Through the VOICE trial, Terry is using his Neuralink implant to help fine-tune a brain-to-voice interface for himself and others who can’t speak. He trained the algorithm first by miming speech as best he could, then by simply thinking the words and hearing them come out in his own natural voice. Powered by Grok Voice from @spacexai

David Friedberg reveals frontier labs are taking novel insights from his chat history and packaging them as their own "I have had experiences where we've asked some fairly novel scientific questions, and it identifies it as a novel insight, 'oh, never thought about that, might be interesting,' blah blah blah..." "And the using a different account, asking the next model version, it's like, 'oh, you could do this'. And it actually just describes this exact thing that we had in our chat in the previous version." "These are a handful of anecdotal experiences. But I know the domain that we work in, and the novelty of this stuff. So I know that there isn't some new corpus of information out there that's training the new model." "So all I can say at that point is that my conversation or our analyses have been used for training. The truth is, it's actually a piece of IP, that's our organizational IP. We don't have any NDA or confidentiality protections, with them being a service provider back to us." "This is why I care a lot about open source, because I don't want them having my chat logs, because they can use them for training to create an IP that is now diffused to the rest of the market. I find this very unfair."

I have interviewed 100 of the best growth leaders in the world. @MattSwulinski is easily top 3. (alongside @alexschultz and Brian Hale) He scaled Wispr Flow to over $100M in ARR and built a UGC machine. He scaled Superhuman from founder personally onboarding every customer to a growth machine with $50M ARR. If you are an early stage founder or growth leader, this will be the best episode you will listen to this year! I condensed my biggest lessons from the discussion below: 1. The E-Commerce Playbook Is the Right Playbook for SaaS The e-commerce playbook, where every dollar spent ties directly to a purchase or conversion, is the right model for modern SaaS. With distribution becoming a critical moat in a crowded AI market, SaaS companies should deploy UGC creators, constantly test new creative, and diversify channels to build their brand. 2. Paid Acquisition Is the Fastest Way to Validate PLG Relying solely on organic content and word-of-mouth takes too long to validate product-market fit. Paid acquisition creates the fastest feedback loop for proving a PLG funnel works, allowing teams to test positioning, refine messaging, and optimize conversion within a single week. 3. You Only Need Three Core Channels to Scale to $10M ARR Startups often ruin their acquisition engines by trying to run ten channels poorly at once. Reaching the first $10M in ARR only requires mastering three core channels: video intent on Meta, search intent on Google, and lifecycle retention through email and SMS. 4. Scaling Paid Ads Requires 500 New Creatives Every Single Month On platforms like Meta, creative increasingly acts as the targeting algorithm. Scaling spend without hitting audience fatigue requires 400 to 500 new creative assets every month, produced through UGC revenue-share programs, specialized agencies, and internal teams. 5. How the Best Growth Leaders Test for True Spend Incrementally Blindly increasing ad spend wastes money on conversions that may have happened organically. The best growth leaders measure spend elasticity against ARR growth and run strict holdout tests to determine whether each additional dollar generates genuinely incremental revenue. 6. In Three Years, Companies Will Operate Like a Board of Directors Tech organizations are shifting away from manual execution. Within three years, lean human teams could operate more like boards of directors, spending 20% of their time on strategy while autonomous AI agents handle 80% of operational execution. 7. Fire Your Marketing Team if They Aren’t Systems Thinkers Marketers focused on repetitive manual tasks are becoming increasingly replaceable. High-performing teams need systems thinkers who can break their work into inputs and outputs, then build self-improving AI workflows that multiply their personal leverage by 10x. (links in comments)

The Privacy Renaissance ft. @NEARProtocol @ilblackdragon One of my favourite interviews to date on The Starting Block 👇 0:00 Introduction & NEAR's Journey 2:30 NEAR Protocol Evolution: From AI Company to Blockchain Infrastructure 5:45 Vertically Integrated Stack: AI + Blockchain 8:15 @near_intents & Cross-Chain Trading 11:00 Mainnet Upgrade: Quantum Resistance & Dynamic Resharding 14:30 Why Confidentiality & Privacy Matter 18:45 Confidential NEAR Intents & @infinex Integration 22:15 X402 Foundation Partnership & Machine-to-Machine Payments 25:00 Computing Hardware & Inference Stack 28:30 IronClaw: Open-Source AI Alternative 32:45 AI as Operating System 36:15 Prompt Injection & Security in Agentic Systems 40:00 DeFi Exploits & Formal Verification 43:30 Current AI Tools & Model Access 46:15 Post-AGI Principles & Societal Changes 49:00 Closing Remarks Most people sleep on the fact that Illia co-wrote Google's foundational Transformer model paper with seven other Google researchers to allow parallel text processing using attention mechanisms instead of slow, sequential reading. | @TheBlockCo | @TheBlockPods |

.@mickymalka is the founder of @RibbitCapital — the firm behind Revolut, Robinhood, Nubank, Coinbase, and more. He bought his first share of Berkshire Hathaway when he was 13, in Venezuela, with money he borrowed from his grandfather. His grandfather charged him interest. He started his first company at 17. In his mid-20s, he put every dollar he had into launching a bank in Brazil for the 50 million Brazilians nobody else would serve. Micky is a quiet killer. Respected by the elite of the elite. When I asked @patrick_oshag how he’d describe Micky to someone who didn’t know him, he said: “He’s a mfing moneymaker.” Micky hates labels. The only label he wants is on his tombstone: “He was a rebel.” 0:00 Why Micky Malka Refuses to Be Labeled 3:00 Writing Your Way to Conviction 5:41 Buying Berkshire at 13 and Learning Buffett's Operating System 11:48 Token Factories, AI Bankers, and the Future of Money 18:38 The Infinite Game: Why It's Better to Be Behind 22:09 Gen Z Founders and the Chaordic Company 29:00 Why Young Founders Want to Build Atoms, Not Just Bits 34:29 Bringing Beauty and Taste Back to Technology 36:56 Revolut, Founder DNA, and Earning Deep Trust 45:54 Building OnePay With Walmart 50:53 From Lemon Bank to OnePay: A 20-Year Idea 56:00 Compounding Trust and Protecting Your Reputation 1:00:30 Node and the Rebel Case for Digital Art 1:07:34 What It Means to Live as a Rebel 1:10:50 Why Ribbit Is Built Like a Startup 1:14:41 Charlie Munger and the Power of Time Includes paid partnerships.