Tech leaders must respond to Trump's attacks on science and democracy

Money-losing businesses are of course endemic to Silicon Valley, as anyone who remembers the days of Uber Pool versus Lyft Line wars can attest. What’s a little less common is building a money losing business on top of another money losing business. Typically the platforms themselves aren’t also money pits, but that’s not the case in the AI moment. Cursor building on top of Anthropic is like DoorDash building on top of Uber, one investor put it. https://lnkd.in/epDRsz78 Tom Dotan

Just launched our brand new AI health & longevity summit Deus Ex Medicina https://lnkd.in/e4N2q3JE

Scoop! Substack is quietly fundraising on the back of exploding usage of its mobile app and a reignited enthusiasm for new political newsletters, thanks to President Donald Trump. The company believes its mobile application is becoming a powerful force for driving paid subscribers to the 500,000 creators now on its platform. And it doesn’t hurt that Substack is signaling to investors that it could do more to help newsletter writers with sponsorships, adding a potential new line of revenue for the creator company and its writers. Sources tell me that Substack is pitching investors on a round between $50 million and $100 million that would value it above its roughly $700 million last round price. How much more is a question for investors to answer. I hear that Substack has already received some term sheets and that, surprisingly, Benchmark is among the investors that have considered an investment in the Andreessen Horowitz-backed company. Substack is telling investors that it’s currently generating about $45 million in annual recurring revenue. The total subscription revenue flowing to Substack creators is roughly $450 million, sources tell me. A spokesperson for Substack declined to comment for this story. We’re at a moment when Substacks are surging back into the zeitgeist. For instance, Emily Sundberg , whose newsletter Feed Me is the number four business newsletter on Substack, has justifiably become a source of media fascination this year with a profile in the New York Times, coverage of her wedding in Vogue, a story in Air Mail, and an interview in Oliver Darcy’s Beehiiv-hosted newsletter Status. (Thanks for name-checking me, Emily.) Publications like Bari Weiss’s The Free Press and Richard Rushfield’s The Ankler have built real publications on top of Substack. Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo is quickly becoming a Substack juggernaut. The generally anti-Trump but conservative The Bulwark has become a staple of resistance media. Relative unknown MeidasTouch Network ranks four in U.S. politics, generating oodles of revenue on the back of anti-Trump coverage. Gavin Newsom launched a Substack on Tuesday. https://lnkd.in/edTF6kpe

Pumped for this!

As Bridge founder Zach Abrams came to the stage yesterday at Breaking the Bank, I called him “the man of the hour.” Abrams’ decision to sell his stablecoin startup to Stripe for $1.1 billion has helped ignite global business interest in the low-cost, crypto-powered, money-moving technology among the traditional finance set. Visa is getting in on the action, planning to launch a stablecoin card with Ramp. Stripe has leaned in. And Congress is working on passing the GENIUS Act which would make it much easier for traditional companies to join in. Bridge alone can’t take all the credit for the stablecoin mania, of course — stablecoin issuer Tether is among the most profitable businesses per employee in the world. That’s certainly caught the traditional finance world’s attention. If everyone at Newcomer’s Breaking the Bank Summit yesterday seemed to agree that stablecoins were the new wave to ride, there was less certainty on how exactly to play the generative AI boom in fintech. Bain Capital Ventures’ fintech guru Matt Harris returned to our event to deliver his view of the world. He argued that founders should be drilling into hard-to-crack financial services categories, like accounting and insurance, with the help of large language models and agents. Harris said it was less clear to him that all these services plus large language models businesses would be perfect vehicles for venture capital dollars. But for founders, he argued, this was the huge opportunity of the moment: Don’t sell software. Deliver services much more cheaply with AI and reap the rewards. “After 25 years of investing in fintech, I want to talk about financial services. I’m tired of nibbling around the edges of this $33 trillion industry, and I think it’s time for founders to also embrace that this isn’t about incremental change,” Harris said. “It isn’t about making incumbents better. It’s about fundamentally changing the experience for the better for customers.” But some of the founders who spoke at our summit yesterday were less optimistic about navigating the minefield that is services-intensive businesses. Josh Reeves, the CEO of payroll company Gusto, said he was only interested in running such a business long enough to figure out how to automate, or get out. “We take these complex compliance-heavy spaces and do what we do best, which is digitize the heck out of it,” Reeves said. Similarly, Jeff Seibert the CEO of next-generation accounting software company Digits, said he had no interest in getting further mired in the hard work of running an accounting business. Instead, he much preferred to sell accounting software to accountants. Businesses want AI-powered software that automates their financial metrics but, he said, “they want their books blessed by a real CPA, because you can’t sue the AI.” https://lnkd.in/e_cuxU5s