Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

The watch worn by Mark Zuckerberg during his free speech announcement video at one point seemed to make more news than the revolutionary move by Meta itself to abandon fact-checking. The price tag of $900k certainly was impressive for an item that shows… time. That some tech is not what it seems was experienced by a Waymo guest whose driverless car started going in circles instead of to the airport. Artificial intelligence is not always better then the human one. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Meta abandons fact-checking

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his company would be phasing out fact-checking programs in the US and move to a community notes model, as pioneered by X. The move puts it at odds with EU regulation such as the Digital Services Act and has quickly evolved into a clash of two opposing sides: one now sees misinformation as a free-for-all, the other regards fact-checking as censorship. Advertisers started to raise concerns over a potential increases in harmful content. If anything, “Facebook jail” will soon be a thing of the past.

Europe’s biggest ever Series A

UK Biotech Verdiva Bio announced a Series A financing round of $410m. The round marks the largest investment during a Series A in Europe so far. The company develops weight loss drugs, with its first drugs having successfully completed Phase I trials. The scale of the investment mirrors the appetite of investors in the nascent weight-loss market.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

A path to AGI?

In a recent blog post, Sam Altman revealed that OpenAI is confident they now know how to build AGI. A path to superintelligent systems would be transformative to anything we have seen so far - are we closer than we think?

Hope for Europe?

Europe’s apparent decline has been much discussed - yet is its doom overhyped? Leon Sandner shared his interesting perspective on how the continents strengths can be played…

Meanwhile, Skype Founder Niklas Zennström follows this path of hope by arguing the continent does not need LLMs to join the AI race, but can build applications on top (see here).

VCs in China - how not to do it?

Some VC practices in North America and Europe have been critiqued for being founder unfriendly. This insightful article examines the business behaviour of VCs in China, which make founders personally liable for the investments - destroying their careers in case of a failure to build a successful business… a direct way of destroying entrepreneurship?

Mark your calendar

Germany

DLD in Munich, 16-18 January [Program]

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Smart hack

VC firm a16z presented its most useful AI apps of the year, curated from the firm’s partners as well as tech influencers such as Lenny Rachitsky. Be sure to find some gems in the list!

One good read

This week, we got two as Meta’s decision on factchecking has been making waves.

One read shedding light on the potential scale of misinformation on Facebook:
Meta surrenders to the right on speech

One read examining Meta’s move as a highly rational business decision:
The coming battle between social media and the state

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

Marketing Intern - France & Southern Europe focus [📍Vienna], AI, Prewave [Apply]
Working Student [📍Berlin], KI, Text Cortex AI [Apply]

Customer Success

Customer Success Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Workflow Automation, n8n [Apply]
Senior Customer Success Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Cloud Connectivity, Solo.io [Apply]

HR & Finance

Talent Acquisition Manager [📍Berlin], Fintech, Bunch [Apply]
Head of People [📍Amsterdam], Quick commerce, Flink [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Head of Media & PR [📍Helsinki], Startup Event, Slush [Apply, Hiring manager]
Demand Generation Manager [📍Remote, Germany], Electronics Supply Chain, Luminovo [Apply]
Associate Brand Designer [📍Barcelona], BioTech, Seqera [Apply]

Sales

Area VP Sales, DACH [📍Remote], Cybersecurity, Semperis [Apply]
Senior Account Manager (DACH) [📍Remote], GTM SaaS Platform, Dealfront [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Head of Procurement [📍Berlin], Fintech, Raisin [Apply]
Operations & Strategy Manager [📍Berlin], IT OS, deeploi [Apply]

Product & Tech

Founding Senior Product Engineer / CTO [📍Zürich, Munich, or remote in Europe], Health Tech, Adead [Apply, Hiring manager]
Director of Product [📍Remote, Europe, UK, East Coast US], Cloud Development, LocalStack [Apply]
Senior Product Manager - Weaviate Cloud [📍Remote], Vector Databases, Weaviate [Apply]
AI & Automation Engineer [📍Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland], FinTech, Paymira [Apply, Hiring manager]

Final words — take what you need