Hey friends,
It’s been a wild week in AI. A ton of things were released—but not everything deserves your attention.
First, something huge: Y Combinator just announced what they’re funding in 2025, and my fellow Canadian Greg Eisenberg broke it down on Twitter (even got Elon’s attention). The key takeaway? YC isn’t looking for better AI—they’re looking for better applications of existing AI to replace entire $100k/year job functions.
Speaking of which, let me break down the biggest AI drops this week that actually matter for your business:
Some Big Moves This Week
OpenAI’s Latest Drop – They just released two new models (o3-mini and o3-mini-high). The free version is already impressive for coding and technical tasks, while the paid version takes it even further. Things are about to move even faster as OpenAI, Claude, DeepSeek, and Qwen duke it out.
Qwen – Alibaba’s new AI model that’s outperforming ChatGPT and DeepSeek in many areas. This isn’t just another AI model. Qwen is crushing it in reasoning tasks, handles multiple languages seamlessly, and costs way less than competitors.
Ask for Me (Google) – While I haven’t tested this yet, Google’s testing this AI that makes calls on your behalf for booking appointments. Worth watching, but too early for implementation.
Four AI Tools Actually Changing How Business Works
1. Lindy
Lindy allows you to build AI agents to automate your workflow. It thinks and acts like a high-end executive assistant, managing your calendar, pulling intel, and handling communications with a human-like voice. It’s 100% worth digging into.How you can use it: Let it prep you for meetings by automatically gathering bios, LinkedIn profiles, and relevant email threads. It can even make calls and book reservations for you.
Fyxer is an AI email manager that learns your writing style and communication patterns over time.
How it can help: It sorts through your inbox chaos, drafts responses in your voice, and ensures you never miss important emails while ignoring the noise.
Howie is your automated meeting scheduler that ends the endless back-and-forth of calendar coordination.
How to use it: Simply CC Howie in an email saying “find a time for me and [person] next week,” and it handles everything else – checking calendars, finding optimal times, and sending invites.
4. Fathom (love this one!)
Fathom is your AI meeting assistant that joins your calls, takes notes, and creates comprehensive summaries.
How it can help: You can finally focus entirely on your conversations while Fathom captures every detail, action item, and follow-up in perfectly organized summaries.
What YC Is Looking For in 2025
The opportunities they’re most excited about:
– AI App Store & Infrastructure (think iOS App Store but for AI agents)
– Vertical AI Agents that replace specific job functions (tax accounting, medical billing)
– Developer Tools for managing teams of AI agents
– AI-first document handling and B2A (Business-to-Agent) infrastructure
The math behind it? 4M people work in compliance/audit, companies spend $8-50k/year on legal templates, and entire job categories are becoming automated. The focus is on high-value, repetitive work.
Mike’s Time to Nerd Out
One of the coolest things about doing this weekly email and sending it out to my friends is you all are reaching out to me, sharing the awesome projects you’re working on. I love digging into them and seeing how I can help. This network is already growing in ways I never expected.
Speaking of growth, a lot of you know I have an Instagram account that I’ve grown to almost 1.6 million followers. I started it for one reason: to learn how to grow an audience. And as you all know, I like to figure things out by doing things rather than just talking about them.
So here’s some insights for ya… I keep seeing the same pattern – many people in social media are obsessing over what the algorithm wants and what time they should post.
It reminds me of amateur athletes who spend thousands on the latest gear while pros are in the gym perfecting their fundamentals. The pros know that no magic shoes will replace the basics.
But here’s what I believe: Great content wins in the long run.
Take Paramount’s new show “Landman” (by the way friends, if you haven’t watched it yet, you absolutely should). Paramount didn’t obsess over the perfect release time. They focused on making it so good that you’ll watch it whenever it drops. That’s exactly how you should think about your content.
Does that mean you’ll write something amazing, post it, and instantly go viral? No. Building an audience is more like compound interest than winning the lottery. Every great piece of content you put out is an investment that keeps paying dividends.
I’ve seen posts from years ago suddenly catch fire because the right person discovered them at the right time. You never know when someone like Elon Musk is going to comment on your thread, or when an influencer will share your post, or when your next big client will discover you through something you wrote months ago.
Stop trying to beat the system. Focus on becoming very good at creating content and putting together valuable things that people want to see. That’s the real algorithm.
Here’s what I’ve learned works: Make every post something you’d want to read yourself. If you’re not excited about what you’re sharing, why would anyone else be?
Until next week,
Mike
