Slidebean startup newsletter

12 Oct Read online Sponsored by ✦ Good morning, founders 🕶️ Hope your weekend had fewer Teams messages than Spirit Airlines'. This week, things nobody thought of as inventory got price tags. An AI startup bid $12.5M for a bankrupt airline's internal chatter. A SpaceX spectrum deal knocked between 8.75% and 13.27% off the three big US carriers in a single day. AG1 changed its name, not its product, and revenue nearly quadrupled. And chatbots now decide which companies get recommended at all. The pattern: your data, your name and your reputation are already being priced, whether or not they're on your balance sheet. So who's setting the price on yours? In today's newsletter, we'll get into: micro1 vs. Google for Spirit's chat logs SpaceX gives the carriers their worst day in decades A $7.5B AI model that doesn't write The stories you clicked most last week ✦ FOUNDER BOARD 💳 On $2M of card sales, a 0.50% markup instead of 0.05% costs $9,000 a year, so ask your processor these five questions before signing. 🧳 Custom GPTs stop running Dec 11 and Gems start disappearing in November, so back up your team's AI instructions now; instructions travel, custom integrations mostly don't. 🏷️ AG1 changed its name, not its product, and revenue went from about $160M to about $600M; name for the buyer you want, and rename early. 🤖 Ask ChatGPT or Claude who's best in your category; if you're missing, these five factors decide whether AI recommends you. 🩺 86% of employers offering accident, critical-illness and hospital-indemnity cover report better retention, and 46% less absenteeism: the three overlooked benefits worth adding. Startup Investor Finder Slidebean’s Investor Finder helps startups find and track the right investors faster. Filter by stage, industry, and location, organize outreach, and manage your fundraising pipeline in one streamlined workspace. Check it out ✦ RUSHIN' ROULETTE Six bullets of updates 🎯 TypeSafe AI, the startup behind Jev, raised $870M at a $7.5B valuation in a round led by a16z, just weeks after Jev's September 15 launch. Jev outputs probabilities, or "calibrated decisions," instead of text, and the company claims a third of the Fortune 500 already use it, a sign that AI built for automation, not chat, is becoming its own investable category. 📉 SpaceX agreed to buy a nationwide spectrum portfolio to take Starlink into mobile, and Verizon fell 8.75%, its worst day since 2002, while T-Mobile dropped 13.27% and AT&T 9.81%. JPMorgan still sees limited near-term risk to the incumbents, but if you're negotiating a carrier contract, a credible fourth network is leverage you didn't have last week. 🚫 Meta banned ByteDance from advertising on Facebook and Instagram in the US and six other countries, and the ban also covers any advertiser whose ads send people to TikTok. "We don't have to run ads from a competitor," Meta said, so if a campaign funnels Meta traffic to your TikTok, rebuild it around your own site before it gets rejected. 🛒 Paul Graham says Amazon's ban on AI shopping agents, which started with blocking Meta's Muse in September, is "the first opportunity I've seen since Amazon was founded" for a startup to build a competitor. His logic: people will want agents to shop for them and won't want an Amazon-supplied one. Every platform that locks agents out is drawing the map for whoever lets them in. 🚗 Tesla renamed "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" to "Tesla Assisted Driving" in Europe after Germany's transport minister called the old name misleading. Tesla suggested the new name itself, and it may smooth an EU-wide approval vote. Regulators now police what you call your product, so audit every "autonomous," "full" and "AI-powered" claim before someone with a letterhead does. 🍌 Google moved free Gemini users to Flash-Lite only and pulled Pro from its $4.99 AI Plus plan, while its new Nano Banana 2.1 image API cuts the price of a 1K image roughly in half, to $0.0336. The catch: