Exclusive: Inside Fortell (@fortellresearch) The $740M startup that had to waitlist billionaires and celebrities for its AI hearing aid. Their custom chip helps you "hear where you look", distinguishing voices in noisy environments - which solved a problem no hearing aid had cracked in 70 years. Now they're expanding across America to start reaching the 1.5 billion people globally who need it. Founded by four wildly impressive co-founders. Plus, backed from top VC's led by @JoshuaKushner @AntonioGracias @traestephens @wolfejosh @GavinSBaker @patrick_oshag @RobertIger @jaltma @aplusk @hbarra + more. We flew to New York, toured their factory, and tried it ourselves. To date, this is our proudest episode, truly technology at it's best. Enjoy :) 0:00 Today's Most Intelligent Hearing Aid 2:09 70 years unsolved - until now 3:34 "I'd mortgage my house for this" 4:37 Igor: A Pianist Turned Physicist 7:18 Andy + Factory Tour: "Injecting The AI" 9:00 Why they built a custom chip 10:39 Live demo: AI vs conventional 14:48 Matt: Building For His Grandparents 15:22 Cole: Can $6,800 Reach Everyone?

My “armchair” thoughts on the personal agent race: 1. Muse is poised to become the leader. The app is intuitive, and Meta is aggressively promoting it across all its properties. Once you use the Muse app, you realize that it makes little sense for an agent to live in an existing messaging app like iMessage. Unless Meta runs out of compute or something, I think this will become the company’s most successful homegrown app after Facebook. It will be much bigger than Threads. 2. ChatGPT is probably still the personal agent leader because it already has 1B+ users. OpenAI’s models, computer use, and voice are arguably better than Muse feature by feature. But it’s hard to build one product for both work and personal use, and harder still to serve enterprises and consumers with the same UX. Even for work, I started using Grok Bot because the Work/Codex split remains too confusing. I’m sure the team is cooking, and we’ll see something good in the next few weeks. 3. Grok Bot isn’t really a Muse competitor because it’s focused on work. Multiple bots naturally fit team-based knowledge work IMO. My bull case for Grok Bot is that it's a few features away from becoming multiplayer agentic Slack for both bots and humans. 4. Google is obviously the dark horse candidate. All these personal agents live off Gmail, Google Calendar, and your Google app's data. Google has their own personal agent in Spark but the last I checked it's a secondary tab in Gemini. I think Google needs to be far more aggressive in making Spark the primary experience and making it intuitive and competitive with Muse. Google however doesn't have a great track record in multiplayer AI... 5. Speaking of multiplayer, nobody has figured this out yet. I can’t easily add my spouse to a Muse chat to plan a vacation. I also can’t loop coworkers into ChatGPT or Grok Bot threads. Multiplayer AI today mostly means tagging bots in Slack. Every major provider is probably working on this, and I think it will be the next big unlock. My personal AI stack right now is Muse for personal, Grok Bot for cloud tasks, Claude for specific use cases, and ChatGPT for everything else. But I think we’re going to see some major updates this week. Everyone should design their personal skills and files so they’re easy to port between harnesses and agents. Otherwise, you’ll spend half your time moving from one tool to another.

another case of tech coming for the ownable episodic series, an industry that's got the capital and the desire to look cool late night talk shows -> architectural digest -> hot ones -> chicken shop date etc. all converging s/o @DylanAbruscato everythings just a format

Introducing Source Material — the weekly series where the designers & creatives shaping culture share the references that shaped them. Our first guest is Thom Bettridge: Editor-in-Chief of @i_D and founder of Content World. 00:00 - Introducing Source Material 00:08 Joe's Magazine (First Issue) 00:49 Colors: A Book about a Magazine About the Rest of the World 01:27 Balenciaga Archetype magazine 02:00 032c 33 (Frank Ocean Cover) 02:28 All-In Nº9 03:32 Highstyle (Migos Cover) 04:23 i-D 374 (“The Unknown Issue” Enza Khoury Cover) 05:42 i-D 375 (“The Beta Issue” Born In 2025 Cover) 06:50 Outro

After 15 years of investing, we realised that truly exceptional founders have something impossible to fake; deeply unconventional lives. We analysed 15,000 founders using five binary signals to measure this: quirky hobbies, early-life signs of exceptionalism, extreme life pivots, unusual geographies, non-linear careers. These sum to give a 0-5 score per founder. Whether someone started coding at age 10, speaks five languages, climbed Everest or quit a safe job to live in Chile, the signal we wanted was deviation from the mean. Rather than focusing on IQ or EQ, we call this metric the Outlier Quotient, or “OQ”. When forecasting founder success, it turns out that OQ was the single most predictive variable in our entire classification model, trained on ~70 different factors. Our OQ score had zero correlation with having worked at a top-tier company or attending an elite university. The signals most VCs rely on are noise without signal. The best founders don’t signal like everyone else, don’t think like everyone else and certainly don’t build like everyone else.

BTS of our latest filming tour for @Sachin_and_Adam show. So many wicked eps to come. 💡 shoutout @CoozeTurei for the edit.

Tariffs or this? Tariffs