brought to you with
✦
This week in tech delivered peak whiplash: Cloudflare briefly broke the internet, Lambda pulled in $1.5 billion to fuel the GPU arms race, and YouTube’s creator economy kept booming even as venture capital slammed on the brakes. Stack Overflow is tossing its entire archive into the AI blender, WhatsApp exposed billions of phone numbers, and startups are rewriting broken systems out of sheer necessity. Tech never sleeps, but it sure does stumble.
Video pick: The AI music scam you’re funding (without noticing)
-🕶️
🎙 Catch the punchline hidden in this week’s headlines 🎙
✦
Seven bullets of updates
💥 A major Cloudflare outage caused widespread disruptions across the internet impacting services like ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, and X.
💵 AI data center provider Lambda raised $1.5 billion shortly after securing a multibillion-dollar deal to supply massive Nvidia-powered AI infrastructure.
🧑💻 Stack Overflow is transforming its 58M-question archive into training data for AI models, aiming to reshape how expert answers fuel new tech.
👩⚖️ A federal judge rules Meta isn’t a monopoly, handing the FTC a major setback in its high-profile antitrust case.
🎥 YouTube’s creator economy is booming, and Agentio just raised $40M to turbo-charge AI-powered brand–creator deals as sponsored video views surge.
💸 Venture capital is hitting the brakes — with longer fund timelines, sinking valuations, and shrinking support for new managers.
📊 Tomorrow! Join our Crash Course in Financial Modeling — Nov 20, live webinar.
✦
The startup that got sick of taxes—and decided to fix them itself
Sphere, founded by Nicholas Rudder after struggling with complex global tax compliance at his previous startup, has evolved from an edtech marketplace into a tax automation platform that helps scaling companies manage international tax registration, calculation, filing, and remittance. Launched in 2023 and built around an AI-driven tax assessment engine called TRAM—supported by human review—Sphere integrates with major billing systems like Stripe and connects directly to more than 100 global tax authorities to streamline end-to-end compliance.
Now serving clients like Replit, Lovable, and ElevenLabs, the company emerged from two years in stealth to announce a $21 million Series A led by a16z, with plans to expand its integrations, AI capabilities, and sales presence as it positions itself against legacy players and complementary partners in the growing tax compliance market.
✦
The AI Music Scam You’re Funding (Without Noticing)
AI-generated bands are racking up millions of streams and exploiting Spotify’s loopholes, creating one of the most profitable scams in music. This video breaks down how streaming economics, click farms, and generative AI collided — and why the future of music may be more artificial than ever.
✦
Why Smart Founders are Turning to Fractional Hiring
Situation: Your startup’s ready for the next level - but you need a new senior-level hire to help you get there.
Problem: Those hires are crazy expensive, and a huge commitment.
Solution: Hire part-time senior operators from top tech startups through Fractional Jobs.
We’ve helped:
1V1ME (Village Global) hire a Fractional Marketing Director for 10 hrs / week
Whalesync (YC S21) hire a Fractional Design Lead for 20 hrs / week
Hearth (8 VC) hire a Fractional CFO for 5 hrs / week
Get hands-on help from people who’ve built and scaled startups just like yours.
Fractional Jobs introduces you to ~5 perfect fits, and you can hire them directly. No markup. No middlemen. Get started here
✦
💸 Kevin Carter’s 1,000+ bets, dozens of unicorns—VC isn’t for every biz; learn how to tell before chasing term sheets.
🎓 8 leaders turned early missteps into must-learn skills —from gritty sales reps to CEOs who own mistakes.
SaaS Growth Calculator
A growth calculator that lets you forecast the impact of your ARPU (average revenue per user) and Churn Rate on the long-term potential of your subscription business.
✦
WhatsApp contact discovery vulnerability exposes billions of user phone numbers
Photo by Dimitri Karastelev on Unsplash
Researchers brute-forced WhatsApp’s contact-discovery system, cycling through tens of billions of numbers to scrape 3.5 billion phone numbers plus profile photos and “about” lines—cheap, fast, and entirely predictable. Meta called the data “public” and tightened rate limits only after disclosure, but until October anyone could have done it, fueling risks like spam, SIM swaps, doxxing, and surveillance. The core lesson: phone numbers are terrible secret identifiers—use handles or opaque IDs, private contact discovery, and strict rate-limiting to avoid turning convenience into a data leak.
✦
Startup Events and Deadlines
TOMORROW! Crash Course in Financial Modeling l Nov 20 l Webinar
Startmate l Deadline Jan 2026 l Accelerator