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📆 This Week in the Newsletter 📆
🫡 Happy Friday y’all! It’s AI realism week, with prophecies for how AI could theoretically destroy us all in the long term and research into how AI has effected elite engineering productivity in the past few months. Giddy Up.
👨💻 Website Of The Week: We’ve got 2 good years left until total extinction, at least that’s what the AI 2027 project believes. Their website is a speculative, research-driven project that imagines how the next few years might unfold as artificial intelligence rapidly advances toward and beyond human-level capabilities. It’s logical, backed by research, and wait should I be worried? Read how AI takes over here →
📖 What We’re Reading: How AI tools actually affect elite engineering productivity. "Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developers" from METR is the first rigorous scientific analysis on the topic. The study found that while AI tools significantly accelerate certain tasks like boilerplate generation and debugging, they also introduce new cognitive overhead and can sometimes lead to over-reliance that reduces deep problem-solving skills (uh-oh). Most intriguingly, the research shows that the productivity gains vary dramatically based on the developer's experience level and the complexity of the task at hand. Read the randomized control trial here →
🎧 What We’re Watching: Don’t like reading about how AI will lead to human extinction? Here’s a fun video instead! “AI 2027: A Realistic Scenario of AI Takeover” is a gripping, thought-provoking exploration of what might happen if artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrives sooner than we expect. If you’re curious about the real risks and wild possibilities of AI, this is a must-watch →
Remember to forward this email to any friends who you think have what it takes to work at a tier-1 VC Backed Startup.
👇 Alright on to the good stuff 👇
🔥 Hot Startups Hiring🔥
Startup #1
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC, SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, IT
💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $70M
🏦 Investors: 8VC, Angels, General Catalyst
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is an Applied AI Lab building agents to transform the IT Services sector.
📣 Talking Points:
$70M+ raised in stealth, backed by General Catalyst, 8VC & top angels
Transforming IT services with AI agents — first acquisition pushes revenue to $50M+
Small, hands-on founding team (4 people), working mostly in-person from NYC or SF
🧑💻 Roles: Full Stack Engineer; AI Engineer; FDE
💸 Salary: $150-250k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
Startup #2
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: AI, Consumer
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $6M
🏦 Investors: Sequoia
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup is building advanced AI and optimization software for home service businesses — think plumbing, HVAC, electrical — to solve the operational and dispatching challenges these companies face daily.
🏗️ Product: Their core product helps these businesses dispatch the right technician to the right job at the right time — using AI.
Most home service companies rely on outdated software and intuition.
This startup is automating complex decisions like technician-job matching using AI/ML/LLMs — a hard technical problem with huge financial impact.
Their software already generated $10M+ incremental revenue for a single enterprise customer in just 2 months.
Product Portfolio consists of:
AI Dispatch System (core)
AI Voice Agents & CV tools (e.g., image-based diagnostics)
Optimization Solvers & Real-time reshuffling
📣 Talking Points:
$10M+ value delivered in 60 days - This startup’s AI-powered dispatching directly increased revenue by $10M for one customer in 2 months—proving real-world ROI at scale.
Top-tier engineering team and 6-day grind culture - Engineers from Roblox, Meta, and ICPC World Finals work side-by-side in a 6-day/week in-office environment designed for speed and ownership.
🧑💻 Roles: Full Stack (Back End emphasis); AI / LLM Engineer
💸 Salary: $175-$275k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 6
Startup #3
🏙️ Hiring Location: SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, Advertising
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $7.3M
🏦 Investors: Canaan, J Ventures, NEO
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup’s mission is to enable clients of all sizes to easily and efficiently execute advertising strategies that optimize return on ad spend. In little more than a year, their data-driven, tech-enabled approach has become thoroughly disruptive, displacing traditional incumbents and winning return business in the highly lucrative half-trillion dollar per year digital ads market.
Traditional agencies have been given notice: This startup is building the future of advertising.
🏗️ Product: They compete directly with traditional ad agencies who are limited to human scale. This startup automates ad buying, strategy, and creative decisions using rich data models. This tooling enables their agency to start faster, act quicker, and iterate more efficiently than traditional agency models.
📣 Talking Points:
AI-native ad agency model - This startup is doing what traditional agencies can’t: automating campaign execution and creative iteration with state-of-the-art machine learning.
Backed by legends who built the internet - Investors include Scott Banister (invented search ads, early PayPal board) and Steve Huffman (Reddit co-founder & CEO)—a high-conviction bet on the next great performance engine.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Software Engineer; Principal Engineer
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 4
Startup #4
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: AI, Healthcare
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $11M
🏦 Investors: Pear VC, a16z
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: Mission is to multiply the world’s healthcare capacity by building an end-to-end medical practice.
Lead with humility. Be kind and share ownership of wins and losses.
Do excellent work.
Solve problems that will meaningfully affect the future of the world and aim to build a healthcare system that is truly patient centric.
🏗️ Product: Offers patients unlimited access to high-quality, personalized medical advice from expert physicians by building an end-to-end medical practice, underpinned by AI.
Patients can message a doctor with any medical question and receive a scientific, accurate, and empathetic response within minutes.
An AI-native “clinician cockpit,” which enables physicians to incorporate the patient’s medical record, specialty medical guidelines, and academic journal articles into every answer within seconds
📣 Talking Points:
$11M seed backed by a16z & Pear VC — early traction with top investors and national expansion underway.
AI-native Medical Network built by physicians & technologists — giving doctors superpowers to deliver fast, personalized care at scale.
Early-stage, high-impact team (12 total, 6 eng) — based in NYC, building at the intersection of healthcare and cutting-edge AI.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Software Engineer
💸 Salary: • $140-220k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 3
Startup #5
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: AI, Legal
💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $24M
🏦 Investors: Liquid2, Redpoint, Sequoia, Tony Xu (Doordash CEO)
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision:
Mission: Build the most trusted, tech-powered legal brand for everyday people — starting with transforming Personal Injury law through automation, AI, and operational excellence.
Vision: To become the de facto brand consumers turn to the 10–15 times in their life they need legal help — replacing today’s fragmented, overpriced, and outdated system with a modern, transparent, and consumer-first experience. Whether it’s immigration, personal injury, employment disputes, or family law.
🏗️ Product: This Startup is reinventing the Personal Injury legal process end-to-end using generative AI, intelligent agents, and automation. Instead of selling point tools to lawyers (like EvenUp), This Startup combines software + services to operate like a tech-enabled law firm, delivering:
Smart case intake and setup from emails, calls, attachments, OCR & LLM pipelines
Medical record and police report acquisition via voice and web agents
Demand letter generation, medical chronologies, insurance claim filing
Full workflow rails to automate matter lifecycle tasks and minimize human error
📣 Talking Points:
This Startup is using the playbook that built modern marketplaces — the same minds behind DoorDash are now reimagining law, an industry still stuck in the 1990s.
Everyone’s chasing SaaS revenue from law firms. This Startup is chasing consumer trust — positioning to become the Stripe / Amazon of legal help for real people.
Most competitors offer a single feature (e.g., demand letters). This Startup is building the entire infrastructure — a vertically integrated legal ops engine from intake to settlement.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Back End; Senior Full Stack; Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
💸 Salary: $150-225k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 4
Startup #6
🏙️ Hiring Location: SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, DevTooling
💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $20M
🏦 Investors: First Round, YC
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup is an AI-powered workflow automation platform that enables users to automate digital tasks through a no-code, drag-and-drop interface. The platform connects various integrations like Google Sheets, Slack, YouTube, websites, and emails to automate mundane digital workflows.
🏗️ Product: Platform for automating complex work with AI and a simple drag and drop interface.
Drag-and-Drop Builder: Visual workflow builder requiring no coding skills
Modular Design: Pre-built modules for common automation tasksNo-Code Interface
Scalability: Handles enterprise-level automation workflows
AI Integration: Native AI capabilities vs. traditional rule-based automation
📣 Talking Points:
Build really powerful workflow automations - use AI without needing to hire an engineering team or be an engineer yourself.
Customers are incredible - include Instacart, Webflow, Samsara, Rippling, Triptease, etc (to name a few)
Building a 10 person, billions dollar company. There are only a few spots left.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Full Stack; Senior Back End; Full Stack Engineer; Backend Engineer
💸 Salary: $150 - 300K
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
Startup #7
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: AI, DevTooling
💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $24.3M
🏦 Investors: Aaron Levie, Anton Troynikov, Buckley Ventures, Daniel Gross, Framework Ventures, Nat Friedman, Naval, Sound Ventures
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup is on a mission to eliminate cloud complexity. By combining deep infrastructure insight with powerful AI agents, the company automates configuration, optimization, and incident response—freeing engineers to focus on building, not debugging.
Vision: Infrastructure that configures, optimizes, and heals itself with minimal human intervention.
🏗️ Product: This startup’s current product automates cloud cost optimization by delivering personalized recommendations tailored to each customer’s infrastructure profile.
The upcoming product evolves this into an AI-driven infrastructure agent that:
Understands infrastructure deeply
Optimizes configurations
Automatically detects and resolves issues
Launches infrastructure in its best state from day one
Operates under outcome-based instructions (e.g., “keep this fast and reliable”)
📣 Talking Points:
From Monitoring to Autonomy - This startup isn’t building another DevOps tool—it’s building self-operating infrastructure that acts on your behalf, not just reports issues.
Proactive, Not Reactive - The AI agent prevents problems before they happen, optimizes configurations upfront, and handles outages without human input.
Deep Stack Automation - Competing with players like DataDog, This startup goes deeper—not just observing infra, but managing and evolving it in real time.
🧑💻 Roles: Product Engineer; Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning; Infrastructure Engineer; Senior Back End
💸 Salary: $200 - 300K
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
💰 Startup #8 💰
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: Crypto/Web3
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, Boot-strapped, profitable, founder-owned
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup is a crypto-native firm specializing in quantitative proprietary trading and DeFi infrastructure.
📣 Talking Points:
Trades hundreds of millions in volume per week, business is wholly owned by the founders (very profitable / bootstrapped) - working with top-tier chains and ecosystems
Small, agile team over-taking market share from massive incumbents in the space. Solely focused on-chain. Team comes from TradFi, digital assets, and high frequency trading.
Strong BD motions; established partnerships in place with leading web3 ecosystems (e.g. Solana, Mysten Labs, etc). Pacing for $XXM+ in profit by EoY (80% Profit Margins)
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Back End; Smart Contract Engineer; Security Engineer
💸 Salary: $250 - $300K+
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
The 2024 Microsoft Excel Championship just wrapped in Las Vegas.
It was a huge upset: financial due diligence expert Michael Jarman (Canada) topped 3x defending champion and actuary Andrew “The Annihilator” Ngai (Australia).
Jarman beat 12 opponents in various 30-minute Excel
— #Trung Phan (#@TrungTPhan)
3:28 PM • Dec 6, 2024
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