Founder Guidance

Bill Gross

Bill Gross has spent decades helping founders build startups. Now he’s imparted some of that knowledge to an AI platform.

The serial entrepreneur and founder of the long-running Idealab incubator is rolling out a new platform containing 1.2 million AI-generated business ideas. The platform draws on 17 million sources, including expired patents, science writing, and news articles, as well as Gross’s “31 different methods of taking problems and technologies and working them together to find a business idea.”

“My whole goal is to cause more entrepreneurship to happen around the world, to lower the bar for entrepreneurship, and to help entrepreneurs be successful at tackling world problems,” Gross told us.

The 1.2 million free business ideas, winnowed down from an original 36 million concepts, come with white space for the market, applicable geography, tech differentiation, and required skills. That allows a user to input their own background, resources, and interests and get matched with a relevant idea to build a business around. It also includes tools to help founders expand that idea like a “periodic table” of “all the functions that a company might ever need to do.”

So where does the human founder come in? “Every business decision is still made by the human,” Gross said. “Think of the human as the master operator, decision-maker of the whole business, but think of what we’re building for you: our tools to make the mechanics work without you having to know those details.”

Army of entrepreneurs: Gross thinks that AI is going to significantly change the business landscape, with more solo entrepreneurs and smaller companies tackling problems they care about. They might be localized to specific markets, he said, like a small startup working on traffic in Cairo or healthcare in Venezuela.

“I think the future of business is more startups. I really feel like AI enables that,” Gross said. “It used to be, to tackle something important, you needed 100 people, and now one person with the power of AI can do much, much more.”

Read more about Idealab’s tool for aspiring entrepreneurs.—PK

      

From The Crew

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Growing Your Business

Morning Brew Inc.

Meta’s plushy new homunculus wants to pull up a chair in your office.

As the Muse personal agent/cartoon mascot gains traction among consumers, Meta is also making a play for the crowded enterprise agent market.

Meta has hired former MongoDB CEO Chirantan “CJ” Desai to build out a new enterprise platform, as the company looks to provide services beyond advertising tools. It also announced a new Muse for Small Business tool that will integrate the agent into tools like Box, Figma, and Shopify, among many others. Details are vague right now on what an enterprise platform will look like, but Muse Code and Meta Business Agent will be among the already-existing offerings.

Business leaders and marketers we talked with said Muse shows computer use capabilities beyond those of other agents on the market, and could be more accessible to small and medium-sized businesses that already number among Meta’s advertising customers. But a wider enterprise play also comes with security concerns and wariness about Meta pulling in ever more data.

All roads lead to enterprise

Meta is certainly not the first company to try to parlay consumer AI momentum into an enterprise product.

It might not be an obvious enterprise tech vendor in the same way as Big Tech rivals that boast cloud arms and office software suites. But Forrester principal analyst Kate Winick said the social platform company is already seen as a growth partner by the millions of businesses that use Meta Ads Manager. On that platform, Meta has been rolling out plenty of AI meant to speed or enhance the creative and audience targeting processes, to some mixed reactions from advertisers.

“The question of whether or not you personally trust Meta with your data is a different question than whether or not your company runs business through Meta,” Winick told us. “For most businesses, the answer is already yes. And so this allows [Meta] to sort of bring together the frontier model that they’ve built with the enterprise relationships they already have.”

Read more about Meta’s AI tools for small businesses.—PK

      

Modal Labs Inc., an AI cloud infrastructure platform, secured $750 million in a Series D funding round led by Accel. The New York-based company is now valued $15.75 billion. (Silicon Angle)

Boston-based company Soufflé Therapeutics, a developer of RNA therapies, raised $135 million in Series B funding led by Juvia Group. (CityBiz)

Abby Care, a San Francisco-based startup that helps family members become paid caregivers, raised $82 million in a Series C round led by Transformation Capital. (Fortune)

Sponsored By Capital One Business

Great flexibility means a lot. For Adam Greenberg, founder of Long Hill Development Group, paying vendors on time or even early builds goodwill that keeps projects moving when timing’s tight. His Capital One Spark Cash Plus card gives him flexibility, plus tools to help keep things running smoothly.

Stat: $100 million. That’s the amount that Toms founder Blake Mycoskie pledged toward research, advocacy, and expanding access for the use of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic purposes in 2023. After experiencing a mental health crisis in the intervening three years, he’s now expanded his focus to include meditation and therapy. (Forbes)

Quote: “Founder advice: If you don’t have a coup attempt every few years, you’re not hiring strong enough leaders.”—Automattic founder and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, in a post on X, after a 33-hour drama where he was deposed from his role as Automattic’s CEO by the board; just over a day later, the board members behind the move were gone, and Mullenweg was back (Fortune)

Read: Social media posts praise the income-generating possibilities of small businesses like laundromats. What they don’t mention are the messes inherent with dirty laundry, like repairing machines clogged with pet hair or evicting drug dealers from the bathroom. (the Wall Street Journal)

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