work in progress

• Betting on people. The first AI wave promised a synthetic life: endless automations, AI-generated media and content, a world of algorithms and sequences. People-first products seemed to be threatened, but now founders are turning this around: enabling humans to do better, instead of being replaced.
  • Donatas (Billo) shares that "in a market flooded with AI “UGC” avatars, demand for real human creators has never been stronger (10M GMV run rate).
  • Evergrowth is growing strong as Agentic Workspace, builds enabling agents for sales teams – instead of massive outbound sequencing machines.
  • Creatives and freelancers getting a boost with Indy AI – Gajus (Contra) ships new engine that finds opportunities when they sleep.
  • Trace.Space is betting on engineering brilliance with a beautiful video, too.
• Betting on decentralisation. Inspiring talk with Axiology's Marius Jurgilas, where he brings a wealth of experience (and insight) on tokenisation and emerging financial infrastructure (talk in LT); of course, they are bullish after securing the licence. Ignas and his impressive team made a big launch of Rizon – a global neobank on stablecoin rails. Betting that 400 million USDT users base will continue to explode, and Rizon will be a leader in user experience and adoption (interview here).

• Startup Estates. We are seeing the rise of builder/hacker spaces – like Sandbox in Berlin. This includes _basedspace, which is an overlooked national treasure already. I am also thrilled to see builders across the continent connecting and visiting, networks expand and ambition gets boosted, too (there is hope, Europe!). In just 18 months, Startup House Riga has become too small for the tech community – things are brewing in Latvia, too.
• Products for life. Pulsetto exceeds past-year revenue in one month (July), scaling like crazy. ItaroBlu has an ambition and impressive technology to upgrade helmet technology. Fieldy is hiring last founding engineer.
• Siauliai in Lithuania keeps on giving, who would have thought? Unicorns Lithuania have an interesting chat with Ignas, founder of sixteen.media agency as well as ConsumerShield. What else is in this town? FPRO, Cherry Servers, Pixpro. More than in Panevezys??
• Speed + scale. Surfshark launched FastTrack - delivers up to 70% faster speeds to Sydney, Seattle, and Vancouver for macOS users. Holo targets 200k MRR by January – backed by FIRSTPICK, hiring (no surprise, ex Sintra.ai builders). Hostinger Horizons now builds e-commerce stores, too. NordVPN lands on Real Madrid shirts. nexos.ai updated LLM lineup, and look –>

• Hackathon not to miss September 12 – might be intense though.

rounds and capital

• GREÏ raised EUR 650K pre-seed from FIRSTPICK. They are bringing AI monitoring to complex industrial and retail sites.
• Latvian Cellbox Labs secured non-dilutive funding of EUR 3.3M for product development: working on dynamic gut-on-chip model.

founder's guide - a lot about media this time

• Writing Club – like a Running Club but for writing.
• Kate (ex-Wise, Plural) is open to work with world-class founders on scaling themselves.
• How to win podcasting in 2025
• Interested in Media and Content economy? Great talk on Taste Economy and how to pursue ventures.
• Best business books according to typefast – founder of Flexport.

further insights

• Inside OpenAI by a former employee.
• Five trends to bet on – for CMOs
• Why most VC firms hire associates wrong (and what we do instead)
• How to be top 5% freelancer
• Sam Altman VS Elon Musk online fights – entertaining
• Elon Musk names OpenAI. Talking about brand names, thought that Under Armour is cool – but founder want to do Body Armor initially.

roleplay

• Great for everyone: How to Build a Career That Thrives Alongside AI
• Also - Andrej Karpathy on how to become an expert