Darrell Etherington

New from me at @theangle: HumanX this year captured a theme that I'm seeing in my own experience of AI, and that I think reframes how we should be thinking about its impact on jobs and enterprise organization design:

Vibes > Vendors. It sounds flippant. It’s actually one of the most important ideas in our manifesto. Communications partners aren’t interchangeable vendors – they become an extension of your team. That’s why agency selection should feel more like recruiting than procurement. open.substack.com/pub/briefingno…

Fable 5 is absolutely unreal. I gave it a startup idea, and in 8 hours it interviewed 100 users, built the v1, raised a 200 million seed round from a16z, blew the entire seed round on expensive GTM hires and slop ad campaigns that didn't convert, panicked and raised a down round, fired their entire leadership team, pivoted twice and then ultimately shut down the startup

No, we don’t do RFPs. Not because we don’t believe in partnership. Because we do. Modern comms deserves modern agency-client relationships. norfps.com

Looking for a clinician to share a smart, nuanced POV on Midjourney for Rounds. This would be in studio, so comfort on camera is a must. And available in NYC July 10th. Crowdsourcing because this is often where I hear the best ideas.

"Survive. Don't sell. Don't quit." @Get_Writer CEO May Habib (@may_habib) has lived this mantra through a pivot, casual VC bias, and living in the shadow of the buzzier, brasher AI labs. "Anthropic and OpenAI salespeople walk in like heroes, get a contract, and leave to literally never be seen again,” she says. She's built Writer into a $1.9B valued business with customers like Accenture, Cigna and Vanguard anyway, by focusing on old-fashioned ROI, and AI tools built for "normal" people: non-coders who she argues are otherwise in danger of getting left behind. On this can't-miss episode of The Upstarts Podcast, Habib isn't pulling any punches 🥊 We talk tokenomics "insanity," and why she believes more accountability is needed In AI spending: "People should be getting f***ing fired." We also cover her pivot from Qordoba to Writer, and why Writer trains its own models, but doesn't want to be a lab. And she calls out as venture capital's ongoing gender bias -- including one famous firm that wrote that her mom status was "inspiring" while they passed 👀 This season is presented by @Rippling 🫡 TIME STAMPS: 00:00 Introduction 1:55 How Writer helps ‘normal’ people 9:31 The temperature in the C-suite around AI 16:56 The killer use case for Writer’s tools 21:16 Pivoting from Qordoba to Writer 22:31 Vinod Khosla, Sequoia, and bias in VC 27:43 ‘Survive, don’t sell, don’t quit’ 30:33 Why Writer trains models, but isn’t a lab 33:38 Anthropic, OpenAI and how Writer can compete 40:52 Why people should be fired for buying AI badly Enjoy!

I’ve known Om Malik for 26 years. We built companies during the first internet boom. We discovered photography together. We wandered Greenland, Svalbard, Wyoming, Idaho, and plenty of places in between. During COVID, he was part of my tiny bubble. We spent far more time talking about life, art, and philosophy than we ever did talking about technology. The world knew Om as one of the greatest technology writers of his generation. He had a rare gift for seeing past the headlines and finding what actually mattered. He didn’t just explain what was happening. He explained why it mattered and where it might lead. Ironically, some of his finest writing came from his hospital room during the last two months as he waited for a new heart. In the end, a heart never came. There is something painfully unfair about that. Om was one of the biggest hearted people I’ve ever known. His loss leaves a hole that stretches far beyond technology. It reaches into the lives of friends scattered across the world who laughed with him, traveled with him, argued with him, and came away seeing things a little differently. I’ll miss his curiosity. His generosity. His perspective. Most of all, I’ll miss my friend. This is a small collection of what 26 years of friendship looked like. christophermichel.com/People/Om-the-…

Om Malik gave me my start in tech media and journalism nearly 20 years ago and it changed my life completely and very much for the better. He was extremely intelligent, supportive and perceptive, and I ascribe much of my success, as well as my continued love of learning and curiosity to him, all these many years later. I was lucky enough to get to see him last year in person in SF, a random encounter and a chance to catch up I’m very glad I got to have. Thank you for everything Om, rest in peace. om.co/2026/06/24/196…

@PimDeWitte @khoslaventures @generalcatalyst @JeffBezos @ericschmidt @NicoRosberg Congrats, that's huge! Strength to strength!

Today we're announcing our $320M Series A at a $2.3B valuation, led by @khoslaventures , with @generalcatalyst, @JeffBezos , @ericschmidt, @NicoRosberg, alongside leading researchers from frontier labs and academia.

LinkedIn messaging is embarrassingly bad. So I built a faster, private, open-source inbox. ⌨️ Superhuman-style shortcuts ⚡ Instant search with local message sync 🌙 Dark mode, emoji, and more 🔒 Runs completely local as a Chrome extension Open source and free. Get it below 👇

@kyliebytes That’s what they all say

there’s an actuator in my purse for an amazing reason

Okay I’ll flex on intheweights.com too

Midjourney is launching AI medical imaging Othership?

The next Camp application is now open, and the theme is The New Agentic Economy Abundant intelligence will result in radical changes to both companies and our economy - we want to see how you are building for this future! Read more about the theme here: betaworks.com/writing/camp-t…

@jmwind @SpellbookLegal share with the rest of the class? 🙏

It’s okay. Yesterday at @SpellbookLegal instead of running costly evals, we asked Fable 5 to generate a replacement Fable 5 as we suspected this would happen.

ai pilled companies spending $90k / employee per year 🤯 per employee, not per engineer. where does this go in a year!? can't wait to find out... from ramp's dataset (70k companies).

Every billion-dollar startup has a good founding legend. But at @TrustVanta, CEO Christina Cacioppo (@christinacaci) says the real story is messier than the legend. According to the lore, she and her co-founder saw the problem first-hand at Dropbox. That part's true. "Then [I] heard compliance, heard what you had to do, ran screaming from the room, did not return," she says. It was only as she looked into wider security needs, that compliance kept coming back up. "That was that terrible, 'scream from the room' thing, but people keep bringing it up," she remembers. Her true founder experience: "Know enough to remember the words, have a place to think about them, and then two years later, run into it again, and go deeper." Catch the full interview on The Upstarts Podcast, presented by @Rippling 🫡

trust Sources

@Patrick_ORourke front-running some kind of impending regulation?

Dedicating this much WWDC keynote time to parental control features feels... odd?

The best tools to build the agentic future: all native on @Cloudflare. Welcome to the team, VoidZero!!