Drew Glover

The $48B Company Coming For The Payroll Budget. Imagine hiring an engineer who never sleeps. You give them a project at 11 PM. They write the code. Test it. Find the bugs. Fix them. And keep working while your entire team is asleep. That’s basically what Cognition is building with Devin. And investors just valued that vision at $48 billion. Cognition just raised more than $2 billion led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Run-rate revenue jumped from roughly $492 million in May to nearly $900 million today. NVIDIA. Citi. Mercedes-Benz. GE Aerospace. All already using Devin. But the most interesting part isn’t how fast Cognition is growing. It’s what budget they’re trying to capture. Traditional software competes for the software budget. Salesforce replaces another CRM. Slack replaces another collaboration tool. AI agents are different. If Devin can actually complete work an engineer would otherwise have to do — Cognition starts competing with the payroll budget. And payroll is a much bigger market. The question stops being — how much is this tool worth? It becomes — how much work can this tool replace? Software engineering is the obvious starting point. But so does a massive amount of modern work. Finance. Marketing. Research. Operations. Customer support. Legal. Sales. A huge percentage of white-collar work is ultimately someone sitting in front of software, moving information, making decisions, and completing workflows. Agents are learning to operate those systems themselves. For most of modern business history — more output meant more people. AI agents could start breaking that relationship. Software used to make employees more productive. AI agents are trying to become productive capacity themselves. Investors aren’t betting on another developer tool. They’re betting that software is about to compete with one of the largest expenses on almost every corporate income statement. People. Follow for more at joinuncovered.com #cognition #devin #AI #business #tech drewglover fiatventures joinuncovered artificialintelligence techinvesting buildingwealth founders startups a16z accel nvidia software payroll futureofwork agentic

David Protein Just Raised $250 Million. Why Do We Keep Falling For The Same Marketing Gimmick? No matter how many ads we see — we will always fall for good branding. And David Protein might be the latest proof. Medici Brands just raised $250 million at a $2.2 billion valuation. David is targeting more than $300 million in revenue in 2026. For a protein bar. But Peter Rahal has basically done this before. He co-founded RXBAR — which took incredibly simple ingredients and did something almost stupidly obvious. Put them in giant letters on the front of the package. Egg whites. Dates. Nuts. No B.S. That packaging helped turn RXBAR into a cultural phenomenon before Kellogg bought it for $600 million. Now he’s doing it again with David. Great nutritional proposition. But also a gold wrapper that looks more like a luxury beauty product than something you’d find next to a protein shake. It reminds me of Liquid Death. Liquid Death didn’t invent water. They put water in a tallboy can, gave it a ridiculous name, and made drinking water feel like joining a subculture. We keep talking about consumers becoming smarter. More skeptical. More immune to advertising. But I don’t think human psychology has changed at all. We still want things that make us feel something. And packaging might actually be becoming more important. Because AI is making it incredibly cheap to create a beautiful advertisement. But you can’t ad-block the protein bar sitting on someone’s desk. The product itself becomes the advertisement. You don’t always need to invent a new category. Sometimes you take something incredibly ordinary — make it impossible to ignore — and suddenly a protein bar becomes a multibillion-dollar company. Technology changes. Advertising changes. Human psychology doesn’t. We will always fall for great branding. Follow for more at joinuncovered.com #davidprotein #marketing #venturecapital #business #food fiatventures joinuncovered CPG branding marketing techinvesting buildingwealth founders startups consumerbrands protein packaging Peter rahal medici futureofbrand

Tesla Is Building A Movement. Waymo Is Building A Service. That’s Why Tesla Is Going To Win The Robotaxi War. Tesla Cybercabs just went live in Austin this week. Fully autonomous. No steering wheel. No pedals. No driver. Already 40 to 50% cheaper than Waymo and Uber. Here’s why. It costs Waymo roughly $125,000 to manufacture one vehicle. It costs Tesla roughly $18,000. They sell it for under $30,000. For the same $1 million — eight Waymos on the road. Or more than 50 Tesla Cybercabs. That cost difference flows directly to the consumer. $7 median Tesla fare versus $17 Waymo and $15 Uber. But here’s what makes Tesla genuinely different. You can build a business on Tesla. You cannot build a business on Waymo. Tesla just opened an interest form for businesses wanting to buy Cybercab fleets and build mobility hubs. An individual. A small business. An operator. Can buy a fleet. Deploy it. And earn from an autonomous transportation network. Waymo owns and operates its own fleet. You can’t buy in. You’re just a customer. And here’s the data advantage nobody is talking about. Waymo has more sophisticated LIDAR-based sensor hardware. But Tesla has billions of miles of real-world FSD driving data collected from its consumer fleet. Waymo has accumulated roughly 200 million miles. Tesla has billions. Waymo has better cameras. Tesla has better data. And in AI — data wins. The flywheel is brutal. More cars. More rides. More data. More revenue. Lower prices. More operators. Repeat. Tesla’s biggest advantage may not be the best self-driving technology. It’s building autonomous transportation that people can actually participate in. Not just ride in. Follow for more at joinuncovered.com #tesla #waymo #robotaxi #cybercab #venturecapital drewglover fiatventures joinuncovered autonomousvehicles AI techinvesting buildingwealth founders startups elonmusk selfdrivingcar FSD austin transportation futureoftech

The Internet Is Running Out Of Data For AI. So Silicon Valley Is Now Buying Humans. AfterQuery just went from a $300 million valuation in April to $3.2 billion five months later. Mercor crossed $2 billion in annualized revenue in June and is reportedly discussing a financing at a $20 billion valuation. And both companies are doing the same thing. Recruiting the world’s best humans — PhDs, engineers, lawyers, bankers, scientists — and turning their expertise into AI training data. The first generation of AI benefited enormously from ingesting the public internet. Wikipedia. Books. Code. Forums. That gets a model to — I know a lot. But the next generation needs to get to — I know how an expert actually does the job. That’s a completely different data problem. Imagine asking AI to become an investment banker. Reading 10 million finance articles doesn’t teach it: here’s why I changed this assumption, here’s the mistake a junior banker would make, here’s when I override the obvious answer. That judgment is what Mercor and AfterQuery are industrializing. Calling these businesses data-labeling companies completely misses the point. Think about the AI stack. Compute. Models. Expert intelligence. Agents. Applications. Nvidia owns compute. OpenAI and Anthropic build the models. But someone has to teach those models how the world’s best humans actually perform work. That’s the layer these companies are fighting to own. And here’s the paradox nobody is talking about. Everyone assumes better AI means fewer humans required. But right now — better AI means greater demand for the world’s most talented humans who can teach it. The world’s best lawyer isn’t just doing legal work anymore. Their reasoning is becoming training infrastructure used across millions of AI interactions. That’s why these valuations are moving this fast. And that’s the bet the market is pricing in. Follow for more at joinuncovered.com #business #afterquery #AI #data #mercor drewglover fiatventures joinuncovered artificialintelligence techinvesting buildingwealth founders startups training machinelearning humandata expertise future labor futureofwork

The New Gold Rush Isn’t AI. It’s Physical AI. And if you’ve seen the movie iRobot — we’re closer than you think. In iRobot every home had a robot. Every building had robots. Every city ran on robots. NVIDIA, Google, Tesla, Figure, and Boston Dynamics are all racing to ship commercial humanoid robots before 2028. Google DeepMind just launched Gemini Robotics 2. A robot receives the instruction “put the watering can into the green bin on the bottom shelf.” It walks across the room. Picks up the can. Places it precisely. No pre-programmed motion. No human controlling it. Pure learned intelligence translating language into physical action. Figure’s robot accumulated 1,250 hours at BMW. Handled 90,000 parts. Contributed to production of 30,000 vehicles. Tesla’s Optimus is being trained in factories right now. NVIDIA is building the operating stack underneath all of it. Jensen Huang calls humanoids a multitrillion dollar economic opportunity. Elon is building Terafab — 100 million square feet of chip manufacturing — to produce 200 million chips per year just for Optimus robots. Samsung became the most profitable company on earth supplying the memory every AI system needs. Models → Agents → Bodies. Models answer questions. Agents take digital actions. Physical AI takes actions in the real world. We spent the last five years asking what AI can know. We’re about to spend the next decade figuring out what AI can do. Follow for more at joinuncovered.com #businessmindset #robotics #AI #google #business fiatventures joinuncovered google deepmind tesla nvidia optimus techinvesting buildingwealth founders startups irobot figure bostonDynamics futureoftech

Why Grindr’s Business Model Should Make Every Founder Pay Attention. Grindr started as the darling of gay dating apps. A simple utility that changed how a generation of gay men connected. Nobody expected it to become one of the most interesting AI business stories in tech. 15 million monthly active users. $540 million in revenue. 175 employees. And 80% of their code is now written by AI. In 2023 a return-to-office decision caused their team to fall to roughly 70 employees. Instead of rebuilding the traditional tech company org chart — they stayed lean. Then AI arrived at exactly the right moment. 94% of their engineers are now running AI agents in parallel. Technical output has increased 2.5x. They’re accomplishing a roadmap that would have historically required hundreds of engineers — with fewer hires than expected. And here’s what they’re building on top of that efficiency. If you already own the digital identity and connection layer for 15 million gay men — what other high-value transactions can sit on top of it? Dating and hookups → discovery → AI personalization → maps → travel → health and wellness → premium lifestyle experiences. Q2 adjusted EBITDA margin: 42%. Revenue growth: 33% year over year. And only 9% of users currently pay. That monetization gap is the entire opportunity. Grindr isn’t using AI to shrink the company. It’s using AI to make the company’s ambition dramatically bigger without making the company dramatically bigger. That’s the new playbook. And every founder building right now should be paying attention. Follow for more at joinuncovered.com #grindr #AI #business #drewglover #gay joinuncovered gayapp tech artificialintelligence techinvesting buildingwealth founders startups saas claudecode cursor productmarket lgbtq business futureoftech