Tech and startups: 21st October 2025

• The AI compute land grab accelerated as a Microsoft-, Nvidia- and BlackRock-led consortium moved to acquire Aligned Data Centers for $40B, while UK’s Nscale will reportedly deploy ~200,000 Nvidia GPUs to Microsoft in a $14B deal.

• Google will invest $15B to build an AI infrastructure hub and 1‑GW data center in India, underscoring the shift of hyperscale AI buildouts to new geographies.

• IBM sharpened its enterprise AI push at TechXchange 2025 and partnered with Groq to speed AI inference with LPUs via watsonx Orchestrate.

• Wearables had a breakout week as smart‑ring maker Oura raised $900M at an $11B valuation, amid a broader surge in funding for AI‑enabled wearables across health and beyond.

• Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 4.5, a cheaper enterprise‑friendly variant with a Deloitte deal and bullish revenue projections, tightening competition on price and capability.

• VCs stayed aggressive in AI—active firms led major Q3 rounds analysis, seed checks focused on back‑office automation, robotics, healthcare and drug discovery, and investors debated whether we’re in an AI bubble.

• Enterprise data stacks for AI evolved as NetApp unveiled an AI Data Engine and disaggregated AFX appliance to streamline pipelines and recovery, while Informatica expanded Oracle Cloud integrations for AI‑powered data management.

• Operators are adapting to AI era: startups are rebuilding hiring with AI‑powered sourcing, screening and evaluation, and Vivun explained how it pivoted its product to an AI‑native platform without losing customers.

Beyond Founder Mode: Mission Mode (blog​.palantir​.com). Mission Mode organizes entire company around customer missions, embedding engineers with teams and prioritizing outcomes over founder involvement

4 Rules for Efficiency: Designing the Systems That Help You Work at Your Best (engineering​.gusto​.com). Practical rules for personal efficiency: adapting advice, focused workspace, mindset rhythm, and tool-enabled work

Building the Web that Moves Money: inside Web engineering at Revolut (medium​.com/revolut). Revolut's web engineering approach emphasizes secure, scalable, and fast web products with XP-inspired practices and a large ecosystem

In the air (benn​.substack​.com). VCs at tech conferences signal potential, while dbt and git reshape collaboration and data tooling amid Vegas Coalesce energy

Selling Lemons (notes​.jim-nielsen​.com). Frank Chimero’s critique of automated job markets, AI, and output versus outcomes, plus insights from tech voices on web, UI, and culture

Fourteen years ago at the blog: the "a pervasive fetish" line actually holds up better today than it did then (observationalepidemiology​.blogspot​.com). Discussion of the Rot Economy, growth fetish, and historical context with references to Ed Zitron and Marc Andreessen/Ben Horowitz

Interview with a new hosting provider founder (ntietz​.com). Diana builds Andromeda Industries / Gigabit.Host to deliver affordable, high-performance hosting using Proxmox, Temporal, Supabase, Next.js, TS, and Ansible

I was interviewed about entrepreneurship (obryant​.dev). Entrepreneurship reflections, solo building, invention vs business-building, and an interview with Jacob O’Bryant on The Sample/Yakread

🎧🍌 Building AI-Native Infrastructure for Developers with Erik Bernhardsson, Co-founder and CEO of Modal (thespl​.it). AI-native infrastructure with Erik Bernhardsson of Modal; GPU scarcity, consumption-based pricing, and startup culture insights

Byte Happens interview with Matt Crampton - From Development to Management Innovating in Tech (mattcrampton​.com). Matt Crampton discusses his tech journey, Gigwalk, Headnote, AOL/Yahoo roles, and transitioning from engineering to management

Dumbest Default: Functional Teams (avivbenyosef​.com). Cross-functional teams beat by-functional silos; end-to-end collaboration, product outcomes, and management alignment over domain-based splits

The illegible nature of software development talent (elezea​.com). Explores how software development talent is often ill-understood and the factors that shape expertise and hiring outcomes

Your next staff engineer is one warm intro away (partly​.work). Staff engineers deliver immediate impact; near-network sourcing and leveraging existing connections beat cold outreach for top talent

What a 10X TEAM looks like (newsletter​.manager​.dev). Velocity-focused engineering: direct customer access, AI-assisted PR reviews, architecture-first code reviews, extensive testing, and hiring interns to boost learning rate

32 things we’ve learned about building a startup that scales (newsletter​.posthog​.com). 32 lessons from scaling PostHog: culture, hiring (SuperDay), PMF, AI, product-led growth, marketing, and team structure

Something Personal: Customer Obsession (chsasank​.com). Customer obsession drives over-engagement, blending support, product development, and sales to deliver value with Ubuntu LTS, PostgreSQL, and GPT-OSS

Surrender to Chaos (writing​.nikunjk​.com). Founders embrace chaos over frameworks, risking perception of instability to pursue breakthrough PMF and market-disrupting visions

Data and AI culture: How Nu’s philosophy became a competitive advantage (building​.nubank​.com). Nu's data and AI culture, Data Mesh, autonomy, and 100+ ML models powering customer-centric decisions

The AI concept that changed our company’s way of working (uxdesign​.cc). How a Product Playground and Infrastructure design reshape collaboration, design handoff, and rapid prototyping across teams using AI-enabled tools

AI and the Future of Software: Thoughts on LLMs and What’s Next (talkingquickly​.co​.uk). Explores potential of LLMs and future software, insights from Ben Dixon on startups, Elixir, AI, and deskless workforces

Google’s engineering culture (newsletter​.pragmaticengineer​.com). Explores Google’s engineering culture, tech stack, internal tools, design docs, performance reviews, and reinvention cycles with insights from Googlers

Developer Flow (leadership​.garden). Explores flow theory, blockers, and practical steps like 15% time, Flow Fridays, and flow-optimized tooling for engineers

Space for innovation, continuous things, and scaling yourself 💡 (refactoring​.fm). Explores piggybacking for tech capital, innovation intermissions, continuous delivery vs deployment, and scaling yourself

Beyond Founder Mode: Mission Mode (blog​.palantir​.com). Mission Mode organizes entire company around customer missions, embedding engineers with teams and prioritizing outcomes over founder involvement

Building the Web that Moves Money: inside Web engineering at Revolut (medium​.com/revolut). Revolut's web engineering approach emphasizes secure, scalable, and fast web products with XP-inspired practices and a large ecosystem

Pycon NL: workshop: measuring and elevating quality in engineering practice - Daniele Procida (reinout​.vanrees​.org). Daniele Procida discusses defining, measuring, and elevating engineering quality at Canonical with a simple dashboard and human-facing methods

The Accountability Problem (jamesshore​.com). Accountability in software shifts from dates to product bets, value trajectories, and maximum wagers amid agile, iterative funding

Your data model is your destiny (notes​.mtb​.xyz). How data model choices—Slack channels, Notion blocks, Toast items, Rippling employee records, Klaviyo order data—shape moat-worthy differentiation

Changing my mind on developer onboarding: code vs product (olshansky​.info). Onboarding engineers: shift from code setup to product usage, user accounts, and real production problems

Top Technology for Product Managers in 2025: Your Essential Stack (aakashg​.com). 12 essential technologies for PMs in 2025, including Jira, Productboard, Aha!, Notion, Figma, Miro, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Linear, Reforge, Product School, and O’Reilly Learning

The Complete Guide to AI Tools for Product Managers (2025) (aakashg​.com). Nine AI tools for product managers—Claude Projects, Cursor+Claude, Dovetail, Perplexity, NotebookLM, v0, Lindy, Kameleoon, and Airtable stack

How to PM Production Changes with Devin: Tutorial From Gumroad CEO, Sahil Lavingia (news​.aakashg​.com). Sahil Lavingia demonstrates AI-driven full-stack PM workflow from Slack to production for Gumroad’s 10M ARR with one employee

Advice for New Principal Tech ICs (i.e., Notes to Myself) (eugeneyan​.com). Principals balance hands-on coding with technical vision, alignment across orgs, and mentorship across product, design, and engineering

What is a Principal Engineer at Microsoft? (newsletter​.techworld-with-milan​.com). Dejan Dundjerski discusses becoming Principal Engineer at Microsoft, Azure SQL MI replatforming, AI troubleshooting, and problem-solving mindset

Navigating the Risks in Leadership (playfulprogramming​.com). Leadership risks, care for people behind the screens, and navigating growth from engineer to VP with personal philosophy

Programming Bowls (stevedylan​.dev). Explores programming minimalism, ‘bowls’ like Next.js, dependencies, languages, and permacomputing through practical, privacy-focused choices

Avoid Complexity (elijahpotter​.dev). Strategies to reduce Harper's complexity: trim build steps, parallelize CI, drop non-essential optimizations, and streamline deployment

The Fast Engineer Trap (digitalbunker​.dev). Slow down to ship with depth: curb fast-ship habits, value questions, tests, and edge-case checks over constant surveillance

How to scale startup ops—lessons from FAANGM, Meter, and Alchemy (blog​.ldtalentwork​.com). Scaling startup operations through legible founder intent, decision records, and a system of record over tool sprawl

Rapid web app development with Devin - A Developer’s Perspective by James Camilleri (blog​.scottlogic​.com). Explores agentic AI Devin vs Copilot for building a carbon-emissions web app, including ACU costs and deployment workflow

🔗 Good coding agent advice (steipete​.me). No-bs guide to agentic engineering: codex codex web, Claude Code, plan mode, subagents, MCPs, tmux, GitHub actions, and testing practices

Just Talk To It - the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering (steipete​.me). Practical workflow for AI coding agents using codex, Claude Code,/subagents, plan mode, and GitOps in a TypeScript/React project

📱 Agentic Phone Coding: WireGuard, Blink Shell, and My Self-Hosted AI Stack (nijho​.lt). Phone-to-NixOS WireGuard, Blink Shell, Mosh, Zellij, FasterWhisper, Ollama, Codex CLI, agent-cli, and iOS Shortcut workflow for self-hosted AI coding

AI Coding (markus​.hofer​.rocks). AI coding workflow with Claude Code tools, multi-agent roles, planning, coding, QA, and agile-like iteration

My Engineering Workflow in CursorAI (codeaholicguy​.com). AI-accelerated software workflow using CursorAI with ai-devkit, MCP, and CLI prompts for faster engineering cycles

ClaunkedIn (paritybits​.me). ClaunkedIn explores using Claude models for software planning, وهو includes internal piloting ideas, opt-in candidate scraping, and buzz-fizzing with open-to-work talent

My coding agent has ads now (ben​.page). Amp Free adds targeted ads in terminal, funded by Axiom, Baseten, Buildkite, Chainguard, Graphite, Parallel, PlanetScale, Prisma, Roboflow, Tailwind Labs, Turbo, WorkOS

How to Build Multi-Agent AI Systems That Actually Work in Production | Tyler Fisk (news​.aakashg​.com). Tyler Fisk demos production-ready multi-agent AI with TypingMind, CassidyAI, and Claude/Perplexity for Apple customer service

Missing arkaine already (hlfshell​.ai). Missing arkaine already: reflections on arkaine framework, HiredCoach PoC, and plans for arkaine 2.0 with Merkle trees, controlled syncing, and improved serialization

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