Slidebean Startup Club newsletter

28 Oct | Read online In partnership with ✦ Howdy, founders. Four days to Halloween, and nothing in tech is scarier than an AI bill. Amazon just told its engineers that counting AI tokens is a "deeply flawed" way to measure their work. Whop is worth $5.1 billion with about 110 people, because it earns a cut of every sale its customers make, not because it hired fast. And Infisical raised $40 million it says it didn't need. Each story is about counting the wrong thing: tokens instead of launches, headcount instead of revenue per person, cash raised instead of cash earned. So which number is your team chasing, and does it actually pay the bills? In today's newsletter, we'll get into: How 6% of every sale built a $5.1B company Why Amazon shut down its AI leaderboard A $40M round nobody needed Discord's servers are heading to Google ✦ FOUNDER BOARD 🗄️ Three humans run SaaStr's 20+ AI agents, and two wiped critical data. Now SaaStr names the backup copy before granting write access and starts new vendors read-only. 🧮 Five data steps at 80% accuracy leave your AI agent with 33%. Nooks fixed its account data and found 700 accounts it didn't know it had. 💳 Usage limits drove 51% of Evernote's 2025 paid conversions. If you raise prices like Evernote did, gate by usage, grandfather loyal users and warn them early. 🏷️ The FTC and 20 states sued Dollar General after 29,000+ complaints that registers charged more than shelf tags. Check that site, ad and checkout prices match, renewals included. 🥗 Sweetgreen will pay its best restaurant managers up to $200K, mixing sales bonuses and equity. Tie key-manager pay to unit results, and pay them for training their replacements. 🛡️ Arctic Wolf tracked 400+ attacks via fake "IT support" Teams chats. Fix: Teams admin center > Users > External access > Allow only specific external domains. Cap Table Template for Startups Slidebean’s Cap Table Template gives founders a clear and practical way to organize and visualize ownership from day one. Instead of juggling spreadsheets or guessing equity splits, this tool helps startups model current and future share distribution, understand dilution scenarios, and plan fundraising rounds with confidence. Designed for simplicity and accuracy, it lets founders focus on building their business while maintaining clean, investor-ready capitalization data. Check it out ✦ RUSHIN' ROULETTE Five bullets of updates 💰 Infisical, which makes software for storing passwords and API keys, raised $40M at a $600M valuation in a round led by Elad Gil, while already cash-flow positive. It says it didn't need the money and has more in the bank than it ever raised, which is the strongest seat in any pitch meeting: raise when you don't have to, and investors start competing for you. 🏭 Re:Build, the Amazon-alumni manufacturing company that spun out EV startup Slate Auto, raised $2.1B in a round led by General Catalyst and JPMorganChase. Its companies already employ 2,100+ people across 2.4M square feet of US factory space, so hardware founders who can't afford their own plant now have a place to build in America instead of Shenzhen. 🔓 Cathedral, a $1.4B security startup run by former DOGE staffers, says it got into Anthropic's internal systems in under 12 hours through third-party business software, after days of failing to break in directly. Anthropic, which invites outside testers, confirmed limited access, and the weak spot was ordinary vendor apps, so audit the tools that hold your salaries and Slack. 🔎 Discord will give its 63,000+ Discoverable Servers, public communities with at least 1,000 members, their own web pages on Nov. 16, and their messages can start showing up in web search in mid-December. It's on by default, which means free search traffic if your community answers customer questions, or an opt-out under Server Settings > Web Presence if it's private. ⚖️ A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25B after a jury found it misled use