Happy Friday.
Yesterday, Spotify announced four products in a single day:
🎟️ Reserved holds concert tickets based on your listening history: resellers cut out entirely
🎙️ Studio creates personal podcasts from a prompt, going after Google's NotebookLM
🔊 An ElevenLabs partnership lets anyone turn text into audiobooks
💰 And Universal Music signed on for fan-made AI covers and remixes, with artists getting paid
It was a busy Thursday.
Enjoy today's news.
Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses: token-based billing was too expensive, even for Microsoft… Meanwhile, Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months… And GitHub is switching from flat-rate to usage-based billing. The subsidy era is over.
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ClickUp, the project management company, cut 22% of staff and introduced $1M salary bands. CEO's take: AI makes the best engineers 100x, everyone else becomes a bottleneck.
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Melian ships Shazam for clothes: point it at any outfit on IG or TikTok, get the products.
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SpaceX is building a 10-gigawatt solar cell factory near Austin to power Starlink and AI data centers in orbit: roughly 10x a large nuclear plant.
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Turbopuffer hit $100M in annual revenue on less than $1M in total funding: profitable, 19 months after crossing its first $1M. The database startup powers search for Cursor, Anthropic, Notion, and Linear.
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Runway launched Aleph 2.0: edit one frame with a text prompt and changes propagate across the full clip.
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Oura has filed to go public: the smart ring maker confidentially filed its S-1 and says it's on pace to pass 5M paid subscribers this quarter.
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Jam opens to everyone, no waitlist. The simplest marketing interface for the agentic era. 2000+ companies on it already.
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Tesla's Full Self-Driving lands in China after years of delays. Comes a week after Musk joined Trump's state visit there.
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Waymo expanded to new cities two weeks ago. Now it's pausing in four because its robotaxis keep driving into flooded streets. Points for commitment.
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Figure AI's robots started with an 8-hour shift demo. They kept going: 200 hours, 249,560 packages sorted, fully autonomous.
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Hark raised $700M to build an always-on AI assistant and the device it lives on: $6B valuation, backed by NVIDIA, ARK, and Salesforce Ventures.
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John Coogan on The Social Radars with YC's Jessica Livingston and Carolynn Levy: the Soylent pivot from a $17K hacker house, turning the FDA into Lucy's moat, and building TBPN from side project to daily three-hour live show, sold to OpenAI.
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As promised, tech and startups in a minute.
See you Monday.
P.S. You know that feeling your phone is listening to you? Three companies sold that to advertisers as an actual product: pay us and we'll tap phone microphones to target your ads. Nearly $1M in FTC penalties later, turns out the tech didn't exist. It was an email list.