🕶️ Two brothers built $1.1B, no VCs

Good morning, founders 🕶️

Every startup keeps two balance sheets. There's the one your accountant keeps, and there's the real one: whatever someone will pay for, or walk off with. EasyA found sponsors willing to prepay for its users, so it never needed a VC. OpenAI says an engineer left for Apple carrying 100+ confidential files on his last day. And Gallup says 8 in 10 Americans think businesses like yours raise prices just to pad profits. Value gets decided at the edges: at checkout, at renewal and on someone's last day. Which edge are you guarding?

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

If you have paid time left on an individual Granola plan, we'll match it with a Wispr Flow subscription that includes Notetaker and dictation, and add bonus time, up to 12 months total. Sign in or create a Wispr account and submit proof of your plan to check eligibility.

Try Notetaker Free

Most startups raise money to find customers. EasyA found customers who'd pay to meet its users, and skipped the raise.

The receipt: brothers Phil and Dom Kwok say they've kept 100% of the company and run it with 30 employees. They also say an independent valuation puts it at $1.1 billion. Its 1.3 million users pay nothing. A direct listing is planned for the first half of 2027, and a draft registration is with the SEC.

Platforms that need developers. Google, Ripple and others pay EasyA to feature their coding challenges in its app and at its hackathons. A partner like Ripple says how many developers and startups it wants building on its tech, and EasyA goes and finds them. The founders say contracts run from mid six to mid seven figures, last multiple years and are billed semi-annually or annually, upfront.

Think of it as a developer-relations department for rent, where the tenant pays before moving in. Cash lands before costs do. That's the money a seed round would buy, minus the board seat.

It wasn't plan A. A £10-a-month subscription (about $15) flopped, and selling to schools pushed revenue close to zero. The fix came in 2022: one San Francisco hackathon, roughly 70 developers, and the realization that the sponsors were the customer. Even the exit skips the raise. A direct listing lets existing shareholders sell without the company issuing new stock.

Before you raise, list the companies that profit when your users succeed. A dev tool's users matter to cloud providers. A freelancer app's users matter to banks and accounting software. Then sell those companies a prepaid sponsorship: a committed number of outcomes, multi-year, billed upfront.

Watch for the public registration ahead of the 2027 listing. That's when "the founders say" turns into audited numbers anyone can read.

Discover why patents are often useless for software startups and the real truth behind patenting tech innovations. Learn from our experience at Slidebean and see real-world examples of patentable vs. non-patentable inventions.

The Hollywood version writes itself: a scrappy AI lab raids the trillion-dollar hardware giant, and the giant sues. The filings are messier, and more useful.

Apple sued OpenAI in July, alleging its hardware chief Tang Tan and former iPhone engineer Chang Liu coordinated to pull Apple's confidential product information out through hires. On Wednesday, Judge Edward Davila said he's "highly likely" to grant Apple an injunction barring OpenAI from using it, Bloomberg Law reported. Likely. Not decided.

Then OpenAI flipped the script. Its new filing alleges that an engineer who joined from Apple, stayed six months and went back sent 100+ highly confidential files about an unreleased OpenAI device to his personal accounts on June 2, his last day. It says he then presented OpenAI's plans to Apple's senior leadership. Apple says it found no evidence and calls the filing a distraction.

Apple says Liu exploited an authentication flaw to reach its network storage and download files. OpenAI's filings say Apple encouraged staff to use personal iCloud for work, and that Apple's own authentication error left Liu with access. Apple's lawyer, in court: "They don't have 400 bad apples, your honor, they have a few bad apples."

Here's the part that matters for you: whoever's right, both stories run through the same door. A departing employee, a personal account, and access that outlived the job.

Because California voids them. Apple can't stop an engineer from leaving. It can only try to prove theft afterward. If the two best-lawyered companies on earth are stuck there, "we trust our team" is not a security policy.

So here's your move: audit offboarding this week. Kill auto-forwarding to personal email, revoke access the day someone leaves, and ban work files in personal cloud storage. Ten minutes of IT now beats a forensic image later.

Watch for Davila's ruling and any OpenAI counterclaim. OpenAI's reported first device, a $300-plus doughnut-shaped speaker due in 2027, now ships with a lawsuit attached.

Scale your growth: Join names like HubSpot, Ahrefs, and Deel. Put your product in front of 85,000+ startup founders. Let's talk.