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Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Meta is building an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg so employees can get CEO-level guidance without bothering the actual CEO. On the opposite end: two brothers just built a $1.8bn telehealth company called Medvi with a dozen AI tools. No employees. $401m revenue last year. One company clones its CEO, the other proves you barely need one. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Aleph Alpha and Cohere explore transatlantic mega-merger
German AI champion Aleph Alpha and Canadian rival Cohere are in advanced merger talks. The combined entity would be dual-headquartered in Germany and Canada, with Berlin eyeing it as a "key customer." Cohere was last valued at $7bn with $240m ARR. Aleph Alpha raised $500m in 2023 from SAP and Bosch. Both focus on enterprise and sovereign AI.
Anthropic launches Project Glasswing with $100m cybersecurity pledge
Anthropic unveiled Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative backed by AWS, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike. Its new Claude Mythos Preview model has already found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities, including a 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD. Anthropic is committing $100m in model credits plus $4m to open-source security orgs. The model scores 83.1% on cybersecurity benchmarks, up from Opus 4.6's 66.6%.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Is becoming a people manager a bad career move?
Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk watched his co-founder, the highest-output engineer on the team, become Head of Product. He had all the intangibles, but didn't love people management or a calendar full of meetings. The company missed him doing what he does best, so he moved back to engineering. High performers shouldn't leave it for a better LinkedIn title.
Action produces information
Are we the last generation that built careers around software?
Elena Verna of Lovable wrote a brutally honest piece about what it actually feels like to be in tech right now: Feeling perpetually behind. Watching a 22-year-old produce a solid version of your decade-honed skills in 14 minutes. The reward for AI-driven efficiency isn't free time, it's more work. If output goes up while the cost of producing it goes down, what happens to compensation?
Smart hack
From our Partners
LLM traffic converts 3× better than Google search
58% of buyers now start their research in ChatGPT or Gemini, not Google. Most startups aren't showing up there yet.
The ones that are get cited by the AI tools their buyers, investors, and future hires already use. And they convert at 3×.
Download the free AEO Playbook for Startups from HubSpot and get the exact steps to start showing up. Five minutes to read.
From us
What if your entire engineering team's knowledge was available to every customer-facing person, instantly? Al Chen of Galileo gave Claude Code access to all 15 of their repositories and turned it into a self-service support tool. His take-away’s:
Code beats documentation. Your codebase is often a better source of truth than any wiki.
Pull, don't snapshot. A 16-line script keeps the AI's context fresh by pulling the latest main branch across all repos.
Hyper-personalize. Combine live code with customer-specific quirks for deployment guides that actually match reality.
Let non-engineers query code. Support teams stopped waiting on engineering. Customers noticed.
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
Internship - Financial Controller - March 2026 [📍Paris, France], Verley Food [Apply]
Working Student: Soil & Crop Modelling (all genders) [📍Berlin, Germany], Data & AI, Klim [Apply]
Business & Sales Ops - Stage [📍Paris, France], Yavin [Apply]
Working Student Trust (Third-Party Risk Management) [📍Munich, Germany], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]
Customer Success
Global Customer Success Program Manager (Remote Friendly within Spain) [📍Barcelona, Spain], Docplanner [Apply]
Key Account Manager | UK [📍London, United Kingdom], Juro [Apply]
Senior Account Manager - Retail & Grocery [📍Paris, France], Food Delivery, Deliveroo [Apply]
Senior Customer Success Manager [📍Paris, France], Choco [Apply]
Customer Success - SMB [📍Milan, Italy], Sibill [Apply]
Marketing & Comms
Sr. Performance Marketing Manager (m/w/x) [📍Berlin, Germany], Grover [Apply]
Sr. Performance Marketing Manager (all genders) [📍Berlin, Germany], Marta [Apply]
Marketing Manager [📍Finland], Defense & Space, ICEYE [Apply]
Customer Intelligence Manager [📍Paid Media Specialist [📍London, United Kingdom], Food Delivery, Deliveroo [Apply]
Sales
B2B Sales Development Representative (German Speaking) (m/w/x) [📍Berlin, Germany], Grover [Apply]
Senior Sales Executive [📍Lyon, France], FinTech, Ebury [Apply]
Account Executive- Enterprise - London, UK [📍London, United Kingdom], Powtoon [Apply]
Senior Partnerships Manager, UK [📍London, United Kingdom], Scan.com [Apply]
Senior Sales Strategy Manager EMEA [📍London, United Kingdom], AI Translation, DeepL [Apply]
Mission Sales Director, France [📍France], Defense & Space, ICEYE [Apply]
Strategy & Ops
Senior Business Analyst (Hybrid in Madrid) [📍Madrid, Spain], Docplanner [Apply]
Talent Lead - Business [📍London, United Kingdom], Relay Technologies [Apply]
Chief of Staff to CEO [📍London, United Kingdom], Multiverse [Apply]
Senior Finance Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Travel Tech, Captaintrain [Apply]
Chief of Staff [📍Hamburg, Germany], Data & AI, Mindpeak [Apply]
Product & Tech
Platform & Security Engineer [📍Berlin, Germany], Construction Tech, Cosuno [Apply]
Senior Manager, Supply Chain Engineering [📍Finland], Defense & Space, ICEYE [Apply]
Controls Engineer [📍Florence, Italy], Automation; Robotics, Bosch Rexroth [Apply]
Data Modeler Junior (F/H) alternant [📍France], Verley Food [Apply]
Data Migration Engineer (PHP) [📍Italy], HealthTech (B2B), AlfaDocs [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!
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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