Paramount is launching a hostile takeover bid to buy Warner Bros. They are going directly to shareholders with a bid valued at $108.4 billion (Source: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/paramount-hostile-takeover-bid-warner-bros-discovery-1236603175/…)

Stripe offered to acquire us for $1.2 billion when we had $2M in revenue. Today, we've raised $330M at an $8B valuation and reached $1B ARR. We could've died three times during this journey. This is the story I've never told anyone before:

Claude Code is personal AGI. You can't use this thing for more than a weekend without realizing it's completely over. At first you make a GUI app, OK cool. Then you're like wait, GUIs are a waste of time, let's just make a terminal app. Then you're like wait APPS are a drag, what if I just ask Claude Code to do the thing directly? Works immediately. Then you're like damn, now asking Claude Code to do stuff feels like a drag, can I... have Claude make a system that says this stuff for me, in the order I've been saying it, for the reasons I've been saying it? Maybe it can do all my tab changing and clicking too? And you really think you're going to break it by asking for something ridiculous, and then even this works, and that's when you realize.... It's over. Claude is now building you an agent system, and it works. Recursively self-improving machine intelligence, today, on your laptop. An agent system building you a custom agent system which gets better simply by using it (and lightly nudging it to improve based on what was learned in the session). I was bearish on Agents for a while. Not anymore. I'm talking home-cooked retard agents. My wife surely thinks I've lost it once and for all. You have to actually pull yourself away because every attempt to find its limit fails to hit any limit. It's not even 'addictive', it's just not believable that the next crazy idea could also work. And then it works and you're like f*ck... It's over.

Traditional venture capital is cooked

Launched http://searchable.com 12 days ago. 4,800 signups, hundreds of paying users, and $40K MRR. Today we’re announcing a $4M pre-seed led by Freestyle Capital. AI Search is real, and we’re building the infrastructure for it. If you want to come work with us in London, shoot me a message.

If you want proof of what a good deal YC is for founders, I just told a UK startup I've invested several million pounds in that I'd be happy if they wanted to do YC. I'd get diluted alongside them, but I know we'd all be net ahead.

BREAKING: Apple’s chip chief Johny Srouji informed CEO Tim Cook he is seriously considering leaving the company and would likely continue his career elsewhere rather than retire. Apple is urgently pushing to keep him. He remains at least for now.

If you have applied @ycombinator you should also consider these equity-free grants too 1. @GoogleStartups : $100k in credits 2. @vercel : $3,600 in credits 3. @aforevc Grants $1,000 4. @joinedgecity grants : $5k-40K 5. @emergent_vc : upto 100k 6. @thielfellowship : upto 200K

OpenAI is co-founding the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation alongside Anthropic and Block to support open, interoperable standards for agentic AI. We’re also donating AGENTS .md to help establish open standards that enable safe, reliable agents across tools, repositories, and ecosystems.

Good Products are Opinionated. “Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things. Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do. If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features. @Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity. You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because they’re even simpler than Google. Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do. You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn’t just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn’t do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. You’d have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you’d have to click through and read it. ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a human—use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer. It might not always be right, but it’s good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer. So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that’s simple enough. To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting. In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you’ve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make. In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, that’s more obvious than ever. People don’t want to make choices. They don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.”

Big fintech news: @mercury is officially launching Mercury Personal to general availability! After a limited beta that started last year (April '24), Mercury is making their product available to all. The early traction was impressive: - Beta users average $80K+ balances (vs ~$60K US average) - 50% are existing Mercury business customers - 50% are entirely new to Mercury It costs $240/year but gives users access to all of the following: - High-yield savings (5x+ national average APY) - Built-in investing via Mercury Invest - Up to $5M+ FDIC insurance - Shared access with customizable permissions - Joint accounts (up to 4 people) - Multiple physical/virtual debit cards with custom limits - Free domestic wires & ACH - Global ATM fee reimbursements - Automated savings & cash flow tools https://businesswire.com/news/home/20251211260682/en/Mercury-Launches-Premium-Consumer-Banking-for-Builders-and-Founder…

NEW: Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner helping to finance Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Bros.

BREAKING: Anthropic is preparing to go public by as soon as 2026 in what is expected to be one of the biggest IPOs in history, per FT. Anthropic is currently in talks for a funding round valuing the company at over $300 billion.

I really think Opus 4.5 was a tipping point. I was at a 2 hour build with @cursor_ai event this evening and the scale, diversity and quality of work that people did in 2 hours was like nothing I’ve seen before. Every project that demoed would have been a strong contender for any 48 hours hackathon in 2023. Map that 24x speedup forward into businesses. Months long projects take days now and the benefits compound. What a time to be alive. Thanks @zeror404 for organizing and @ericzakariasson for MCing

New job! I’m hiring folks interested in building and researching the next generation of evals and eval infa. DMs are open :)

The wait(list) is over. A new era of personal banking* starts now. *Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.

linktree is a billion-dollar company????? a billion???????? dollars??????????????? for literally... links. in. a. tree.

JUST IN: Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara becomes the youngest self-made female billionaire in history, surpassing Taylor Swift and Lucy Guo.

vc website: "we invest pre-seed, and help you go from zero to one" vc response: "we like what you're building, but you're a bit too early for us"

I've scaled 4 products past $100k MRR everyone asks for the strategy here's what actually worked: 1. week 1: build something, anything, ship it 2. find 5-10 people, get them to try it 3. become annoying - DM, email, call 4. watch them use it (most won't) 5. ask why, fix it, ship again 6. daily check-ins, daily updates 7. solve their actual problem, not what you think it is 8. keep shipping until they beg you not to change anything 9. that's your signal - now go loud 10. content everywhere, SEO grind, paid ads 11. double down on channels that work 12. cut everything else the gap between $0 and $100k? steps 3-8 most people never leave their code editor you can't build a business without talking to humans