The American story is about people who, when faced with impossible odds, did the improbable.
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π This Week in the Newsletter π
π Happy Independence Day! We've got America's debt clock (FUN!), SpaceX's historic 500th Falcon 9 launch, and the secret formula behind eight decades of American innovation dominance.
π¨βπ» Website Of The Week: Meet the US Debt Clock, a live dashboard that displays the current state of the United Statesβ financesβmost notably, the national debt, which is updated in real time. Itβs a data-heavy, visually dense site that aims to make the scale and speed of Americaβs borrowing and spending immediately tangible. Checkout the Debt Clock Here β
π What Weβre Reading: "The Double Power Law: How American Innovation Really Works" reveals the secret behind eight decades of U.S. technological dominance. This fascinating analysis from War on the Rocks explains how America's deliberately decentralized model of federal research support has created an innovation ecosystem unlike anywhere else in the world. The piece argues that this model, refined over decades, remains America's greatest competitive advantage in the global innovation race. Learn How American Innovation Really Works β
π§ What Weβre Watching: SpaceX achieved a historic milestone this week with the 500th launch of the Falcon 9 rocket, deploying 27 Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral. This isn't just a numberβit represents the most successful rocket in history. As we celebrate Independence Day, it's worth remembering that American innovation doesn't just change industriesβit changes the world. (SpaceX YouTube, July 2, 2025)
Remember to forward this email to any friends who you think have what it takes to work at a tier-1 VC Backed Startup.
π Alright on to the good stuff π

π₯ Hot Startups Hiringπ₯

π Startup #1 π
ποΈ Hiring Location: SF
π οΈ Industry: AI, Advertising
πΈ Round/Funding: Seed, $7.3M
π¦ Investors: Canaan, J Ventures, NEO
ππΌ Mission/Vision: This startupβs 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.
ποΈ 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.
π£ Talking Points:
AI-native ad agency model - This startup is doing what traditional agencies canβt: 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)βa high-conviction bet on the next great performance engine.
π§βπ» Roles: Senior Software Engineer; Principal Engineer
π Days Required Onsite: 4
π₯ Startup #2 π₯
ποΈ Hiring Location: NYC
π οΈ Industry: AI, Healthcare
πΈ Round/Funding: Seed, $11M
π¦ Investors: Pear VC, a16z
ππΌ Mission/Vision: Mission is to multiply the worldβs healthcare capacity by building an end-to-end medical practice.
Lead with humility. Be kind and share ownership of wins and losses.Β
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.
ποΈ 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 βclinician cockpit,β which enables physicians to incorporate the patientβs medical record, specialty medical guidelines, and academic journal articles into every answer within seconds
π£ Talking Points:
$11M seed backed by a16z & Pear VC β early traction with top investors and national expansion underway.
AI-native Medical Network built by physicians & technologists β giving doctors superpowers to deliver fast, personalized care at scale.
Early-stage, high-impact team β based in NYC, building at the intersection of healthcare and cutting-edge AI.
π§βπ» Roles: Senior Software Engineer
πΈ Salary: $140k-220k
π Days Required Onsite: 3
π€ Startup #3 π€
ποΈ Hiring Location: SF, South Bay
π οΈ Industry: AI, SaaS
πΈ Round/Funding: Seed, $23M
π¦ Investors: Coatue, GTM Capital, Karthik Narsimhan, Tal Shaked, The Anthology Fund, Vinod Marur
ππΌ Mission/Vision: This Startup is on a mission to unlock real-time, self-service data insights for enterprises by building a cutting-edge AI platform that seamlessly handles structured and unstructured data. Their vision is to make trustable, agentic data access the new normalβreplacing bottlenecks with autonomy and speed across decision-making teams.
ποΈ Product: This Startup is building the agentic AI platform for enterprise dataβbringing real-time, explainable insights directly to the fingertips of non-technical users like ops leaders, product managers, and execs. The system spans internal structured data (think Snowflake/BigQuery) and unstructured knowledge (Confluence, Slack, Notion, etc.).
Engineers at this startup tackle:
LLM grounding + retrieval augmentation at scale
Self-serve, low-latency querying over massive datasets
Robust infra for multi-modal enterprise data access
π£ Talking Points:
Built by AI legends β From ex-Google Search to Rubrik, Tagtile (acq. FB), AWS, Glean, and DatabricksβThis startupβs team has built infrastructure powering trillions of queries.
Tech with purpose β Solving real-world data pain for CDOs and CIOs. The AI actually worksβand doesnβt hallucinate.
Your fingerprints will be everywhere β Youβll help define the product roadmap, ship core systems, and scale to Fortune 100 usageβwhile the company is still lean and early.
π§βπ» Roles: Full Stack Engineer; Front End; Back End; Machine Learning
πΈ Salary: $170-$250k
π Days Required Onsite: 5
βοΈ Startup #4 βοΈ
ποΈ Hiring Location: NYC
π οΈ Industry: AI, Healthcare
πΈ Round/Funding: Seed, $11M
π¦ Investors: A*, Box, Epic Ventures, Liquid2, Maverick, SV Angel
ππΌ Mission/Vision: Increase Americaβs health span and provide 100M+ American employees and their families with an affordable, accessible, high quality, and aligned advanced primary-care experience.
ποΈ Product: A B2B2C healthcare platform that connects large employers and health insurers with high-quality, cost-effective advanced primary care providers. It operates as a marketplace that helps employers choose, contract with, and offer access to top-tier clinics and care organizations like One Medical, Galileo, Marathon, and others.
Hereβs how it works, simplified:
Employers (like 7-Eleven) join the platform to provide better healthcare benefits for their employees.
Advanced primary care providers list their services on the marketplace.
This startup facilitates the contracting, onboarding, and employee engagement process β making it easier for employers to offer accessible, quality healthcare without the usual friction.
Itβs like a matchmaking + infrastructure layer between modern care providers and the employers who want to offer them as benefits.
π£ Talking Points:
$11M raised from top investors like A*, SV Angel, Liquid2, and Box β building the next-gen health benefits platform for large employers.
Early traction with major customers like 7-Eleven and large employer groups (HTA, Cincinnati Employers Group), with 2β10x industry engagement rates from employees.
B2B2C marketplace model that connects employers to high-quality advanced primary care groups (e.g. One Medical, Galileo), already scaling nationally.
π§βπ» Roles: Staff Software Engineer
πΈ Salary: $175k-$200k
π Days Required Onsite: 2
πͺ Startup #5 πͺ
ποΈ Hiring Location: SF
π οΈ Industry: AI, DevTooling
πΈ Round/Funding: Series A, $20M
π¦ Investors: First Round, YC
ππΌ 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.
ποΈ 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
π£ 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.
π§βπ» Roles: Senior Full Stack; Senior Back End; Full Stack Engineer; Backend Engineer
πΈ Salary: $150 - 300K
π Days Required Onsite: 5
βοΈ Startup #6 βοΈ
ποΈ Hiring Location: NYC
π οΈ Industry: AI, DevTooling
πΈ Round/Funding: Series A, $24.3M
π¦ Investors: Aaron Levie, Anton Troynikov, Buckley Ventures, Daniel Gross, Framework Ventures, Nat Friedman, Naval, Sound Ventures
ππΌ 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 responseβfreeing engineers to focus on building, not debugging.
Vision: Infrastructure that configures, optimizes, and heals itself with minimal human intervention.
ποΈ Product: This startupβs current product automates cloud cost optimization by delivering personalized recommendations tailored to each customerβs 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., βkeep this fast and reliableβ)
π£ Talking Points:
From Monitoring to Autonomy - This startup isnβt building another DevOps toolβitβs 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 deeperβnot just observing infra, but managing and evolving it in real time.
π§βπ» Roles: Product Engineer; Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning; Infrastructure Engineer; Senior Back End
πΈ Salary: $200 - 300K
π Days Required Onsite: 5
π Startup #7 π
ποΈ Hiring Location: SF
π οΈ Industry: AI, Automotive
πΈ Round/Funding: Seed, $17M
π¦ Investors: Breakpoint Capital, Explorer Fund, Flex Capital, Unpopular Ventures, YC, a16z
ππΌ Mission/Vision: This startupβs mission is to modernize how automotive dealerships handle communication by deploying intelligent AI agents that function as reliable, first-line team members.
The long-term vision is to build a fully autonomous AI teammate capable of managing all dealership communication and back-office tasks β from handling phone calls to executing service requests β allowing human staff to focus on high-value customer interactions like relationship building and closing sales.
ποΈ Product: This startup provides customizable AI agents for automotive dealerships that:
Answer 100% of inbound calls
Handle a wide range of service and sales requests autonomously
Are tailored to each dealershipβs brand, tone, and workflows
Use multi-model LLM orchestration, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Groq, and in-house models
Support natural conversation, with edge-case training and environmental awareness
Integrate with internal systems like DMS, CRM, service scheduler, and external sources like NHTSA and Black Book
This startupβs voice AI platform was built entirely in-house.
π£ Talking Points:
AI voice agents for dealerships, already handling 1M+ call minutes since launch.
Backed by a16z, YC, and CarDealershipGuy and have clear PMF β with some dealerships seeing millions in recovered revenue and >50% of tasks fully handled by AI.
10-person team in SF early-stage, huge ownership, deep technical surface.
π§βπ» Roles: Senior Product Engineer
πΈ Salary: $180k-$250k
π Days Required Onsite: 3
π° Startup #8 π°
ποΈ Hiring Location: NYC
π οΈ Industry: Crypto/Web3
πΈ Round/Funding: Seed, Boot-strapped, profitable, founder-owned
ππΌ Mission/Vision: This startup is a crypto-native firm specializing in quantitative proprietary trading and DeFi infrastructure.
π£ 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)
π§βπ» Roles: Senior Back End; Smart Contract Engineer; Security Engineer
πΈ Salary: $250 - $300K+
π Days Required Onsite: 5

nyc: are we dating the same guy?
sf: ARE WE HIRING THE SAME GUY???
β #Michelle Fang π (#@michelleefang)
10:23 PM β’ Jul 2, 2025
POV: youβre Soham Parekh about to check in for the day
β #VCs Congratulating Themselves πππ (#@VCBrags)
7:32 PM β’ Jul 2, 2025
LinkedIn is gonna melt when they hear about Soham Parekh next week
β #Turner Novak ππ§’ (#@TurnerNovak)
10:03 PM β’ Jul 2, 2025

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