Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Oracle founder Larry Ellison briefly topped the richest person list when shares in his company spiked 30% on signing new customers for AI-related projects. Meanwhile in Silicon Valley, news broke that former OpenAI exec Mira Murati raised $2bn in Seed funding without a public idea of her new venture. We take a bold guess here and say it will be something with AI. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Klarna pulls off $1.37bn IPO at $15bn valuation

Klarna raised $1.37bn in its long-awaited New York debut, landing a $15.1bn valuation, far below its $45bn peak in 2021. The deal was oversubscribed 25x, signalling revived fintech IPO appetite. Still, Klarna’s losses widened to $52m last quarter despite $823m in revenue, leaving investors watching closely if brand power can outweigh profitability concerns.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

Different Sales teams for the future?

Sales teams will look different in five years from now. Veronika Wax breaks down how they could look like. Are you hiring GTM Engineers?

Are you scaling your business, or killing it?

Guillaume Moubeche is famous for scaling the Lemlist empire without raising a single cent. In this post, he breaks down three things that successfully scaled them, and three ones that almost broke them.
The don’t do’s: Building for everyone too early, staying CEO too long, delaying hard conversations. Sounds familiar?

Growth shifts?

Growth is changing a lot with the rise of AI-native software products, many of the old ways in Marketing, Sales and Product don’t apply anymore. As Elena Verna outlines in this insightful blog post, new rules are shifting an entire industry. Some of the headlines which caught our attention:

• Marketing can’t keep up with shipping velocity

• Brand becomes a product job

• Founder-led social is the most powerful channel

Are you specific enough?

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

Don’t miss the summit for AI customer service leaders

Pioneer is the summit for forward-thinking leaders in AI customer service to come together and explore the latest opportunities and challenges transforming service with AI Agents.

Register now for October 9th, 2025. You won’t want to miss this.

Register for Pioneer today

From us

Preparing, running and handling performance reviews is difficult. They are supposed to be objective, yet often get attached an emotional burden for both employee and line manager.

Revolut has published this template of a Performance Review Scorecard they use.

No matter if you fully agree with their culture, it is worth a look given their track record as a highly successful organization.

One good read

How chatbots are changing the internet

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

Senior Founder Associate [📍Winterthur, Zurich], Real Estate Transactions, AssetOS [Apply]
Finance & Operations Working Student/ Intern [📍Remote, Munich], Electronics Supply Chain, Luminovo [Apply]
Working Student Operations [📍Munich], Data Analytics for Battery Storage, TWAICE [Apply]
Working Student Customer Growth & Communication (DACH Market) [📍Berlin], Fintech, Raisin [Apply]
Visiting Analyst [📍London], VC, Creandum [Apply]

Customer Success

Team Lead, Customer Success - DACH SMEs [📍Remote, Germany], Cybersecurity, XM Cyber [Apply]
Senior Customer Success Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Design Engagement System, CoLab [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Entrepreneurship & Community Coordinator [📍Zurich], AI, ETH AI Center [Apply] - come and work with Melanie!
(Senior) Influencer Marketing Manager [📍Hybrid, Berlin], Tax accounting, Taxfix [Apply]

Sales

Director of Sales - DACH [📍Remote, Berlin, Munich], AI automation, Axelera AI [Apply]
Country Manager [📍Berlin, Frankfurt], LLM model builder, Cohere [Apply]
Strategic Business Development Principal, DACH [📍Berlin], Transportation Network Technology, Via [Apply]
DACH Partnerships [📍St. Gallen] Ecosystem, START Summit [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Chief of Staff [📍Berlin], VC, Visionaries Club [Apply, Hiring manager]

Product & Tech

Product Engineer & Customer Success [📍Zurich], Real Estate, Optiml [Apply, Hiring manager]
Senior Product Manager - Internationalisation & Taxes [📍Hybrid, Berlin], Investment API, Upvest [Apply]
Senior Product Manager [📍London], Data, Ledgy [Apply]
Principal Product Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Network Assurance, IP Fabric [Apply]
Senior Robotics & AI Research Engineer, Perception [📍Zurich], Robotics, ANYbotics [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!