We’re celebrating another win to close out the year! 🎉 Apptronik has been named a 2025 Top Tech Startup by @SDCExec , a recognition that highlights companies transforming the supply chain and logistics space. This win is a testament to Apollo’s recent development milestones and Apptronik’s commitment to helping humans in warehouse settings. Kudos to our innovative team! Read more here:  #SupplyChain# #Logistics# #FoodLogistics# #TechStartups# #AI#

Early-stage deep tech startups can be seen as a big risk to investors. @EikeGerhardt explains how @DemetriMxm used credibility signals throughout Nephrogen’s Startup Battlefield pitch to overcome it. More pitch advice on the latest Build Mode.

FIVE POINT ONE BILLION DOLLARS RICHER AND DONALD TRUMP WANTS YOU TO THANK HIM FOR IT Not a typo. Five point one billion. That's the House Oversight tally on what the Trump family has vacuumed up since he retook the Oval Office Forbes says his personal net worth went from 2.3 billion to 6.2 billion in barely two years. The whole family — Melania, the kids, Kushner — sitting on roughly 10 billion now. Nearly doubled since election night How does a family double its money while running a country. Follow the paper A billion-dollar tungsten mining deal cut with Kazakhstan. Trump's sons holding a stake. Tungsten. The stuff that goes into weapons and armor plating, and somehow the sons are positioned to cash in Defense-tech startups the sons invested in have pulled in 3.2 billion dollars in direct government contracts since. Another 3.1 billion sitting in future contract options. That's not luck. That's a pipeline Over a billion parked in World Liberty Financial, the family crypto fund, bankrolled in part by the United Arab Emirates. A foreign government has a financial stake in a business tied to the sitting president's family ProPublica says the White House leaned on getting a 620 million dollar deal done for an obscure rare earth magnet company connected to Donald Trump Jr. Trade adviser Peter Navarro allegedly worked the phones for them. Don Jr. says he had nothing to do with it. Sure And here's the part that should make you scream into a pillow — there's reportedly a settlement in place between Trump and his own government that keeps the IRS from auditing the Trump family So while your refund gets audited over a 400 dollar discrepancy, the family raking in billions from foreign governments and Pentagon contracts gets a permission slip This isn't governing. This is a toll booth with Trump's name on it, and every branch of government that's supposed to stop it is busy handing him the keys They are not going to stop, and they are laughing while they count it

Everyone is talking about how easy it is to build now. A $20 subscription gives you coding capabilities that were reserved for the best engineers just a few years ago. Building a product has never been cheaper or faster. But that's exactly the problem. When building is commoditised, the technology stops being the moat. Everyone has access to the same tools, the same models, the same capabilities. The advantages that once differentiated startups are disappearing. The companies that win from here aren't the ones with the best product today. They're the ones with the best team. A team with enough trust, conviction and energy to keep showing up every single day. Through the hard stretches, the slow periods, the moments when nothing is working the way you expected. AI can accelerate execution. It cannot replace belief. It cannot replace shared ambition. That's the real competitive advantage in 2026. And it's the hardest one to build. I shared this in the latest @ForbesTechCncl article on the biggest challenges facing tech startups today.

a lot of people overcomplicate this: GTM IS MUCH SIMPLER THAN YOU THINK most people hear "go-to-market" and assume it requires complex tools and growth hacks. But no, -> cold email is not gtm. -> content is not gtm. -> ads are not gtm. -> sales is not gtm. they can all be parts of it, but none of them define it. at the most basic level, gtm is: person ➔ place ➔ approach ➔ action ➔ feedback here is what that actually means: 1. person who are you actually trying to reach? not a vague market category like "b2b companies." an actual type of person dealing with an immediate problem today. 2. place where can you reliably find their attention? is it linkedin, x, corporate email, google search, youtube, or an in-person event? 3. approach (channel vs tactic) this is where most people get confused: linkedin is a CHANNEL. founder content is a TACTIC. sales navigator searches are a tactic. direct outbound messages are a tactic. commenting on industry discussions is a tactic. it is the same place, but completely different ways of using it. 4. action what do you want the person to do next? walk through the door, start a trial, book a 15-minute call, or reply with their current workflow? your cta needs to be crystal clear 5. feedback: what happened after you tried? this is the step that turns random promotion into actual gtm. did the right people respond? what specifically caught their attention? where did they drop off? what should change on the next attempt? this loop works outside tech startups too, for a new neighborhood restaurant: • person: people living or working within four blocks • place: google maps and street foot traffic • approach: sidewalk chalkboard menu, local food reviews, and weekday lunch specials • action: walking in and ordering • feedback: did the chalkboard bring more office workers than the lunch discount? the takeaway: you don't need a massive growth stack to start. you need answers to five basic questions: 1. who should care? 2. where can i reach them? 3. what will make them pay attention? 4. what do i want them to do? 5. what did i learn after trying? do it repeatedly and you start building a real go-to-market motion. share this framework with someone who needs to hear it. later today i'll show how that motion becomes an engineering system instead of a collection of random experiments.

one of the valuable types of data in the future might be inspiration for agents. hear me out. i don’t mean inspiration as in “an idea for the agent to make”. i mean inspiration the agent uses to raise its ambition and divergent creativity. the only reliable way i found to raise the creativity and ambition of llms is to give them an idea what you’re after. yes you could interject and state “duh lol bro that’s just few shot prompting”, but few-shot prompts were meant to solve output shape (same as fine-tuning). and sure, you might already do some of this naturally in your prompting, but developing an intuition which exact combination of curated examples lead to superior results isn’t trivial. the datasets needed are creative sparks that force the agent to think bigger and better. if you tell an agent “design me an editorial yearly recap of my e-commerce platform”, I guarantee that it won’t arrive at an idea (and execution, but that’s a different problem) as powerful as shopify’s winter editions site. but if you give it enough truly extraordinary examples, it will raise its own ambition. crucially, these creative sparks don’t have to come from the same niche. in fact, it’s often better they don’t. but calibrating these datasets and how and when to employ them is not obvious, and itself requires human creativity llms do not possess (yet). i suspect this is a entire new job category we’ll soon see manifest, distinct from prompt engineering, or perhaps an evolution of it: ‘idea guys’, interior designers, curators, tastemakers, will find jobs in tech startups curating these creative spark datasets. there is so much value, and thus money to be made building these creative engines. exciting times!