Tech Reporter @alexrkonrad.bsky.social on Going Independent with Upstarts, What Drives Subscribers (vs Just Views) and How He Uses AI in His Content Creation hunterwalk.com/2025/09/17/t...

Really enjoyed this chat with the great @hunterwalk.com about what we're building at @upstarts.bsky.social as we approach our 6 month mark. Feedback includes: "You are SUCH a nerd my god" 🤓 and "You really nailed the balance of promo + substance here!" 😂

When I still worked at Forbes, I'd annoy our IT helpdesk by filing tickets to update Signal and WhatsApp seemingly every week. One-year-old startup Console, which just raised $23M, uses AI agents to automate away basic IT requests like that. www.upstartsmedia.com/p/console-ai...

When Margot was a puppy, she tried to say hi to a skunk and got sprayed pretty bad. Years later, she still freaks out when she sees black and white dogs. Which raises an important question: does she think the dogs are skunks, or that skunks are just a spooky kind of dog 🤔

— Scene: outside a fancy new Brooklyn high rise, 1pm — Broker [suit, clipboard in hand]: sir, do you have an appointment? Me [gym clothes, stomping on 50 spotted lanternflies]: no, just getting my steps in!

Chatted with Klarna's CEO from NYSE during their IPO week. We talked about what he learned from IKEA and Walmart, Klarna's evolving mission, his stance on crypto, personally vibe coding fixes for bad customer text messages, handling CEO pressure and much more. www.upstartsmedia.com/p/klarna-ceo...

Tech legend Jack Dangermond founded Esri in 1969. Now 80 years young and with a net worth of $10B+, he's still "all in" on his company and global mission. @upstarts.bsky.social spent an hour with Jack this week for one of our best interviews yet, full of lessons on startup-building and life.

Intel has been touting partnerships with sanctioned Chinese surveillance firms as Trump announces that the USG is taking a stake in the company: www.forbes.com/sites/emilyb...

Scoop: Meta has held talks with Midjourney about a partnership including a potential acquisition, among several previously-unreported AI video startups it's met recently, sources tell me at @upstarts.bsky.social. Midjourney's been busy, too, pitching an API. www.upstartsmedia.com/p/meta-talks...

it’s a beautiful San Francisco day in NYC

need burning man to start already so I can finally catch up on email

The status quo in Medicare is grim: call center brokers spamming senior citizens to change plans, in hopes of a commission. YC alumni startup careCycle and founders Alex Doonanco and Evan Roubekas think they have a win-win solution: voice AI. They've raised $2M to build it. But questions remain.

Sequoia not even cracking the top 350 (!) VC firms on TIME's new Midas list knockoff is a wild troll and instantly invalidating

Exclusive: Startups in the AI race are throwing money at growth. But the result is often "chaos." Roadway, a new startup by veteran Webflow and Notion growth marketer Tim Dalrymple, has launched today with $3.2M in funding and customers like Clay and Decagon to use AI tools of its own to help.

AI is sparking a moment of big change in cybersecurity. I sat down with Wiz co-founder Ami Luttwak to talk in depth about how his security startup is thinking about AI - as well as the latest on its $32B acquisition by Google, his take on CyberArk's big deal, and his advice for founders today.

Can a financial market for GPU compute improve access for startups, and help finance big datacenter projects better? Today's @upstarts.bsky.social post talks to Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Milgrom about his newest project to create such a market, a partnership with startup OneChronos.

Best thing about flying Delta is the chance to watch Delta CEO Ed Bastian’s 2025 CES Keynote over and over again

Can insurance underwriting and a new SOC 2-like certificate help AI startups grow faster? Or will it just create a new "racket" for them to pay? I spoke with the founder behind the idea, AIUC CEO Rune Kvist, as well as with a bunch of other AI startup leaders, to dive in 👇

WSJ claimed the Trump–Epstein article was an “exclusive.” But what if I told you they fully intended to show it to people? storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Sometimes I forget to turn off my recorder and it catches me talking to my dog

I've written about startups for a decade-plus. For today's scoop on Cambridge Aerospace, a stealthy defense tech startup based in the U.K. that's raising big VC $, I turned to a career-first source: An investor presentation posted publicly... on Vimeo. www.upstartsmedia.com/p/inside-ste...

AI companies like Cursor and Perplexity are increasingly turning to tools from a smaller startup, Unify, to automate their outbound emails to potentially interested customers. Unify's part of a new GTM software tech stack with Clay. Now it's raised $40M. I wrote about in @upstarts.bsky.social.

Cheering alone in the theater at Superman when the reporters bravely publish their story directly from the CMS

I wrote today about Nothing, the smartphone company with $1B in sales you’ve probably never heard of, and whose phone some reviewers call “ugly”. But founder Carl Pei isn’t bothered by it. “As a startup, we have to have an opinion,” he tells @upstarts.bsky.social. “We have to be different.”

A dedicated new @upstarts.bsky.social subscriber (a GTM leader at a startup) has been steadily working his way through our entire back log of stories and commenting on each one... I am both thrilled and concerned 🤣

Starbucks to develop "coffeehouse of the future" that looks as much as possible like your local coffee shop it previously killed

Exclusive: AI research labs are in a NBA-style free agency frenzy. @upstarts.bsky.social obtained OpenAI's comp tiers for research staff, including how much each level researcher can expect in comp and the cash-equity split, as well as its pitch for why talent should turn down Meta.

folding a fitted sheet is truly the final boss of adulthood. every how-to video I watch makes it worse

Scoop: 3 ex-OpenAI staffers -- all recent Stanford students -- have raised $20M for an unannounced company, Applied Compute. The reinforcement learning startup is in tests with several other tech companies, and has fielded investment offers at valuations up to $500M, @upstarts.bsky.social learned.

Scoop: 3 ex-OpenAI staffers -- all recent Stanford students -- have raised $20M for an unannounced company, Applied Compute. The reinforcement learning startup is in tests with several other tech companies, and has fielded investment offers at valuations up to $500M, @upstarts.bsky.social learned.

News: Hebbia has made its first acquisition. The AI startup is acquiring another one, FlashDocs, which makes an API for generating presentations that can be exported to PowerPoint and Google Slides. The move solves a last-mile problem, CEO George Sivulka tells @upstarts.bsky.social exclusively.

What is acceptable dress code for speaking on a tech panel when it’s 100 degrees 🥵

Does vibe coding mean vibe testing? Skyramp founder Nithin Michael spent 3 years working on a solution to code gen's testing limits: agents that generate tests automatically without calling LLMs itself, so you have "one leg to stand on". He's launching from stealth today with $10M from Sequoia.

At this point I’ve gotten so many campaign texts about the NYC elections that I’m pretty sure the hot dog vendor guys have my number

“It only takes one breakthrough to turn the tables.” Amid splashy moves by OpenAI and Meta, you might be sleeping on poolside, the frontier AI lab led by Jason Warner and Eiso Kant. I spoke to them about the model race, VC groupthink, Meta and more, for this week’s premium @upstarts.bsky.social ⬇️

wanted to post this yesterday

When someone messages you how great it was to meet at an event you RSVPed for but didn't make 🙃

Is there such a thing as a good bot? Ethical web scraping? Startup Browserbase argues so — claiming its headless browsers democratize publicly available data for others to build AI agents that can improve our lives. It’s now raised $40M in funding to try to get non-developers to use it, too.

In Nov 2022, @alexrkonrad.bsky.social and I wrote in @forbes.com about Jeremy Jordan-Jones, a man who made wild claims of his blockchain startup. Last month, he was federally indicted on one count of wire fraud. DOJ: www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr... Our story: www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusf...

everyone still working on this gorgeous summer Friday in NYC should get a medal for each stupid email we send

Scoop: Airtable investor and 4x Midas Lister Max Gazor plans to leave CRV to launch his own early-stage AI fund, sources tell @upstarts.bsky.social, looking to raise about $150M. "We're excited for Max," the VC firm says. His departure is surprising -- and the latest example of a shakeup in VC.

Last night my spouse described my job as “yap and tap” and it’s 100% true

Exclusive: In a "brutal" fundraising environment, emerging managers face an uphill battle. Amanda Robson's answer was two-fold: the power of community, and a relentlessly high-energy approach ⚡ Here's how the VC known as "Robby" was able to raise $22M to back startups at Modern Technical Fund.

sad nod of mutual understanding with a woman also fully decked out in Knicks gear on the subway… priceless

Does Salesforce's big-ticket, $8B Informatica buy have ripple effects for startups? "Customers don't want to bring all their data together in Salesforce," says a CEO. “The deal is validating for the potential for data in AI today and tomorrow," says another. My analysis in @upstarts.bsky.social 👇

AI leaders Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have predicted a 1-person, $1 billion startup is coming. New holdco Infinity, which launched today with 8 subsidiary startups, is trying to come close by focusing on AI-boosted services. But will ambitious founders want to sign up for its terms? My latest:

There's a race going on to bring AI to customer support. Two startups, Bret Taylor's Sierra AI and Decagon, are getting extra buzz. But it's early. I dug into how Decagon and Sierra compete — and spoke to founders at others — for my latest @upstarts.bsky.social feature. Here's the state of play 👇

Canadian startup founder Wally Haas has spent the past decade trying to bring Tony Stark's hologram from "Iron Man 2" to life. It's a daunting task. Last week, @upstarts.bsky.social got to see his future. The only catch: Haas' hologram table costs $5 million for now. So he has a lot of work to do.

Still looking for Roni

So Databricks is acquiring Neon for $1 billion? www.wsj.com/articles/dat... Just like @alexrkonrad.bsky.social reported last week: www.upstartsmedia.com/p/scoop-data...