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Hey — It’s Charlie.

Welcome to the latest edition of Great Startups! Here’s what’s in store:

• The Collaboration Lie: What’s Actually Slowing Your Startup Down

• Guide: What’s working in GTM right now

• Solution: Do you have a demand problem?

• Question: Why pitches fail (and a template that will fix yours).

• Targeting Made Simple: A step-by-step guide to finding your perfect customer.

• Hidden Startup Debt: The silent killer that’s slowing growth.

Get ready to dive into these power-packed insights for founders and growth enthusiasts!

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Resources

• What’s working in GTM right now. (LINK)

• Non-obvious pricing advice for startups. (LINK)

• Do you have a demand problem? (LINK)

• Why pitches fail (and a template that will fix yours). (LINK)

• Sam Blond on how to generate more demand. (LINK)

ICYMI

• SoftBank just sold its entire stake in Nvidia. (LINK)

• Netflix is getting into short videos with a new vertical feed for mobile. (LINK)

• Cloudflare launches a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping. (LINK)

• The WordPress vs. WP Engine drama, explained. (LINK)

• 1X will test humanoid robots in ‘a few hundred’ homes in 2025. (LINK)

Quick Links

• Ray Dalio built a $14B empire by following core success principles that took him from humble beginnings to founding the world’s largest hedge fund.

• Iman Gadzhi and Pierre de Preux launched a SaaS and hit 7-figure ARR in 9 months by moving fast, using Iman’s audience, and solving a real problem.

• Lenny Rachitsky and Jen Abel on how to approach founder-led sales.

• Carta shares 50 slides packed with insights for founders from 45,000 startups.

• How One AI App Founder Makes $20K+ Monthly—and How You Can Too!

Recently Funded / Raised

• Moniepoint raised $323M to expand its business banking, credit, and payments platform for enterprises across Africa and beyond.

• Knownwell raised $50.6M to enhance its AI-powered commercial intelligence platform that helps businesses identify risks and growth opportunities.

• Alto Neuroscience raised $301M to develop AI-driven precision medicines targeting mental health conditions.

• CoMind raised $87M to advance noninvasive neural interfaces that connect the human brain with artificial intelligence.

• Anrok raised $109.3M to streamline sales tax compliance for SaaS businesses through automation.

• Findem raised $88.3M to grow its AI-powered Talent Data Cloud that automates and unifies enterprise hiring workflows.

• Finster AI raised $16.8M to build an AI-driven research platform for asset managers and investment banks.

• Africa Finance Corporation secured $6.78B in debt financing to fund large-scale infrastructure and industrial investments across Africa.

• Niron Magnetics received a $171.6M grant to develop high-performance, rare-earth-free permanent magnets using Iron Nitride technology.

• Cala Health raised $248.3M to advance its wearable bioelectronic therapies for neurological and chronic diseases.

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$6B Team Just Unleashed Cinderella on a $2T Market

Cinderella isn’t looking for her glass slipper— she’s busy smashing the $2T media market to pieces.

Elf Labs spent a decade at the US Patent & Trademark office in a historic effort to lock up 100+ historic trademarks to icons like Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel and more — characters that have generated billions for giant studios. Now they’re fusing their IP with patented AI/AR to build a new entertainment category the big players can’t copy.

And the numbers prove it’s working.

In just 12 months they raised $8M, closed a nationwide T-Mobile–supported telecom deal, launched patented interactive content, and landed a 200M-TV distribution partnership.

This isn’t a startup. It’s a takeover. And investors are sprinting to get in.

Lock in your ownership now

Invest in Elf Labs

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Want to Move Faster? Collaborate Less. Seriously.

Collaboration sounds great on paper, but in most startups it becomes a speed bump. There’s a big difference between getting useful feedback and dragging ten people into something that one person should just ship. When everyone wants to “hear X’s take” or “loop in Y,” the actual driver loses momentum. And in a fast-moving team, that slowdown quietly kills progress.

The fix is to keep things simple: make ownership obvious, tag only the people you genuinely need, and ship first instead of waiting for approval-style feedback. A quick pull request beats a long Slack thread every time. Remind the driver that the final call is theirs, not the crowd’s. The less unnecessary collaboration you allow in, the faster your team moves and the more you actually get done. (LINK)

Ok that’s it for this week, We keep refining our newsletter content, just hit reply to let us know what you think about this issue.