What Caught My EyeCulture · Brands · Design · BuildingWeekly Links by Mike LitmanIssue #004Ten Links. No Filler.Curated, Not AggregatedWhat Caught My EyeCulture · Brands · Design · BuildingWeekly Links by Mike LitmanIssue #004Ten Links. No Filler.Curated, Not Aggregated
Weekly Links
What Caught My Eye
Curated links on culture, brands, design and building.
Week of 2 April 2026 · Issue #004
↓ ten links. no filler. your tabs are safe.
AI & BuildingCulture & BrandsDesign & ProductStrategy & BusinessWild Card
Matthew Gallagher spent $20,000, two months, and a stack of AI tools to build Medvi – a GLP-1 telehealth company. In 2025, its first full year, it did $401M in sales. In 2026, it's tracking for $1.8B. The entire company is still just him and his brother.
The standard founder story involves a co-founding team, a couple of funding rounds, and a slow build. Medvi breaks every assumption. One person coded the product, wrote the copy, built the ads, ran customer service – all with AI. The business case for small, AI-leveraged teams is no longer theoretical. This is what the next decade looks like.
^ this changes the headcount conversation
Send to:every VC who still insists on a "founding team" slide
OpenAI has acquired TBPN, one of tech's most-listened-to podcasts. It's the company's first media property and a direct move into the distribution layer for AI ideas and culture.
OpenAI has the models. Now it wants the narrative. Owning a trusted voice in the tech community is a completely different kind of moat from compute or data. This is a media and culture play dressed up as a content acquisition. The most powerful AI companies will be the ones that shape what "AI" means in people's heads – not just what it does.
distribution is the new model
Send to:every CMO whose AI strategy stops at the product layer
Tom Tunguz's session with Lena Waters – who ran marketing at Notion, Grammarly, and DocuSign – on restructuring marketing operations around AI. Her observation: most companies adopted AI tactically without redesigning anything around it.
Buying AI tools and redesigning your marketing function for AI are completely different things. Most marketing leaders have done the first and avoided the second. This is a practical guide to the second. The companies that get this right in the next 18 months will be structurally different from the ones that don't.
tactical vs structural
Send to:the marketing director who added AI to job specs but not to how the team actually works
Rec Room is shutting down on 1 June 2026. The company's farewell post is unusually honest: 150 million players, a $3.5B peak valuation, and an economics problem it couldn't solve. Worth reading in full.
This matters beyond gaming. Rec Room was one of the most genuine attempts to build social infrastructure for the next internet – not a metaverse bet, but actual behaviour change, actual community, real love from real users. The lesson isn't that social worlds don't work. It's that user love and unit economics are not the same thing. A lot of "engagement-first" strategies should be reading this carefully.
150M players, zero path
Send to:anyone building "the metaverse" in their next pitch deck
American Exchange Group has acquired Allbirds' assets for $39 million – a fraction of its $1.7B IPO valuation in 2021. The brand continues under new ownership, with a very different kind of company behind it.
Allbirds didn't fail because the shoes were bad. It failed because "sustainable performance" couldn't carry a premium forever. Purpose-led branding is not a business model – it's a positioning layer that still needs unit economics underneath it. This is the cautionary tale that should be studied in every brand strategy department in 2026.
the $1.7B lesson
Send to:every brand strategist pitching purpose-led positioning as a growth strategy
Nothing is developing AI smart glasses for a 2027 launch. Carl Pei, who was publicly sceptical just months ago, has reversed position. The glasses will carry cameras, microphones and speakers – the same formula as Ray-Ban Meta, but with Nothing's design sensibility.
When the most sceptical voice in consumer hardware changes course, the category has crossed a threshold. Pei doesn't chase trends. If he's building glasses, it means the hardware problem is more solved than it looks. The AI wearables race just got its most interesting entrant – and the design bar is about to get raised.
the contrarian joins in
Send to:anyone who still dismissed the Ray-Ban Meta as a gimmick
A browsable archive of tech company ads, built on Lovable. Deceptively simple – one person's project that fills a real gap for anyone who studies how the industry talks about itself over time.
The best reference tools get built by people who couldn't find what they were looking for. This is that thing. Useful for brand strategists, planners, creative directors – anyone who wants to understand how tech brands have positioned themselves across different eras. Bookmark it now, you'll thank yourself later.
bookmark this now
Send to:the creative team prepping a tech brand pitch with no reference material
The fitness wearable company has closed another $575M round at a $10B valuation, with an IPO in sight. Whoop's model – subscription-only, no screen, pure data – is the direct opposite of every other wearable on the market.
While Apple Watch chases feature parity, Whoop doubled down on being less. No display, just data. The $575M suggests the market believes wellness infrastructure is a category with serious long-term defensibility. The subscription model is worth studying separately: Whoop sells commitment, not hardware. That's a very different relationship with the customer.
the anti-Apple Watch
Send to:any hardware founder still agonising over whether to add a screen
TechCrunch analysis of Carta data: AI startups captured 41% of the $128B raised on the platform last year – the highest share on record for any single category. And unlike previous tech cycles, the returns so far are holding up.
This isn't a bubble narrative. When 41% of VC money goes to one category and the returns validate the bet, something structural has shifted permanently. The question isn't whether AI investment is justified – it's who, outside AI, is quietly losing access to capital. Every non-AI sector is being repriced against this benchmark.
the great reallocation
Send to:the CFO still treating AI as a cost centre, not an investment thesis
A study across 28 million US households found that adopting AI tools significantly boosts leisure browsing on home devices – while leaving time spent on productive digital tasks completely unchanged. Efficiency gains go to leisure, not to more work.
We built productivity tools and used them to find more time to scroll. This is the most human outcome possible and also the most important finding for anyone building AI products: the productivity story is real, but where the time goes is the more interesting question. If the benefit is an hour of Netflix instead of an hour of admin, that's still a good product – just not the one you pitched.
efficiency met with scrolling
Send to:every productivity app founder presenting their time-saved metrics to investors
arxiv.org
Spot something I should feature?
Reply to any issue or tag me on LinkedIn. If I use it, you get the credit.
your name in lights (well, in Caveat font)
don't miss next week's picks
Get notified when a new issue drops
A short email every Friday with the link. The reading happens here.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Powered by Buttondown.