Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as ambitious as Zuck building a personal AI agent to run Meta 🤖
In today’s edition:
💡 An idea inspired by some newly minted billionaires
🛠 Turning Gemini into your personal assistant
🔋 From digging holes to a €1B acquisition + more
🔍 OpenAI, SpaceX, YC + more
🍻 A bedtime snack that actually works
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x BILL.com: This week we've partnered with BILL to offer one Half Baked reader a new Macbook Neo. To be considered, just:
Check out BILL here (this really helps us out)
Reply to this email with what you’ll build on your brand new Neo!
Good luck!
P.S: Shoutout to last week’s winner: Lauren Kozak
🤖 AI Market Makers for Prediction Markets
Spread the word
Source: Tarek Mansour & Luana Lopes Lara at Kalshi
The Problem: Here in Ireland we all enjoy a cheeky pint - it's basically in our DNA. So it won't surprise you to hear that one of my favorite podcasts is John Collison's Cheeky Pint. And recently John sat down with the founders of Kalshi - the prediction market trading $10 billion a month, and buried in that episode was a fascinating stat. Over 95% of their market making comes not from Jane Street or Goldman, but from 2,000+ garage operators with no real tooling. Then, when John asked Tarek directly if people were already using AI agents to trade, he confirmed it - quietly, informally, through the API. But it turns out nobody has built a product around it yet. Someone should. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI-powered market-making agent that provides automated, 24/7 liquidity across the long tail of prediction markets
🛠️ Product:
Connect your agent to Kalshi's API, define a category of markets you want to quote (politics, entertainment, sports, macroeconomics), and the AI continuously monitors information sources, synthesizes signals, and posts competitive bid/ask quotes across hundreds of markets simultaneously.
The system dynamically adjusts spreads based on information velocity - wider when a market is moving fast, tighter when things are calm - and pulls quotes entirely when it detects potential adverse selection from an insider-informed trader.
A backtesting dashboard lets you simulate your agent's P&L against historical Kalshi data before going live, so you can tune the model's risk tolerance and position sizing before real money is on the line.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: The revenue is the trading P&L itself - your agent quotes a spread, earns the difference when both sides fill. Layer on a SaaS tier ($500-2,000/month) for teams who want the backtesting tools, risk dashboards, and multi-market management without running the raw infrastructure themselves.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by Kalshi, Polymarket, or a quant trading firm wanting a fast-follow into the prediction market space. 10-20x revenue multiple on a business generating meaningful trading P&L.
Rate this idea
💰 Take a BILL Demo, Get a $100 Gift Card
Juggling spreadsheets, inboxes, and disconnected systems isn't a finance strategy. But for a lot of growing startups, that's still the daily reality.
BILL puts 20 years of expertise in one streamlined hub:
One platform for bills, company spending, payments, and approvals
Automated workflows that cut down manual work
Real-time visibility into every dollar
Plus, when you take a BILL demo, you get a $100 Apple gift card as a thank you for your time.
🤖 Turning Gemini into Your Personal Assistant with Workspace Studio
The Context: Google just quietly shipped something founders should pay attention to. Workspace Studio is a free, built-in automation tool inside Google Workspace that lets you describe a workflow in plain English and Gemini builds it for you - no Zapier, no code, no extra subscriptions. Think of it as finally being able to tell your Google apps what to do, and having them actually listen. Here's how to set up your first flow: an AI that automatically sends meeting summaries and action items to everyone on the call the moment it ends.
Step-by-step:
Head to studio.workspace.google.com, click "New Flow," and type in plain English: "After a meeting ends, summarise what was discussed, extract the action items, and send them to attendees by email" - Gemini will build the entire flow for you automatically.
Review the steps it generates - you'll see a trigger (meeting ends in Calendar), Gemini summarising the transcript, action items being pulled out, and a Gmail draft being sent - adjust the email tone or add/remove recipients as needed.
Hit the toggle to activate your flow, and from your next call onwards every attendee gets a clean summary and action items in their inbox within minutes - without you lifting a finger.
❌ AI Just Made Your Document Workflow Obsolete
Most founders are still stitching together 3 or 4 tools to handle their documents. pdfFiller replaces all of them.
Here's what it can do:
Generate professional docs from a simple AI prompt
Summarize any PDF instantly or chat with it to extract key info
Collect bulk eSignatures via a shareable link, no back-and-forth needed
56 million users have already made the switch. Time to catch up.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This guy went from digging holes to a €1B acquisition. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: The debate over paid vs organic marketing is really heating up online right now after this tweet. Here’s a more nuanced take I back.
💬 Prompt Drop: Check out these 5 Claude prompts that turn your LinkedIn into a thought leadership machine
🆓 Founder Resource: This guy’s AI agent got him 60 million views, #1 in the AppStore and 1 million downloads in 3 days. Here’s how.
💵 Founder Deal: Granola captures action summaries for every meeting. They're giving Half Baked readers 100% off their first month!
🔍 Founder Finds
🔌 OpenAI is in early talks to buy a big chunk of Helion Energy's future fusion electricity to meet its surging AI data center needs.
🚀 SpaceX just announced TERAFAB, the “next step towards becoming a galactic civilization”. Here’s what that really means
🕵️ Chris Lu analyzed all YC W26 companies: Here's what it tells us about the future.
🎧 Adam Neumann recently went on Rick Rubin’s podcast. Love him or hate him, he’s an n of 1 person. Worth a listen.
💡 Ania Wysocka turned her own panic attacks into a $1M app. When life gives you lemons…
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Sleep Cream
Can't sleep? Tried meditation, melatonin, counting sheep, and doom-scrolling until 3am?
Introducing Snooz™, the world's first ice cream engineered to knock you out. They swapped sugar, emulsifiers, and E-numbers for chamomile, theanine, magnesium, and lemon balm. It’s basically a sedative in a tub.
Snooz™ - out cold
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
Before you go just a few public service announcements:
Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap.
See you soon,