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Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
LinkedIn now puts a Seems like AI slop button on every post, after detection firm Pangram found that more than 40% of long-form posts there are fully AI-generated. The same week, it quietly retired its own "enhance your post" writing tool. In the age of AI, will content get easier, or harder? Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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PPS: The podcast is still on its summer break until September. The feedback survey is open until 15 August: thirty seconds, four questions.
Your talk track for this week's cocktail party
The Exploration Company is closing in on a $2bn valuation
Atomico and Bessemer are in talks to co-lead at least $300m into The Exploration Company at around $2bn post-money. The Franco-German company, founded in 2021 by Hélène Huby, is building Nyx, a reusable capsule designed to dock with any space station, with a first flight demonstration due in 2028.
Serbia's first unicorn has been profitable since day one
Ominimo raised €20.1m from the EBRD's venture arm at a €1.4bn valuation, two years after launching. The Serbian-Hungarian motor insurer says it has been profitable in Hungary since launch and is taking the money to accelerate rather than to fund operations. Its gross written premium run-rate went from €26.3m in 2024 to roughly €306.8m today, across nearly 1m customers in four countries.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
The most successful YC companies?
The hard part is no longer building
Tines rebuilt its front end, middle layer and back end from the ground up while the existing business was still growing. CEO Eoin Hinchy decided there is a sell-by date on low-code and no-code now that models write the code themselves. What replaced it is governance: AI still writes the workflow, but it runs as deterministic code under IT control. His name for the mess that creates otherwise is Wild Code, software that works and that nobody owns.
More AI exposure, more job openings?
Smart hack
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From us
Trying to build your own agent? Most people bolt an AI agent onto a chat window and hope for the best. Zach Chmael gave his agents a company Slack instead, with identities, permissions and their own memory. The value is in the boring part:
Every channel gets a written operating contract. What belongs there, who owns it, and what the agent may never touch.
Keep memory out of the chat. Conversations are disposable, decisions get promoted somewhere that survives.
Anything that touches reality needs a human. Publishing, deploying, spending, talking to customers.
One good read
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
Associate Product Owner (m/w/d) (APO) Summer Internship [📍Munich, Germany], Check24 [Apply]
Working Student - Data Migration (all genders) - Fixed-term 2 months [📍Hamburg, Germany], Fashion Cloud [Apply]
Internship/ Working Student: Business Development Coordinator (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], ecoPals [Apply]
Working Student Marketing & Events (f/m/d) [📍Heidelberg, Germany], Data & AI, paretos [Apply]
Customer Success
Head of Renewals [📍Cologne, Germany], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
Enterprise Customer Success Team Lead DACH [📍Cologne, Germany], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
Implementation Lead [📍London, United Kingdom], Kernel [Apply]
Principal Customer Value Manager (m/f/d) [📍Spain], Buynomics [Apply]
Marketing & Comms
Senior Product Marketing Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Causaly [Apply]
Product Marketing Manager [📍Ukraine], Mental Health, Mindly [Apply]
Manager, Product Marketing [📍Germany], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
Junior Marketing Manager (12 Month Contract) [📍Dublin/Hybrid, Ireland], Distilled [Apply]
Marketing Manager (all genders) [📍Berlin, Germany], HR Tech, Lumiform [Apply]
Sales
Sales Development Representative, EMEA [📍Dublin, Ireland], SaaS, Frontapp [Apply]
Enterprise Account Executive [📍London, United Kingdom], Elyos AI [Apply]
Account Manager - UK&I [📍Lisbon, Portugal], Pleo [Apply]
Team Lead Sales Development (SDR) DACH [📍Berlin, Germany], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
Account Executive - B2B SaaS [📍Berlin, Germany], Carbon Intelligence, Climatiq [Apply]
Revenue Operations Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Apron [Apply]
Small Business Account Executive - US (M/F) [📍Paris, France], Mytraffic [Apply]
Sales Manager:in (w/m/d) [📍Austria], Holzkern [Apply]
Strategy & Ops
Head of Operations [📍Berlin, Germany], Prior Labs [Apply]
General Counsel [📍Cologne, Germany], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
Junior Lawyer [📍London, United Kingdom], Volta [Apply]
Executive Assistant / Office Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Volta [Apply]
People&Workplace Specialist [📍Barcelona, Spain], Qualifyze [Apply]
HR Specialist sistemi supporto al riposo notturno [📍Catania, Italy], Rhino [Apply]
Talent Acquisition Manager [📍Paris, France], Timeleft [Apply]
Product & Tech
AI Product Manager [📍Paris, France], Inato [Apply]
Senior iOS Engineer [📍London, United Kingdom], Motorway [Apply]
Senior Data & Python Software Engineer [📍Berlin, Germany], Ceartas DMCA Ltd [Apply]
Engineering Manager - Employee Spend [📍Copenhagen, Denmark], Pleo [Apply]
Solution Engineer | DACH [📍Cologne, Germany], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
Full Stack Delivery Lead [📍Finland], Volta [Apply]
Enterprise Data & Systems Architect - 100% [📍Schlieren, Switzerland], Lightium [Apply]
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Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.
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