👋 Good morning. If life has been feeling like running on a hamster wheel recently, here’s a slight reframe: Scientists say hamsters may actually enjoy it. Researchers found that wild mice voluntarily run on exercise wheels, suggesting the behavior might not be due to captivity-induced stress or boredom, after all. In fact, it might even be for fun. One biology professor even compared it to “zoomies” — so your pet hamster’s 2am marathon might actually be a little joyride.
NEWS FLASH
🎧 Go night-night: Sond, a Boston-based startup founded by Bose’s former head of sleep, emerged from stealth yesterday with $7m in funding to launch Dreambuds. The earbuds analyze 12 physiological signals, including respiration, heart rate, and body position, to help wearers sleep more soundly. Data from the sensors is streamed in real time to an AI sleep coach that plays a customized sleep audio program in response. Users can talk directly to the AI, asking for insights, specific programs, or a customized sleep story around a certain theme. Can’t wait to nod off to “winning the lottery.”
☕ America is getting more caffeinated: 7 Brew, a drive-thru coffee chain founded in Arkansas in 2017, already has 700+ locations in 38 states with 340 more coming soon. If you haven’t heard of the chain, it’s because it’s not found in airports, malls, or major cities — 7 Brew’s drive-thrus are popping up in undercaffeinated areas with little competition. Powered by a Blackstone investment in 2024, the brand nearly doubled its sales to $1.2B last year as consumers cling to their little sweet treats.
🍕 So much for that pizza party: Picnic, a Seattle startup with a pizza station that promised to make 100 pizzas per hour with robots and just one human employee, has shut down. Despite a partnership with Domino’s, Picnic was unable to pay its debts and a buyer has since been found for its assets and IP. Lee Kindell, owner of Seattle pizza chain Moto Pizza, told GeekWire he’s stuck holding a $250k “robot aquarium” — defunct Picnic robots, that is — and was “so pissed,” he’s started his own pizza robot company.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
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Excuse us? Joi AI is hiring 10 “masturbation consultants,” who will earn $2k to use its X-rated audio feature for a month and provide feedback. The company has received 100k+ applicants.
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Do-over: Michael Preysman co-founded clothing brand Everlane in 2011, but left its board earlier this year. Now, following the sale of Everlane to Shein, he’s launching a new brand, Still Radical, with the “same principles,” but “no venture capital, no private equity.”
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I spy AI: YouTube is making its AI labels on Shorts and long-form videos more prominent and will begin automatically labeling AI-generated content.
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Browser wars: DuckDuckGo saw US app installs pop 18.1% week-over-week on average from May 20 to May 25, peaking at 30.5% on May 25. The surge is driven by Google users ditching its new AI-enhanced Search.
FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM
Spotify hits play on paid AI-generated music
The streaming giant wants AI remixes to be licensed, paid, and regulated.
Spotify says its new AI music tools are meant to curb piracy and give artists more control over how their music is used.
But critics worry the platform could soon be flooded with AI-generated songs, making it harder for originals to stand out.
👉 Read more on Mindstream.
THE BIG IDEA
Forget LinkedIn, Vamo helps find 'cracked' engineers on GitHub
Bolun Li learned the struggle startups face recruiting top engineers when he founded Zogo, a financial literacy platform. Great coders, he told The Hustle, “are not great at marketing themselves” on LinkedIn.
A lot of gifted candidates are left undiscovered, and that’s the problem Li’s latest startup, Vamo, is trying to solve. It’s an AI-powered B2B recruiting platform that surfaces top developers from their public GitHub repositories, where their raw code — not their pedigree — is on display.
“If you hire a content creator to do videos for your company, obviously you’re going to look at the videos that they’ve made before versus the resume,” he said. “It just seems so obvious to me. Why are we not looking at GitHub for engineers?”
Since launching just over a month ago, Vamo says it’s attracted ~2k customers, including companies like Autopilot and Cognition, largely through word-of-mouth and Li’s LinkedIn posts highlighting the “cracked” coders — that’s slang for highly-skilled developers — Vamo has surfaced. One highlights a Chipotle worker who just graduated high school and has been coding since he was a child.
How it works
Because many hiring managers, recruiters, and founders are not engineers, AI does the heavy lifting.
- Vamo’s AI analyzes GitHub profiles, then ranks engineers using an algorithm that factors in things like how many stars — how GitHub users bookmark and favorite projects — they’ve received, their followers, and community engagement. Those that rank highly get a “cracked” badge.
- Subscriptions start at $159/month and allow users to search GitHub’s millions of profiles in plain language to find developers who’ve created similar projects. They can contact potential candidates directly through their GitHub emails.
Vamo is currently tailored to find engineers over “vibe coders,” though Li has plans to build similar projects aimed at other kinds of creators.
“I think the future shouldn’t be defined by your job titles and your LinkedIn profile. It should be what you actually built,” he said.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
LinkedIn isn’t just for cringe marriage announcements: It’s actually one of the top tools big brands use to win at AEO. Here’s how.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
How much less likely students are to end up in low-skill, low-paying jobs after participating in the rootEd Alliance program, which staffs dedicated advisers at rural high schools to help students find college and career opportunities and resources in areas where there are few.
It was founded in 2018 by billionaire and former Goldman Sachs banker Byron Trott, who told The Wall Street Journal there’s “huge talent in these rural communities,” likely inspired by his own story: Raised in rural Missouri, Trott, whose school counselor was also his football coach and driver’s ed instructor, says his success was “almost accidental.”
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 2006, San Francisco Giants outfielder Barry Bonds hit his 715th home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s record.
🪼 Wow: A short film featuring real footage of deep sea creatures.
🍔 Useful: A collection of fast-food menu hacks.
📱 That’s cool: Discover interesting Instagram feeds.
🐦 Aww: A very cool bird’s nest.
SHOWER THOUGHT
We never say it's partly moony. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Still trying to crack the code" Friedman.
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