Hey founders,

Welcome back to your weekly dose of reality. Last week we launched AI Startup Mentor, an AI that brutally dissects your startup idea so investors don't have to. The response was exactly what we expected: half of you loved the unfiltered honesty, and the other half are still recovering from the emotional damage. If you haven't tried it yet, you can now talk for the first 5 minutes completely free and get a scorecard on your startup before you spend a single dollar. Just show up and find out where you actually stand. Which, given the alternative is six months of building something nobody wants, seems like a reasonable use of five minutes.

Anyway, let's look at what happened this week while you were tweaking your landing page font for the 14th time.

Let's get into it.

OpenAI officially killed Sora this week. To everyone who spent months building their entire startup around an API that was never going to be released, our condolences. The team says they'll share details on "preserving your work" soon, which is corporate speak for "please don't sue us."

Shopify brands are now natively shoppable inside ChatGPT. Harley Finkelstein says "AI shopping isn't coming. It's here." Because exactly what we needed while asking ChatGPT to debug our Python code was to impulse-buy an overpriced water bottle.

Figma just launched AI agents that design directly on your canvas. It's in open beta, meaning your designers now have a new excuse for why the mockups look weird. The "use_figma" MCP tool is here to either 10x your productivity or create a million identical-looking SaaS dashboards. Probably both. (Figma)

Danny Hype said the quiet part out loud: "AI CMOs are a scam." Shocking absolutely no one, slapping a custom GPT wrapper on some marketing prompts and charging $99/month does not, in fact, replace a human who actually understands why your product isn't selling.

OpenAI is backing Isara, a new startup building software for "AI agents" to communicate and solve complex problems in finance and biotech. Because when you want to solve complex global financial issues, the obvious solution is to let a bunch of bots talk to each other without human supervision. What could go wrong?

This newsletter exists because the startup world produces an extraordinary amount of noise and a genuinely embarrassing amount of bad advice. We cut through it. Every Monday you get the week that actually mattered, written by someone who reads primary sources instead of reposting LinkedIn thought leadership and calling it a newsletter. The funding rounds, the product launches, the things that are either quietly brilliant or loudly stupid. Delivered before you've had time to convince yourself your pivot idea is a good one.

Forward it to a founder who needs honest information more than they need another motivational quote. So, all of them.