Matija Šošić

Traditional competitive advantages are vanishing. I hear about it daily in my work with stuck startups: “We raised too much money under a business model that no longer works because we’re getting undercut by new competitors.” As AI and cheap infrastructure level the playing field, there’s very little “moat” for companies to hold onto in the long run. Or is there? I am seeing a new frontier emerging—one that will redefine success in the coming decades. A massive opportunity that is mostly hidden in plain sight. I’m dedicating my newsletter to this seismic shift that’s about to happen, and how you can build sustainable competitive advantage while the competition battles for pennies. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gzipBkqJ #FutureOfWork #AI #Leadership #Innovation #CompetitiveAdvantage #Startups #Entrepreneurship

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Over the years of managing talented developers at COXIT, I’ve seen firsthand how the proper workspace setup can significantly boost productivity and job satisfaction. Based on my personal experience and that of our developers, here are a few suggestions: My personal productivity boosters: - Quality keyboard and mouse: I use the Numphy Air V2 keyboard and Logitech MX Anywhere 3s mouse, and I couldn’t be more satisfied with them. - The right music choice: For me, it was Dubstep between 2011 and 2015, and since then, it has been a few Drum and Bass playlists. - Physical routine every few hours: Doing 20 push-ups and 20 squats makes the heart beat faster, stimulating the brain. - A 1-hour power nap: I try to split my day into two, so my productivity is revived after the first half-day sprint. Here are some more practices I try to maintain: - Keep physical and digital workspaces tidy (especially challenging when working from home). - Wear protective glasses and take regular breaks to look away from the screen every few hours. - Add greenery to both the office and personal workspaces. (This is something we've embraced at COXIT.) - Plan tasks ahead of time using sticky notes or handwritten reminders, a method I prefer. The goal is to create an environment that supports deep work, which is challenging considering the short attention spans many of us have these days. Explore other elements that might work for you—meditation, aromatherapy, power naps, or a standing desk—and incorporate them into your routine. Now, I’m curious about you. What’s your favorite working music or work equipment? How have you customized your environment to boost productivity?

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While recovering from the Exit Festival, sipping on my first morning coffee after dancing all night to Rudimental and Dub FX until 4 am, I got some exciting news from the Serbian community: DocsCube 2.0 is now live on Product Hunt! 🚀 My friends Teon Stamenovic and Nikola Cvetkovic are launching DocsCube today, and they need our support! So, what's new in DocsCube? DocsCube is rolling out Deal Rooms—a shared professional space for closing deals, signing contracts, and onboarding customers. The main goal here is to smooth out the B2B buying process. Take control of the buyer's journey with 👇 1. B2B Deal Rooms 2. Forms & workflow automation 3. Documents & unlimited eSignatures 👉 Show them some love on Product Hunt: https://lnkd.in/dfqM6qX6 Let's make it happen!

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Being a founder is all about work flexibility, right? Wrong. Productive routine matters a lot. But like most of us, I haven't yet cracked the code for the perfect balance. Especially difficult when you don't have external accountability. Viktor Tsvil 🇺🇦 and I like to romanticize the period when we started Taita a year ago in San Francisco. Back then, it seemed we found a near-perfect work-life balance. ✅ Wake up between 7 am and 8 am. ✅ Viktor would often wake up a bit earlier and prepare breakfast for Ivanna Kreshchenetska and me. We lived together, like a true startup house. ✅ We’d pack a healthy lunch and go to a co-working space to work. ✅ Check out by 4-5 pm. Extremely productive 8 hours of work. ✅ Then, gym and social activities. Fulfilling rest. ✅ Weekends for personal projects (e.g., I was working on a cool research paper that sadly never got published). We felt productive. We felt rested. We felt like we could achieve anything without working more than full-time. Interestingly, the work-life balance crumbled as soon as we moved to Tokyo. We’ve been sucked into the workaholic culture. Staying in the office until 9-10 pm quickly changed from being an exception to being a rule. Gym or any sort of sports stopped being a part of a daily plan. Rest was superficial. We’ve put in more hours of work but the work seemed less productive, and more stressful. Here’s what ChatGPT thinks have been the reasons: - Cultural emphasis on long work hours in Japan - Quality of sleep due to increased stress - Regular, meaningful social activities in SF - Community support and networking opportunities in SF Not sure I agree with everything. What do you all think? 🤔

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Why we created the next AI assistant: non-obvious reasons 👀 How it all started: – In the nascent days of mymeet, when GPT-2 was in vogue, it seemed to us that in-house development was our everything. Briefly, who doesn't know what mymeet. ai is - AI for online meetings. It will come to the call, make a transcript, summary, write down tasks with deadlines and people in charge – In 2022, when talking to investors, faced with a haunting question: how will you compete when Google and Microsoft release something like this? (and yes, they did). Then we realized: dreams of venture capital millions are off. Switching to bootstrap 🫠🫠🫠 Lesson of the year: technology is getting cheaper, and the real value is now in UX/UI and sales. You need to be where it's convenient for the user, at the right moment. Have access to decision makers and be able to reach the first hundred customers manually, and then build the sales machine. That said, we are not competing with Google / Microsoft / etc because: 1. they will always be sharpened to use their own ecosystem models. Their own models are not always the top, we take the best from the market and use it in the product 2. big companies are not ready to go for on-premise solutions and customization (e.g. a unique type of report after a meeting) 3. Our clients: salespeople, recruiters, researchers who call in a bunch of different callers where it is convenient for their counterparties. They need an end-to-end solution for all VCS and a common meeting repository 4. A client's life is richer than just going to a meeting and getting a report on it. He wants to automatically record the meeting, make a transcript of the webinar into an article for the website or a script for another rilsik, collect all the results of all the meetings and quickly get insights, embed us somewhere via API in a complex process. We're going in that direction, grabbing more and more users' jobs left and right of CJM 🚀💪 So, yes, we made another AI assistant and we're happy about it! The market is there, the JTBD is clear, and along the way we are looking for differentiation and fighting for every millimeter of product value for the customer. P.S. the photo is of me and my co-founder CTO Fedor Zhilkin

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I tested GPT o1 against all logical tasks that were too complicated for previous versions. The answers were simply wrong, not conclusive, too vague. But there are not so many comments on o1. It solved all the tasks correctly. That is it. So, I switched to creativity tests. I used standard Guilford's question on the different usages of a brick. A regular person can come up with ~40 usages before repeating themselves. Of course, not all the answers are different. People tend to use a brick for building purposes: houses, roads, garden decorations... 𒋰 o1 easily provided me with 50 different usages, and all of them were adequate, despite some of them being too creative, in my opinion. 𒋰 o1 was able to do a proper classification. For instance, to make a sublist for situations where a brick was used because of its property of durability for building purposes and a sublist for situations where a brick was used because of its property of mass. 𒋰 Moreover, o1 demonstrated an understanding of its mistakes from one example and adjusted all the lists accordingly. 𒋰 And what I liked the most. o1 tends to agree with a user. 'Jack is using a brick to increase a water lever in a pool'. When I asked o1 to classify this case, o1 classified it as the property of the mass sublist. It is obvious to me that, in that case, volume is important, while having the property of mass is crucial for a brick to sink. I asked o1 to argue with me. And it did! Its arguments were valid enough to convince me that Jack uses the property of mass in his experiment. So, in general, I was astonished by o1. I've already read a lot of objections from people who, obviously, have more expertise than me. But I want to conclude that I can see a lot of business implementation here.

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THE PATH OF A WILDLY SUCCESSFUL STARTUP 1️⃣ Hard Work 2️⃣ Attention to Customer Feedback 3️⃣ More Hard Work, and then 4️⃣ ⚡️Disrupt⚡️ an Industry Marko Jak and his teams at Secta Labs have bootstrapped their way to thousands of LinkedIn profile photos, and they're just getting started. This week they rolled out body🕺🏻 shots, great for when you need more than just a headshot view. They're fantastic🌟... but in looking at the new model, I see just how far this team has come in terms of photo-realism... My 🙃 smile lines are alllll there, but a half-dozen other sticky issues have been solved. This is good 🤖 technology, my friends. For those I've pestered and stalked to replace your outdated, worn-and-weary headshots (you know who you are - and yes, I'm talking to you 👀)... You've seen me after Barre class and at campfires; the shots below were modeled on 🤳🏼selfies taken during the pandemic... after campfires.🔥 I don't own any of those clothes or 💍 jewelry, and I certainly didn't get fixed up for the photos 📸. Legend is, all my pix were uploaded while in my pajamas drinking a cup of Lady Grey tea late one night. We all deserve to present ourselves in the best possible light, but few of us have patience to chase the details of getting proper photos taken. Everyone should try Secta Labs and see for themselves just how far #AI photography has come.✨ Tell them Tonya sent you... I'm their biggest fan, as long as I don't have to arm wrestle Victoria or Kelli to prove it. 🫶🏼 🐦‍⬛ Quantum Crow Advisory 🐦‍⬛

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I was on YouTube watching yet another AI garbage video and as usual it was interrupted by ads, and of course targeted ads, not about my dream trip or Swift programming assistant, nope... It was Personal Assistant who was supposed to help me with my diary! Great, I need one of these! But then I looked at the calendar in the demo which the nice looking young gentleman presented as a great help and if you do the same and look closely you will understand the target marketing audience. Fake workers need tools to pretend: "Pretend like I'm working from home 9-10 AM" "Most important meal of day 9-10 AM" "Write top 40 song 11:30 AM - 12 PM"... I understand this is a demo, but does this look like a frighteningly real schedule of people addicted to AI? 😉

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We recently set up Plausible Analytics on Dub.co for web analytics and have been loving it: ◆ Cross-domain conversion tracking support ◆ Create public/password-protected dashboards for easy sharing with external stakeholders ◆ Mintlify integration 🌿 I've personally been a huge fan of what Marko Saric has been building for a while now, so very excited to be using them in production. This article that he wrote about how Plausible got to 1M ARR as an open-source SaaS has been a big inspiration as well: https://d.to/NcRKhNy

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"Organizing an full day in-person event is easy and fun." - Said no one ever. 😅 Where do I even begin? Last year was also the first year of my start-up, Particula. And anyone who has ever built a start-up knows how exhausting and crucial the first years are. What I wanted to avoid at all costs was burying myself in work and never talking publicly about what Particula does—I wanted to build brand awareness and reputation as early as possible. Because of this, I traveled a lot last year and attended several conferences, including the RWA Summit by Centrifuge in New York. I have to be honest, the people at Centrifuge know what they're doing because the event was one of the best I’ve been to. I liked that it wasn’t huge and that the focus was on tokenization rather than general about digital assets, where it feels like every second person is doing something in staking - Everyone present was relevant to me in some way. That same evening, I spoke with Maex Ament (Co-Founder of Centrifuge), congratulated him, and told him I wanted to do something like that in Germany. He just smiled and said, “Nadine, remember you’re still small, Centrifuge has very different resources.” I must admit, this triggered my (sometimes unhealthy) ambition. (Of course, he was right; it’s sometimes a bit much and without our co-organizer Blockstories, it probably wouldn’t have been possible.) But now, here we are almost a year later and just about two weeks away from our first major event: TOKENFUTURE 2024! I am over the moon excited with the line-up, the location, and all the positive feedback we’ve received in recent weeks. It was and is important to us to create value for everyone and to really dive deep into the topics, something I’ve missed at most other conferences. So, if you’ve read this far and definitely want to be there, send me a message and I’ll see what I can do! 😉 Cheers, Nadine P.S. I definitely need a little break after that - therefore thinking back of this great evening at the RWA Summit in NYC with this amazing view 🤩

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What I read last weekend ** 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗞𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗔**𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗲 ** Turns out, good and horrible founders have the same characteristics, but very different characters. How do you tell them apart up front? (It’s super easy after a few days of working together though) --> https://lnkd.in/dsU9wD6J ** 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲 𝗮 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗿 ** You are Volkswagen, it’s 1949. You want to sell the car Hitler commissioned. To Americans. The car is about half the size of an American car, but gas is still cheap. Ah, the car also looks a bit odd.  Your ad agency has a secret weapon though: humor. These ads have everything I miss from this region: a sense of humor, the clever, self-deprecating kind. Copywriting that sounds like a human had written it. --> https://lnkd.in/dUwv4T3T ** 𝗥𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗣𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗧𝗮𝗹𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁𝘀 ** Robo-advisors for investments were statistically better than humans. Nevertheless, they did not succeed. Why? We will soon all talk to AI agents (and those are probably way better than the lets-not-even-mention-them-anymore chatbots of yesteryear) but here’s why they still won’t replace many human ones.  --> https://lnkd.in/dHYV7gqx

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Don’t let a €1 problem turn into a €1000 headache - and why rescue projects cost more... In e-commerce, as in life, small issues left unchecked can snowball into massive, costly problems. Fixing a minor glitch today might cost you a euro, but ignoring it? That could turn into a €1000 headache before you know it. By the time we’re brought in for a rescue project, that tiny problem has often spiralled out of control and it’s not pretty. Most of the projects we take over are buried under so much technical debt that things have ground to a halt. Performance tanks, features break, and maintenance becomes impossible. Our first step? Clean up the mess. We strip out unnecessary or poorly implemented features and bring the system back to a lean, manageable state. Once the shop is stable, the next step is almost always performance. After spending more than they’d like fixing old mistakes, clients are understandably wary of costly bespoke projects. Standardised tools allow us to make impactful improvements, like faster load times at a fraction of the cost. It’s this mix of deep cleaning and efficient upgrades that sets us apart. Not every agency likes to tackle messy rescues, but we thrive on turning chaotic projects into streamlined, high-performing webshops. And by focusing on scalable, standardised solutions, we help clients future-proof their investment without breaking the bank. Have you ever faced a project that spiralled out of control? Let’s talk about how to stop a €1 issue from becoming a €1000 problem!

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Dear Santa, For Christmas this year, this is my professional wishlist: 1. For everyone to learn that “AI” is many things, not just ChatGPT 2. A mandatory TL;DR at the top of all privacy policies, Terms of Service etc. - so that I have less text to not read and accept. 3. That we start sharing more of our failures and hardships openly, not just “look how much we sold for in X” 4. A global ban on sending clearly AI-written job applications 5. To become cool enough to be invited to Harry Stebbings podcast 6. For companies to start naming their AI projects something superiorly cool like “Project Skubilubf” or "Project Cheeseburger" 7. Another global ban, this time on AI-automated B2B outreach 8. A tiny bit less red tape in Europe regarding AI adoption. Just a tad. 9. A global halftime break in the AI race, to just take a couple of days to breathe and get an overview of everything… jesus christ 10. Another year of +100% growth in Good Tape please I’ll put out the milk and cookies - thank you! 🤞

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What is your favorite type of client? While all of them are equally important, I just love working with tech-savvy people! It’s always a great pleasure for me to have conversations with individuals who deeply understand technical specifics and can even challenge your knowledge of some details. And if they also possess great soft skills (especially open-mindedness), it’s a true find. Why do I love these features in my customers? Usually, such individuals know exactly what they need for their projects. Given that we are technical professionals too, it’s easier to identify the challenges that need to be tackled and find common ground. Birds of a feather flock together, as they say. Do you enjoy working with tech-savvy clients too?

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How compared to many digital health companies, Mykare’s metrics will be among the best in most areas✨🔥 One area I always want to focus 🧘‍♂️ on as a founder is maintaining the spirit and motivation of both myself and the team 🌟. Trust me, it can be challenging. There are times when you might be fully energised ⚡️ while the team isn't, and vice versa. But over time, I've learned one crucial thing: if the team truly understands what you’re aiming for— what you want to achieve, how you plan to get there, and how everyone will benefit, along with our customers—they'll be more aligned. ✨ To make that happen, the problem we’re solving needs to be clearly communicated, discussed, and understood by everyone. If they don’t understand it, they won’t grasp why it matters or how they can contribute to the solution. At Mykare we, instead of just telling the team what work they have to do, we started communicating what problem we're facing and allow anyone to step in and solve it. In fact, most bottlenecks ☝️ within our team have been solved by the team itself—not by me or the other founders. When we’re open to listening to them and let them take the lead, you’ll see incredible results. We get excited about solving problems and breaking through bottlenecks together.😎 We regularly experience this: we present a problem, and together, at every level, we solve it as a team. Weekly, two or three times, we take the time to identify new problems, solve them, and keep moving the team forward, inch by inch. 🚀 The key is allowing the team to take charge in solving these challenges, rather than standing over them and dictating every move. Once they solve it, make sure to acknowledge their contribution, give them the credit they deserve, and show it to others.🙌 Enjoy the journey together. It’s like what we see in the Nehru Trophy boat race—everyone is equal, rowing together toward one shared goal.🚣 By communicating, demonstrating, and putting this into action, you’ll see that it’s not just you or your co-founders driving the company. The whole team begins to feel like founders themselves, building the company together. If you can elevate the team to that level, it’s the first step toward even greater achievements. Here I want to acknowledge that my team have showed me more progress in matrix than I able to identify 🔥🔥🔥✨✨🫶🫶 We become unit level positive with better EBITA , ROAS, CAC , Revenue Growth, Patient Experience, our Partner hospital growth , collections, HR, Finance , Tech , Content and Digital… all areas they are stars 🌟 I love our team for this very reason: together, we’re always pushing to solve the problems we see. Let me know about how you manage your bottleneck and how your team contributes…. 🔥 Hari TN Sandeep Singhal Sandeep Divakaran Andrew Parker Alfredo Vaamonde Sanil Sachar

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The SaaS industry is still growing. But much more slowly. Last month I shared an Aleph statistic. Over the last 3 years we have invested in 17 companies. Only 1 out 17 was a classic horizontal SaaS company. SaaS was the single best business model of the last cycle (2008-2021), but the category has since entered a maturity stage (see graph below). This new report from the wonderful software team at Avenir clearly illustrates it. Growth rates for the combined SaaS industry are quickly declining as we are entering the later stages of maturity. In other words, there’s already an established software company in most sectors - and there’s very little room for entirely new software categories. At Aleph we still believe there’s an opportunity to build successful SaaS companies, but new entrants would have to carve out market share in existing industries and displace existing vendors. Vertical software is one area where lesser competition makes it more attractive, but entrepreneurs in crowded horizontal markets would have to work harder than ever before. Another key takeaway from the report - there are only 72 publicly traded companies (with market cap > $5Bn) with a combined market cap of $5.8Tr. However, 56% of this value is attributed to Microsoft alone, followed by a very long tail of lesser performing companies. Moreover, only 2 of the largest 11 companies were funded after the year 2000 (ServiceNow, CrowdStrike). If you are building or investing in SaaS, you should definitely read the full report by Jared Sleeper, Hannah Bao and David Prilutsky (link in the first comment).

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- There are 30 Mio devs or so. - But how many great devs are there, who have a good understanding of software engineering AND machine learning and are interested in building AI agents? - How many of those practice meditation at least sometimes or did so for some time? - How many of those are super curious about consciousness? Maybe you? Or you know someone? If so, I would love to chat!

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Tech founders usually struggle to share their stories. But why? Far too often, I see highly technical individuals sharing their stories during media interviews, panel discussions or online forums. But no one listens - or cares. Sure, there are those who naturally captivate their audience. But a large % don't. I say it comes down to three things: 1️⃣ They struggle to distill their ideas into one clear, repeatable message. 2️⃣ They haven't prepared. 3️⃣ They simply haven't practised these types of engagements enough. A lot of it comes down to focus and practice. Storytelling is about presenting ideas in a way that others can understand, relate to and stay engaged with. Even if the subject matter is niche. For those in my network who support startups with media and broader communications, what are your thoughts on this? Alexandra Dewar Louay Al Samarrai Colm Woods Seán Pattwell

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