Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos committed to his new love in a lavish three day wedding in Venice. While the rest of us was gossiping about the custom one-and-half year in the making Dolce & Gabbana dress of his wife Lauren Sanchez, the current heatwave was a reminder that both the wedding and the gossip may be time and money spent away from one of our real issues, climate change. Hopefully, AI will solve that problem for us, too. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

H Company’s COO exits amid ongoing leadership shakeup

Mike Benchimol has quit as COO of French AI startup H Company, just two weeks after its CEO was replaced. Benchimol’s exit follows a year of turmoil, including the departure of three DeepMind cofounders and a prolonged stealth phase post-$220M seed round. Only one original cofounder remains active, raising fresh doubts about the startup’s direction.

Zuckerberg poaches OpenAI talent, plots $29bn AI war chest

Meta has lured three top OpenAI researchers and is in talks to raise $29bn to turbocharge its AI ambitions. The talent raid comes as Zuckerberg personally courts AI experts with $100m offers and ramps up spending to $72bn this year. Meta’s AI pivot follows underwhelming model launches and intense competition from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

Reddit ramps up AI fight to protect human touch

Reddit is tightening defenses against AI-generated content, as CEO Steve Huffman declares an “arms race” to keep its forums human. With Google and OpenAI paying millions for training rights, Reddit’s data is now AI gold - and a magnet for spam. The company plans user verification without names, possibly via Worldcoin, and is suing Anthropic over content scraping.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

The end of B2B SaaS?

E-signature giant DocuSign has threatened to take legal action against a copycat app - which was apparently built in just two days with Lovable and Cursor AI. Is this a fate many B2B SaaS companies will have to face?

The reality about exits

We all live in our own bubble and our startup bubble is all about exits. Is every exit a success, though? Alex Turnbull breaks down a 9-figure exits in this thought-provoking post. His rundown:

• We sold the company for $100M (their "9-figure exit")

• But we had to pay our Series A/B investors $63M

• We also paid our seed investors $10M

• Then, we divided $27M between 3 - as we're 3 co-founders

• That's $9M each

• With 37% capital gains tax; that's another $3.3M less

• So $5.7M pre-debt

• But since we didn't take a salary for the first 2 years and had to take a $500K personal loan to make us investable → We made $4.8M in the end

Was it worth all of it? You tell us!

Is AI automating things we don’t want to have automated?

While many startups are seeking to build AI for replace entire jobs, a new study suggests workers want AI to do the boring tasks on their behalf. Before getting an AI to create your marketing campaign, you want an AI to actually do your expense reports, right…

A fragmented Europe: advantage or drawback?

Europe’s core challenge in backing strategic tech: countries compete even when they try to collaborate. A new report on the turmoil at the 2-year-old NATO Innovation Fund highlights this. Can the continent fix its structure - or will national agendas keep sabotaging shared ambition?

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

Customer stories are a valuable, but rare asset. Your Marketing teams want them, their are hard to organize by Customer Success. Meg Gowell of Typeform shared her hack on how she obtained 24 customer stories in one easy run:

• Ask your customer to share a win they had with your tool

• Offer them to feature this win on one of your platforms, like your newsletter

The key: Don’t simply ask for information. Acknowledge they achieved something of value, and ask them to share it. Find the template here.

One good read

My couples retreat with 3 ai chatbots and the humans who love them
+ more AI readings: AI’s metrics question

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

AI Intern (AI Platform Team, 6 months contract) [📍Zurich], HRTech, Beekeeper [Apply]
Visiting Analyst [📍Stockholm], VC, Creandum [Apply, Hiring manager]
Talent Acquisition Working Student [📍Frankfurt], Supply Chain Management, Qualifyze [Apply]

Customer Success

Customer Success Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Travel, Hostaway [Apply]

HR & Finance

Tech Recrutiter[📍Amsterdam], Gastronomy, tebi [Apply]
Senior Strategic Finance Analyst [📍Madrid], HRTech, Nextthink [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Sales & Marketing Officer [📍Germany], Logistics, SaveSpace [Apply, Hiring manager]
Performance Marketing Manager[📍City or Remote], Fashion, AMELI Zurich [Apply, Hiring manager] - also check out our conversation with AMELI’s co-founder and CEO, Christina 👀

Sales

Account Executive [📍Zurich], AI, Instabase [Apply]
Account Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Localization platform, Lokalise [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Chief of Staff & Operations [📍Rome], FinTech, Huspy [Apply]
Chief of Staff [📍Berlin], VC, Lucid [Apply, Hiring manager]

Product & Tech

VP Product [📍Berlin], Food, Formo [Apply]
AI Engineer - Junior [📍London], EdTech, Memrise [Apply]
Product Analyst [📍Stockholm], FinTech, Brite Payments [Apply] - check out our conversation with Brite’s founder and CEO, Lena 👀

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!