Good morning founders,

We launched something this week that the startup ecosystem desperately needs and will probably ignore until it's too late. It's called AI Startup Mentor and the concept is radical by 2026 standards: you show up, talk about your startup for 30 minutes, and instead of being told how innovative and disruptive you are, an AI tells you exactly what's broken and what to do about it. No "great question." No "I love the vision." No investor-speak that means nothing and costs you six months of your life building the wrong thing. Just honest feedback, a GTM action plan, and a pitch deck outline, delivered the moment the call ends, built on actual frameworks from YC, a16z, Techstars and NFX. $49. Available right now. Brutal by design.

We also started this newsletter, because apparently we enjoy additional work. Every Monday you get the week in startups, the raises worth knowing about, the scandals nobody is covering seriously enough, and the things your founder Slack is somehow still not talking about.

Let's get into it.

Delve, a YC-backed startup with Forbes 30 Under 30 founders, raised $32 million to automate compliance and apparently decided the easiest way to do that was to just skip the compliance part. Nearly 500 fake SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR reports, 493 of them basically identical, audit conclusions written before anyone submitted evidence, and "US auditors" that traced back to Indian shell firms. Lovable quietly switched providers before the story broke. Delve called it misleading. The 493 identical typos were unavailable for comment.

Zuckerberg spent $80 billion on the metaverse, renamed his whole company after it, and killed it in a community forum post this week. He is now spending $115 billion on AI. No apology. Just vibes and a new vision. The man treats billion dollar mistakes like browser tabs.

Apple is blocking App Store updates for vibe-coding apps including Replit, the $9 billion startup, demanding UX changes. Rork just shut its iOS app down entirely after three months off the store. The app that helps you build apps cannot get into the app store. Perfectly normal.

Lovable announced it is no longer just an app builder, now it is also your analyst, deck builder, data scientist and marketing assistant. Focused product becomes general purpose tool. Investors are happy. Users are confused. This always ends well.

Noah Kagan posted on LinkedIn that LinkedIn has become too mean and critical. The comments were mean and critical.

This lands in your inbox every Monday morning,  the week in startups, sharp and honest, from someone who actually reads the news instead of summarizing a16z blog posts and calling it insight. The raises, the scandals, the things worth caring about, all done before your second coffee.

Forward it to a founder who needs it. Which, let's be honest, is every founder you know.