post about your accomplishment, have nine posts with actual contributions. Do you let your story do the talking?

Founder Sales first?

Agree?

“Convince me” shifts to “prove it”

B2B Sales today is full of obstacles and inefficiencies: complex demos, costly implementations, adoption hurdles. As Micheal Shields points out, this “convince me” model will be replaced by AI with a “prove it” model: deployment will become quicker and have to show results, pilots will be replaced by sandboxes.
Who will win? Providers, customers - or both?

The founder journey

The founder journey is one marked by pain, setbacks - and huge potential for development. We loved this post of Lemlist founder Guillaume Moubeche who talks about being first a founder, then evolving into a CEO and then into an owner. It is all about realizing the demands a business has on you as a founder - and stepping into the right role…

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:

Smart hack

From our Partners

How Canva, Perplexity and Notion turn feedback chaos into actionable customer intelligence

You’re sitting on a goldmine of feedback: tickets, surveys, reviews, but can’t mine it.

Manual tagging doesn’t scale, and insights fall through the cracks.

Enterpret’s AI unifies all feedback, auto‑tags themes, and ties them to revenue/CSAT, surfacing what matters to customers.

The result: faster decisions, clearer priorities, and stronger retention.

👉 See how top teams do it

From us

Being in a Sales team is not easy. Benefitting from good sales leadership is even rarer. Meredith Chandler calls out how often both Leadership and AEs are frustrated and stuck in pipeline reviews and CRM checks. In this post, she describes how AEs can take things into their own hands and manage up:

• Come prepared to your 1:1’s, and focus on points growing your skills

• Be specific in your goals

• Send call recordings in advance - self-assess first, then review together live

• Ask for direct, targeted feedback - “What’s the biggest gap in my skill set right now?”

One good read

The curse of being driven

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

Werkstudentin Content Creatorin / Markenbotschafterin (weiblich) [📍Berlin], Fashion, Sains Sass [Apply]
Visiting Analyst (January 2026 onwards)[📍Berlin], VC, Merantix Capital [Apply, Hiring manager - check our very candid conversation with Adrian]

Customer Success

Scale Customer Success Manager [📍Düsseldorf], Event Tech, vivenu [Apply]
Director of Customer Success [📍Düsseldorf], Compliance in fashion supply, retraced [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Content Lead (Strategy & Operations) [ 📍Remote-first across Europe], Media, EUVC [Apply, Hiring manager]
Freelance Visual Designer - part-time [📍Amsterdam], BioTech, Cradle [Apply]
Communications Manager, Frontier AI Research [📍London], AI, DeepMind [Apply]

Sales

VP Sales, Digital Signage [📍Remote, Europe], Communication & Workspace, Poppulo [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Deployment Strategist [📍Europe Remote], Compliance, Duna [Apply]
Head of Startups Programs & Partnerships [📍Paris], Ecosystem, Station F [Apply, Hiring manager]
Project Manager [📍Zurich], Robotics, mimic [Apply]

Product & Tech

Process Engineer [📍Lupfig, Switzerland], Packaging, noriware [Apply, Hiring manager]
Product Manager - Strings Connect & Deliver [📍Remote, Europe], Localization, Phrase [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!