The one thing that’s making all the noise …. with a bit of fact checking.
💡Innovator Spotlight
Founders that are doing stuff differently.
🛠️ Tool of the Week
Something useful to up your startups velocity.
📌 Note to Self
Stuff I constantly remind myself about, don’t want make the same mistakes again.
📈 Trending Now
Last August we were talking Agentic AI and debating if we will see a 1 person unicorn startup…
For years, that sounded like a punchline, not a plan. But I’m starting to think it’s not just plausible—it’s inevitable. The story of Base44, sold to Wix for $80 million just six months after launch, is a serious wake-up call.
Base44 wasn’t some VC-backed rocketship with a 50-person dev team. It was lean, fast, and built around the idea of vibe coding—where anyone can describe an app in plain English and have it built instantly using AI. Over 250,000 users, nearly $200,000 in monthly profit, and barely any overhead. That’s not luck. That’s a signal.
Wix paid cash—$80 million—for a business that proved something important: you don’t need a massive team to build something massive. Yes, Base44 had a few employees at the end, but the engine was AI. Tech, ops, even customer support—it was all run by systems, not people.
And here’s the thing: this might be the start of a whole new wave. The “solo unicorn” idea—where one founder builds and exits a billion-dollar business using AI instead of headcount—is no longer a fantasy. It’s a blueprint.
I think we’re about to see a surge of one-person startups doing what used to take a village. AI’s getting better by the day, and Base44 just proved what’s possible when you let the machines take the wheel.
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💡Innovator Spotlight
🧠 You know the phrase “betting on the jockey, not the horse”? Well, Mira Murati just took that to a whole new level.
🚀 In 2025, she stepped away from her role as CTO of OpenAI and launched Thinking Machines Lab. No product. No revenue. Still in stealth. And yet—she raised $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation. As a seed round.
💰 I know, it sounds like a typo. But it’s real.
📈 Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with Conviction Partners and other top-tier firms piling in. Why? Because Murati doesn’t just have a track record—she helped bring ChatGPT and DALL·E to life. She even stepped in as interim CEO during OpenAI’s infamous 2023 meltdown. When someone like that decides to build something new, investors don’t wait for a pitch deck—they write cheques.
🧑🔬 The company is still in stealth, but she’s already assembled a dream team of AI royalty: John Schulman (co-creator of ChatGPT), Barret Zoph, Bob McGrew, Alec Radford… basically the Avengers of machine learning. About 30 of them, all in.
⚡ This isn’t a normal startup story—it’s a signal. In a world obsessed with traction and product-market fit, Murati raised billions on pure reputation, talent, and vision. And it tells you everything about where the AI gold rush is right now: if you’re the right person, building with the right people, the money will find you—long before the market does.
🛠️ Tools of the Week
💬 Whimsical AI– I use Whimsical for mapping out ideas and workflows, and their new AI integration is actually useful—it suggests diagrams, rewrites stickies, and helps structure your thinking. Great for product planning or untangling chaos.
🧩 Tavily– I’ve been testing this one out, and it’s hands-down one of the smartest AI research assistants I’ve used. Ask it a question and it brings back real-time, cited answers from trusted sources—not just made-up LLM guesswork. If you're using AI for actual decisions, not just chat, this is a must-have.
🧠 Gamma – AI-powered slide decks that don’t make your eyes bleed. It’s great for turning a rough outline or brain dump into something presentation-ready in minutes. Ideal if you’re pitching, presenting, or just can’t face another blank slide.
The one I am most excited about is the release of Figma AI. We all love Figma—but the latest update, Figma AI, isn’t just a redesign. It’s a proper leap into the future.
This 2025 release doesn’t just add a few clever tools—it shifts Figma from a design platform to a full-blown AI co-creator. Here’s what’s actually landed:
🧠 Prompt-to-UI Type what you want—“3-screen onboarding with dark mode and illustrations”—and it builds the flow for you. Like ChatGPT, but for interfaces.
📐 Smart Auto Layout Automatically handles spacing, alignment, and responsiveness. Brilliant when it gets it right, frustrating when it fiddles with your layout.
🧭 Design Copilot A handy little sidebar assistant that renames layers, tidies assets, and suggests plugins. Think of it as your ultra-organised desk mate.
🖼️ Code & Content Generation Creates placeholder text, images, and basic React/Vue snippets. Not quite dev-ready, but solid for prototypes and handoffs.
🧼 New UI Overhaul Cleaner and sleeker overall—but lots of tools and shortcuts have shifted, which means some of us are having to re-learn old habits.
🤝 Live AI Collaboration Work alongside teammates and AI, with suggestions popping up live in your file. Feels a bit like having a group brainstorm on autopilot.
💬 Comment Summaries AI now summarises threads and suggests next steps. Genuinely useful when feedback’s all over the place.
🔍 Is This the End for Loveable or Cursor?
Not quite—but the heat is on.
🎨 Loveable Figma’s AI can now whip up icons and illustrations, which overlaps with Loveable’s space. That said, Loveable still wins on style and polish.
💻 Cursor Figma now spits out basic code snippets, but Cursor’s still stronger for proper dev workflows and complex handoffs.
⚡ Speed vs. Control
Founders and lean teams will love the speed. Designers who obsess over the finer details might feel like they’re fighting the tool a bit.
But like it or not, Figma AI has changed the game. The future of design is AI-assisted—and it’s already baked into your canvas.
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