Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as mind-bending as Anthropic adding $10B in revenue in under 3 months (what a run) 🤯
In today’s edition:
💡 The $200B crisis hiding inside almost every company
🛠 How to use Google Stitch Like a pro
🔋 Turning a college blog into a $50M media empire + more
🔍 Anthropic model, Hermeus raise, hottest secondary shares + more
🍻 A product to get us investing early
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x Ferndesk: This week we've partnered with Ferndesk to offer one Half Baked reader a new MacBook Neo to support them on their founder journey. To be considered, just:
Check out Ferndesk here
Register for our Masterclass this Wednesday (it’ll be epic)
Good luck!
🧑💼 AI Copilot for Managers
A Few Good Managers
Source: Half Baked
The Problem: There are 83 million managers in the United States alone. Most of them are winging it. The typical first-time manager gets promoted because they were great at their individual job - which has absolutely nothing to do with running a team. And yet companies hand them direct reports, a calendar full of 1:1s, and a performance review template and say "good luck". The result? Disengaged teams, missed reviews, vague feedback, and a lot of very stressed people pretending they know what they're doing. The global cost of poor management is estimated at over $8.8 trillion in lost productivity every year. That's not a people problem. That's a tooling problem. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI-powered copilot for people managers to help them to become great managers
🛠️ Product:
Connect your calendar and the AI automatically joins every 1:1, captures the conversation, logs action items, and sends you a pre-meeting brief before each session - surfacing what was discussed last time, open items, and suggested talking points based on how each direct report is trending.
After each meeting, the AI analyses patterns across your entire team - flagging things like "you've spoken 80% of the time in your last 4 meetings with Sarah" or "you haven't given James positive feedback in 6 weeks."
At review season, the copilot auto-drafts a full performance review for each team member from the year's worth of 1:1 transcripts, sentiment data, and logged feedback - formatted for whatever HR system the company uses.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $25-50/month per manager self-serve; $10-30k/year enterprise deals sold through HR teams.
⭐ End Goal: Get acquired by Workday, BambooHR, Microsoft (Teams), or a talent management platform like Lattice or Culture Amp looking to own the manager layer. Target exit 8-12x ARR.
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🤖 Most "Solo Founders" Are Still Doing the Work of 5 People
Running a business alone doesn't have to mean running yourself into the ground. The founders clearing $1M+ solo aren't working harder - they've just built smarter AI systems than everyone else.
This Wednesday, Wilson Wilson (founder of Ferndesk) is breaking it all down live:
How he built and scaled a $1M+ business with no full-time team
The exact AI automations he uses to run his operations daily
A live demo of Ferndesk - the tool at the center of it all
Free to attend. 45 minutes. Zero fluff.
🎨 How to Use Google Stitch Like a Pro
The Context: Google Stitch just became one of the most powerful free tools available to founders - it turns plain English into high-fidelity UI designs in minutes. The problem? Most people type one vague sentence and wonder why the output looks generic. Here's what to do instead.
Step-by-step:
Go to stitch.withgoogle.com and sign in with your Google account. You're on the canvas in under a minute.
Before you prompt, define two things: who is using this, and how do you want them to feel? "A busy founder who needs to feel in control" produces a completely different design to "a teenager who wants to feel like a pro trader."
Hit the '+' button and use the prompt enhancer. It translates vague words like "modern" or "sporty" into specific design language Stitch actually understands - think "architectural limestone" or "high-end stationery." That specificity is the difference between generic and intentional.
Tell Stitch your colour hierarchy explicitly: Neutral for the canvas, Primary for key UI elements, Tertiary for your loudest accents - used sparingly. Say it in the prompt and the output looks structured, not chaotic.
💸 26% of VC-Backed Startups Have Less Than 6 Months of Runway
The fundraising market recovered in 2025. But the recovery is not evenly distributed - and if you're planning a raise in 2026, going in without the data is a serious mistake.
Pilot's H2 Year-End VC Market Report covers what founders actually need to know:
AI represented ~65% of total VC deal value and ~40% of deal count
Early-stage activity rebounded in H2, nearing 2021 highs
What financial signals separate fundable companies from the rest
Capital is still selective. Fundraising timelines are stretching. Know what you're walking into.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: This guy turned a finance blog in his college dorm room into a $50M/year media empire. Here's the full story.
📈 Trends with Benefits: A particular life philosophy is going viral in tech circles, mainly after Marc Andreessen talked about it last week. Honestly? Not the worst advice (although the name might need some work…)
💬 Prompt Drop: You can use this prompt to predict your competitor’s next move.
🆓 Founder Resource: If you want to build your personal brand on LinkedIn, here’s how to beat the new algorithm.
💵 Founder Deal: Get 12 months of ElevenLabs for free with their startup grant program. Perfect for founders building voice AI products.
🔍 Founder Finds
🤝 Anthropic just teased the launch of Mythos, their most powerful model ever. Anthropic cooked with this one. Here’s everything you need to know.
🚀 Hermeus just raised $350M to build autonomous hypersonic fighter jets. That’s literally one of the coolest sentences I’ve ever read.
📊 Setter Capital just released a list of the 30 most in-demand startup secondary shares in Q1 '26. A few surprise inclusions in there…
🍺 Sundar Pichai just went on John Collison’s podcast Cheeky Pint. Google has clearly been fully AI-pilled.
❤️ Lovable just launched the Founder Series, a new set of global events, by founders, for founders. Very cool initiative!
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Smart Piggy Bank
Are your kids losing out to inflation? Wish their piggy banks could do more than just sit there?
Introducing FirstFolio™, the world’s first smart piggy bank for kids. Instead of just keeping their coins in cash, your kids can invest in stocks, Bitcoin, Argentinian government bonds, synthetic CDOs, triple-leveraged inverse ETFs…whatever takes their fancy. Because you can never start investing too young.
FirstFolio™ - Too small to fail.
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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