🎁  Gift local

👋  Good morning, and good news: we’ve got a new friend! Today we’re proudly welcoming Starter Story to our HubSpot Media network, and if you don’t already, you’re gonna love them. Starter Story is an invaluable resource on all the ways people are building successful businesses today — authentic founder stories, detailed case studies, and more. We’ll regularly share some of their best work here, but go get yourself the full experience: Subscribe on YouTube and watch until your eyes hurt.

STARTING UP

Can a next-gen aircraft beat out Boeing?

❌  The problem: Airbus and Boeing dominate commercial aviation, and traditional jets don’t leave much room for cargo. 

💡  The pitch: US aerospace startup Natilus unveiled Horizon Evo, a dual-deck blended-wing jet with a passenger level on top and a cargo level below. The ultra-wide jet would offer ~2.6k cubic feet of dedicated cargo space — more than most Boeing 737s or Airbus A320s — and up to 250 seats at 50% lower operating costs.

🚀  The outlook: The Horizon Evo is still just an idea, but Natilus does have a smaller prototype of its Kona blended-wing cargo plane that’s been test flying since 2023. While beating Airbus and Boeing is no small feat, the startup can get in line on the runway ahead of a projected shortfall of ~15k narrow-body aircraft over the next 20 years.

NEWS FLASH

• If you’ve ever seen a kid glued to an iPad, then this’ll make sense: In the upcoming Toy Story 5, the toys’ greatest villain isn’t a cruel neighbor, it’s… tech. The big bad is Lilypad, a frog-themed tablet that’s pulling children’s attention away from Jessie, Woody, and the crew. The film debuts June 19.

• Now in 3D: World Labs, a startup founded by computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, creates “world models,” or AI models that can perceive 3D environments. It’s already released Marble, a model that can create 3D worlds from image and text prompts, and just raised $1B to expand into applications for robotics, scientific discovery, and more, per Bloomberg.

• Supermarket om: A Sheffield, England, co-op grocery store has gone viral thanks to its freezers, which pleasantly drone like “an electrical gong bath,” according to one Reddit post. The Guardian reporter Alim Kheraj checked it out, confirming an “unbelievable symphonic hum.” In these modern times, we recommend meditating wherever you can.
  

• OK, so still bad: One of Nintendo’s biggest failures was its 3D gaming console, Virtual Boy, released in 1995. It was uncomfortable, expensive, and gave some users eye pain and nausea. Nintendo relaunched the concept as a Switch accessory, which, per The Verge’s Andrew Webster, is still uncomfortable, expensive, and “a novelty for Nintendo sickos only,” though he noted a few games and their 3D gimmicks are “fun in short doses.”

PROMPTS GALORE

Prompts to tackle every inch of strategy

This is how you carve out hours for dilly dallying, vegging out, goofing off, and all fitting synonyms.

Behold: 1000+ prompts for marketing and productivity, stuffed into one fun sheet. See all of the eloquent shortcuts that are saving experts time across the funnel. 

Work smarter with AI:

• Copywriting
• Marketing and social media
• Brand identity and analysis 
• SEO, paid search, and ads
• Pricing, distribution, and sales
• Productivity (and plenty more)

THE BIG IDEA

(Screenshot via Giftphoria)
Instacart convenience, but for unique, local gift-giving
There’s something impersonal about buying a gift from Amazon or a big box retailer, but many of us don’t have time to browse a dozen shops hoping one of them has the perfect present.
Giftphoria, founded by Anthony Abaci and Nic Clar, is a new startup that offers shoppers the best of both worlds: online shopping and same-day delivery — akin to Instacart — but only from local, independent boutiques.
How it works
Giftphoria is currently available in parts of Los Angeles with plans to expand.

• Store owners can sync their inventory with Giftphoria’s platform, allowing customers to shop their selection online. If an item sells out, the platform updates in real time.
  
• Shoppers can browse by store or category, finding things like ceramics, knickknacks, apparel, accessories, home goods, and pantry items. 
  
• Purchases can be delivered in three hours for ~$14, same-day for $10, or next-day for ~$7. Customers can also choose in-store pickup, which accounts for ~5% of orders.
  
• Giftphoria takes a commission from each order. 

Initially…
… Abaci set out to build an AI gift recommender, inspired by asking Anthropic’s Claude for help shopping for his girlfriend’s cousin. Users could fill out a quiz, choose a suggested gift from a nearby retailer, and have it delivered.
Abaci soon found that no one wanted AI to tell them what to buy, but they did like everything else.
“I think we got duped into thinking that convenience was associated just with corporate,” Abaci told The Hustle, referring to giants like Amazon or Instacart. “But as I was talking to customers, they loved how convenient it was for them to buy from a local store that they couldn't go to.”
Which, if you think about small businesses and how they often operate, makes sense. Many are only open during office hours, making it hard for people with full-time jobs to visit or even discover them.

• In fact, Abaci said that 83% of Giftphoria’s customers end up purchasing from a store they’d never heard of before, despite the fact that, to ensure speedy delivery, customers can only purchase from shops in or near their neighborhoods.

When Giftphoria launched its beta in September, Abaci and Clar made all the deliveries themselves. Since then, they’ve had to hire additional drivers and have onboarded 40+ stores. In the future, Giftphoria may expand not just geographically, but to also include local artists, “almost like a localized Etsy.”
“If we can give [artists] that distribution platform and help everybody make money [and] have everybody find really unique, one-of-a-kind items, everybody wins.”

🔗

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Where’d all the electricians go? From Gen Z’s disinterest in the trade to changing education policy, we explore the shifts that created the gap.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Average age of incoming CEOs this year, two years younger compared to 2025’s cohort — 84% of whom had no prior experience helming a company. Across S&P 1500 companies, roughly one in nine CEOs were replaced last year, according to executive-recruiting firm Spencer Stuart, marking the highest rate since 2010, when the country was recovering from the financial crisis. 

Influencing the big shakeups this time: “complex global challenges” and, of course, AI, per The Wall Street Journal. While appointing a bunch of inexperienced, young CEOs might seem like an illogical choice given the circumstances, to be fair, so does reusing an old playbook to navigate uncharted territory.

“Younger makes sense to me,” one exec told WSJ. “Things are shifting and changing very dramatically and permanently and you want people who’ve been in the trenches facing these decisions.” 

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1886, chemist Charles Martin Hall invented an affordable way to produce aluminum. 

👀  That’s cool: Explore Easter Island via this 3D map. 

🗞️  Newsletter: Want to get smarter about financial markets? Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily.

🥪  That’s interesting: An ode to “lunch ladies.”

🐶  Aww: An appreciator of sticks.

SHOWER THOUGHT

Seeing color is one of the most subjective experiences in zoology. SOURCE

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