🕶️ No one wants Zuck’s money

Six bullets of updates

1. 🤖 The future of innovation may be 50/50: experts argue that true breakthroughs will come from human–AI collaboration, not automation or replacement.

2. 🧼 Two brothers turned a garage-born car detailing hustle into a $100M franchise, proving that grit, branding, and clean cars still scale.

3.  🧠 A founder reflects on 20 years of lessons, sharing three things he wishes he knew earlier; starting with the power of saying no to the wrong opportunities.

4. 📈 To future-proof your career in an AI-powered world, experts say focus on uniquely human skills; like creativity, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.

5. 🏠 The top 10 mobile and home-based franchises of 2025 are in, with low startup costs and flexible models driving a new wave of entrepreneurial freedom.

6. 📜 Building a strong succession plan is key to protecting your business legacy; start early, document everything, and groom future leaders before you need them.

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💰 How Much Does Microsoft Really Pay Its Engineers?

An internal Microsoft document just leaked and it reads like a cheat code for salary negotiations. The pay guidelines, updated in May, outline everything from base salary to signing bonuses to massive stock awards across engineering levels. Think $408K salaries and $1.9M in stock grants… and that’s before your annual bonus.

The document confirms what many suspected: Big Tech’s fight for AI talent is driving comp through the roof. Microsoft has built-in flexibility to go beyond listed ranges in “competitive situations”; aka, when Meta dangles a $100M check in front of your best candidate. And with hiring concentrated in high-cost hubs like Redmond and San Francisco, those top-of-range figures are more common than you’d think.

The full breakdown offers rare transparency in an industry known for closed-door deals and hush-hush negotiations. If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to climb from L57 to L70, or what those numbers even mean, this leak is your new favorite spreadsheet.

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This Guy HACKED Wall Street and Walked Free

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These companies just raised money

1. 💳 Ramp rockets to a $22.5B valuation just 45 days after hitting $16B, as investor demand surges for its AI-powered finance automation tools.

2. 🧠 Groq nears a new funding round at a $6B valuation, as the Nvidia rival gains traction with its ultra-fast AI chips designed for real-time inference.

3. ⚡ Ascend Elements raises $162M to swap copper for aluminum in EV motors, claiming their redesign slashes material costs by up to 75% without losing performance.

4. 📢 Two UC Berkeley dropouts raise $28M for Whirl, their AI marketing automation startup that promises to replace growth teams with a single prompt.

5. 🚁 Air raises $23M to ramp up U.S. expansion and advance its eVTOL tech, betting on sleek, personal aircraft as the next wave of urban mobility.

6. 🐞 PlayerZero raises $15M to stop AI agents from deploying buggy code, using real-time user data to catch issues before they hit production.

7. 🧬 Maui raises $14M with a viral pitch deck for its AI medical copilot, aiming to streamline diagnosis and charting for overworked doctors.

8. 🎯 Gradient Labs closed $10M in just one week with a sharp 15-slide pitch deck, betting on AI agents that can reason and plan like humans.

9. 🚀 The founder’s startup, Lambda Automata, raised $6.7 million in seed funding to build AI-powered defense systems from Athens, Greece.

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🧠 Billion-Dollar Bribes Can’t Buy AI Loyalty (Yet)

Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly offering up to $1 billion to poach top AI talent and still getting ghosted. His new Meta Superintelligence Lab is on a warpath, targeting OpenAI veterans and the elite 50-person team at Thinking Machines Lab, led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Some engineers were offered $100 million per year. So far? Not a single one has said yes.

Why not? Sources cite a lack of compelling mission (building “AI for Reels” doesn’t spark joy), skepticism about leadership, and the simple fact that TML just raised the biggest seed round in history; at a $12B valuation. In other words: they’re not broke, and they’re not impressed. Even OpenAI’s Sam Altman threw shade, saying Meta “had to go quite far down their list.”

Zuck is betting that open-source models and big checks will win the AI arms race. But if no one wants to build the lab with him, Meta might end up rich in compute and poor in direction. For now, this looks less like a moonshot and more like a very expensive game of phone tag.

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Startup Events and Deadlines

1. Crash Course on Startup Fundraising with Caya (Slidebean CEO) l Aug 6 l Online

2. Slidebean’s Crash Course in Financial Modeling l Aug 7 l Online

3. Startupbootcamp | Energy & Sustainability | Deadline: Aug 10 | South Africa

4. Startupbootcamp | Health & LifeScience | Deadline: Aug 10 | Netherlands

5. New York Venture Summit | 9, 10 Sept | NYC

6. Antler Canada | Deadline: Sept 29 | Canada

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