Laura Little

Founder ✹ Recruiting talent for seed to series C ✹ Join Laura’s List for weekly roles ⚡️find me on LinkedIn for fast fit eval

[Laura Little @ideaslivehere]

If you're thinking of making a (quiet) move, then I want you to reach out to me. Looking for
✵ Full Stack Engineer
✵ Forward Deployed Engineer
✵ Back End Engineer
✵ Growth + Marketing + GTM Skills (specifically SAAS)
✵ Account Executive
London, NY, SF and Barcelona
#hiring

[sarah guo @saranormous]

.@JensenHuang is one of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs of all time. He’s bent the arc of technological progress, and the growth engine of the American economy rests on the shoulders of the company he built.

Sadly, greatness doesn’t guarantee goodness. It’s disappointing.

The Economist says “no one is irreplaceable.” They are very wrong. A founder who has spent 30 years building such a unique company so capably has earned the presumption that he should keep leading it.

More importantly, our competitors and adversaries will not wait for us to find “another Jensen.”

The board is getting to the bottom of the national security and judgement questions. Depending on the answers, I expect most shareholders would want him to continue leading.

We should demand loyalty and accountability, but sainthood cannot be the price of admission to leadership. or to Team America.

[Laura Little @ideaslivehere]

@nickreidx Why she so mean!! Dang who trained her

[Dalai Lama @DalaiLama]

It’s in our interest to take care of others. Self-centredness is opposed to basic human nature. In our own interest as human beings we need to pay attention to our inner values. Sometimes people think compassion is only of help to others, while we get no benefit. This is a mistake. When you concern yourself with others, you naturally develop a sense of self-confidence. To help others takes courage and inner strength.

[Laura Little @ideaslivehere]

@adithi_mallesh Uh oh what did he say this time

[Kelly McCarty @KellyLMcCarty]

Humans trolling these ridiculous AI job interview bots is the kind of entertainment I didn't know I needed. Pure perfection. 🤣

[Abby Libby @abbythelibb_]

I've seen a lot of posts ridiculing Jensen Huang's wife for not being hot enough at 65 to keep him from cheating and zero posts about what an absolute fool this 63 year old man was to think the hot Chinese woman was actually into him and worth destroying his life over.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

openai just let every business claim a profile inside chatgpt. my honest reactions:

1/ this could be the google my business moment for ai, and a lot of agencies made a great living (millions!) in the 2010s just claiming and fixing listings for local businesses

2/ ads can now click through to a conversation with your agent instead of your website (interesting)

3/ every business agent runs on context the company writes, and most brands are going to be bad at it

4/ your product feed is your new seo. boring, and it matters more than your blog now in some ways if you think about it

5/ the dashboard tells you how often chatgpt mentions you but HIDES the prompts and your competitors, so you still can’t see why you’re winning or losing

6/ discovery topics shows what chatgpt already cites you for, which is basically a free content calendar

7/ agents are only open to us ecommerce and online services right now. plumbers, dentists etc are next, and so lots of opportunity to help main street here

8/ businesses can’t see the conversations, so nobody knows which chats turn into sales yet

9/ i’m not sure people want to talk to a brand’s agent. i think they’ll want their own agent to talk to it for them

10/ 1.2 billion people use chatgpt every week. i’d go claim my profile before finishing this post if you can

[Laura Little @ideaslivehere]

@gregisenberg Im just dreading ads. They’re going to charge more to have an ad free experience 😭🫠

[Porkchop Express @Porkchop_EXP]

This is a 65 year old woman.

What is she even doing wrong? She has a nice haircut, a maintained hair color, she looks fit and healthy, and she’s wearing a very nice dress. I’m sure she’s wearing age appropriate makeup too.

She’s might not be the most stunning beauty, but she’s obviously also not someone who just let herself go.

Anyone piling on her today is a lowlife.

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

Marco Rubio realizing he has to be the next Nvidia CEO

[Laura Little @ideaslivehere]

@AutismCapital 😭😭

[Laura Little @ideaslivehere]

Breaking up with someone over a text message is fcked up but at least @elonmusk is honest about who he is. I respect that more then a cheater. Tell me who you are and let me decide, at least I know what we’re working with. Was Jensen always a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

[Laura Little @ideaslivehere]

Jensen (sigh) thought he was one of the good ones. 🫠 I really don’t understand how hard it is to keep your side of the street clean, seriously the dude has everything!!

[Joe Mama @goldbugger]

The problem with this narrative is the implication that Jensen would not have lobbied for loosening export controls if he had not been involved with this woman.

He's the CEO of the company that sells the chips. It's his job to sell as many chips as possible and to lobby to that end.

[Anthony Pompliano 🌪 @APompliano]

Let me tell you a story about how unethical Anthropic is.

In April, the Anthropic team began heavily courting our engineering team to tell them corporate secrets, technical details, and future plans for @cfosilvia.

They pretended their interest was due to our exploding popularity and accelerating compute usage, but it quickly became apparent that Anthropic was fishing for details on how we built our product and why it was so popular.

This included the Anthropic team trying to wine-and-dine our engineers, including a infamous steak dinner where someone told our team "don't worry about it, this is on Dario."

Our team was not born yesterday, so we quickly realized what was happening and refused to share sensitive information and technical details with the Anthropic team.

As we suspected, Anthropic was trying to get information from us, so they could build a competing product. Some people on their team must have a guilty conscious because they messaged us a few days ago to give us "a heads-up" that they were launching a competing product.

Thankfully, the Silvia engineering team has been aggressively working to get off the frontier models for the last ~ 6 months. That effort has been highly successful, because our compute costs are ~ 97% lower when we use our own model & hardware, the latency is lower, and the accuracy of answers materially increases as well.

The sad thing for Anthropic is they have now released an inferior product and they had to sell their soul to do it.

The only thing worse than being a trillion-dollar company that can't beat a 10-person team is being a trillion-dollar company that no one trusts and everyone knows is unethical.

Serious investors continue to choose @cfosilvia over ChatGPT, Claude, and other frontier companies because these products are not optimized to solve the actual user problem.

Today, Anthropic launched a Claude wrapper that is masquerading as a personal finance product. Best of luck to them.

But I will take the Silvia misfits vs the Anthropic losers any day of the week.

if you want to support people trying to do things the right way, and help investors be more informed, then consider signing up for Silvia today: https://t.co/4LyYZFRC4m

[Lyndsey Fifield @lyndseyfifield]

Well this final GoFundMe update from The Red Baron Worker has assured me that we could not have supported a better man.

[Laura Little @ideaslivehere]

Dead chat BBT 😭😭 https://t.co/Qz8rPoafUw

[Laura Little @ideaslivehere]

@Jason @united Idgaf you couldn’t play me to get into a small Plane or helicopter - I’ve been ten toes down on this for years. My husband likes Costa Rica he goes with his buddies because I refuse to fly in the little plane. Nope

[Laura Little @ideaslivehere]

Kind of wild finding my own post in a Canva search from 2019 - they had a good run.

[Laura Little @ideaslivehere]

If you know anything about me at all you'll know that I am a motivation junkie!
Use these Canva created inspirational cards for pinning and sharing on social.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

If you've ever made a birthday flyer on Canva and never paid a dime, you're a tiny part of why 1,271 people there got really bad news today.

Canva has about 265 million people using it every month. Only around 31 million of them pay.

Melanie Perkins built it that way on purpose. She's said for years the free version was supposed to be generous, because giving away a template costs basically nothing. It's a file sitting on a server. Enough free users eventually upgraded that Canva got to $4 billion a year in recurring revenue and stayed profitable for nine years straight.

Then they put AI in it. Canva AI 2.0 launched in April, and Perkins called it the biggest launch in the company's history. It worked better than anybody planned. People started using AI three times as much, and about 75 million of them were on the AI tools.

Every one of those "make me a flyer" prompts runs on a model somebody has to pay to run. Free users included.

Her cofounder Cliff Obrecht told Forbes that "a very generous free AI product comes with a huge cost."

So Canva slowed the whole rollout down and rebuilt it. They built more of their own models and started reusing their 165 million templates and assets before generating anything from scratch. Cost per AI task dropped about 90%, which is wild, except usage had tripled, so the bill was still very real.

Revenue for the quarter came in at $921.9 million. That's up 25%, which most companies would kill for, but it was under plan, and Canva told investors 2026 growth would land around 20% instead of 30%.

Ten days later, Blackbird and Airtree, its earliest backers, marked Canva down from $42 billion to $34.9 billion. Earlier this year Blackbird had told its own investors Canva was ready to go public in the back half of 2026. Now the IPO talk is about 2027.

The Information reported something worse. Canva execs had been watching people skip Canva entirely and just ask ChatGPT to make the design.

That's the backdrop for today. Product, growth and platform get smashed into one team, a bunch of management layers go away, and more of the work moves to Sydney.

To be fair to Perkins, she handled the exits about as decently as anyone could. Everyone leaving gets at least six months of pay and a year of healthcare. Anyone who just joined gets their vesting cliff waived. There's a $10,000 grant to start a company with Canva taking zero equity, and you get to keep your MacBook.

I ran product at Apollo, which also lives on a huge free tier. The whole freemium playbook quietly assumes a free user costs you close to nothing. AI wrecks that assumption, and Canva hit the wall first because it has one of the biggest free user bases in software.

Every free app on your phone is running the same math Canva was. Most of them just haven't sent the email yet.