NEW ECONOMIES

Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Saul Klein
(2:21) Starting LoveFilm
(8:48) LoveFilm's Route to Market
(11:10) Building Skype
(17:30) Skype's Early Network Effects
(19:29) Is Europe Still a Great Place to Build?
(24:10) Which Are the Best Regions to Start?
(31:10) Hardest Challenges in Scaling in Europe
(35:26) How Should Founders Select Investors?
(43:47) VC Stewardship & Shared Ownership
(52:36) What Would Saul Build Tomorrow?

Our notes from this conversation

Capital is a commodity. Access to a contract is not.

With 20,000 VCs in the world, “we have money” isn’t a value proposition, it’s the line every fund uses. Saul’s actual differentiator: nondilutive revenue, a real purchase order or contract, then access to the right talent, then capital formation most founders don’t know exists. His analogy: 20,000 barber shops all shouting “I cut hair” until someone breaks the pattern.

Netflix’s real innovation wasn’t DVDs by mail. It was demand data.

LoveFilm’s (the company Saul founded) edge wasn’t logistics, it was the queue: people ranked 20-50 titles, giving the business live demand data that became leverage with studios. The company hit $100M+ revenue growing 30-40% a year, largely by powering DVD rental for Tesco, ITV, Odeon and MSN.

Skype grew 400,000 users a day, and Saul couldn’t spend a marketing budget.

Product-driven virality was adding users faster than paid acquisition could. In 12-18 months the team went from ~20-30 people to 500, and Skype’s revenue went from zero to $200 million.

Blindly chasing the US as market #2 is what Saul calls a catastrophic error.

Most investors are “sheep,” and following them west assumes the US is one easy market, it’s actually fifty fragmented jurisdictions and usually the toughest “red ocean” to enter second. Zoopla, a strong #2 to Rightmove in a market worth hundreds of millions, is his proof a well-chosen home market often beats the US by default.

Phoenix Court’s & venture stewardship.

Structured as a company, not an LLP, since year one, a rarity among ~20,000 global funds - Phoenix Court has always shared profit and carry with every employee, not just partners.

Links

Follow Ollie on X: https://x.com/ollieforsyth

Follow Saul on X: https://x.com/cape

Phoenix Court: https://www.phoenixcourt.vc

Our partner for today’s episode is Harmonic - the go-to startup database: https://harmonic.ai

Previous episodes include

See all previous episodes here 👉

If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

Xero

Ollie Forsyth — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:43:02 GMT

Subscribe to stay ahead of technology trends. Never miss future editions.

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, CEO of Xero, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explain why cracking the US took twenty years and an acquisition despite Xero being the more open, cheaper alternative to Intuit, why she treats “respected vs. liked” as a false choice a new CEO has to reject on day one, and why the biggest threat to a twenty-year-old platform isn’t a faster competitor but the capital and infrastructure it takes to replicate what that platform already owns.

About Xero
Xero is a global small business platform serving over 5 million customers across 180 countries, providing cloud-based accounting, payments, and payroll software for small businesses and their advisers.

Watch Now - Sukhinder Singh Cassidy - CEO at Xero

During this episode, we also cover the strategy behind narrowing Xero’s US focus from “5 million customers” to a single unicorn-revenue number, how a survey of Xero’s own customer base splits into a majority still non-native to AI and a fast-growing minority already building on the company’s APIs (4x since January), and why Airtable selling for $1.2B on $450M in revenue is the cautionary tale for the current market.

As we know, layoffs happen across many companies, and Xero was no exception. Six weeks after joining as CEO, Sukhinder laid off 700–800 employees. We get into how she ran the numbers and surveys, and why she believes accountants will outlast the “Claude will just tell you the answer” argument because human judgment and advice still matter.

We close on why she’d rather be model-agnostic than bet the business on a single AI partner, what a week actually looks like running a 5,000-person public company, and how she keeps a fiercely scheduled career next to a deliberately unscheduled personal life.

Available everywhere you listen to podcasts: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X

Download the transcript 👇

NEW ECONOMIES Podcast: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, CEO at Xero

303KB ∙ PDF file

Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Sukhinder Singh Cassidy
(2:17) The Current State of Xero
(5:35) Why America Was So Hard to Crack
(10:05) Why It's Important to Focus
(12:55) Joining Xero as CEO
(16:40) Being Respected vs. Liked
(22:57) How to Prepare for a Layoff
(27:30) Being a Publicly Listed Company CEO
(30:07) The State of SMBs
(33:30) Thinking How to Partner with AI Models
(36:24) How Much Code Is Written by AI?
(38:39) How Does Xero Stay Relevant?
(42:51) Is Trust the Next Biggest Moat?
(43:39) The Biggest Opportunity for Xero
(46:00) Will Accountants Still Be Relevant?
(48:08) Companies Who Aren't Hiring AI Talent
(49:05) Ollie Joins as Sukhinder’s Chief of Staff
(50:39) Personal Time Out

Our notes from this conversation

1. Being liked and being respected are different jobs, and she picked one.
When we asked during the episode, Sukhinder is direct about it: over a thirty-year career, she’s optimized for going where her strengths are valued and her values fit, not for being liked. That meant walking into Xero, presuming people are smart and honest, and telling them the hard truth on day one rather than sugarcoating the situation.

2. She benchmarked the layoff before she announced it.
Three months before officially becoming CEO, she surveyed over a thousand Xero employees, ran an outside-in with McKinsey against comparable SaaS companies, and read the data back to the company twice before cutting 700–800 roles six weeks later. The data made the decision defensible: it didn’t make it easy. She openly shares that she was heartbroken announcing it, and got Slack messages that day from employees she’d never met, checking if she was okay. This can say a lot about the company culture.

3. Cracking America took twenty years because incumbency beats a better product.
Intuit is twice Xero’s age, born in the US, with 100% of its attention on that one market. Xero had to double its US organic growth rate, bring on US engineers building for US customers instead of running the market from the southern hemisphere, and narrow its pitch to “easier, cheaper, more open” before the US became its fastest-growing region, helped along by the Melio acquisition.

4. Public company CEO in a choppy market means the job doesn’t change.
Her answer to “what’s hardest right now” is basically: nothing new, be a value creator, be focused, keep delivering through good times and bad. She thinks the market currently can’t tell one SaaS company from another, and her job is to keep 5,000 employees focused on Xero’s own numbers rather than the noise.

5. Most SMBs aren’t using AI yet, and that gap is the opportunity.
Xero’s own customer survey shows the majority of small businesses are still early in their AI adoption. A smaller, fast-growing minority is already comfortable enough to use Claude for real financial actions: API usage on Xero is up 4x since January. She sees Xero’s job as meeting the whole spectrum, from AI chat for the least advanced to XeroForce for the most.

6. Trust, not code, is becoming a real moat for companies.
Her response to a competitor who can build “a thin slice of software faster” is: sure, but can you raise the capital, acquire the customers, get the data trusted, and be accurate and compliant across every job a customer needs done? Ollie points to Airtable’s $1.2B sale on $450M in revenue as the cautionary tale: the product was replicable, the twenty years of infrastructure, data, and distribution weren’t.

Links

Follow Ollie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ollieforsyth

Follow Sukhinder on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sukhinders

Visit Xero: https://www.xero.com

Episode Partners - Harmonic, the go-to startup database: https://harmonic.ai

Episode Partners: Hostinger, a go-to tool for builders: https://hostinger.com/neweconomies. Enter code NEWECONOMIES for 10% off.

Previous episodes include

See all previous episodes here 👉

If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

This Week In Startups

Ollie Forsyth — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:58:54 GMT

Hey readers

Welcome back to your regular tech digest, a quick snapshot of the most recent tech news worth paying attention to.

This week was a mighty one for tech: Databricks raised $5B at a $190B valuation, Lovable raised $400M at a $13.3B valuation, and OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap departed as the company’s leadership exodus continues. Apollo Global Management agreed to acquire easyJet for $7.6B (which has plans to make it upmarket), and Anthropic announced it will watermark all AI-generated text to bring better transparency to the ecosystem.

We also explore why healthcare is having its biggest moment yet, alongside the week’s biggest startup funding news, acquisitions, new VC funds, and our latest conversation with Thumbtack co-founder and CEO Marco Zappacosta on why AI search is becoming a powerful new customer acquisition channel for marketplaces.

This edition covers:

🗝️ Trend of the week: Healthcare is having a moment
🔍 Top startup tech news
💰 Startup funding highlights easily sourced by using Harmonic
🤝 Acquisitions
👀 New VC funds launched
🎤 Must-watch interviews from our podcast show

and much more.

A message from today’s partner: Mostly Metrics

The CFOs of Robinhood, Figma, Plaid, and Major League Baseball all read the same free newsletter every week.
Mostly Metrics is trusted by 75,000 readers and regularly breaks down metrics and monetization models the best CFOs in the world actually use to run their companies. Fundraising. Headcount planning. Pricing. The stuff nobody teaches you until you’re already in the seat.
Subscribe to the Mostly Metrics newsletter to learn the latest strategies.

🗝️ Trend of the week: Healthcare is having a moment

Healthcare is having an incredible moment across gut, personal and physical health. This explainer video breaks down why the sector has reached this inflection point, plus 3 companies to watch.

🔍 This week in startups: Top startup tech news

Lovable raised $400M at a $13.3B valuation.
Databricks raised $5B at a $190B valuation.
OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap departs, one of OpenAI’s most senior and longest serving execs left to “start something new,” continuing a months-long leadership exodus (Fidji Simo, Bill Peebles, Kevin Weil, Johannes Heidecke all left this year).
Anthropic announces it will watermark all text generated by its AI models - a significant move toward AI transparency and provenance tracking.

💰 Startup funding highlights easily sourced by using Harmonic

Vaderis Therapeutics raised $152.5M Series B to advance its rare vascular disease pipeline and AKT inhibition therapies into late-stage clinical trials.
CodeRabbit raised $143M Series C at a $1.5B valuation, co-led by Atomico and Smash Capital - the AI code review pioneer grew from $15M to $40M ARR in nine months.
Boulevard Bio launched from stealth with $65M from founding investor Deerfield Management to develop a new class of biologics.
Skan AI raised $63M co-led by Cathay Innovation and Dell Technologies Capital to map how enterprise work actually gets done - now trusted by a quarter of the Fortune 50.
Flagler Health raised $50M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners for its AI-native musculoskeletal healthcare platform, bringing total funding to $63M.
Blacksmith raised $45M Series B led by Peak XV at a $550M valuation, nearly 10x its valuation from less than a year ago - to test and validate the flood of AI-generated code.
Remepy raised $36M Series A led by O.G. Venture Partners and M Ventures to advance Hybridopa, its hybrid drug for Parkinson’s disease, into Phase III trials.
Mindgard raised $30M Series A led by Album VC to scale its AI security platform that protects models from adversarial attacks.
Discovered Materials raised $9M Seed led by Lightspeed India Partners to develop next-gen sustainable materials.
Yulu raised $93M Series C to expand its electric micro-mobility fleet across India.
Bakingo raised $10.5M Series B led by Faering Capital to scale its online bakery and delivery platform.
Volta raised $300M to tackle the soaring cost of building AI infrastructure.

🤝 Acquisitions

OpenAI acquired presentation startup NextSlide.
Manus AI is unwinding from Meta’s $2B acquisition after Beijing blocked the deal.
Apollo Global Management agreed to acquire budget airline easyJet for $7.6B.

👀 New VC funds launched

Accel raised $3.5B to invest in emerging global AI startups.
Thrive holdings raised $2B to bring AI to the enterprise.
South Park Commons raised $575M to double down on their best bets.

🎤 Must-watch interviews from our podcast show

Marco Zappacosta, co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explain why Google search volume has reaccelerated to an all-time high post-ChatGPT, why the customers now converting through AI chat are more qualified and further into their decision than any channel Thumbtack has seen before, and why marketplaces for hiring humans, unlike commodity marketplaces such as Uber or food delivery, are mediated by certainty and confidence rather than speed and price.

Previous episodes include

$2 Billion Founder: The Secret to Building a High-Growth Startup in 24 Months | Tanay Kothari
Canva Co-Founder: AI Is Useless Without This 1 Skill | Cam Adams
Hollywood is Secretly Replacing Films With AI | Justine Moore.
Why most people are underusing AI and why the winners won’t just be OpenAI and Anthropic | Reid Hoffman.
Base44 Founder: The Strategy Behind Building a Million Dollar Company Solo | Maor Shlomo (Base44) & Mark Tluszcz (Wix).
AI is a Better Writer Than You But Here’s What it Can’t Replace | Mark Manson.
The Couple That Bootstrapped a Billion Dollar Company | Julia & Kevin Hartz.
Email Never Died | Rahul Vohra founder at Superhuman.
Replit’s President & Head of AI | Michele Catasta.

Watch and subscribe now!

NEW ECONOMIES Subscriber Offers

Hyperagent: Build AI agents in minutes. Get $1,000 in free credits here. Enter code NEWECONOMIES.
Hostinger: Buy a domain, hosting service or build any website within minutes. Start building with 10% off here.
Attio: Tired of trying multiple CRM tools? Attio is the favorite, used by thousands of startups. Start using it here.
Harmonic is your go-to startup database provider.

If you enjoyed this edition, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

Circle

Ollie Forsyth — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:14:19 GMT

Subscribe to stay ahead of technology trends. Never miss future editions.

Sid Yadav, co-founder of Circle, joins the podcast to break down what it takes for creators to succeed in 2026 and beyond: building real communities, capturing attention through audience-building, and using taste as a creative edge. Sid also shares what creators and platforms should be doing more of, how to actually start building an audience, and the possibilities that open up once you do.

About Circle
Circle is a technology company helping creators, entrepreneurs, and brands build and monetize thriving online communities. Every day, tens of thousands of communities turn to Circle to run memberships, courses, events, and discussions - all in one place. With over $60 million in annual recurring revenue and a growing suite of AI-powered tools through Circle AI, they help creators go beyond content and build real, lasting businesses.

Watch Now: Sid Yadav - co-founder at Circle

We also cover why chasing audience size is “playing the game on hard mode,” and how most creators have a blind spot around lifetime value, never building products beyond the content itself. We get into the Sean Ellis product-market-fit framework Circle borrowed from Superhuman’s early playbook, why a nurse-coaching collective is one of Circle’s most successful communities, and why Sid thinks YC is secretly the best community business in the world, monetizing through a 7% pre-seed stake rather than membership fees.

We close on Circle AI and the Eclipse launch: the shift from platform to AI partner that guides creators through every failure point of building a community: the one board seat Sid still wants, and where he thinks digital businesses go over the next 10 to 20 years.

Transcript Sid Yadav

367KB ∙ PDF file

Watch or listen now across YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X

Our notes from this conversation

1. Audience and LTV are two different equations, and most creators only optimize one.
Circle’s model for creator businesses is audience × lifetime value. Everyone obsesses over growing the audience side: subscribers, views, virality - while ignoring LTV entirely: what products, memberships, or experiences you actually sell to the people already paying attention.

2. Chasing viral reach is “playing the game on hard mode.”
Sid draws a hard line between shallow attention (a video going viral to an anonymous crowd) and durable attention (people who recognize your brand and follow you across formats). The 1,000 true fans who’ll pay you repeatedly beat 100,000 people who saw one video once.

3. An audience is not a community, and conflating the two is where most creators fail.
An audience consumes your content. A community is the subset that shows up for each other around a shared transformation. Sid’s biggest predictor of failed communities: no defined answer to “who is this person becoming in 3, 6, and 12 months?”

4. Circle’s own founding came from watching Teachable’s best creators outgrow static courses.
Sid and his co-founders noticed the strongest course creators were building community around their content, not just selling video modules. That became Circle’s founding thesis: community, not education, is the better organizing principle for the creator economy.

5. They borrowed the product-market-fit framework from Superhuman.
Circle’s early growth process: mandatory founder demos, a curated waitlist, and tracking the Sean Ellis “how disappointed would you be” score, came directly from Rahul Vohra’s public playbook. Rahul later became a seed investor in Circle.

6. One of Circle’s most successful communities is a nurse coaching collective.
Nurses with demanding 9-to-5 shifts join, get trained into coaches, and build a second income stream outside their original job. Sid holds it up as the model: concrete transformation, massive addressable market, members who stay for years.

7. YC is the best community business that’s never called itself one.
Office hours, a founder network, an alumni network, and one unifying ritual (demo day) - monetized through a 7% pre-seed stake rather than subscription fees. He thinks more community builders should study the YC model instead of the average Discord server.

8. Circle AI is a bet that the platform itself should diagnose your failure point.
Rather than a generic feature, Circle AI is built to sit “next to you” and identify exactly where you are in the failure sequence - no audience, undefined transformation, missing rituals, or burnout - then guide you to the next step.

9. Taste has two components, and AI abundance makes both more valuable, not less.
Sid breaks taste into perspective (your unique, non-commoditized point of view) and craft (fine-tuned execution quality). As AI makes content production free, he argues taste becomes the only differentiator left.

Links

Follow Ollie on X: https://x.com/ollieforsyth

Follow Sid on X: https://x.com/sidyadav

Visit Circle: https://circle.so

Partnership: Harmonic is the go-to startup database - https://harmonic.ai

Partnership: Hostinger is a go-to tool for builders. Subscribers receive 10% off here - https://hostinger.com/neweconomies.

Previous episodes include

See all previous episode here 👉

If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

This Week In Startups

Ollie Forsyth — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:32:20 GMT

Hey readers!

Welcome back to your regular tech digest, a quick snapshot of the most recent tech news worth paying attention to.

This week was packed with major developments across tech. Airtable was acquired by Bending Spoons, SpaceX reported its first quarterly earnings, Nikita Bier stepped down from X, and billions more flowed into AI, defense, energy, and infrastructure startups. We also explore why AI search is becoming a powerful new customer acquisition channel for marketplaces, alongside the week’s biggest startup news, acquisitions, new VC funds, and our latest conversation with Thumbtack co-founder and CEO Marco Zappacosta.

This edition covers:

🗝️ Trend of the week: AI search is becoming the new lead-gen channel for marketplaces
🔍 Top startup tech news
💰 Startup funding highlights easily sourced by using Harmonic
🤝 Acquisitions
👀 New VC funds launched
🎤 Must-watch interviews from our podcast show

and much more.

A message from today’s partner: Mostly Metrics

The CFOs of Robinhood, Figma, Plaid, and Major League Baseball all read the same free newsletter every week.
Mostly Metrics is trusted by 75,000 readers and regularly breaks down metrics and monetization models the best CFOs in the world actually use to run their companies. Fundraising. Headcount planning. Pricing. The stuff nobody teaches you until you’re already in the seat.
Subscribe to the Mostly Metrics newsletter to learn the latest strategies.

🗝️ Trend of the week: AI search is becoming the new lead-gen channel for marketplaces

Marco Zappacosta, co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, joins us on the podcast to explain why Google search volume has reaccelerated to an all-time high post-ChatGPT, why customers who convert through AI chat are more qualified and further into their decision than any channel Thumbtack has seen before, and why marketplaces for hiring humans, unlike commodity marketplaces such as Uber or food delivery, are mediated by certainty and confidence rather than speed and price.

About Thumbtack
Thumbtack is a technology company helping millions of people confidently care for and improve their homes. Every day in every county of the U.S., people turn to Thumbtack to complete small fixes, routine maintenance, and major improvements. With over 12 million 5-star projects and counting, they help homeowners and home professionals accomplish more.

Watch Now: Marco Zappacosta - co-founder of Thumbtack

🔍 Top startup tech news

Airtable gets acquired by Bending Spoons for $1.28B. Once valued at $11B, now picked up at a fraction, the third brand-at-a-discount play this year after AOL and Eventbrite.
Google’s AI leadership reshuffle. Demis Hassabis moves from CEO of DeepMind to Alphabet Chief Scientist.
Nikita Bier steps down from X as Chief Product Officer.
Revolut founder in line for a mega payout. Nik Storonsky’s incentive package could push his fortune to £57B if Revolut hits $200B valuation, not far-fetched after its latest secondary at $115B.
SpaceX posted its first quarterly earnings. Revenue reached $7.8B (nearly 2x YoY, beating estimates).

💰 Startup funding highlights

Valar Atomics raised $1B Series B led by Sequoia to build safe, next-gen nuclear reactors.
Base Power Company raised $1B Series D to deploy distributed home battery storage that strengthens grid reliability and manages peak demand without solar.
Mariana Minerals raised $310M Series B led by Khosla Ventures to supply critical minerals for energy, AI, and defense.
Volta raised $300M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz to build a fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform from capital to clusters to software.
Horizon3.ai raised $250M Series E led by NEA and NightDragon to scale its autonomous penetration testing platform that continuously finds and prioritizes vulnerabilities.
Moove raised $250M Series C led by the likes of Mubadala to expand revenue-based vehicle financing for mobility entrepreneurs in underserved markets.
HappyRobot raised $150M Series C led by Eurazeo and Prysm Capital to scale its AI-native operating system that autonomously manages complex supply chain operations.
Zenity raised $115M Series C led by Norwest to secure low-code/no-code development environments and AI agents across enterprises.
Decade raised $85M Seed led by Greenoaks to build AI-powered wealth management for individuals, founded by Nubank’s former CTO and first Brazilian Thiel Fellow.
Convex raised $57M Series B led by Insight Partners to power real-time backend development for TypeScript apps.
Ore Energy raised $43M Series A led by HV Capital and Plural to develop long-duration grid energy storage.
Aurelius Systems raised $40M Series A led by the likes of Draper Associates to build autonomous directed energy systems that neutralize aerial drone threats with high-power lasers.
Moss raised $35M Series C led by the likes of Cherry Ventures and Portage Ventures to automate spend management, invoice processing, and corporate card workflows for businesses across Europe.
Ambrook raised $30M Series B led by Lachy Groom to build the financial platform purpose-built for agriculture operations.

Sourced by using Harmonic

🤝 Acquisitions

Deel acquired Israeli deepfake security startup Clarity in a $40-50M deal.
AI chip startup Taalas was acquired by AMD.
Firefly Bio was acquired by Johnson & Johnson for $1B (cash).
eBay acquired Depop from Etsy for $1.2B.

👀 New VC funds launched

White Star Capital closes $350M for their fourth fund.
Robinhood Ventures launched Fund II centered on Y Combinator startups.

🎤 Must-watch interviews from our podcast show

Tanay Kothari, founder of Wispr Flow, joins NEW ECONOMIES to unpack why most startups don’t die from bad ideas but from chasing too many good ones, and why matching your number of initiatives to your organizational capacity matters more than simply working longer hours.

Previous episodes include

Canva Co-Founder: AI Is Useless Without This 1 Skill | Cam Adams
Hollywood is Secretly Replacing Films With AI | Justine Moore.
Why most people are underusing AI and why the winners won’t just be OpenAI and Anthropic | Reid Hoffman.
Base44 Founder: The Strategy Behind Building a Million Dollar Company Solo | Maor Shlomo (Base44) & Mark Tluszcz (Wix).
AI is a Better Writer Than You But Here’s What it Can’t Replace | Mark Manson.
The Couple That Bootstrapped a Billion Dollar Company | Julia & Kevin Hartz.
Email Never Died | Rahul Vohra founder at Superhuman.
Replit’s President & Head of AI | Michele Catasta.

Watch and subscribe now!

NEW ECONOMIES Subscriber Offers

Hyperagent: Build AI agents in minutes. Get $1,000 in free credits here. Enter code NEWECONOMIES.
Hostinger: Buy a domain, hosting service or build any website within minutes. Start building with 10% off here.
Attio: Tired of trying multiple CRM tools? Attio is the favorite, used by thousands of startups. Start using it here.
Harmonic is your go-to startup database provider.

If you enjoyed this edition, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

Thumbtack

Ollie Forsyth — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:18:31 GMT

Subscribe to stay ahead of technology trends. Never miss future editions.

About Thumbtack
Thumbtack is a technology company helping millions of people confidently care for and improve their homes. Every day in every county of the U.S., people turn to Thumbtack to complete small fixes, routine maintenance, and major improvements. With over 12 million 5-star projects and counting, they help homeowners and home professionals accomplish more.

Watch Now: Marco Zappacosta - co-founder of Thumbtack

We also cover why word of mouth, not a competitor, is Thumbtack’s biggest threat, capturing 80% of home-services demand through calls to neighbors and posts in group chats, and how LLMs are finally solving a personalization problem Thumbtack couldn’t crack in 20 years, replacing one generic question set per category with fully bespoke, project-specific questioning, using Marco’s own Murphy bed installation as the test case. We get into why almost no startup has survived in a marketplace category with close to a trillion dollars of spend, and what half the Thumbtack product team is now rebuilding around AI.

We close on the interface shift Marco almost missed, voice, not text, the board seat he still wants to fill, and where he expects human-capital marketplaces to go over the next 20 years.

This was a fascinating episode! Available everywhere you listen to podcasts.

Watch or listen now across YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X

Download the transcript 👇

Marco Zappacosta Transcript

306KB ∙ PDF file

Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Marco Zappacosta
(1:57) Thumbtack Turns Nearly 20
(3:00) Why Marketplaces Are Challenging
(6:30) Thumbtack's First 12 Months
(8:57) How Thumbtack Uses AI Today
(17:34) The Ideal Customer Profile
(19:18) How Homeownership Is Changing
(24:09) Why Experts Have High Expectations
(26:55) Building Trust With Users in Today's Environment
(29:03) Experts Communicating Offline
(30:54) Tensions With Marketplaces
(33:12) Integrating AI Into Thumbtack's Complex Stack
(38:42) Where and How to Place Bets
(42:04) The Next Big Opportunity
(44:29) How Marco Runs Thumbtack
(51:02) What Is Still Yet to Be Achieved?
(52:14) Rapid Fire

Our notes from this conversation

1. AI customers convert better than search customers ever did.

Post-ChatGPT, Google search volume for Thumbtack-relevant categories has reaccelerated to its highest point ever, but the more telling shift is on the AI side: users arriving via ChatGPT or Claude are more qualified, more motivated, and further into the decision than a typical search customer. Volume is still low, but Marco is treating it as the leading indicator for how discovery gets rebuilt.

2. Word of mouth, not a competitor, is Thumbtack’s real adversary.

80% of home-services demand still flows through a call to a neighbor or a post in a group chat. Marco sees the AI moment as the first real chance to intercept that demand before it disappears into an informal network Thumbtack can’t see or monetize.

3. Hiring a human is not a commodity purchase.

Marketplaces like Uber and food delivery compete on speed and price because the average basket is under $50. Home services average around $1,000 per purchase with real consequences for getting it wrong, so the decision is mediated by certainty and peace of mind, not convenience.

4. Marketplaces are brutal to bootstrap — and that difficulty is the moat.

Despite near-trillion-dollar category spend, almost no home-services startup has survived alongside incumbents like Angi and Yelp. The same friction that kills most entrants is what protects the few that break through to compounding scale.

5. LLMs are solving a 20-year personalization problem overnight.

Thumbtack historically applied one generic question set per project category, fine for common jobs, useless for anything niche. Marco’s own Murphy bed installation became the test case: an LLM asked the right follow-up questions instantly, something no static form could match at that level of specificity.

6. Half the product team is now rebuilding around AI.

Marco describes the integration as touching everything, core matching, the customer and pro experience, pricing, refunds, monetization. It’s a ground-up rebuild, not a feature bolted on top.

7. Voice is the interface shift he almost missed.

Asked what he’s changed his mind on in the past year, Marco points to voice as input and output, not because it’s novel, but because it removes typing entirely for how his kids and Thumbtack’s pros interact with technology. He doesn’t think it kills the keyboard, but expects it to sit alongside it as a default mode.

The board seat he still wants to fill: a technologist.

His current board covers CFO, CEO, and COO backgrounds, but he’s missing a product-obsessed technologist, someone in the mold of Snap’s Evan Spiegel, to pressure-test where AI takes the product next.

Links

Follow Ollie on X - https://x.com/ollieforsyth.

Follow Marco on X - https://x.com/mlz.

Visit Thumbtack - http://thumbtack.com.

Partnership: Harmonic is the go-to startup database - https://harmonic.ai.

Partnership: Hostinger is as a go-to tool for builders. Subscribers receive 10% off here - https://hostinger.com/neweconomies.

Previous episodes include

See all previous episode here 👉

If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

This Week In Startups

Ollie Forsyth — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:17:59 GMT

Hey readers!

Welcome back to your regular tech digest — a quick snapshot of the most important recent tech news worth paying attention to.

This week has been a chaotic one: public markets were rattled while private markets stayed active. Nvidia announced a $5 billion investment in Safe Superintelligence, DoorDash launched its in-house drone delivery service, Highland Europe closed a €1.1 billion growth fund, and Cyera agreed to acquire Oasis Security in a $1 billion deal.

This edition covers:

🗝️ Trend of the week: The Death of the Keyboard
🔍 Top startup tech news
💰 Startup funding highlights easily sourced by using Harmonic
🤝 Acquisitions
👀 New VC funds launched
🎤 Must-watch interviews from our podcast show

and much more.

A message from today’s partner: Mostly Metrics
The CFOs of Robinhood, Figma, Plaid, and Major League Baseball all read the same free newsletter every week.
Mostly Metrics is trusted by 75,000 readers which regularly breaks down metrics and monetization models the best CFOs in the world actually use to run their companies. Fundraising. Headcount planning. Pricing. The stuff nobody teaches you until you’re already in the seat.
Subscribe to the Mostly Metrics newsletter to learn the latest strategies.

🗝️ Trend of the week: The Death of the Keyboard

Tanay Kothari, founder of Wispr Flow, joined NEW ECONOMIES to explain why he believes voice could become the default way people interact with computers.

His starting point is accessibility. Around 700 million people worldwide have dyslexia or a speech impediment, making typing far more difficult than speaking. But Wispr Flow’s growth, 30× year over year and 15,000 enterprise customers, including more than half of the Fortune 500, suggests that voice isn’t just solving an accessibility problem. It’s becoming a faster, lower-friction way for many people to work.

Tanay argues that as voice interfaces improve, keyboards will increasingly be reserved for tasks that require precision, like editing or coding, much like film cameras are still used by enthusiasts, even though digital photography became the default for most people.

Source: Harmonic

Getting people to believe in voice, however, was a bigger challenge than making it accurate. After years of disappointing experiences with assistants like Siri, users were skeptical. Wispr’s breakthrough was making voice input quiet and reliable enough to use in shared workspaces. Features like Talk & Whisper let teams at companies such as Ramp and Klarna dictate naturally at their desks, making voice practical in everyday office environments.

If this trend continues, the biggest barrier to voice may no longer be the technology, but habit. Just as touchscreens replaced physical keyboards on smartphones, speaking to your computer could become the default interface for everyday work, leaving the keyboard as a specialist tool for moments when precision matters most.

What do you think?

🔍 Top startup tech news

AI chip stocks lost $1.3T in market cap as Nvidia, TSMC, and Samsung got hammered by growing fears over whether the massive AI infrastructure buildout will deliver real returns, the sharpest correction in the AI trade since the boom began.
DoorDash launched DoorDash Air, its in-house drone delivery service.
Nvidia is set to invest $5B in AI startup Safe Superintelligence, marking one of the chipmaker’s largest direct bets on an AI company.

💰 Startup funding highlights

Antares raised $470M to build nuclear reactors for the US military.
Harmony raised $34M in Seed funding led by Lightspeed to automate workplace requests.
Pangram raised $9M led by Menlo Ventures to detect AI generated content.
Spur Intelligence raised $200M led by Insight Partners to help identify fake users and threats.
Henry AI raised $16.5M Series A led by FirstMark to automate back-office document workflows for commercial real estate teams.
Throne raised $10M Series A led by Will Ventures to build an AI-powered toilet sensor that tracks gut health and works toward early colon cancer detection.
ThreatLocker raised $190M Series F led by Elephant to scale its Zero Trust cybersecurity platform, now protecting over 70,000 organizations worldwide with deny-by-default endpoint security.
Glow raised $180M Series A led by Sequoia and Cyberstarts to build AI-powered endpoint security for the agentic era, emerging from stealth as a unicorn at a $1.2B valuation.
Freehand raised $75M Series B co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital to run supply-chain spend for Fortune 500s with autonomous AI agents, already deployed at Meta, Unilever, J&J, Pfizer, and Dunkin.
ProphetX raised $35M to expand its regulated sports prediction market platform.
Twenty raised $30M led by Khosla Ventures to build AI-enabled cyber warfare and defense systems for military and intelligence agencies.
Trooly raised $20M Seed to automate qualitative user research with AI agents that conduct deep 45-minute interviews across 180M respondents in 25 countries.
Centralize raised $19M led by NEA to build relationship intelligence for enterprise sales teams.
Healia raised $18M including a $14M Series A to reduce health benefit costs for dual-income families and employers.

Sourced by using Harmonic

Cyera agrees to acquire Oasis Security for $1B to safeguard proliferating AI agents.
Legora acquired Wexler to add AI-powered litigation and fact analysis to its legal AI workflows, Legora’s fifth acquisition since its March 2026 Series D.
Midjourney acquired the astrology app Co-Star.
Sony offers to acquire Tamron.

👀 New VC funds launched

Highland Europe raised €1.1 Billion Fund VI to back growth-stage European technology companies.
Index Ventures raised $3.5B in fresh funds.

🎤 Must-watch interviews from our podcast show

Cameron Adams, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explain why AI gives creators more options than ever but not more chances to send the right message, and why taste becomes the real opportunity once every tool produces passable designs.

Previous episodes include

Hollywood is Secretly Replacing Films With AI | Justine Moore.
Why most people are underusing AI and why the winners won’t just be OpenAI and Anthropic | Reid Hoffman.
Base44 Founder: The Strategy Behind Building a Million Dollar Company Solo | Maor Shlomo (Base44) & Mark Tluszcz (Wix).
AI is a Better Writer Than You But Here’s What it Can’t Replace | Mark Manson.
The Couple That Bootstrapped a Billion Dollar Company | Julia & Kevin Hartz.
Email Never Died | Rahul Vohra founder at Superhuman.
Replit’s President & Head of AI | Michele Catasta.
Inside Mercury’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund.
Inside Gusto’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim.
We Had to Reimagine Nextdoor | CEO & Co-Founder Nirav Tolia.
5 Grand Slam Champion Maria Sharapova: Tennis Icon | Entrepreneur | Investor | New Media Creator.

Watch and subscribe now!

NEW ECONOMIES Subscriber Offers

Hyperagent: Build AI agents super easily. Get $1,000 in free credits here. Enter code NEWECONOMIES.
Hostinger: Buy a domain, hosting service or build any website within minutes. Start building with 10% off here.
Attio: Tired of trying multiple CRM tools? Attio is the favorite, used by thousands of startups. Start using it here.
Harmonic is your go-to startup database provider.

If you enjoyed this edition, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

Wispr Flow

Ollie Forsyth — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:40:07 GMT

Subscribe to stay ahead of technology trends. Never miss future editions.

About Wispr Flow
Wispr Flow turns voice into clean text. 4x faster than typing. 85% zero-edit. Speak naturally. Write perfectly.

Watch now: Tanay Kothari - Founder of Wispr Flow

We also get into the future of voice dictation and whether the keyboard is on its way out; how Wispr built an enterprise sales motion from scratch in less than a year, now accounting for a third of the company's revenue and serving more than half of the Fortune 500; the pricing psychology behind why ChatGPT feels free while Claude feels like a paid product; and why Wispr chose to build its own voice models in-house instead of relying on third-party AI providers.

We close on the story behind Wispr’s tuk-tuk campaign in India, how Tanay structures his week acting as chief of staff to the whole company, and a quickfire round covering his dream board pick and a free idea for Wispr Flow for creators by Ollie.

Watch or listen now across YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X

Download the transcript 👇

NEW ECONOMIES Podcast: Tanay Kothari

252KB ∙ PDF file

Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Tanay Kothari
(1:50) Why Tanay Started Wispr
(4:12) Building a Rocket Ship with Discipline
(8:52) Why Now Is the Moment for Voice Dictation
(12:27) Launching Wispr in India
(14:51) Why Computing Is Still So Expensive
(17:48) Why You Must Listen to Customers
(24:00) How Tanay Stays Focused
(27:00) Wispr's Internal Product Roadmap
(29:15) Ollie Becomes Tanay's Chief of Staff
(32:58) How to Keep the Talent Bar High
(37:10) Rapid-Fire Round

Our notes from this conversation

Most startups don’t fail from bad ideas, they fail from mismatched capacities.

Tanay’s reframe: the opposite of distraction isn’t focus, because focus can point at the wrong thing just as easily as the right one. A thousand-person company can be laser-focused and still fail if what it’s focused on doesn’t match what it can actually execute. His fix is mechanical, match your number of initiatives to your organizational capacity, because a task that took five people to build takes ten or twenty to maintain.

Enterprise wasn’t bolted on. It was built from zero in under a year.

Wispr went from a pure consumer motion to a third of total revenue coming from B2B, with 15,000 companies and more than half the Fortune 500 as customers including: Microsoft, Nvidia, Notion, Clay, and Klarna. Companies like Slack and Notion took four to eight years to make that same consumer-to-enterprise jump. Tanay’s team compressed it into twelve months by treating it as a different product, not a repackaged one.

ChatGPT feels free. Claude feels paid. That gap is the whole game.

This isn’t a throwaway comparison, it’s Tanay’s actual pricing philosophy. Perception of price is one of the most under-used levers founders have, more powerful than the marketing budget behind it. It’s why ChatGPT crossed a billion monthly active users while Anthropic, by his account, remains far behind on volume despite the stronger product.

When nobody had a good enough model, Wispr stopped shopping and started building.

The team tried routing through other providers first and found the accuracy ceiling too low for voice specifically. So they built their own frontier voice lab from scratch, 15 people today, headed to 40 by the end of the year. The bet is that harness engineering, squeezing frontier performance out of cheaper models, only gets you so far before you have to own the stack.

The keyboard isn’t dying of old age. It’s being made obsolete by 700 million people who never wanted it.

Tanay’s most pointed number: 700 million people worldwide have dyslexia or a speech impediment, and for them typing isn’t friction, it’s the single worst way to interact with technology. Voice isn’t a UX preference for that group, it’s the first real unlock they’ve had.

There’s no fixed job at the top, just whichever fire is biggest that week.

Tanay describes his own role as deliberately fluid: one week he’s PMing a launch, the next he’s deep in Figma five days a week, the one after that he’s building out a CRO’s B2B function from scratch. The throughline isn’t a job title, it’s finding “the most important dumpster fire in the company that is not being taken care of” and sitting in it until it’s solved.

Five to ten hours a week with users isn’t research. It’s the entire strategy.

Tanay doesn’t outsource customer insight to a feedback form. He sits beside users, watches their day, and treats that time as non-negotiable, not because it’s good practice, but because he thinks no company has ever succeeded without it. The line he keeps coming back to: your single job is to figure out what people want and give it to them, and everything else is downstream of that.

Links

Follow Ollie on X - https://x.com/ollieforsyth

Follow Tanay on X - https://x.com/tankots

Try Wispr Flow - https://wisprflow.ai

Previous episodes include

If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

Cameron Adams (Canva)

Ollie Forsyth — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:44:55 GMT

Subscribe to stay ahead of technology trends. Never miss future editions.

Watch now: Cameron Adams - Co-Founder at Canva

We also get into the contrarian bet behind Canva’s early success - ignoring The Lean Startup playbook to spend six extra months on user testing before launch, plus where AI is actually moving inside the product, from Canva AI 2.0 to magic layers to voice as the next creative interface.

We close on the fourteen-year journey of co-founding Canva with Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, and what Cam thinks creators should be focusing on going forward.

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X

Download the transcript

NEW ECONOMIES Podcast Cameron Adams (Canva)

339KB ∙ PDF file

Timestamps

(00:00) Meet Cameron Adams
(02:06) Canva Create 2.0
(05:13) The Canva Founding Story
(07:45) Canva's First 6–12 Months
(09:45) Building Fanatical Early Users
(11:37) Landing the First Users
(15:35) How Canva Stays Relevant
(17:03) Canva's Focus on AI
(19:50) Taste Is the New Differentiator
(21:46) What Design Platforms Do Best Today
(25:24) Canva's Most Popular Features
(27:04) Inside Canva's Product Roadmap
(34:05) What Creators Should Focus On
(36:35) What Cam Is Most Excited About
(38:25) AI-Generated Content
(42:22) Why Music Is the Next Big Trend
(46:10) Anyone Can Build Now
(49:12) Cam's AI Stack
(50:34) Ollie Joins as Cam's Chief of Staff
(51:28) Co-Founder Relationships
(56:00) What's Next for Canva

Our notes from this conversation

AI gives you more options, not more chances.

You can now generate ten, twenty, thirty plus versions of anything using these AI tools, but the audience still only lets you send one message, maybe two at most. Cam’s take: the volume of options AI produces doesn’t lower the stakes of choosing correctly, it raises them. Great taste matters more than ever.

The moat isn’t the model, it’s the product workflow around it.

One prompt box spitting out one image is table stakes now - anyone can do it. Canva’s edge comes from pulling teams, brand context, and every stage of a project into a single loop, which is why a quarter of a billion people bring their colleagues, friends, and family into the suite of product offerings with them.

Ignoring conventional wisdom was the actual growth hack.

Investors were pushing Canva to ship fast per the famous playbook: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. They spent six extra months on user testing instead, betting that a polished first experience would turn users into fanatical fans. Cam believes that patience became Canva’s early advantage. By delaying launch until the experience felt polished, the team laid the foundations for Canva’s organic growth loop.

Voice is the next interface opportunity.

Cam points to Africa as a voice-first market by necessity, places where typing was never the default way people interacted with technology. Whoever wins on voice interfaces wins access to users that keyboard-first products never reached. The death of the keyboard may be looming.

Fully AI-generated content plateaus. AI-assisted creators don’t.

AI Micro-dramas out of China are going viral on the strength of human storytelling, not the fact that they’re AI-made. Cam’s bet: pure AI-generated content is a novelty that settles into a niche, while creators who use AI to extend their own taste keep compounding.

Velocity and quality aren’t in tension anymore, they’re the same discipline.

Canva mapped every feature shipped over the previous three months and found it had delivered more product output than at any point in the company’s fourteen-year history. Cam’s explanation isn’t “we cut corners” - it’s that better internal tools let designers and engineers prototype more ideas and still nail the one that ships.

Fourteen-year co-founder relationships survive on self-awareness, as well as chemistry.

Cam’s answer to what makes Canva’s founding team last isn’t just the shared vision, it’s each person knowing precisely what they’re great at, what they’re not, and staying a well-rounded contributor instead of hiding in one fixed lane. That’s what let three people cover for each other for over a decade without competing for the same territory.

Links

Follow Ollie on X: https://x.com/ollieforsyth

Follow Cameron on X: https://x.com/themaninblue

Listen to all previous episodes: https://www.neweconomies.co/podcast

Subscribe to Cam's newsletter: https://promptedwithcam.substack.com/

Subscribe to Cam's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLATYfhN6gQz_ynkjnu_d63u1Qp600SlBH

Previous episodes include

If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

…..

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The Uber Founder Is Back

Ollie Forsyth — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:58:38 GMT

NEWSLETTER | PODCAST | NEW MEDIA

Hey readers!

Welcome back to your regular tech digest — a quick snapshot of the most important recent tech news worth paying attention to.

This week in startups: funding surged across robotics, cybersecurity, healthcare, infrastructure, and enterprise software. At the same time, major industry moves included Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s latest startup, Atoms raising $1.7B, OpenAI unveiling its first AI hardware device, Databricks reaching a $188B valuation, and Apple confirming its first CEO transition since Steve Jobs.

This edition covers:

🗝️ Key trends: AI Microdramas
📊 Graph of the week on U.S. funding rounds
🔍 Top startup tech news
💰 Startup funding highlights easily sourced by using Harmonic
👀 New VC funds launched
🎤 Must-watch interviews from our podcast show

and much more.

🗝️ Key trends: AI Microdramas

AI microdramas are exploding globally. In China, these bite-sized, mobile-first entertaining forms of content already generate more revenue than the country’s domestic box office.

Justine Moore, Investor at Andreessen Horowitz calls them the next generation of soap operas: serialized, mobile-first, and monetized like games. As AI increasingly replaces work once handled by CGI - such as visual effects, backgrounds, voices, and other production tasks - they’re becoming dramatically cheaper and faster to produce. We even created our own, see a snippet of it below on the Nike origin story.

The impact will extend well beyond entertainment. As production costs fall and AI tools continue to improve, creators will be able to produce and iterate on content at a much faster pace, enabling entirely new business models centered on high-volume, personalized storytelling distributed through recommendation algorithms.

Learn about the latest trends across consumer tech and entertainment on our latest podcast episode.

Watch now

📊 Graph of the week: U.S. Venture Rounds

Over the last 30 days, 181 early-stage deals (Pre-Seed and Seed) deployed just $1.5B - high volume, small checks. At the other end, 26 late-stage deals (Series C through E+) deployed $6.3B, or 4.2× more capital from 7× fewer deals.

The most striking comparison is that Series D rounds ($3.1B from 10 deals) now rival Series A ($3.0B from 70 deals) in total capital deployed, despite having one-seventh the deal count.

Those 70 Pre-Seed deals raised just $80M total (avg. $1.2M each). The 70 Series A deals raised $3.0B (avg. $42.7M each). Same deal count, wildly different dollars. Series A sits at the heart - it matches Pre-Seed on volume (70 deals each) but delivers 37× more capital.

Data shows, this is a market funding more experiments than ever at the bottom while concentrating unprecedented capital into a shrinking number of winners at the top.

🔍 Top tech news

Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s industrial automation startup Atoms raised $1.7B in funding.
DeepSeek prepares for mainland China IPO filing.
OpenAI revealed its first hardware device, a smart speaker. Designed with Jony Ive’s LoveFrom studio, the screenless device includes cameras, sensors, and autonomous movement capabilities.
Databricks hits $188B valuation with $3B Coatue-led round.

💰 Startup funding highlights

AegisAI, founded by former Google security execs raised $36M in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures to stop AI-driven spear-phishing.
Yope raised $12.3M in Seed funding led by Northzone to build a private social network without algorithms or ads.
Humanoid raised $152M in Series A funding at a $1.35B valuation, the UK’s first humanoid robotics unicorn.
Genius AI raised $44M in Series D funding led by Lux Capital to expand from wellness into AI in-person service economy.
Scape raised $3.2M from Y Combinator, General Catalyst and others to build the first email inbox that works for you.
Paper raised $34M in Series A funding led by Accel and ICONIQ Capital to connect your teams, agents, code, and data on a single design space built on web standards, so nothing gets lost in translation.
Etched raised $300M in Series C funding led by Sequoia at a $10.3B valuation to power large-scale AI inference.
CuspAI raised $450M in Series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins to expand its AI-powered materials discovery platform, international operations and AI Materials Foundry.
Defense startup Twenty raised $30M led by Khosla to build and scale software for modern cyber conflicts.
Meticulous raised $15M in Series A funding led by Chemistry Ventures to help software teams test AI-generated code and ship it faster.
Telli raised $15M in Seed funding led by Redalpine to build AI for customer-facing operations.
Candid Health raised $120M in Series D funding led by Sixth Street Growth to automate the entire financial infrastructure of healthcare.

👀 New VC funds

Dimension closes $800M Fund III.
Lakestar raised $300M Resilience I Fund.

🤝 Acquisitions

Sierra acquired Takeoff.
Cognition is acquiring Interaction, the makers of Poke.
Midjourney acquired the astrology app Co-Star.

🎤 Must-watch interviews

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explain why we’re still underutilizing AI, why agent management - not individual contribution - becomes the default mode of work within three years, and why the next decade of company-building rewards taste and judgment over raw skill: once AI can draw, code, and write as well as any specialist, the only thing left to own is the specific, unrepeatable bar for what excellence looks like.

Previous episodes include

AI is a Better Writer Than You But Here’s What it Can’t Replace | Mark Manson.
The Couple That Bootstrapped a Billion Dollar Company | Julia & Kevin Hartz.
Email Never Died | Rahul Vohra founder at Superhuman.
Replit’s President & Head of AI | Michele Catasta.
Inside Mercury’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund.
Inside Gusto’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim.
We Had to Reimagine Nextdoor | CEO & Co-Founder Nirav Tolia.
5 Grand Slam Champion Maria Sharapova: Tennis Icon | Entrepreneur | Investor | New Media Creator.
How Many $10 Billion Startups Will There Be? | Eric Hippeau.
Will AI Models Ever Compensate Creators? | Tony Stubblebine.
No More Traditional School Teachers | Joleen Liang.

Watch and subscribe now!

NEW ECONOMIES Subscriber Offers

With Deel, companies get full coverage across payroll, HR, benefits, mobility, performance, and device management in 150+ countries — with compliance built in. Try it here.
Hyperagent: Build AI agents super easily. Get $1,000 in free credits here. Enter code NEWECONOMIES.
Hostinger: Buy a domain, hosting service or build any website within minutes. Start building with 10% off here.
Attio: Tired of trying multiple CRM tools? Attio is the favorite, used by thousands of startups. Start using it here.

If you enjoyed this edition, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

P.S. The CFOs of Robinhood, Figma, Plaid, and Major League Baseball all read the same free newsletter every week.

Mostly Metrics is trusted by 75,000 readers which regularly breaks down metrics and monetization models the best CFOs in the world actually use to run their companies. Fundraising. Headcount planning. Pricing. The stuff nobody teaches you until you’re already in the seat. Subscribe to the Mostly Metrics newsletter to learn the latest strategies.

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Justine Moore: Andreessen Horowitz

Ollie Forsyth — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:07:42 GMT

Subscribe to stay ahead of technology trends. Never miss future editions.

Consumers care less about how something was made.

Justine Moore is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz investing across AI and consumer, and one of the earliest backers of ElevenLabs. In this episode, she breaks down why AI microdramas are becoming one of the fastest-growing entertainment formats in the world, why China’s microdrama market has already overtaken its domestic box office, and why the U.S is only now catching up.

Watch now: AI Microdramas Are Exploding

We also explore why the first wave of AI video creators were attention seekers rather than storytellers, why that’s changing fast as real creatives move into the space, and why Justine thinks the “AI slop” debate misses the point entirely: slop existed long before AI, and the label won’t matter once most content is partially AI-made anyway.

We close the episode on why Justine believes agents that work before you ask are the next real unlock in consumer AI.

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X

Download the transcript

NEW ECONOMIES Podcast: Justine Moore (a16z)

305KB ∙ PDF file

Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Justine Moore
(1:52) Generative Media's Inflection Point
(4:23) AI Microdramas Are Exploding
(10:02) Why AI Dramas Are New Forms of Entertainment
(13:52) How to Create AI Microdramas
(17:28) The Adoption of AI Microdramas
(22:00) Content Becoming Timely vs. Timeless
(25:00) Should Creators Be Disclosing AI Features?
(33:45) How to Build AI Generative Media Startups
(40:13) Justine's Favorite Agents
(41:45) Is Consumer Tech Back?
(45:15) Justine's Startup Ideas
(46:40) Founders to Watch

Our notes from this conversation

1. AI video is finally good enough to stand on its own.

Early AI videos attracted attention because they were novel. Today, that's no longer the story. As Justine describes, model quality has improved to the point where AI-generated video can hold a viewer's attention with a coherent storyline. The competitive advantage is shifting from the technology itself to the creativity of the people using it.

2. Cheaper AI production is opening opportunities that global studios will eventually adopt.

Microdramas are the clearest signals of what is actually possible. Creators are already using AI to generate backgrounds, visual effects and techniques that were previously handled with CGI. The expectation is that major film studios will follow the same path, not to replace production or talent, but to cut costs on specific parts of production.

3. Ollie started producing a micro drama. This is what is possible!

Ollie built a short microdrama around the Nike origin story to stress-test the opportunities directly. The narrative, design and aesthetics came together fast and relatively cheaply. There are still gaps where these platforms can improve, for example: transitions between chapters aren’t natural yet, storytelling in the creator’s tone of voice has a way to go until perfect, and the cost to create these compounds very quickly once you’re iterating and constantly editing.

Watch here

4. Consumers care less about how something was made

Justine’s instinct is that mass-market audiences aren’t selecting for or against something because it’s AI-made, they’re asking whether it’s good. The people fixated on provenance are concentrated on X and Reddit, which is a different audience than the one actually consuming the content at scale.

5. Timely vs. timeless is a more useful lens than AI vs. human.

The human vs. AI comparison is the wrong split. Slop predates AI entirely, it was never a tooling problem, it’s a quality-and-intent problem, which is why “timeless” content (built to hold up regardless of when or how it was made) survives that axis and disposable content doesn’t.

During the episode, we also talked about if creators should be disclosing if AI tools were used and if so how. However, Justine thinks labeling is a losing battle: content is heading toward being partially AI-made by default, at which point a label stops signaling anything useful.

6. The hardest part of building here right now is differentiation.

Competing with OpenAI or Google at the foundation-model layer has gotten expensive enough that most new entrants shouldn’t attempt it. The real contest is one layer up, at the app and workflow level: the question isn’t whether you can build on top of the models, it’s who you serve and why they stay instead of switching to the next thin wrapper.

7. AI agents will matter more for individual creators than for big companies.

Justine’s case is that solo creators and small teams are the most resource-constrained group in the market, so offloading admin and logistics to agents is a bigger unlock for them than for anyone already running a team to handle it.

Links

Follow Ollie on X - https://x.com/ollieforsyth

Follow Justine on X - https://x.com/venturetwins

Justine's market map on AI Microdramas:

Previous episodes include

If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

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$1M ARR in 3 Weeks. $150M ARR One Year Later

Ollie Forsyth — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:22:33 GMT

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Maor Shlomo, founder of Base44, and Mark Tluszcz, Chairman at Wix, join NEW ECONOMIES to unpack the fastest-moving acquisition story in vibe coding: a solo founder who hit $1M in annualized revenue three weeks after launch, sold Base44 to Wix for $80M within months, and grew the business from roughly $3M to $150M in annualized revenue in the year since the deal closed.

Maor walks through the origin story — building a tool for his now-wife’s CRM problem, wanting to give non-technical people a way to build tools rather than just websites — and the operational chaos that followed, including running the platform solo with no monitoring and fielding a security scare in the middle of his brother’s wedding.

Mark also explains why Wix, twenty years into believing non-technical people deserve real building tools, saw Base44 not as a bolt-on but as the natural extension of what Wix had been doing since 2006.

WATCH NOW: $1M ARR IN 3 WEEKS

Throughout the episode, we get into why owning the full stack — front end, back end, and now the model layer — was non-negotiable for both companies, culminating in the release of Base 1, Base44’s own fine-tuned model for building web applications, and why Maor thinks the real bottleneck has already shifted from writing code to making good product decisions: as coding stops being the constraint, taste, distribution, and the judgment to know what’s worth building become the differentiators.

We also cover the coming wave of vibe-coded enterprise tools, why “verticalized” models beat horizontal ones for this category, and the emerging idea of Base44 acting less like a coding assistant and more like a co-founder.

We close on where Maor and Mark think the next big opportunities sit — re-humanizing technology through live events and the “off planet opportunity” (space) opened up by the SpaceX IPO — and who each of them would want on their board, landing, unexpectedly, on…

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X

Download the transcript

NEW ECONOMIES Maor Shlomo (Base44) & Mark Tluszcz (Wix)

323KB ∙ PDF file

Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Maor Shlomo & Mark Tluszcz
(2:00) The Origin of Wix
(4:07) The Base44 Founding Story
(7:30) $1M in Revenue in Just 3 Weeks
(9:23) The Craziest Base44 Story
(12:08) Why Wix Acquired Base44
(20:42) Launching Base44's AI Model
(30:07) Why You Should Own the Stack
(32:33) How We Update AI Models
(34:18) What's Still Missing for AI Builders?
(39:36) The State of Vibe Coding
(47:40) Tech Predictions from Maor & Mark

Our notes from this conversation

Coding stopped being the bottleneck. What to build is.

Base44 hit $1M in annualized revenue three weeks after launch, then a couple million within three months — solo, with no funding. Maor’s line: “coding is not the issue anymore. The question is what are you going to build.” That’s the thesis for the next few years, not just the next few months.

Why Base44 and Wix teamed-up

Wix approached Base44 because a “crazy guy” running a one-man show kept generating enough noise that people started telling Mark’s team to buy him. Nir Zohar, Wix’s President, sealed the vibe over steak; the real decision came later, with Maor and Avishai Abrahami (CEO and Founder at Wix) at a whiteboard in the middle of the night, mapping three paths: stay bootstrapped, raise a lot of money, or partner with Wix.

Maor’s real hesitation wasn’t valuation — it was fear of scaling the “magic” too fast and killing the thing that made it work. Avishai’s answer was structural, not financial: lean on Wix for the boring infrastructure, stay lean and move fast everywhere else.

Owning the front and back end obligates you to own the middleware too.

Base44’s release of Base 1 — its own fine-tuned model for building web applications — wasn’t a marketing move, it was the logical endpoint of a stack Wix and Base44 already owned end to end. Mark’s framing:

If you own the front end and the back end, you eventually have to own how you deliver the service between them, or you’re dependent on someone else’s pricing and roadmap.

Scale generates the training data that makes owning a model worth it.

Two things moved Base44’s model timeline up by a year or more: open-source models reaching frontier-adjacent quality, and Base44’s own traffic generating millions of usable data points. The lesson generalizes — building your own model only makes sense once you have the volume to fine-tune it well, not before.

The next differentiator isn’t code quality — it’s taste.

Horizontal coding models are good at many things. Base44’s bet is that a model trained specifically on what makes a good product decision — not just working code — becomes a durable edge as raw code generation becomes commoditized across every vibe coding platform.

Distribution, not creation, is the unsolved problem for builders.

Mark’s read on the ecosystem:

Plenty of products get built, very few get used, because building well and marketing well are different skills. Base44’s answer is a beta “distribution layer” that uses its own context on each app — B2B or consumer, local or global — to recommend a growth playbook, not just more features.

Vibe coding is quietly eating enterprise software, not just side projects.

The skepticism about production-readiness a year ago has given way to real adoption: internal tools, dashboards, and niche SaaS products built by domain experts with zero developers on staff. Maor’s example — a former restaurant manager building an invoicing tool for local restaurants — is the shape of a much larger shift in who gets to start a software business.

Nobody has visibility past about three months, and that’s the honest answer.

Maor won’t pretend to forecast a year out — internal roadmaps only run two or three months because the ground moves that fast. What he will say:

Frontier-model costs keep compressing, open source keeps closing the gap, and the category itself is widening past web apps into games, slide decks, and design — anywhere code can define an output.

Building in public is now a distribution channel, not a personality quirk.

Maor’s early growth came from documenting the numbers, the features, and the struggles publicly every day, not from a marketing budget. His conclusion for founders generally:

Storytelling and audience-building are becoming as valuable a skill as the product itself, especially for anyone starting without capital.

A board doesn’t need people like you. It needs people who aren’t.

Mark’s operating principle for Wix’s board — deliberately including outsiders like the CEO of Manchester City for a completely different read on marketing and culture — showed up again when asked who they’d add next: both landed on the same instinct, that the highest-leverage addition is someone who understands modern culture and storytelling, not another operator who thinks like they do.

Links

Follow Ollie on X - https://x.com/ollieforsyth

Follow Maor on X - https://x.com/MaorShlomo

Follow Mark on X - https://x.com/marktluszcz

Visit Base44 - http://base44.com

Visit Wix - http://wix.com

Previous episodes include

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…..

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Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn

Ollie Forsyth — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:19:59 GMT

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Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explain why we’re still underutilizing AI, why agent management — not individual contribution — becomes the default mode of work within three years, and why the next decade of company-building rewards taste and judgment over raw skill: once AI can draw, code, and write as well as any specialist, the only thing left to own is the specific, unrepeatable bar for what excellence looks like.

We also cover why AI carries a positive perception across Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America while triggering data-center bans and slowdown politics in the US and Europe — and why 91% of non-Chinese AI market cap still sits within 30 miles of Silicon Valley. We get into the founding story behind Manas AI — Reid’s drug-discovery venture, plus whether Silicon Valley is still the best place to start a company.

We close on the lessons Reid has learned from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the technology trends Reid is most excited about next.

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

Download the transcript

NEW ECONOMIES Podcast: Reid Hoffman

793KB ∙ PDF file

Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Reid Hoffman
(1:36) Why Most People Are Under Utilizing AI
(5:28) How Should We Be Using AI?
(7:17) Why Agent Managers Are Next
(8:47) Are We Taking AI Seriously Enough?
(11:58) How Is Blitzscaling Different Today?
(15:00) Is Silicon Valley Still The Best Region?
(16:27) Should Startups Partner with AI Models?
(21:37) Personalized AI & Taste
(24:28) Is Distribution The New Moat for Startups?
(26:19) Does AI Have a Negative PR Problem?
(28:48) What Would Reid Coach Governments?
(33:20) It’s Not Just Anthropic or OpenAI
(36:36) The IPO Gold Rush
(38:32) Sam vs Dario Characteristics
(42:30) Lessons from Satya Nadella
(47:30) Ollie Joins As Reid’s Chief of Staff
(49:39) Reid’s Trends
(55:27) Fire Round

Our notes from this conversation

The next career move isn’t a skill — it’s a headcount.

Individual contributors are giving way to agent managers, each overseeing anywhere from a handful to tens of thousands of agents. Reid’s timeline: broad-based adoption within three years, starting with coding and spreading into every “digital closing loop.”

Non-US, non-Europe just inherited the industrial revolution’s rematch.

AI carries a negative PR perception in the US and Europe (job-loss anxiety, data-center bans) and a positive one everywhere else — Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa. Reid calls it the reverse revenge of the industrial revolution: the regions that missed the first wave may lead the cognitive one.

Distribution didn’t die — it became the AI amplifier.

Moats aren’t dead, but they’ve changed shape. Existing companies with distribution aren’t finished; they’re only finished if they refuse to plug AI into what they already own. Refuse, and “the dinosaur decay has started.”

Wrapper businesses are living on borrowed time.

If a competitor can point Claude Code or Codex at your product and rebuild it for the token cost, you were never defensible. The businesses that survive have a theory of the game: network effects, enterprise integration, or data loops the model can’t just absorb as a feature.

Hand skill is depreciating. Taste is the new scarce resource.

AI coordination doesn’t need better hand-eye coordination to draw well — so that skill’s value drops. What rises: judgment about what excellence actually looks like, in code, writing, and product. Reid expects taste and context-awareness to matter for decades, not quarters.

The market isn’t consolidating to three companies — it’s expanding to ten or fifteen.

Reid’s eight-year-old antitrust argument held: from five-to-seven heading toward ten-to-fifteen frontier and adjacent players, not three. That’s good for entrepreneurs — more potential acquirers, more room to build something valuable without having to out-build OpenAI or Anthropic.

Blitzscaling didn’t disappear — it moved from headcount to compute.

The old version was maximum organizational scale under uncertainty. The new version: build something in two weeks, throw it away, rebuild — at higher velocity and higher risk — while a much smaller human team manages a much larger agent workforce.

Trust gets built by value, not by messaging.

Reid’s answer to AI skepticism isn’t a better narrative — it’s a free medical assistant, a lease-reading legal agent, a tutor on every phone. “It isn’t by a story of words... how you get trust is by seeing value.”

Links

Follow Ollie on X - https://x.com/ollieforsyth

Follow Reid on X - https://x.com/reidhoffman

Subscribe to Reid’s Podcast, Masters of Scale - https://mastersofscale.com/

Discover Reid’s other projects: https://beacons.ai/reidhoffman

Reid’s Books - Blitzscaling & Superagency

Related previous episodes

If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

The New Era for Gaming

Ollie Forsyth — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:14:02 GMT

Hey readers!

Welcome back to your regular tech digest — a quick snapshot of the most important recent tech news worth paying attention to.

This week, gaming entered a new era as Sony’s push toward an all-digital PlayStation ecosystem sparked a fierce debate over ownership, preservation, and consumer rights. At the same time, AI continued reshaping the startup landscape: billion-dollar funding rounds accelerated across healthcare, defense, banking, and creative tools, while major industry moves — including Tom Blomfield joining Anthropic, Fidji Simo stepping down at OpenAI, and Greylock and Paradigm raising $2.7B in fresh capital combined — highlighted that the AI investment cycle is showing no signs of slowing down.

This edition covers:

🗝️ Key trends: The New Era for Gaming
🔍 Top tech news
💰 Startup funding highlights
👀 New VC funds
🎤 Must-watch interviews

and more… let’s dive in.

🗝️ Key trends: The New Era for Gaming

Do you remember the days when we went into an actual shop to buy the latest games for our PlayStation? Well, those times are about to change forever because Sony is discontinuing physical PlayStation discs starting in 2028, and the backlash has been immense.

A petition against the move has passed 300,000 signatures, with KFC and Domino’s joining in with parody jabs of their own. On paper, this looks inevitable: Sony says almost 80% of its game sales are now digital, up from 27% a decade ago, and Capcom, Nintendo and Rockstar are all reporting the same shift. So what’s actually driving fans’ anger?

Well it isn’t nostalgia for plastic cases — it’s ownership. As you might know, physical discs are how players resell, lend and pass games down; losing that pushes everyone into a pure licensing model, where a purchase is really just a rental Sony can end whenever it likes. That shift matters more in gaming than it did for music or film, because a delisted game can vanish entirely rather than simply move platforms — the Video Game History Foundation already rates 87% of classic US-released games as “critically endangered”, no longer commercially available anywhere.

Sony’s economics are straightforward: cutting out manufacturers and retailers keeps a bigger margin on every digital sale, and dropping disc drives trims future console costs — savings unlikely to be passed on to gamers. What’s missing from the announcement is any kind of offset: no resale system, no lending mechanism, no preservation commitment, no price cut. That silence is the real story fans are asking for — it reads less like a company adapting to consumer trends, and more like one that sees its most loyal fans as a captive audience rather than stakeholders worth negotiating with.

Source: Financial Times

🔍 This week’s top tech news

Neko Health, founded by Spotify founder Daniel Ek has raised $700M Series C.
YC Partner Tom Blomfield is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic.
Fidji Simo, CEO of AGI Deployment at OpenAI, has stepped down.
David Beckham’s health drink startup IM8 raised $1B from General Catalyst’s unusual CVF fund.

💰 This week’s startup funding highlights

Intelligence startup Fireworks raised $1.5B at a $17.5B valuation.
Rippling co-founder Prasanna Sankar launched Vorflux, Autopilot for software engineers. The new startup emerged with $15M in fresh capital.
Valarian, which is building sovereign infrastructure for high-consequence systems, raised a $50M Series A led by NEA.
Meticulous, which helps teams ship software at the speed AI agents write code, has raised $15M Series A from the likes of Chemistry Ventures and Menlo Ventures.
AI-Native private banking startup, Flex raised $70M Series B.
Chai Discovery, an AI drug startup, raised $400M.
PixVerse, the creative infrastructure platform for the next generation raised $439M.
Singularity Defense raised $80M in Series A funding to build low-cost air defense systems that can be produced at scale.
Infinia raised $13.5M in Series A funding to connect traditional banking infrastructure with next-generation digital asset rails.
Oak raised $60M in Seed funding to build the AI-native identity operating system for the enterprise AI era.
Sliceline raised $6M in Seed funding to operationalize internal company comms and more.
microagi, a data research and deployment lab powering embodied AI raised $55M in Seed funding led by Hummingbird.
Prediction markets platform Pascal raised $15M in funding.
Indian AI coding startup Emergent becomes a unicorn after raising $130M in Series C funding.

👀 New VC funds

Greylock raised $1.5 Billion for Greylock 18 to back AI-native founders.
AlleyCorp raised $335M for Fund II.
Paradigm raised $1.2B to invest in ‘technical frontier’ startups.
Acurio Ventures launched $130M vehicle to provide liquidity to European VC funds.
Catalyst Fund raised $30M to back climate tech startups across Africa.

🤝 Acquisitions

Stripe and Advent offered to buy PayPal for more than $53 billion.
OpenAI deployment arm to acquire Northslope.
Y Combinator backed startup Benchmark joins Harvey.
Whatnot acquired Shaped to power real-time live shopping recommendations.

📎 What we are reading

The Most Human Technology Ever Made | Anish Acharya, Andreessen Horowitz.

🎤 This week on the NEW ECONOMIES Podcast Show

Mark Manson is someone you've probably heard of before. He's the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. In this episode, he shares some incredible advice on life, what it takes to become a successful creator, why creators should think more like founders and what he's building next - including his self-help app, Purpose.

Previous episodes include

The Couple That Bootstrapped a Billion Dollar Company | Julia & Kevin Hartz.
Email Never Died | Rahul Vohra founder at Superhuman.
Replit’s President & Head of AI | Michele Catasta.
Inside Mercury’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund.
Inside Gusto’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim.
We Had to Reimagine Nextdoor | CEO & Co-Founder Nirav Tolia.
5 Grand Slam Champion Maria Sharapova: Tennis Icon | Entrepreneur | Investor | New Media Creator.
How Many $10 Billion Startups Will There Be? | Eric Hippeau.
Will AI Models Ever Compensate Creators? | Tony Stubblebine.
No More Traditional School Teachers | Joleen Liang.

Watch and subscribe now!

With Deel, companies get full coverage across payroll, HR, benefits, mobility, performance, and device management in 150+ countries — with compliance built in. Try it here.
Hyperagent: Build AI agents super easily. Get $1,000 in free credits here. Enter code NEWECONOMIES.
Hostinger: Buy a domain, hosting service or build any website within minutes. Start building with 10% off here.
Attio: Tired of trying multiple CRM tools? Attio is the favorite, used by thousands of startups. Start using it here.

If you enjoyed this edition, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

Mark Manson

Ollie Forsyth — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:29:44 GMT

Subscribe to stay ahead of technology trends. Never miss future editions.

Mark Manson is someone you've probably heard of before. He's the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. In this episode, he shares some incredible advice on life, what it takes to become a successful creator, why creators should think more like founders, and what he's building next - including his self-help app, Purpose.

Throughout the episode, we also explore why he believes AI content and human content are splitting into two permanent tracks, why non-fiction book sales are down 20–30% and what an “AI-proof” book would actually need to look like, and why Mark thinks the next decade of media rewards trust and credibility over cleverness — because the moment ChatGPT can write as well as he can, the only thing left to own is the specific, unrepeatable mix of experience that makes his voice his.

If that’s not enough, we go deep on the founding story behind Purpose, his new AI life-advice app built to do what ChatGPT can’t — actually challenge you instead of just agreeing with you — plus why traditional publishing has banned AI outright while his own two-person research team now outproduces the four-person team he had two years ago, and much more.

Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Mark Manson
(2:20) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
(9:00) Why Creators Should Think Like Founders
(17:17) NEW MEDIA: Will AI Content Survive?
(19:30) How Mark Manson Uses AI
(26:55) How To Write A Non-Fiction Book Today
(32:34) How To Master Your Edge Case
(35:13) Has The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Changed?
(37:13) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Anymore
(39:46) Mark’s App - Purpose

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

Download the transcript

NEW ECONOMIES Podcast: Mark Manson

273KB ∙ PDF file

Our notes from this conversation

1. AI self-help is coming for most of human self-help.
Therapy, coaching, and advice are all just language processed through experience — exactly what LLMs are built for. Mark’s bet with his new app, Purpose, is that AI will do it better and cheaper than most coaches ever could.

2. Non-fiction is on a countdown.
Sales are down 20–30% over two years — not to podcasts, but to AI. Readers now get a chapter in, then interrogate the idea in ChatGPT instead. Survival means novel frameworks AI couldn’t have generated on demand.

3. Media is splitting into AI content and human content.
AI is closing in on pure entertainment and education — it can already find the platonic ideal of what makes someone laugh or cry. What it can’t replicate is the parasocial layer: trust, belonging, a specific person’s judgment.

4. The moat isn’t the idea — it’s the audience you own.
Mark regrets chasing traditional publisher/Audible/Netflix deals instead of owning distribution directly. Mel Robbins did it right: a viral book converted deliberately into live events, podcasts, and an owned brand.

5. Everyone needs a 99.9th-percentile intersection.
As AI closes the gap on any single skill, defensibility shifts to combinations — three or four things that overlap in one person and can’t be cleanly copied. Not one moat, a stack of them.

6. Trust-dependent verticals resist AI longest.
Relationships and money are getting hotter, not colder, in the AI era — because people don’t want the same answer ChatGPT gives everyone else. Credibility itself is becoming the scarce resource.

7. AI compounds — and legacy media is opting out.
Mark’s research team shrank from four to two while output and quality went up. Meanwhile traditional publishing often bans AI outright, ceding a gap that compounds every quarter against competitors who didn’t wait.

8. Good advice has a shelf life.
Mark’s own “give a f*ck about less” advice was right for an overwhelmed era — but it also fed the tribalism defining today’s polarization. Advice isn’t universal; it’s tied to the context that produced it.

Links

Follow Ollie on X here.

Follow Mark on X here.

Follow Mark on Instagram here.

Download Mark’s new app Purpose here.

Interested in NEW MEDIA? Visit our latest project on the most promising new media creators here.

Related previous episodes

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The UK's Moment

Ollie Forsyth — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:05:20 GMT

NEWSLETTER | PODCAST | NEW MEDIA

Hey readers!

Welcome back to your regular tech digest — a quick snapshot of the most important recent tech news worth paying attention to.

This week, the UK quietly became the most interesting place in tech again — $17B raised in six months, four separate billion-dollar AI rounds, and a growing case that Europe’s AI story isn’t happening in Paris or Berlin. Meanwhile, new data just broke the “AI kills jobs” narrative wide open: the companies spending the most on AI are hiring the fastest, not the slowest.

This edition covers:

🗝️ Key trends: The UK is having a moment
📊 Graph of the week
🔍 Top tech news
💰 Startup funding highlights
👀 New VC funds
🎤 Must-watch interviews

and more… let’s dive in.

🗝️ Key trends: The UK is having a moment

The UK’s startup ecosystem has had its strongest start to the year since 2022, with startups raising $17B in the first half of ’26, up 102% from a year earlier. The standout trend is, of course, AI, which attracted $12.6B in funding, accounting for nearly three-quarters of all venture funding.

The UK has had its fair share of political challenges over the past few years, so this will be a positive moment for the region. What’s driving the trend?

Four companies, Isomorphic Labs, Nscale, Wayve and Ineffable Intelligence, each raised more than $1B, highlighting how investor capital continues to concentrate around frontier AI infrastructure and applications. Beyond foundation models, enterprise software, healthcare, semiconductors, quantum computing and robotics are attracting significant investment, while later-stage mega-rounds now account for the majority of venture capital deployed.

The UK also captured 39% of all European VC funding and 41% of Europe’s Deep Tech and Life Sciences investment in H1 2026, reinforcing its position as the continent’s leading innovation hub. At an estimated $1.7T (trillion) in enterprise value and with 217 unicorns, the UK’s technology ecosystem is increasingly defined by globally competitive AI and deep tech companies rather than consumer internet startups.

SOURCE: Dealroom

📊 Graph of the week: Heavy corporate AI spenders add staff faster than peers

Companies investing the most in AI are hiring more workers, according to new research that challenges the idea that AI will lead to widespread job losses. Over the two years after adopting generative AI, the biggest investors increased white-collar employment by 10.2%, with growth across all job functions and seniority levels. Entry-level hiring also rose by 12%.

By contrast, companies with lower levels of AI investment saw little to no change in headcount compared with similar businesses that had not adopted AI. The findings suggest that significant AI investment can drive productivity gains that support business expansion and hiring, rather than replacing workers.

A recent study analyzed nearly 22,000 US companies and is the first to combine company-level AI spending with employment data, providing one of the clearest pictures yet of how AI investment affects hiring.

SOURCE: Financial Times

In other news: Vibe coding tool Lovable is in talks to raise $300M at a $13.2B valuation.

Salesforce just announced that it will be deepening its commitment to Switzerland by investing $1B to accelerate agentic AI transformation.
30M US customers later and Klarna wants its own bank by applying for a U.S. banking license.

💰 Startup funding highlights

AI law startup Norm raised $120M Series C led by Khosla Ventures to build the future of agentic law.
Chip startup SambaNova raised $1B at an $11B valuation, as investors continue to double-down on the rising demand for infrastructure tied to AI.
Even Realities raised $150M to take on the smart glasses market.
Proxima Fusion raised $468M to build the world’s first nuclear fusion plant.
Quantum Systems raised $1.2B at an $8B valuation to transform decision-making processes through aerial data intelligence.
Jesse and Ben’s - restaurant-quality fries without seed oils raised $10M led by Greycroft.
Nexcade, which does real freight forwarding work with teams raised $6M led by Project A.
Twelve Labs, which develops artificial intelligence models and infrastructure for understanding, searching, and analyzing video content raised $100M Series A led by Naver Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.
Venice, which generates text, images, characters, and videos raised $65M led by Dragonfly.
Super.com raised $65M Series D led by TPG at a $1.2B valuation to scale the savings super app for everyday Americans.

👀 New VC funds

Ruya Ventures raised $50M Fund I focusing on European deep tech startups.
Chemistry Ventures is raising $500M for Fund II.
BAE Systems and the NATO Innovation Fund, closed a $225M second fund to develop sovereign military technologies in Europe.

🎤 This week on the NEW ECONOMIES Podcast Show

How Eventbrite survived the business apocalypse — and why the internet made real life more valuable than ever.

Husband and Wife duo Kevin and Julia Hartz, co-founders of Eventbrite, join us on the NEW ECONOMIES podcast show to share how they built one of the world’s largest event marketplaces, navigating a leadership transition after a decade as co-founders, surviving COVID when their entire industry (and revenue) shut down overnight, and why the future belongs to companies bringing people together.

Previous episodes include

Email Never Died | Rahul Vohra founder at Superhuman.
Replit’s President & Head of AI | Michele Catasta.
Inside Mercury’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund.
Inside Gusto’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim.
We Had to Reimagine Nextdoor | CEO & Co-Founder Nirav Tolia.
5 Grand Slam Champion Maria Sharapova: Tennis Icon | Entrepreneur | Investor | New Media Creator.
How Many $10 Billion Startups Will There Be? | Eric Hippeau.
Will AI Models Ever Compensate Creators? | Tony Stubblebine.
No More Traditional School Teachers | Joleen Liang.

Watch and subscribe now!

NEW ECONOMIES Subscriber Offers

With Deel, companies get full coverage across payroll, HR, benefits, mobility, performance, and device management in 150+ countries — with compliance built in. Try it here.
Hyperagent: Build AI agents super easily. Get $1,000 in free credits here. Enter code NEWECONOMIES.
Hostinger: Buy a domain, hosting service or build any website within minutes. Start building with 10% off here.
Attio: Tired of trying multiple CRM tools? Attio is the favorite, used by thousands of startups. Start using it here.

If you enjoyed this edition, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

The Eventbrite Story | Julia & Kevin Hartz

Ollie Forsyth — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 13:02:44 GMT

Subscribe to stay ahead of technology trends. Never miss future editions.

How Eventbrite survived the business apocalypse — and why the internet made real life more valuable than ever

Husband and Wife duo Kevin and Julia Hartz, co-founders at Eventbrite, join us on the NEW ECONOMIES podcast show to share how they built one of the world’s largest event marketplaces, navigating a leadership transition after a decade as co-founders, surviving COVID when their entire industry (and revenue) shut down overnight, and why the future belongs to companies bringing people together.

About Eventbrite:
Eventbrite is one of the world's largest event technology platforms, enabling anyone to create, promote, and sell tickets for live experiences. Since its founding in 2006, the company has powered millions of events across more than 180 countries, helping creators — from independent organizers to major venues — connect with audiences at scale.

In our latest podcast episode, Kevin and Julia share Eventbrite's origin story — from a married founding team working out of a windowless office and surviving on cup noodles to building a global marketplace that transformed how people create and discover live experiences. They explain why curiosity became their greatest competitive advantage, why they ignored conventional startup advice by serving every event category from day one, and why complementary founders consistently outperform identical ones.

If that’s not enough, we also unpack the brutal reality of leading a public company through COVID after revenue turned negative almost overnight, why acting before everyone agrees is often a founder’s greatest advantage, what selling Eventbrite to Bending Spoons (who went public this week) taught them about long-term stewardship, and why, despite every wave of technology, they believe the most valuable human experiences will always happen in real life.

Timestamps

(0:00) Kevin & Julia Hartz
(1:45) A Blossoming Relationship
(3:40) The Aha Moment for Eventbrite
(8:15) Ideas Outside Eventbrite
(9:24) Eventbrite’s First Year
(12:50) The Product Market Fit Moment
(14:58) Building a Self-Serving Product
(17:25) 2016: Julia Takes Over as CEO
(23:00) The Brilliance of Eventbrite vs. Competitors
(30:22) The COVID Moment That Changed Us
(38:22) IRL Is Back
(41:34) Bending Spoon Acquires Eventbrite
(45:13) A* Star Raises $450M
(47:10) Young Founders to Watch
(48:25) What’s Next?

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

Download the transcript

NEW ECONOMIES: Kevin & Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)

297KB ∙ PDF file

Our notes from this conversation

Eventbrite wasn’t built to sell tickets — it was built to make gathering possible.

Kevin and Julia saw ticketing as an overlooked payments problem. If anyone could create an event as easily as sending an email, millions of communities, creators, and organizers could exist that otherwise never would.

The best co-founding teams divide by strengths, not titles.

From day one, they focused on complementary abilities instead of overlapping responsibilities. Rather than competing for the same decisions, each founder owned the areas where they naturally created the most leverage.

Curiosity became the company’s competitive advantage.

The early years weren’t spent making assumptions — they attended events, watched customers, worked the door themselves, and continuously simplified the product based on real behavior instead of internal opinions.

Product-market fit expanded by following customers, not chasing categories.

Instead of focusing on one niche, Eventbrite launched broadly and observed where adoption naturally emerged. Every new customer segment revealed the next opportunity to build for.

Crisis rewards speed more than certainty.

When COVID shut down live events almost overnight, the team assumed the worst immediately. They raised capital, reshaped the roadmap, focused on customer survival, and acted long before the situation became obvious to everyone else.

The internet didn’t replace real life — it made it more valuable.

Every major technology wave has changed how people connect, but none has replaced the human desire to gather. Digital platforms increasingly become discovery engines for experiences that ultimately happen offline.

Building companies isn’t a chapter — it’s an identity.

Even after taking Eventbrite public, leading it through COVID, and eventually selling it, Kevin and Julia continue building new companies and backing founders. For them, entrepreneurship isn’t a milestone — it’s how they approach the world.

Links

Subscribe to NEW ECONOMIES on YouTube.

Follow Ollie on X: https://x.com/ollieforsyth.

Follow Julia on X: https://x.com/juliahartz.

Follow Kevin on X: https://x.com/kevinhartz.

Visit A* Capital: https://www.a-star.co.

Related previous episodes

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Are Agent Managers The Next Big Role?

Ollie Forsyth — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:04:58 GMT

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Hey readers!

Welcome back to your regular tech digest — a quick snapshot of the most important recent tech news worth paying attention to.

This week, AI infrastructure funding surged, WhatsApp introduced usernames, and one prediction stood out above everything else: in the near future, the most valuable managers may not manage people first — they'll manage teams of AI agents.

This edition covers:

🗝️ Key trends: Managers become Agent Managers
🔍 Top tech news
💰 Startup funding highlights
👀 New VC funds
🤝 Acquisitions
🎤 Must-watch interviews

and more… let’s dive in.

🗝️ Key Trends: Managers become Agent Managers

One of the most thought-provoking conversations we recently had was with Michele Catasta, Head of AI at Replit, who predicts that 2026 will be the year of the “Agent Manager.”

As he put it:

“It’s more about waking up in the morning, mapping exactly what you want to accomplish in the day, launching several agents... The rest of your workday is vetting what the agents are doing.”

His point isn’t that AI replaces people. It’s that our role shifts from execution to orchestration. Instead of doing every task ourselves, we’ll direct teams of AI agents, review their outputs, and apply the judgment that machines still can’t.

The competitive advantage won’t simply be knowing how to use AI — it will be knowing how to manage it effectively.

See the episode in full here.

🔍 Top tech news this week

WhatsApp just launched usernames!

Tennis icon Novak Djokovic has a new tech job — advisor to private equity firm General Atlantic.

Amble, street-legal EV built for short local trips, with no doors, fewer screens, and a modular design inspired by the 1960s lunar rover just launched!

💰 Startup funding highlights

8090 Labs founded by Chamath Palihapitiya’s raised $135M Series A.
General Intuition raised $320M to use video game data to train robots.
Caplight raised $16M Series A led by BlackRock to power private market data and secondary liquidity.
Runlayer raised $30M Series A to help enterprises go all in on AI.
Lama AI raised $12M Series A to bring AI agents to banking.
Fomo raised $75M Series B to scale on-chain trading.
Tsuga raised $35M in Series A funding to build observability for the AI era.
Allium raised $40M Series B to power blockchain for institutional finance.
Warp raised $60M Series B to rebuild HR software with AI.
Partly raised $50M Series B led by DST Global to power AI infrastructure for the vehicle repair industry.
Patronus AI raised $50M to build ‘digital worlds’ that stress-test AI agents.
Assort Health raised $120M Series C to scale voice AI agent platform for healthcare.
Netris raised $15M Series A from a16z to help AI neoclouds go live faster.
Taxwire raised $25M Series A to simplify sales tax compliance.

👀 New VC funds

8VC closed their seventh fund at $1.5B.
Ashton Kutcher exits from Sound Ventures to set up new venture firm.
Daybreak raised $100M Fund II.
Discipulus Ventures raised $30M oversubscribed fund.
Harpoon Ventures launched Fund IV at $155M.
Cantos launched Fund IV at $70M.

🤝 Acquisitions

Qualcomm acquired Modular.
AMD acquired MEXT.
Superhuman acquired AI detection startup GPTZero.
Walmart acquired connected TV platform Vibe.co for $1.4B.
HubSpot acquired Warmly.
SpaceX acquired Mesh Optical.
MoonPay acquired Entendre.

🎤 This week on the NEW ECONOMIES Podcast Show

Ben Miller, CEO and Co-Founder at Fundrise, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explore the future of investing in an AI-driven world.

From democratizing private markets to backing the next generation of technology companies, Ben explains why software is entering a new era of disruption, and how AI could reshape everything from work and housing to healthcare and human longevity.

Previous episodes include:

Email Never Died | Rahul Vohra founder at Superhuman
Replit’s President & Head of AI | Michele Catasta
Inside Mercury’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund
Inside Gusto’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim
We Had to Reimagine Nextdoor | CEO & Co-Founder Nirav Tolia
5 Grand Slam Champion Maria Sharapova: Tennis Icon | Entrepreneur | Investor | New Media Creator
How Many $10 Billion Startups Will There Be? | Eric Hippeau
Will AI Models Ever Compensate Creators? | Tony Stubblebine
No More Traditional School Teachers | Joleen Liang

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How We Access The Best Companies

Ollie Forsyth — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:29:26 GMT

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Ben Miller, CEO and Co-Founder at Fundrise, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explore the future of investing in an AI-driven world. From democratizing private markets to backing the next generation of technology companies, Ben explains why software is entering a new era of disruption, and how AI could reshape everything from work and housing to healthcare and human longevity.

About Fundrise:
Fundrise is the largest direct-to-consumer alternative asset manager with more than 385,000 active investors, 2.1 million platform users, and $3.3 billion in assets across real estate, venture, and private credit.

In this episode, we explore why Fundrise expanded beyond real estate into venture investing, how Ben thinks about building with conviction instead of institutional consensus, and why some of the best investment decisions come from waiting rather than deploying capital on schedule.

We also go deep on how AI is reshaping software, venture, and the broader economy — from why application-layer businesses may become harder to sustain, to why capital is increasingly concentrating around models, compute, and infrastructure.

If that’s not enough, we also discuss why venture is far more relationship-driven than most people realize, why investors often overstate their impact relative to founders, and why Ben believes the next great opportunities won’t come from another consumer app — but from applying AI to the physical world through biology, materials, energy, and longevity.

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

Download the transcript

NEW ECONOMIES Transcript: Ben Miller (Fundrise)

318KB ∙ PDF file

Timestamps

(0:00) Ben Miller
(1:42) Democratizing Access To Private Markets
(9:50) Venture vs. Real Estate
(12:48) Getting Access To Companies
(15:07) Venture Is Changing
(20:10) What Happens Next?
(22:10) Companies Going Public
(28:16) Where Are The Next Opportunities?
(31:22) The Impact of Longevity
(33:30) Tough Categories Right Now
(35:15) Thoughts On Vibe Coding Tools
(36:12) Ollie Joining As Chief of Staff
(37:35) How Ben Uses AI
(40:53) The Next Big Act For Fundrise
(44:22) What Categories Would Ben Build In?
(46:13) Rapid Fire

Our notes from this conversation

Fundrise was built as a reaction to the financial system.

The idea didn’t start with real estate — it started with distrust. After living through the 2008 financial crisis firsthand, Ben’s view became simple: people should be able to own real assets directly instead of relying entirely on financial institutions.

Private markets became consumer products.

Fundrise saw the opportunity earlier: It took institutional investing models — private equity, real estate funds, venture — and rebuilt them for individuals. The thesis wasn’t to invent a new asset class. It was to open access to one that already existed.

Great investing often means not doing what you said you would.

The team raised venture capital to invest in tech — and then barely invested for a year. Instead of deploying because markets expected it, they waited. Flexibility became an advantage over institutional pressure.

Access in venture is more random than people admit.

From the outside, venture looks like a system. Inside, it often looks like relationships, timing, and proximity. Many of the best investments happen through unexpected connections rather than structured processes.

Founders create outcomes. Investors mostly provide fuel.

The venture industry talks heavily about value-add. Ben’s view: teams build companies. Capital matters. Advice occasionally matters. But execution compounds more than introductions.

AI is making software easier — and company building harder.

As models become more capable, application layers become vulnerable. Product roadmaps compress. Builders increasingly compete not just with startups, but with the platforms underneath them.

Capital is concentrating faster than people expect.

AI isn’t only changing software — it’s redirecting capital. Trillions are flowing into models, compute, and infrastructure, creating second-order effects across housing, credit, real estate, and the broader economy.

The next breakthrough isn’t digital — it’s physical.

The most exciting opportunities may not be chat interfaces or copilots. They may come from applying AI to biology, materials, medicine, energy, and the physical world itself.

The future belongs to people willing to suffer for the hard decisions.

Ben’s framework for leadership is simple: the best decisions are often the ones that are personally painful. Building means choosing uncertainty, absorbing pressure, and taking responsibility before outcomes are obvious.

Learning remains the ultimate competitive advantage.

The next company, sector, or wave rarely looks obvious in advance. Curiosity, experimentation, and being willing to look outside your category matter more than defending a fixed identity.

Links

Subscribe to NEW ECONOMIES on YouTube

Follow Ollie on X (https://x.com/ollieforsyth)

Follow Ben on X (https://x.com/BenMillerise)

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AI Startups Choose London

Ollie Forsyth — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:27:50 GMT

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