BREAKING: The pride of France, Mistral AI, is exploring a raise of €3B at a €20B valuation

for sure

Worst VC behaviour I’ve seen in a portfolio company: A euro VC limited founder salaries to a very low level (<$100k). Founders then received a 9 figure acquisition offer. VC tried to block the deal as was only a 4-5x for them. I and other angels told them in no uncertain terms that we would go scorched earth on their reputation if they blocked the deal. The worst part: they failed to connect the fact that their miserly salary cap was likely the cause of the founders wanting to accept the offer. One of the founders was still renting a 1 bed apartment at this time and had a bunch of credit card debt. You should want your founders to be financially comfortable post series A so they can really swing for the fences…

One of the UK's top legal AI startups, has just raised a HUGE $70m Series B! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇬🇧 Professional services play a huge part in the British economy. This means our economy is massively at risk of being gutted by AI companies who are disrupting these professional services. The legal sector is a prime example. Companies like Harvey and Legora are reducing the demand for young lawyers in large law firms. This means we're seeing UK GDP and jobs drain away to American and Swedish companies. That's why it's such great news that Wordsmith has just raised a HUGE $70m Series B led by @IndexVentures (@HannahLSeal) and @HighlandEurope. It's British (or Scottish to be precise) meaning the UK will get to benefit from the upside of this technological disruption. The company now serves more than 500 in-house teams who are using Wordsmith to organise, route and complete legal work across the business, reducing reliance on outside counsel. It also grew revenue by an insane 14x in the past 12 months. If we want the UK to benefit from AI, we have to be willing to invest and back great founders - and Ross is one of the best we have. AMAZING news - congrats to the team!

Big names are also bringing their world tours to London 🌍 @stripe is coming June 10th stripetour.com/london @vercel is hosting Ship on June 17th vercel.com/ship/london @googlecloud's summit is June 17th-18th googlecloudevents.com/london… @salesforce's Agentforce day is June 18th salesforce.com/uk/events/lon…

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something. And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy. Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output. This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work. I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution. Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook. With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it. My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day. There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed. Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work. I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things. I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master. Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

Our Scotland. You’re an easy country to love… #FIFAWorldCup | @FIFAWorldCup

The real headline for people in the UK is that a Scottish company has just been acquired by @OpenAI. The company, Tomoro AI, is an AI consulting company that will form the initial bulk of the "OpenAI Deployment Company". Talent in the UK continues to be some of the best in the world, and it's great to see OpenAI doubling down on people here.

Old playbook: “Get big to go global” New playbook: “Go global to get big” Some stats: - 22.9% Stripe users are making most of their money abroad (up 2x from 11.6% in 2020). - Of those, a quarter are making most of their money outside the top 10 global markets. - Among the top 100 ai startups on Stripe, the median earns most of its revenue internationally and sells into 55 markets within its first year. - As an example, Emergent Labs gets 70% of their revenue from abroad, and is doing material business (1% of revenue) in sixteen countries. 🌎🌍🌏

Your honour, I think this should be allowed.

BREAKING: Stripe CEO @patrickc says March was an all-time record for new business incorporations with Stripe, and that new businesses joining Stripe in Q1 were up 71% YoY: "It's parabolic. It's exponential. I'm running out of mathematical terms, but it's really very striking."

LIVE ON TBPN FROM STRIPE SESSIONS!!

So @levelsio was right: Stripe launched Treasury It’s like Wise but with your stripe balance. You get - bank account details - balance transfers - credit cards All with your stripe balance So you can pay friends and invoices without a bank

Tune in tomorrow.

London owns the ground and the clock — @GRITCULT

Palantir Head of UK @louismosley: “Palantir has 1/5 of its employees here in Britain.” “That’s 4-5x more than any comparable tech company.” “We build an enormous amount of product in the UK.” “That’s a little known fact about Palantir—you could stick a ‘Made in Britain’ sticker on the product. It’s made in London.” “Like Google DeepMind is Google’s frontier lab, all in London, we in Britain have ended up with a significant chunk of two of the most important nodes in what is the emerging supply chain.” Via @etnshow