GOOD PEOPLE QUOTE

🤝 Good Morning Good People, a weekly newsletter for elite engineering and product talent looking to change the world, one Ghibli edit at a time.

📅 This week in the newsletter:

 👷 GPT-4o Image Generation: Game-Changer for Startup Engineers

 🔥 Fresh batch of Hot Startups Hiring

🖼️ Photoshop Panic Attack: OpenAI just dropped GPT-4o's image generation capabilities, and Adobe executives are collectively reaching for their blood pressure medication.
Because nothing says "lean startup" quite like firing your design team and replacing them with increasingly specific prompts.

👇 Alright on to the good stuff 👇

GPT-4o Image Generation: Game-Changer for Startup Engineers

Small, elite engineering teams just became the most dangerous people in tech.

For years, we've been telling ourselves that software is eating the world. But the dirty secret? Creating software that doesn't look terrible required specialized design talent. A three-person engineering team could build incredible functionality but would still produce interfaces that screamed "built by engineers." The visual layer remained the great equalizer between startups and incumbents.

That advantage just evaporated overnight.

GPT-4o's image generation democratizes the final frontier of software creation. Small engineering teams can now:

• Launch with interfaces indistinguishable from those produced by dedicated design teams

• Iterate visual concepts in minutes rather than days

• Present to investors with polished assets typically requiring weeks of preparation

• Build and test multiple visual directions simultaneously

The implications are profound. The optimal startup team structure is no longer 2 engineers + 1 designer + 1 business person. It's evolving toward 3 engineers with complementary skills, one of whom has strong product instincts and prompt engineering capabilities.

The small expert team isn't just viable now—it's optimal. They move faster, communicate with less overhead, and can now produce output visually indistinguishable from larger competitors.

What a time to be alive! 🚀

🔥 Hot Startups Hiring

📍SAN FRANCISCO🌉

AI / Dev Tooling - Series A (First Round, YC)

• Mission/Vision: No-code platform that lets anyone have the impact of an engineer through AI automation.

• TLDR:

  • Build really powerful workflow automations that use AI without needing to hire an engineering team or be an engineer yourself.

  • Customers include Instacart, Webflow, Samsara, Rippling, Triptease, etc (to name a few)

  • Building a 10 person, billions dollar company. There are 6 spots left.

• Open Roles ($150-300k + Equity):

  • Senior Full Stack

  • Senior Backend

  • Full Stack Engineer

  • Backend Engineer

Advanced Conversational AI - Series B (Bain Capital, a16z)

• Mission/Vision: Building the most advanced conversational AI agents for the enterprise.

• TLDR

  • Clients include Eventbrite, ClassPass, Substack, Rippling, and BILT

  • Founders w/previous exits

  • Founded by an elite team of engineers (early-Ramp, Scale AI, Retool)

• Open Roles ($250k+)

  • Staff Software Engineer

  • AI/ML Engineer

Leader in AI for Plaintiff Law - Series A (Lightspeed, Menlo, a16z)

• Mission/Vision: Leader in AI for Plaintiff Law, helping them take on more cases and increase revenue

• TLDR:

  • End-to-end, vertical AI platform for plaintiff litigation firms, built on top of a case intelligence engine - helping these firms transform their business operations

  • High-velocity commercial momentum: 8x’d ARR → multiple millions in 6 months

  • Handles the heavy lifting of a case - from intake through resolution. Built on top of a case intelligence engine, they ingests all case information from legal business and communication systems and uses it to perform a wide variety of legal work including document analysis and legal document drafting.

• Open Roles ($200-300k+):

  • Senior Full Stack Engineer

  • Senior Backend Engineer

  • Staff Software Engineer

  • AI/ML Engineer

📍 NEW YORK CITY🗽

Generative AI for Financial Institutions - Series A (Khosla Ventures)

• Mission/Vision: Generative AI for Financial Institutions. Their financial AI platform aggregates the most important financial and customer data into a simple AI chat platform (like ChatGPT), then partners with clients to build their key workflows (e.g. building slide decks, writing investment memos, analyzing financial data).

• TLDR:

  • Exceptional GTM Traction: Top Investment Banks, Hedge Funds and PE funds are clients

  • Rapid Growth Rate: 0 —> $1M ARR in < 10 months

  • 25 person team in NYC; small, tight-knit group

• Open Roles ($220-250k):

  • Senior Backend Engineer

  • Senior Full Stack Engineer

  • Engineering Manager

  • AI/ML Engineer

Leading Blockchain WaaS - Series A (Further, Coinbase)

• Mission/Vision: Wallets-as-a-Service (WaaS) platform that helps fintechs, institutions, and enterprises worldwide simplify digital asset management and securely bring users into crypto.

• TLDR:

  • API-first approach has made them the most popular developer platform to configure, automate and orchestrate digital asset applications and operations at scale. 130 fintech clients, $1 billion in monthly transactions, 10+ million API calls per month

  • Trusted by clients like ABN AMRO, Fidelity, Zodia Custody, Bridge, Stripe, and more than 100 financial applications, they’ve created over 10 million wallets and secures 1 billion in transactions per month — zero hacks or lost keys

  • Small, lean, agile engineering team consisting of top blockchain, cryptography, and security leaders.

• Open Roles ($280-350K + Equity):

  • Principal Engineer

  • Staff Software Engineer

AI / Crypto/Web3 - Series A (Thrive Capital, Bain)

• Mission/Vision: The most powerful decentralized financial ecosystem on Sui. Vision is to define how users interact with AI in web3, starting with a set of agentic workflows for DeFi actions in the Sui ecosystem.

• TLDR:

  • #1 Sui Defi project on Sui, with a spot AMM & orderbook-based perps. Combined, the two have $50B traded, 157k unique depositors, and $130M in TVL

  • $51B in cumulative volume & about $300M/day

  • Stellar, reputable founding team with an incredible track record - opportunity to build their on-chain order-book (first on Sui)

• Open Roles ($220-250K + Equity/Token):

  • Smart Contract Engineer

  • AI/ML Engineer

💻 REMOTE-FIRST 🌎

Crypto/Web3 - Seed (Lemnis Capital)

• Mission/Vision: Fastest & most developer friendly modular SVM rollup for Solana builders. 

• TLDR:

  • Innovating at the intersection of monolithic and modular infrastructure to integrate the Solana Virtual Machine with rollup technology

  • Team has previous experience at leading crypto protocols and companies like Lyft, SpaceX and Microsoft

  • Globally remote team building a SVM optimistic rollup that offers Solana developers a new design space to create killer dapps.

• Open Roles ($200-230k+ Equity)

  • Senior Backend Engineer

Leading NFT Marketplace - Series B (Sequoia, Greylock)

• Mission/Vision: Be the one-stop shop destination for digital assets to supercharge web3 commerce

• TLDR:

  • Leading Multi-Chain NFT Platform - Pushing Boundaries on Solana, Ethereum, Polygon and Bitcoin

  • 22M+ Unique Monthly Users (largest on Solana) & 8K+ NFT collections, 100K+ daily wallet connections, $1.9 B secondary trading volume

  • Largest NFT trading platform in crypto

• Open Roles ($170-250k):

  • Staff Software Engineer

  • Senior Backend

  • Mobile Engineer

  Learn More

AI Creator Tools - Series A (Tiger Global, Floodgate)

• Mission/Vision: Help teams of one (small businesses, agencies, entrepreneurs, creators) create on brand content (social media, blogs, emails, etc) in one click. Taking on Canva.

• TLDR:

  • Building a real-time document editor with collaborative editing and a Canva-like visual studio with thousands of templates and dynamic elements

  • INSANE commercial momentum: $0-10M ARR in < 8 months; 100K+ paying customers, 30% MoM growth

  • Small team of 20; full distributed work-force

• Open Roles ($140-170k):

  • Senior Full Stack

  • Senior Designer

GHIBLI BREAK 🌊 

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