LaunchPad

🚀 LaunchPad #28: New MacBook Drop 🍎

Shivam Purohit — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:30:28 GMT

🗞️ Tech TLDR of the Week

Apple unveils new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with the M5 chip, continuing its rapid pace of in-house silicon upgrades.
ChatGPT installs surged 295% after a U.S. Department of Defense deal, highlighting how government adoption is becoming a major catalyst for AI distribution.
Stripe is exploring ways to turn AI infrastructure costs into revenue streams, signaling a shift toward monetizing AI usage directly through payments platforms.
Anduril is reportedly set to double its valuation with a new $4B round, showing just how hot defense tech and AI-powered military systems have become.
OpenAI is developing a potential alternative to GitHub, which could shake up the developer tooling ecosystem if it gains traction.
CrowdStrike forecasts strong revenue growth into 2027, driven largely by rising demand for cybersecurity as AI adoption accelerates.
Users are increasingly experimenting with switching from ChatGPT to Claude, as the AI model competition continues heating up.

Welcome to Issue #28 of LaunchPad. Every Tuesday, I share a curated list of Tech Ops roles like BizOps, RevOps, and Chief of Staff. Every Thursday, I drop a Spotlight deep dive on one standout company or role worth your attention. If you’re trying to break into tech or level up your career, you’re in the right place.

If a friend forwarded this to you, subscribe below so you don’t miss the next big drop.

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Chief of Staff

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Thanks for reading this week’s edition of LaunchPad! The job market can feel like the wild west some days, but my goal is for this to be a place you can rely on for high-quality roles, useful context, and a bit more confidence in your next step.

If you see something you like, go for it. If you find this helpful, please share it with a friend who’s also looking to break into tech or level up their career. More good things will be landing in your inbox next week!

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🔎 Spotlight #27: Inside Anthropic

Shivam Purohit — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 02:33:26 GMT

The founding story: building AI the cautious way

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, along with a group of former OpenAI researchers who wanted to take a different approach to frontier AI development.

Dario had previously led research at OpenAI. Daniela led safety and policy efforts. Together, they believed that the next generation of AI models would become extraordinarily powerful and that alignment, interpretability, and safety needed to be core product principles, not afterthoughts.

So they left and built their own lab.

Anthropic’s thesis was simple but bold: build cutting edge models, but design them from the ground up with safety research embedded into the architecture and training process.

That philosophy became “Constitutional AI,” their framework for training models to follow a set of principles rather than relying purely on human reinforcement learning.

Their flagship product line, Claude, is the public face of that work.

What Anthropic actually does

At its core, Anthropic is a frontier AI research and product company.

They develop large language models under the Claude brand, which power chat interfaces, enterprise tools, developer APIs, and integrations across productivity software.

Claude is positioned as:

• Highly capable in reasoning and long context tasks

• Strong in coding and analysis

• Designed with safety guardrails baked in

• Enterprise-ready with controllable outputs

Anthropic licenses its models via API to startups, enterprises, and partners. It has also integrated Claude into products through partnerships, including a major strategic investment and cloud partnership with Amazon.

Unlike many AI startups, Anthropic operates both as a research lab and a commercial software company. They are pushing model capabilities forward while simultaneously building enterprise distribution.

Funding and team at a glance

💰 Just raised a $30B series G at a $380B post-money valuation

🏦 Backed by Amazon, Google, Spark Capital, Menlo Ventures, and others

👥 4000+ employees

🌎 HQ: San Francisco, CA

🖥️ Website: anthropic.com

Anthropic is widely considered one of the leading frontier AI labs alongside OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and xAI.

The competition and how Anthropic compares

Anthropic competes directly with:

• OpenAI

• Google DeepMind

• xAI

• Meta AI

The differentiator is positioning.

OpenAI often leads with product velocity and ecosystem dominance. Google DeepMind leans into deep research and integration across Google’s stack. Anthropic leans heavily into safety-first design, transparency discussions, and enterprise trust.

Claude has developed a reputation for being particularly strong in long context windows and nuanced reasoning tasks, which has made it attractive for enterprise and developer use cases.

Anthropic is also aggressively releasing model updates, including the Sonnet line, to remain competitive in performance benchmarks.

The race is tight. The capital intensity is massive. The infrastructure demands are growing by the month.

Anthropic is not trying to be loud. It is trying to be durable.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 just dropped

Anthropic recently rolled out Claude Sonnet 4.6, and the benchmarks tell a pretty clear story.

On OSWorld and OSWorld-Verified computer use evaluations, Sonnet has steadily improved from 14.9% (Sonnet 3.5) to 28.0% (3.7), then 42.2% (4.0), 61.4% (4.5), and now 72.5% with 4.6.

That’s not a marginal bump. That’s a compounding curve.

These tests measure how well the model can handle multi-step computer tasks, which is increasingly important as AI moves from chat interfaces into actual workflow automation. A jump into the 70% range suggests 4.6 is significantly more reliable when interacting with structured systems and executing complex instructions.

What this means in practice is simple: Claude is getting meaningfully better at doing things, not just talking about them.

Sonnet 4.6 doesn’t feel like hype. It feels like tightening execution. And in a world where enterprises care about reliability more than demos, that trajectory matters.

Sam Altman 🤝 Dario Amodei… on the same stage?

Literally days after Anthropic announced its $30B raise at a $380B valuation, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman ended up on the same stage at the India AI Summit.

You have to appreciate the timing.

These two are leading arguably the most intense rivalry in tech right now. Billions in funding. Benchmark wars. Enterprise contracts. Talent poaching. The whole thing.

And yet there they are, sitting side by side, calmly discussing the future of AI like they’re co-founders of a startup instead of competitors in a global compute arms race.

There’s something very 2026 about it. Hyper-competitive behind the scenes, collaborative and polite on stage.

The AI race is serious. The optics? Slightly hilarious.

Anthropic raises $30B at a $380B valuation

Just eight days ago, Anthropic announced a massive $30 billion Series G round, bringing its post-money valuation to $380 billion.

That number is staggering. It cements Anthropic as one of the most valuable private AI companies in the world and signals just how aggressively capital is flowing into frontier model development.

The raise reflects two realities. First, training and deploying state-of-the-art AI models requires extraordinary amounts of compute, infrastructure, and top-tier research talent. Second, investors clearly believe that a handful of frontier labs will become foundational infrastructure for the global economy.

With this round, Anthropic is not just competing. It is fully capitalized to operate at the highest tier of the AI arms race alongside OpenAI and Google Gemini and DeepMind. The scale of funding also reinforces how quickly AI labs have transformed from research-heavy startups into geopolitical, infrastructure-level players.

My take

Anthropic feels like one of the most strategically positioned companies in AI right now.

They have serious research credibility. They have distribution through AWS. They have capital to compete. And they have a differentiated brand built around safety and thoughtful deployment.

What stands out most to me is that they are playing a long game. In a space full of hype cycles and viral demos, Anthropic is building infrastructure that enterprises can actually trust.

If you care about frontier AI, research-driven companies, or the long-term architecture of the AI economy, Anthropic is absolutely one to watch.

The model race may grab headlines, but the companies that combine capability with discipline will likely define the next decade.

🧭 Anthropic Roles

These are some pretty cool roles at Anthropic at the moment. I encourage you to keep in tune with future LaunchPad job posts to see any new exciting roles that pop up at Anthropic and many other cool firms!

That’s a wrap on Spotlight #27

If you made it this far, thank you for reading! I hope these spotlights help you discover companies worth your time, and make the job hunt feel just a little bit less overwhelming. Keep an eye out for next Tuesday’s LaunchPad job drop, and if you know someone looking to break into tech or level up, feel free to share this with them too.

Here’s to building something cool, or better yet, joining something cool. 🚀

If this post helped you, consider sharing it to your friends to “launch” their tech career:

🚀 LaunchPad #27: New AI Models 🤝 Jobs

Shivam Purohit — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 01:16:06 GMT

🗞️ Tech TLDR of the Week

Thrive Capital raises $10B for its latest fund, doubling down on AI and late-stage tech bets as mega-funds continue to dominate venture.
Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.6, pushing forward model performance as the frontier AI race intensifies.
Apple is reportedly developing a trio of AI wearables, signalling that ambient AI hardware could be the next big consumer battleground.
Adani commits $100B to data center expansion in India, underscoring how AI infrastructure has become a global arms race.
Waymo defends its use of remote assistance in U.S. robotaxi operations, highlighting the messy reality behind “fully autonomous” vehicles.
Tiger Global trims stakes in AI heavyweights, suggesting even big believers are recalibrating positions after a massive AI run-up.
Palo Alto Networks cuts its annual profit forecast, showing that even cybersecurity leaders are feeling margin pressure in a tighter enterprise environment.

Welcome to Issue #27 of LaunchPad. Every Tuesday, I share a curated list of Tech Ops roles like BizOps, RevOps, and Chief of Staff. Every Thursday, I drop a Spotlight deep dive on one standout company or role worth your attention. If you’re trying to break into tech or level up your career, you’re in the right place.

If a friend forwarded this to you, subscribe below so you don’t miss the next big drop.

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🔎 Spotlight #26: Inside Zip

Shivam Purohit — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 23:54:52 GMT

The founding story: fixing how companies actually buy things

Zip was founded in 2020 by Rujul Zaparde and Lu Cheng, two former Airbnb employees who saw firsthand how broken enterprise procurement really was.

Despite companies investing billions into ERP systems and finance software, the actual process of requesting, approving, and purchasing tools was chaotic. Employees didn’t know how to buy software. Finance teams had no visibility. Procurement teams were stuck chasing emails and spreadsheets. Shadow IT was everywhere.

Zaparde and Cheng realized something simple but powerful: before you optimize procurement, you need to fix the intake.

So they built Zip as a procurement orchestration platform. Not another ERP. Not another legacy procurement suite. Instead, a modern layer that sits on top of existing systems and makes purchasing actually usable.

What started as a workflow tool has evolved into a central nervous system for how companies request, approve, and manage spend.

What Zip actually does

At its core, Zip is an intake-to-procure platform.

That means it gives employees a single place to request anything they need to buy, from SaaS subscriptions to agencies to hardware. Behind the scenes, Zip routes those requests through the correct approval chains, integrates with finance and ERP systems, and provides visibility into spend before money goes out the door.

Key capabilities include:

• Guided purchasing workflows
• Automated approval routing
• Integration with systems like SAP, Oracle, and Coupa
• Real-time visibility into company-wide spend
• Vendor onboarding and risk management workflows

Instead of procurement being a blocker, Zip aims to make it a streamlined experience for employees while giving finance leaders control and data.

It’s not flashy. It’s operational plumbing. But in enterprise software, plumbing wins.

Funding and team at a glance

💰 Raised over $190M in late 2024, valued at $2.2B
🏦 Backed by investors including Y Combinator, Tiger Global, BOND, YC Continuity, and CRV
👥 1000+ employees
🌎 HQ: San Francisco, CA
🖥️ Website: ziphq.com

The competition and how Zip compares

Zip operates in the broader procurement and spend management ecosystem. Competitors include:

• Coupa
• SAP Ariba
• Oracle Procurement Cloud
• GEP
• ServiceNow (workflow layer)

Traditional procurement tools tend to be heavy, ERP-native systems that require complex implementation. Zip’s edge is that it focuses on orchestration and user experience first.

Instead of replacing your ERP, Zip sits on top of it.

That positioning has helped them win over modern CFOs and procurement leaders who want visibility and control without ripping out existing systems.

In many ways, Zip is doing for procurement what companies like Ramp and Brex did for corporate cards. Make it easier. Make it visible. Make it modern.

Expanding north: Zip opens its Toronto office 🇨🇦

Zip recently announced the opening of a Toronto office, marking a meaningful expansion into Canada’s growing enterprise tech ecosystem.

This move is not random. Toronto has quietly become one of North America’s strongest hubs for fintech, enterprise SaaS, and AI talent. By planting roots here, Zip gains access to a deep talent pool while strengthening relationships with Canadian enterprises and multinational companies operating in the region.

It also signals something important: Zip is not just building a US-centric procurement tool. They are scaling into a global procurement platform. Expansion into Toronto reflects long-term ambition, not just opportunistic growth.

$6B in customer savings: proving procurement is a growth lever

Zip recently reported that its platform has helped customers save over $6 billion through smarter procurement workflows and AI-powered automation.

That number matters.

Procurement has historically been seen as administrative overhead. Zip is reframing it as a margin protection engine. By improving intake visibility, automating approvals, and centralizing purchasing data, companies are identifying redundant tools, negotiating better vendor contracts, and reducing unauthorized spend.

The article also highlights Zip’s work with major global enterprises, reinforcing that this is not a mid-market experiment. Large, sophisticated companies are relying on Zip to modernize purchasing at scale.

In today’s environment, where efficiency is king and CFOs are under pressure, demonstrating measurable cost savings is a massive competitive advantage. Zip is not just selling workflow software. They are selling financial impact.

And in enterprise software, impact wins.

My take

Zip is tackling a problem that almost every growing company runs into but few think about until it becomes painful.

Procurement is messy. Requests live in Slack threads, approvals get buried in email, finance teams lack visibility, and spend creeps up quietly in the background. It is not flashy work, but it is mission critical. Zip brings structure and clarity to that chaos.

What I like most is that Zip positions procurement as a strategic lever, not a back office chore. By centralizing intake and layering in automation and AI, they are helping companies move faster while staying financially disciplined. In this environment, that balance matters more than ever.

If you care about operational excellence, scalable systems, or building companies that can grow without losing control of spend, Zip is absolutely worth watching. This is the kind of infrastructure that becomes invisible once implemented, but incredibly hard to live without once removed.

🧭 Zip Roles

These are some pretty cool roles at Zip at the moment. I encourage you to keep in tune with future LaunchPad job posts to see any new exciting roles that pop up at Zip and many other cool firms!

That’s a wrap on Spotlight #26

Here’s to building something cool, or better yet, joining something cool. 🚀

If this post helped you, consider sharing it to your friends to “launch” their tech career:

🚀 LaunchPad #26: Trifold Phones and Jobs

Shivam Purohit — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 02:51:34 GMT

🗞️ Tech TLDR of the Week

Half of xAI’s founding team has reportedly left, raising questions about talent churn and execution at Elon Musk’s AI venture.
AI-generated music made its Olympic debut, as an ice dance duo skated to a track composed with AI tools.
Rivian revealed how it redesigned the R2’s rear door manual release, showing how EV makers are obsessing over UX details.
Amazon may launch a marketplace where media companies sell content directly to AI firms, opening a new front in the AI data economy.
Vega raised $120M in Series B to help enterprises better detect and respond to cyber threats.
Samsung’s TriFold phone is expected to cost $2,899 in the US, pushing premium hardware pricing even further.

Welcome to Issue #26 of LaunchPad. Every Tuesday, I share a curated list of Tech Ops roles like BizOps, RevOps, and Chief of Staff. Every Thursday, I drop a Spotlight deep dive on one standout company or role worth your attention. If you’re trying to break into tech or level up your career, you’re in the right place.

If a friend forwarded this to you, subscribe below so you don’t miss the next big drop.

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Strategy & Operations (BizOps)

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Revenue Operations (RevOps)

Canada 🇨🇦

USA 🇺🇸

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Chief of Staff

Canada 🇨🇦

Chief of Staff @ Ribbon
Chief of Staff @ Nango
Chief of Staff @ SpryPoint
Chief of Staff @ Affirm
Associate Chief of Staff @ BoomerangFX

USA 🇺🇸

Remote 🌍

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🚀 LaunchPad #25: AI Continues to Rule

Shivam Purohit — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 02:07:07 GMT

🗞️ Tech TLDR of the Week

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang shuts down OpenAI acquisition rumors, saying there is “no drama” as AI competition continues to heat up.
Teradyne stock jumps 12% after earnings, driven by surging demand tied to AI and automation.
Elon Musk’s xAI and SpaceX combination is being called the biggest merger of all time, raising big questions about AI, defense, and space consolidation.
Spain moves to ban social media for users under 16, part of a broader European crackdown on Big Tech and online safety.
Google earnings spark renewed questions around Apple’s Siri-Gemini partnership, as analysts look for clarity on AI strategy alignment.
Palantir stock rallies after beating earnings estimates, reinforcing investor confidence in AI-driven government and enterprise contracts.
A looming AI memory shortage is emerging, with SoftBank and Intel racing to get ahead of next-gen infrastructure constraints.

Welcome to Issue #25 of LaunchPad. Every Tuesday, I share a curated list of Tech Ops roles like BizOps, RevOps, and Chief of Staff. Every Thursday, I drop a Spotlight deep dive on one standout company or role worth your attention. If you’re trying to break into tech or level up your career, you’re in the right place.

If a friend forwarded this to you, subscribe below so you don’t miss the next big drop.

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Strategy & Operations (BizOps)

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USA 🇺🇸

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Revenue Operations (RevOps)

Canada 🇨🇦

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Chief of Staff

Canada 🇨🇦

Chief of Staff @ Wagepoint
Chief of Staff @ Ribbon
Chief of Staff @ Nango
Chief of Staff @ Nokia
Associate Chief of Staff @ BoomerangFX

USA 🇺🇸

Remote 🌍

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🔎 Spotlight #24: Inside CodeRabbit

Shivam Purohit — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 02:56:44 GMT

The founding story: fixing code review before it breaks teams

CodeRabbit was founded in early 2023 by Harjot Gill and Guritfaq Singh, two experienced engineers who saw a problem most development teams silently suffer through with a simple but painfully familiar observation: code review is one of the most important parts of software development, and also one of the most broken.

As engineering teams scaled, pull requests got larger, review cycles got slower, and feedback quality became inconsistent. Senior engineers were stretched thin, junior engineers waited days for responses, and critical issues slipped through because reviewers were overloaded or context switching.

The founders saw this firsthand. Code review was supposed to improve quality and collaboration, but in practice it had become a bottleneck. Instead of helping teams move faster, it slowed them down.

So they asked a straightforward question: what if AI could take the first pass?

Not to replace human reviewers, but to handle the repetitive, time consuming, and obvious parts of review so engineers could focus on judgment, architecture, and real decision making.

That question became CodeRabbit.

What CodeRabbit actually does

At its core, CodeRabbit is an AI-powered code review assistant that plugs directly into a team’s existing development workflow.

When a pull request is opened, CodeRabbit automatically reviews the changes and provides inline feedback across areas like:

Bugs and logical issues
Code quality and readability
Security risks
Performance considerations
Best practices and style consistency

Instead of waiting hours or days for initial feedback, developers get immediate, contextual comments right inside their pull request.

What makes CodeRabbit different is how opinionated and conversational the feedback feels. It does not just flag issues. It explains why something might be problematic, suggests alternatives, and adapts to the language and patterns used by the team.

The result is faster reviews, fewer back and forth cycles, and cleaner code before a human even touches the PR.

For engineering managers, it means shorter review queues and more consistent standards. For developers, it means learning happens in real time, not after a mistake ships.

Why AI code review is having a moment

Modern engineering teams move fast. Continuous deployment, microservices, and remote collaboration all increase the volume of code shipped every day.

But code review has not scaled at the same pace.

Most teams rely on a handful of senior engineers to maintain quality across dozens of repositories. That creates burnout and blind spots. CodeRabbit steps into that gap by acting as a first line of defense.

It does not replace human judgment. It augments it.

By catching common issues early, CodeRabbit allows humans to spend their time on higher leverage questions like system design, tradeoffs, and long term maintainability.

In a world where AI is being pushed into everything, this is one of the most practical use cases. It removes friction without getting in the way.

Funding and team at a glance

💰 Raised a $60M (valued at $550M) Series B backed by Scale Venture Partners

👥 100+ employees across the globe

🌎 Based in California, with presence in Bengaluru, India

🖥️ Website: coderabbit.ai

The competition and how CodeRabbit compares

CodeRabbit operates in the fast growing developer productivity and AI tooling space. Adjacent players include:

GitHub Copilot, focused on code generation
Amazon CodeWhisperer, embedded in AWS ecosystems
Static analysis tools like SonarQube, focused on rule based scanning

Where CodeRabbit stands apart is in review, not generation.

Instead of helping you write code, it helps you evaluate it.

That positioning matters. Generated code still needs review, and static tools often lack context. CodeRabbit lives directly inside the pull request, understands the diff, and speaks the language of developers.

It feels less like a scanner and more like a teammate who never gets tired.

Viral growth through UGC

Funny enough, I actually found CodeRabbit the same way a lot of developers are discovering new tools right now: TikTok. Creators like @the_varunrana have been sharing real pull requests, real code reviews, and real reactions to CodeRabbit catching issues they would have otherwise missed. It feels authentic, not scripted.

What’s smart is how naturally CodeRabbit fits into this format. The product is visual, opinionated, and easy to demo, which makes it perfect for short-form content. Instead of polished marketing, you’re seeing the tool in action inside real developer workflows, which builds trust fast.

This UGC-first motion is a huge advantage. Developers trust other developers, and CodeRabbit has positioned itself right where those conversations already happen. It’s less “here’s our product” and more “here’s how this actually saves me time,” which is exactly why it’s spreading.

Giving back to open source: a $1M commitment

CodeRabbit recently announced a $1 million commitment to open source, and it’s one of the more thoughtful moves I’ve seen from a young developer tools company.

The idea is simple. Open source software powers modern engineering, but the people maintaining it are often underfunded, overworked, and invisible. CodeRabbit is putting real money behind supporting maintainers, projects, and communities that form the backbone of the developer ecosystem.

Instead of treating open source as a marketing checkbox, they’re treating it as infrastructure. The commitment is meant to fund maintainers directly, sponsor critical projects, and help sustain the tools engineers rely on every day. It also aligns closely with CodeRabbit’s own mission. Better code review only works if the broader ecosystem stays healthy.

For a company building in developer tooling, this move builds a lot of goodwill. It signals long-term thinking, respect for the community, and an understanding that great software does not exist in isolation.

My take

CodeRabbit is tackling a problem every engineering team understands but few have solved well.

Code review is critical, but it is also one of the biggest sources of friction in shipping software. By automating the obvious and accelerating feedback loops, CodeRabbit gives teams something rare: speed without sacrificing quality.

What I like most is that it respects the human in the loop. It does not pretend AI can replace judgment. It simply removes the noise so judgment can matter more.

If you care about developer productivity, engineering culture, or building scalable teams, CodeRabbit is absolutely worth watching. This is one of those tools that quietly becomes indispensable once it is in place.

🧭 CodeRabbit Roles

These are some pretty cool roles at CodeRabbit at the moment. I encourage you to keep in tune with future LaunchPad job posts to see any new exciting roles that pop up at CodeRabbit and many other cool firms!

That’s a wrap on Spotlight #24

Here’s to building something cool, or better yet, joining something cool. 🚀

If this post helped you, consider sharing it to your friends to “launch” their tech career:

🚀 LaunchPad #24: Snowstorms and Job Boards

Shivam Purohit — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:01:36 GMT

🗞️ Tech TLDR of the Week

Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs publicly condemn ICE violence, while also praising Trump’s recent comments, highlighting growing tension between tech leaders and U.S. policy.
TikTok says it is still working to recover parts of its U.S. infrastructure, raising fresh questions about platform resilience and geopolitical risk.
Airtable launches Superagent, officially entering the AI agent race as productivity tools race to embed autonomous workflows.
Amazon is shutting down more physical Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores, continuing its pullback from brick-and-mortar retail.
Samsung announces its TriFold phone will cost $2,899 in the U.S., underscoring how premium hardware pricing is climbing fast.
Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni raise $35M for Phia, betting that social and AI-powered shopping can make commerce feel fun again.

Welcome to Issue #24 of LaunchPad. Every Tuesday, I share a curated list of Tech Ops roles like BizOps, RevOps, and Chief of Staff. Every Thursday, I drop a Spotlight deep dive on one standout company or role worth your attention. If you’re trying to break into tech or level up your career, you’re in the right place.

If a friend forwarded this to you, subscribe below so you don’t miss the next big drop.

Subscribe now

Strategy & Operations (BizOps)

Canada 🇨🇦

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Revenue Operations (RevOps)

Canada 🇨🇦

USA 🇺🇸

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Chief of Staff

Canada 🇨🇦

USA 🇺🇸

Remote 🌍

If this post helped you, consider sharing it to your friends to “launch” their tech career:

🔎 Spotlight #23: Inside Cluely

Shivam Purohit — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 02:33:57 GMT

The founding story: turning interviews into a solvable problem

Cluely was founded by Roy Lee and Neel Shanmugam, two former Columbia University students who started with a blunt observation: interviews and live assessments often reward memorization and stress management more than real problem solving.

Instead of treating that as a flaw to work around, they treated it as a system to redesign.

Their question was simple. If people are allowed to use tools on the job, why are interviews the one place where help is banned? In real work, engineers Google, operators reference dashboards, and analysts use models. Yet interviews pretend none of that exists.

Cluely was built as a response to that disconnect.

I do not condone cheating of any sort lol just thought this company was interesting, don’t come for me

The lore: from InterviewCoder to Cluely

Before Cluely ever existed, Roy Lee was already poking the bear.

Roy first built Interview Coder, a tool that was very explicitly designed to help candidates cheat during technical interviews. There was no ambiguity about the intent. It listened during interviews and helped generate answers in real time. Unsurprisingly, it blew up. And just as quickly, it got banned, criticized, and written off as unethical by much of the hiring world.

Most founders would have stopped there.

Instead, Roy doubled down.

Rather than walking away, he reframed the entire argument. The backlash around InterviewCoder made something very clear to him. People were not just mad about cheating. They were uncomfortable confronting how artificial and outdated interviews had become.

So Cluely was born as the evolved version of that original idea.

Where InterviewCoder was deliberately provocative, Cluely was positioned as philosophical. The core question shifted from “How do I cheat interviews?” to “Why do interviews ban the exact tools people use every day at work?”

That context matters. Cluely did not come out of nowhere. It was the second act of a very intentional experiment. InterviewCoder tested the boundaries. Cluely challenged the assumptions behind those boundaries.

The lore is part of the product.

Roy has been unusually open about this progression, and that transparency is a big reason Cluely keeps showing up in conversations across tech Twitter, LinkedIn, and hiring circles. Love it or hate it, the company is not pretending this was accidental.

Cluely exists because InterviewCoder forced a reaction. And Cluely is the refined answer to that reaction.

What Cluely actually does

At its core, Cluely is a real time AI assistant designed for live interviews, screens, and technical evaluations.

It listens, understands context, and provides guidance during conversations or problem solving sessions. Think of it less as cheating and more as augmentation.

Cluely can help users:

Break down ambiguous interview questions
Structure responses more clearly under pressure
Get real time nudges during technical or case style prompts
Stay calm and organized when stakes are high

The key idea is not replacing thinking. It is reducing unnecessary friction. Cluely assumes that interviews should test judgment and reasoning, not memory recall or stress tolerance.

That philosophy is exactly why it sparked so much debate.

Funding and team at a glance

💰 $20.3M+ raised to date, including Abstract Ventures, Susa Ventures, and a16z
👥 Small but fast growing team of ~70 employees
🌎 Based in NYC
🖥️ Website: cluely.com

The competition and how Cluely compares

Cluely does not compete directly with traditional interview platforms like HackerRank or Codility. Those tools still focus on testing in isolation.

Its closest comparisons are:

Generic AI copilots that are not interview aware
Practice tools that stop working once the interview begins

Cluely’s differentiation is timing. It operates during the moment that matters most.

Rather than prepping you beforehand or grading you afterward, it exists inside the live interaction. That makes it uncomfortable for traditional hiring frameworks, but also uniquely powerful.

The real engine: UGC, distribution, and attention

Under the hood, Cluely is just as much a media and marketing company as it is a software startup.

Their biggest advantage isn’t purely the product. It’s distribution. The team has built a massive presence on Twitter and TikTok, where short clips, memes, and polarizing takes regularly rack up millions of views. Instead of polished launch announcements or traditional SaaS marketing, Cluely leans into internet-native storytelling. Fast edits, bold claims, and content that sparks debate.

A lot of their UGC blurs the line between product demo and satire. Some posts openly joke about “cheating,” others frame Cluely as a productivity edge, and many are designed to trigger strong reactions. That ambiguity is intentional. It keeps Cluely in the feed, in group chats, and in comment sections.

What’s clever is how tightly the content loop feeds the product. Every viral clip becomes a funnel. Every controversy becomes awareness. They are not waiting for press or enterprise deals to validate them. They are manufacturing attention in real time.

In that sense, Cluely feels less like a traditional startup and more like a modern consumer brand that happens to ship software. Distribution first, product second. And in today’s market, that playbook can be just as powerful as any technical moat.

Just check out their launch video and look how it’s set up. It’s really just a meme of a company in my honest opinion, but you can’t help but appreciate what they’re building and how they’re going against the grain.

My take

Cluely is not an easy company to have an opinion about, and that is exactly why it is interesting.

Personally, I do not condone any form of cheating/gaming the system, but as I said earlier, I can’t help but appreciate a company that goes against the grain. Their philosophy of “cheating” on everything has a great double meaning, because not only does it mean you can cheat on your technical interview, but you can take a sales call with Cluely and learn industry insights or tips about the client you’re chatting with.

Do I really think it’ll go far? I’m not quite sure. I think they’re an incredible viral marketing company. Are they an actual SaaS firm? Not in my books. But definitely something to keep an eye on!

🧭 Cluely Roles

Engineering Intern @ Cluely
Founding Engineer @ Cluely

These are some interesting (but technical) roles at Cluely. I probably won’t be sharing many more of their roles on LaunchPad, but who knows maybe I will one day.

That’s a wrap on Spotlight #23

Here’s to building something cool, or better yet, joining something cool. 🚀

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🚀 LaunchPad #23: I'm Back, and Happy New Year!

Shivam Purohit — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:11:13 GMT

It’s been a little while. I took a proper holiday break, extended it more than planned, and spent some much needed time with family. Stepping away was refreshing, but I’m excited to be back and get LaunchPad moving again.

If there’s one thing that didn’t change while I was away, it’s how hard it still is to find great, high quality roles in tech ops without digging endlessly. That’s exactly why I’m picking this back up. I’m here to keep surfacing interesting opportunities, sharing context on the market, and helping make the job hunt feel a bit more manageable.

Thanks for sticking around. Happy New Year, and let’s get back to it 🚀

🗞️ Tech TLDR of the Week

Humans&, a human-centric AI startup founded by alumni from Anthropic, xAI, and Google, raises a massive $480M seed round.
ICE becomes one of the most blocked accounts on Bluesky shortly after verification, spotlighting growing moderation tensions on new social platforms.
Netflix revises its offer to pay all cash to Warner Bros. in an effort to fend off Paramount, escalating the streaming consolidation race.
SpaceX failed to properly inspect a crane before its collapse at Starbase, according to OSHA findings.
Meta’s Oversight Board weighs in on permanent account bans in a landmark content moderation case.
Netflix rolls out a live voting feature, continuing its push into interactive entertainment.
Grubhub’s parent company acquires restaurant rewards startup Claim.
Indian “vibe-coding” startup Emergent triples its valuation to $300M after a $70M fundraise.

Welcome to Issue #23 of LaunchPad. Every Tuesday, I share a curated list of Tech Ops roles like BizOps, RevOps, and Chief of Staff. Every Thursday, I drop a Spotlight deep dive on one standout company or role worth your attention. If you’re trying to break into tech or level up your career, you’re in the right place.

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Chief of Staff

Canada 🇨🇦

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🚀 LaunchPad #22: New CROs and New Jobs

Shivam Purohit — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 02:42:35 GMT

🗞️ Tech TL;DR of the Week

OpenAI hires Slack’s former CEO as its new Chief Revenue Officer, signaling a stronger push toward commercial growth.
Intel takes a major step toward acquiring SambaNova as it doubles down on AI hardware.
America’s biggest Bitcoin miners are pivoting to AI by converting mining centers into compute infrastructure.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block announce a joint effort to create shared standards that help AI agents work together safely.
Mistral releases new open AI models as Europe works to keep pace with the US and China.
Microsoft announces a $7.5B Canadian data centre expansion with a focus on digital sovereignty.

Welcome to Issue #22 of LaunchPad. Every Tuesday, I share a curated list of Tech Ops roles like BizOps, RevOps, and Chief of Staff. Every Thursday, I drop a Spotlight deep dive on one standout company or role worth your attention. If you’re trying to break into tech or level up your career, you’re in the right place.

If a friend forwarded this to you, subscribe below so you don’t miss the next big drop.

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Revenue Operations (RevOps)

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Chief of Staff

Canada 🇨🇦

USA 🇺🇸

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🔎 Spotlight #21: Inside Kalshi

Shivam Purohit — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:05:56 GMT

Want to give a huge shoutout to Salman Sohani, a former classmate of mine in undergrad that works Growth at Kalshi for inspiring this week’s spotlight. Check him out to learn more about Kalshi and his amazing thought leadership!

The founding story: turning curiosity into a regulated market

Kalshi was founded in 2018 by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara (former professional ballerina btw), two MIT grads and absolute quant demons who bonded over a shared question: why can people invest in stocks, commodities, or currencies, but not on the outcomes of real-world events that actually drive those markets?

They had seen how everyday decisions and forecasts rely on probabilities. Elections, inflation reports, rate decisions, GDP prints, new product launches, even weather patterns constantly shape business results. Yet there was no regulated financial instrument that allowed someone to directly hedge or express a view on these outcomes.

So they built one.

Kalshi became the first federally regulated events exchange in the United States, approved by the CFTC. That approval process took years, dozens of legal battles, and more scrutiny than most fintechs face in a decade. But it paid off. Today, Kalshi lets traders buy and sell contracts on questions like:

Will the Fed raise rates at the next meeting
Will inflation come in above a certain percentage
How many jobs will be added in Friday’s payroll report
Will a major tech company hit a product milestone this quarter

Each contract settles at either zero or one dollar depending on whether the event happens, which creates a clean, binary trading experience centered on information, probability, and timing.

Kalshi’s goal is ambitious. They want to build a brand-new asset class, where information becomes a tradable product and forecasting becomes a market activity rather than a guessing game.

What Kalshi actually does

At its core, Kalshi is an events futures exchange, regulated similarly to the CME or CBOE. However instead of trading soybeans, lean hogs or interest-rate futures, users trade on the outcomes of real-world events.

This creates a new way to:

Hedge exposure to uncertain outcomes
Speculate based on research, data, or expertise
Price probabilities more accurately than polls or predictions
Tap into markets that historically had no financial instruments

An example is inflation. Companies and individuals regularly deal with inflation risk, but hedging it usually requires complex instruments like TIPS or rate swaps. On Kalshi, someone can simply buy a contract that pays out if CPI comes in above the expected level.

But it can go beyond all of that boring stuff as well. Not sure if you saw all the publicity, but with NYC electing a new mayor was all the rage. One side there was a youthful, charming fellow named Zohran, and then we had Andy Cuomo, that ran into some Sean “Diddy” Combs level allegations in 2021.

Kalshi is attempting to take the idea of prediction markets, clean them up, fully regulate them, and position them as a legitimate part of the financial system.

The vision is bold. If they succeed, “event contracts” could become as common as stock options.

Funding and team at a glance

💰 Just recently raised $1B at an $11B valuation from investors including Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, AH, and more, literally 2 months after they raised $300M
🏦 First fully regulated events exchange approved by the CFTC
👥 Team of 100+ employees
🌎 HQ: New York, NY
🖥️ Website: kalshi.com

The competition and how Kalshi compares

Kalshi sits in a unique position. Most “prediction markets” operate in grey areas or as hobbyist platforms. Some adjacent competitors include:

Polymarket
Crypto-based prediction market with large volume but limited regulation.

PredictIt
Popular for political markets, but constrained by regulatory restrictions.

Manifold
Runs more of a social prediction economy using virtual currency.

These platforms are fun and have strong communities, but they cannot support institutional money or regulated hedging activity.

Kalshi’s biggest differentiator is legitimacy. They are the only events exchange with federal approval, which means they can build markets that serious traders, institutions, and risk managers can use.

That regulatory moat is massive. In a world where markets are shaped by data and uncertainty, Kalshi wants to become the place where information has a price. And unlike consumer prediction apps, Kalshi is treating this like a financial product from day one.

Partnering with major media: Kalshi data becomes part of the news cycle

CNN has begun integrating Kalshi event market data directly into its election coverage, using real-time probability signals from Kalshi to help viewers understand how key political outcomes are shifting. CNBC also struck a partnership with Kalshi to incorporate their prediction data across their networks.

This is a big deal for a few reasons.

First, it shows that event markets are becoming part of mainstream information flows. Election coverage usually leans on polling, expert commentary, or models from places like FiveThirtyEight. Now, Kalshi is providing a live financial signal that reflects what traders believe the most likely outcomes are at any given moment.

Second, it validates Kalshi as more than just a trading platform. They are positioning themselves as an information engine. The probability data generated from Kalshi markets is becoming a resource that media organizations can use to explain complex events in a clearer way.

Third, it pushes prediction markets into the public consciousness. When a major media outlet like CNN or CNBC broadcasts Kalshi data, it normalizes the idea that markets can price real-world events with accuracy and transparency.

In short, this partnership helps Kalshi transition from a niche fintech to a mainstream forecasting tool. When your probability curves are being shown on national television, you are clearly shifting how the public thinks about prediction, uncertainty, and the future.

My take

Kalshi sits at one of the most interesting intersections in fintech: the overlap between financial infrastructure, regulatory innovation, and the psychology of prediction.

Personally, I find their concept fascinating because so much of our professional and personal decision making hinges on events we cannot control. The idea that you can hedge those moments or profit from your expertise is incredibly powerful.

Kalshi is growing like a wildfire, and their regulatory moat, strong founding team, and growing liquidity make them one of the most compelling fintech stories to watch right now.

If you care about markets, economics, or the future of trading, keep Kalshi on your radar. They are building something entirely new, and that does not happen often.

🧭 Kalshi Roles

These are some pretty cool roles at Kalshi in the moment. I encourage you to keep in tune with future LaunchPad job posts to see any new exciting roles that pop up at Kalshi and many other cool firms!

That’s a wrap on Spotlight #21

Here’s to building something cool, or better yet, joining something cool. 🚀

If this post helped you, consider sharing it to your friends to “launch” their tech career:

🚀 LaunchPad #21: AI, AI, and more AI

Shivam Purohit — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:45:56 GMT

🗞️ Tech TL;DR of the Week

Mistral releases new open AI models as Europe pushes to keep pace with the US and China.
OpenAI shifts into “code red” mode with major upgrades planned as competitors close the gap.
India proposes mandatory government app installs on all smartphones, raising privacy concerns.
Startup pitches are shifting to video, with founders replacing slide decks with short trailers.
Apple poaches Microsoft exec to lead its AI division, signaling a serious push in the AI race.
Samsung forms new M&A unit dedicated to acquiring AI and advanced chip technologies.
Germany’s Black Forest Labs emerges as a rising AI challenger with advanced image generation tech.

Welcome to Issue #21 of LaunchPad. Every Tuesday, I share a curated list of Tech Ops roles like BizOps, RevOps, and Chief of Staff. Every Thursday, I drop a Spotlight deep dive on one standout company or role worth your attention. If you’re trying to break into tech or level up your career, you’re in the right place.

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Strategy & Operations (BizOps)

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Business Operations Analyst @ Happy Money
Senior Strategy Associate @ Crypto.com
Business Operations Manager @ Pulley
Business Operations Lead @ Render
Business Operations @ Navina
Business Operations @ Paxos

Revenue Operations (RevOps)

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Chief of Staff

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Chief of Staff @ Coverdash (New York)
Chief of Staff @ Giga (San Francisco)
Chief of Staff @ Flam (San Francisco)
Chief of Staff @ Compass (New York)
Chief of Staff @ Nory (New York)
Chief of Staff to COO @ Coinbase (US Remote)

Remote 🌍

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🔎 Spotlight #20: Inside Ramp

Shivam Purohit — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 02:41:24 GMT

The founding story: rebuilding corporate finance from first principles

Ramp was founded in 2019 by Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh, and Gene Lee in New York City. Before Ramp, Glyman and Atiyeh built Paribus, a price-tracking tool that was acquired by Capital One. At Capital One, they saw a recurring problem across companies of all sizes. Businesses were drowning in bloated spend, messy expense reports, outdated cards, and little visibility into where their money was going.

The insight was simple. If you can help a business track spending more efficiently, you can help it run more efficiently. That became Ramp. A corporate card and finance automation platform built to help companies spend less, automate more, and run smarter.

Ramp grew fast by positioning itself as the opposite of traditional corporate cards. Instead of encouraging spend, it set out to eliminate waste. For finance teams, Ramp became both a cost-saving engine and an operational toolset, not just another card in a wallet.

What Ramp actually does

Ramp is a modern finance automation platform built to help companies control spending, close their books faster, and run finance with far less manual work. Think of it as a unified command center for everything related to spending.

Here’s what Ramp helps companies with:

Corporate cards
Custom spend limits, auto categorization, real-time alerts, and built-in compliance.

Bill pay automation
OCR for invoices, automated approvals, faster payment workflows.

Expense management
Receipt matching, policy enforcement, and automated coding.

Procurement and vendor management
Automated intake forms, workflows, and vendor renewals.

Accounting automation
Integrations with QuickBooks, Netsuite, Xero, and others, plus automated reconciliation.

Savings insights
AI-generated suggestions that help companies reduce spend across software, travel, and vendors.

Ramp’s whole philosophy is centered around giving finance teams leverage. Instead of juggling ten different tools, everything sits in one place, with automation doing the heavy lifting.

Funding and team at a glance

💰 Raised more than $2.2B USD to date from Founders Fund, Coatue, Thrive, Redpoint, and Stripe
🦄 Valued at over $32B USD
👥 3000+ employees across engineering, go-to-market, and operations
🌎 HQ in New York City with a growing remote workforce
🖥️ Website: ramp.com

The competition and how Ramp compares

Ramp operates in one of the most competitive categories in tech. Key players include:

Brex
Strong in startups and scale-ups. Focus on spend management and travel.

Airbase
More of an accounting and bill-pay heavy platform that appeals to mid-market finance teams.

Navan (formerly TripActions)
Travel first, spend second, but still a major player.

Float
A Canadian player, one that I’ve actually done a spotlight on. Focused on SMBs in the Canadian market.

Where Ramp stands apart:

Cost savings focus
Ramp markets itself as a savings tool first, card second. Their insights engine is a real differentiator.

Automation depth
They automate more of the close process than anyone else in the category.

Procurement workflows
A major edge as companies try to unify spend, intake, approvals, and vendor management.

Breadth of product
Ramp is trying to become the all-in-one financial operating system for companies, not just a spend tool.

Most importantly, Ramp’s UX is extremely clean. Finance teams love tools that get out of the way and just work, and Ramp has built a product that feels like it belongs in 2025, not 2010.

What Ramp is doing with investing and treasury: new partnership with Apex

Ramp recently announced a major step into the world of corporate investing through a partnership with Apex, and this move tells you exactly where the company is heading. Together, they unveiled a digital investing solution that helps businesses earn stronger returns on idle cash, all while staying inside the Ramp ecosystem.

The idea is simple. Most companies sit on cash that earns very little in traditional accounts. Ramp and Apex want to change that by giving finance teams easy access to automated investing options that align with their risk profile. Instead of manually moving money across accounts or juggling separate tools, businesses can now manage working capital, payments, spend, and returns in one place.

What stands out most is how seamless Ramp is trying to make this. The product handles liquidity needs, surfaces insights on optimal cash allocation, and helps companies make better decisions without extra operational overhead.

The launch of Ramp Agents

Another big update from Ramp is the introduction of Ramp Agents, a new automation layer designed to take on repetitive finance tasks that normally slow teams down. This is not a simple workflow builder. Ramp Agents act more like smart assistants that watch for patterns, surface recommendations, and trigger actions on behalf of finance teams.

Ramp describes Agents as a way to give finance teams leverage. Instead of spending hours chasing receipts, categorizing transactions, or fixing errors in accounting systems, Agents handle these tasks in the background. They look for inconsistencies, route items to the right people, and help maintain clean books without manual work.

The interesting part is how proactive these Agents are. They do not just respond to tasks. They help flag risks, catch issues before they become real problems, and keep everything running smoothly. Think of it like having a junior analyst who works 24 hours a day, never gets tired, and keeps improving.

This is another sign that Ramp is moving deeper into automation and intelligence. With spend controls, procurement, accounting automation, treasury, and now Agents, Ramp is slowly shaping itself into a platform that handles the heavy lifting for modern finance teams.

My take

Ramp is one of the most impressive operational platforms in modern SaaS. They have a clear vision, fast execution, and a product that solves painful problems for finance teams. What I like most is that Ramp isn’t trying to be flashy. They’re practical, precise, and deeply focused on saving time and money for businesses.

Funny enough, I’ve interviewed with them a few years ago for a Growth role in their NYC office. Super competitive process, and although I didn’t get the role, I could tell that the team moved at a rapid pace and was packed with a ton of smart individuals.

If you care about automation, enterprise-grade UX, or the future of cost control in tech, Ramp is one of the best case studies out there. They’ve already reshaped how companies think about finance workflows, and they’re not slowing down. Would also be a sick place to work!

🧭 Ramp Roles

These are some pretty cool roles at Ramp in the moment. Although not much, I encourage you to keep in tune with future LaunchPad job posts to see any new exciting roles that pop up at Ramp and many other cool firms!

That’s a wrap on Spotlight #20

Here’s to building something cool, or better yet, joining something cool. 🚀

If this post helped you, consider sharing it to your friends to “launch” their tech career:

🚀 LaunchPad #20: Hello, US Expansion

Shivam Purohit — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 23:00:59 GMT

The big two–zero feels like the right moment to level things up. Over the last few months, LaunchPad has grown from a Toronto-only job roundup into something much bigger. And today marks the first step in that evolution. LaunchPad is now centered on the world of Tech Ops: BizOps, RevOps, and Chief of Staff roles across Canada and the United States, with options for both onsite & remote roles in major markets like Toronto, New York, San Francisco, and more.

Going back to why I started this newsletter, I really wanted to create a resource for people trying to break out of traditional roles (banking, consulting) and enter tech. All things considered, I think operations is the best place to start, which is why I’ve trimmed down the job focus to the three categories listed above. In the coming issues, I plan to also include a TL;DR on the tech industry for our Tuesday issues, that way you can keep on top of the latest trends and news in the space.

With that, welcome to Issue #20 of LaunchPad. Every Tuesday, I share a curated list of Tech Ops roles like BizOps, RevOps, and Chief of Staff. Every Thursday, I drop a Spotlight deep dive on one standout company or role worth your attention. If you’re trying to break into tech or level up your career, you’re in the right place.

If a friend forwarded this to you, subscribe below so you don’t miss the next big drop.

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Strategy & Operations (BizOps)

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Revenue Operations (RevOps)

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Chief of Staff

Canada 🇨🇦

USA 🇺🇸

Chief of Staff @ Coverdash
Chief of Staff @ Mbodi AI
Chief of Staff @ Nory
Chief of Staff, LSS Marketing @ LinkedIn
Chief of Staff @ Uber Freight
Chief of Staff to COO @ Coinbase

Remote 🌍

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🔎 Spotlight #19: Inside Moonvalley

Shivam Purohit — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:47:43 GMT

The founding story: rebuilding Hollywood’s creative pipeline

Moonvalley was founded by Naeem Talukdar and John Thomas, two builders coming at the film world from entirely different angles but with the same frustration.

Together, they joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch with a clear vision: build AI infrastructure that supports filmmakers, animators, and creative studios as they develop scenes, worlds, characters, and storylines. Not replacing creativity, but accelerating it.

They describe their mission as building “the foundational model for Hollywood”. Given how slow, manual, and expensive early production still is, that mission makes sense.

What Moonvalley actually does

Moonvalley is an AI-powered creation platform designed specifically for film, TV, gaming, and animation teams. It helps creators instantly generate:

Characters
Worlds
Environments
Storyboards
Previsualizations
Scene drafts

Instead of waiting weeks for concept art or early storyboards, creators can explore dozens of directions in minutes.

The goal is not just to generate visuals. It is to support the full pre-production process and become the creative engine studios rely on long before a camera starts rolling.

Film teams describe it as “Figma for storytelling” and “Midjourney built for Hollywood”.

Funding and team at a glance

💰 Raised $84M in June by General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures
💪 Backed by Y Combinator (W24)
🎥 Building the next-gen creative OS for Hollywood
📍 Based in Toronto and Los Angeles
🖥️ Website: www.moonvalley.com

The competitive landscape and how Moonvalley stands apart

Moonvalley operates in one of the busiest areas in AI right now: AI video and creative generation. There are a lot of players, but very few are actually built for Hollywood.

On the general AI side, tools like Midjourney, Runway, Stability AI, and OpenAI’s Sora dominate the conversation. Sora especially went viral because of how realistic its demo clips were, spawning a wave of memes and people joking that it could replace entire film crews. These tools are great for creative exploration, but they are not built for the strict continuity and structure film studios need.

Then there are the more specialized tools like Wonder Dynamics, Fable Studios, and Flawless AI. They focus on specific tasks such as character animation or video dubbing. Strong tools, but each one only solves a slice of the workflow.

Moonvalley’s edge is its focus on a full pipeline. They want to be the place where creators build scenes, maintain character consistency, iterate on worlds, and keep everything cohesive through the entire pre-production process. It is not trying to create quick clips for social media. It is trying to become the foundation for how visual storytelling gets planned and developed.

The first Moonvalley-powered films are coming soon

Moonvalley is not just a cool demo anymore. According to a recent report from ITBrief, the first films using Moonvalley’s technology are expected to release within the next year, which is a massive signal that studios are moving from testing to real production.

This is a big milestone for any creative tooling company, especially one tackling something as complex as previsualization and AI-assisted filmmaking. Getting a studio to rely on your tech is one thing. Getting that tech into an actual film release is another level entirely.

The early feedback from studios has been promising. Directors are using Moonvalley to quickly explore shots, revise scenes on the fly, and ideate on worlds that would normally take weeks to visualize. It is helping teams move faster, stay aligned creatively, and reduce the cost of iteration.

If they deliver on this next phase, Moonvalley will not just be building a tool. They will be shaping a new workflow for how films get made. And once studios experience a workflow that is faster and cheaper without sacrificing quality, it is very hard to go back.

My take

Moonvalley feels like one of those companies that will either quietly become a giant or suddenly explode into the mainstream. The problem they are solving is real. Hollywood runs on slow, expensive, outdated workflows, and even simple creative iterations take days or weeks. Anyone who has spoken to people in film or animation knows how painful that pipeline can be.

What I like most is that they are not trying to replace creatives. They are building tools that expand what creative teams can do. Faster previsualization, more accurate worldbuilding, and consistent characters across scenes can save studios weeks of effort and give directors more room to experiment. That is a real multiplier.

The YC pedigree is impressive, but what matters more is that the team is clearly shipping fast and listening to real studios. If they keep pace, Moonvalley could end up being one of the most important creative tools built in Canada. This is one of the few AI companies that actually feels like it has a deep understanding of its users and the pain they experience.

🧭 Moonvalley Roles

These are some pretty cool roles at Moonvalley in the moment. Although not much, I encourage you to keep in tune with future LaunchPad job posts to see any new exciting roles that pop up at Moonvalley and many other cool firms!

That’s a wrap on Spotlight #19

Here’s to building something cool, or better yet, joining something cool. 🚀

If this post helped you, consider sharing it to your friends to “launch” their tech career:

🚀 LaunchPad #19: When the Internet Breaks

Shivam Purohit — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:38:23 GMT

If you felt like the internet was wobbling today, you weren’t imagining it. A major Cloudflare outage took down a huge chunk of the web for a solid stretch of the morning. Everything from SaaS tools to ecommerce checkouts to random apps you forgot you still had installed suddenly decided to tap out.

Cloudflare is one of those companies most people never think about, but when it sneezes, the whole internet catches a cold. It’s a reminder of how much modern infrastructure depends on a handful of backbone companies keeping everything stable behind the scenes. A single misconfiguration, a network ripple, or a global routing hiccup can send tech teams scrambling, Slack channels popping off, and engineers revisiting logs like it’s a crime scene.

But outages like this also highlight something important for anyone working in tech. Systems fail. Tools break. Unexpected things happen. The real skill is how teams respond, communicate, and troubleshoot under pressure. Ops is no longer the quiet function in the background. It’s mission critical, and days like today prove it.

Welcome to Issue #19 of LaunchPad. Every Tuesday, I share a curated list of Toronto-based roles in Strategy, Ops, Growth, and more. Every Thursday, I drop a Spotlight deep dive on one standout company or role worth your attention. If you’re trying to break into tech or level up your career, you’re in the right place.

If a friend forwarded this to you, subscribe below so you don’t miss the next big drop.

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Strategy & Ops (BizOps)

Revenue Operations (RevOps)

Growth (Growth/Marketing Ops)

Product (PM and ProdOps)

Product Ops Analyst @ Hopper
Product Analyst @ Kindsight
Product Operations Associate @ Lightspeed Commerce
Lead Product Data Analyst @ CloudBees
Associate Product Manager @ Rose Rocket
Product Manager @ Flywheel
Product Manager, Crypto @ Pebl
Product Manager @ Stripe
Product Manager @ Zip
Product Manager @ AutoDesk
Senior Product Manager @ Wealthsimple
Senior Product Manager @ Venn

Chief of Staff

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🔎 Spotlight #18: Inside Top Hat

Shivam Purohit — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:22:23 GMT

The founding story: bringing classrooms into the digital age

Top Hat was founded in 2009 by Mike Silagadze and Mohsen Shahini in Toronto. Both had experienced the frustration of traditional lecture halls where professors talked at students, and engagement was often limited to whoever raised their hand. They wondered: what if technology could make classrooms more interactive and participatory?

Their answer was Top Hat, a platform that lets professors run polls, quizzes, discussions, and even full textbooks directly through students’ devices. Instead of passively listening, students could engage in real time, and instructors could measure comprehension on the spot.experience that made healthcare feel approachable rather than bureaucratic.

What Top Hat actually does

At its core, Top Hat builds interactive learning software designed to make higher education more engaging, for both professors and students. The platform replaces static slides and traditional textbooks with live polls, quizzes, and digital course materials that drive real-time participation in and outside the classroom.

For instructors, Top Hat offers tools to design, deliver, and grade content more efficiently, while tracking how students are engaging with their material. For students, it transforms lectures from passive listening to active learning, giving them a voice in the process and better retention through interactivity.

Over the years, Top Hat has expanded beyond classroom engagement. Today, it’s an end-to-end learning platform that includes homework tools, assessments, attendance tracking, and customizable textbooks, all under one roof. The mission is simple but ambitious: make learning more human, by helping educators connect better with their students through technology.

Funding and team at a glance

💰 Raised more than $130M USD from investors like Georgian Partners, Inovia Capital, and Union Square Ventures

👥 400+ employees with a strong Toronto presence

🌎 Serves 750+ higher ed institutions across North America

🖥️ Website: tophat.com

The competition and how Top Hat compares

Top Hat competes with big names in edtech like Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Cengage, as well as software-first players like Kahoot!, Poll Everywhere, and Canvas.

Where Top Hat stands out is its focus on live engagement. Traditional publishers may have content, and LMS platforms may manage classes, but Top Hat’s sweet spot is making real-time learning more interactive and measurable. That focus has helped it stay sticky on campuses even as edtech trends shift. I’ve actually used Top Hat personally in class back in my second year finance class and I actually quite enjoyed using it. It made class more fun and easier to participate and be active.

Bringing AI into the classroom in a meaningful way

Top Hat recently rolled out a new wave of AI-powered teaching tools, and what’s impressive is how practical and instructor-focused they are. Instead of using AI as a buzzword, Top Hat is using it to actually solve day-to-day problems educators face.

Their latest feature lets instructors generate AI-crafted examples that explain concepts in different ways depending on the student’s background, skill level, or learning style. Think of it like having a co-teacher who can instantly produce alternate explanations, real-world analogies, or simplified breakdowns of tough topics.

For professors teaching large or diverse classes, this is huge. It means they can:

Create multiple variations of the same example to reach different learners
Personalize complex topics without spending hours writing new material
Make lectures more inclusive and accessible
Increase engagement with content that feels more relatable

The goal from my understanding isn’t to replace instructors, it’s to give them superpowers. Top Hat is positioning AI as a tool that enhances teaching, not automates it. And in a world where students expect more interactive, modern learning, these features help educators bridge that gap without burning out.

This move also reinforces Top Hat’s broader philosophy: technology should make learning more human, not less. AI becomes a way to elevate the teaching experience rather than standardize it.

My take

Top Hat is a great example of a Canadian company solving a universal problem: making education less passive and more engaging. With so many debates about the future of higher ed, it’s refreshing to see a platform that bridges traditional classrooms with modern technology instead of trying to replace them outright.

Personally, I like that Top Hat has leaned into content ownership alongside engagement tools. It gives them a long-term moat and positions them to be a core part of course delivery, not just an add-on.

If you care about the future of education and want to see Canadian startups leading the charge, Top Hat is one worth keeping close watch on.

🧭 Top Hat Roles

These are some pretty cool roles at Top Hat in the moment. Although not much, I encourage you to keep in tune with future LaunchPad job posts to see any new exciting roles that pop up at Top Hat and many other cool firms!

That’s a wrap on Spotlight #18

Here’s to building something cool, or better yet, joining something cool. 🚀

If this post helped you, consider sharing it to your friends to “launch” their tech career:

🚀 LaunchPad #18: A Fresh Coat of Space Paint

Shivam Purohit — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 01:07:27 GMT

You might’ve noticed things look a little different today if you’re reading this on Substack natively. LaunchPad’s had a bit of a glow-up (or you could say glow down lol): darker, sleeker, and a little more futuristic. The black theme isn’t just for style points (though I’ll take them). It’s the first small step toward the next phase of what LaunchPad’s becoming, and don’t worry, although it feels like when Peter Parker got the symbiote it’s not going to end as badly.

If you caught the hint with our last issue about “something on the horizon,” this isn’t it. Think of this as the pre-launch sequence, setting the tone for what’s ahead. The update I’ve been teasing is still in the works, but I wanted the look to finally match the vibe: modern, tech-forward, and a little bit ambitious. Anyways, let’s get to our regularly scheduled programming

Welcome to Issue #18 of LaunchPad. Every Tuesday, I share a curated list of Toronto-based roles in Strategy, Ops, Growth, and more. Every Thursday, I drop a Spotlight deep dive on one standout company or role worth your attention. If you’re trying to break into tech or level up your career, you’re in the right place.

If a friend forwarded this to you, subscribe below so you don’t miss the next big drop.

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Strategy & Ops (BizOps)

Revenue Operations (RevOps)

Growth (Growth/Marketing Ops)

Product (PM and ProdOps)

Product Ops Analyst @ Hopper
Product Analyst @ Kindsight
Product Operations Associate @ Lightspeed Commerce
Lead Product Data Analyst @ CloudBees
Product Operations Manager @ 1Password
Product Manager @ Aha!
Product Manager @ Coinbase
Product Manager @ AutoDesk
Senior Product Manager @ Wealthsimple
Product Ops Lead (Americas) @ Shopify

Chief of Staff

If this post helped you, consider sharing it to your friends to “launch” their tech career:

🔎 Spotlight #17: Inside League

Shivam Purohit — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:31:32 GMT

The founding story: modernizing healthcare from the ground up

League was founded in 2014 by Michael Serbinis, Dan Leibu, and Dan Galperin, three longtime collaborators who had previously worked together at Kobo, the Canadian e-reading company later sold to Rakuten for $315 million.

Serbinis, a serial entrepreneur and engineer who once worked with Elon Musk at Zip2, had already built and scaled multiple tech ventures before turning his attention to healthcare. Partnering again with Leibu (Kobo’s former CTO) and Galperin (SVP of R&D at Kobo), the trio saw an industry that hadn’t caught up to the digital world.

Their question was simple: why are employee health benefits still stuck in the past — with clunky portals, paper forms, and zero personalization?

Their answer became League, a digital health platform built to give employees a better, more connected way to access and manage their benefits. Instead of static insurance plans, League offered flexibility, a sleek app, and a consumer-grade experience that made healthcare feel approachable rather than bureaucratic.

What League actually does

At its core, League is a digital health benefits platform that helps employers deliver and manage personalized healthcare experiences for their teams. Instead of juggling multiple insurance portals or outdated HR systems, companies use League’s Health Operating System (Health OS) — a unified platform that connects everything from health spending accounts and insurance plans to wellness programs and virtual care.

For employees, it means one sleek app where they can check their coverage, book appointments, access health resources, and get real-time support. For employers and insurers, it provides data-driven insights into engagement, utilization, and overall workforce well-being.

League has built what’s essentially the backbone for digital health benefits, powering experiences for major enterprise clients like Shoppers Drug Mart, Loblaw Companies, and Manulife. Their focus isn’t just on digitizing healthcare, it’s on making it personal, connected, and proactive.

What’s new in League’s world

League has grown into a major player in healthtech, working with both employers and insurers. In the past few years, they’ve:

Partnered with Google Cloud to build the Health OS platform, a backbone for digital health experiences
Expanded their focus beyond small businesses into large enterprises and global health providers
Continued rolling out new personalization features that make healthcare more accessible for employees and families

It’s impressive to see a Canadian startup not just building for local companies but also providing the tech infrastructure for global partners.

Funding and team at a glance

💰 Raised over $235M USD in venture funding from investors including TDM Growth Partners, Workday Ventures, and OMERS Ventures

🏦 Secured a $100M USD credit facility from RBCx in January to help fuel continued expansion and enterprise adoption

👥 400+ employees across North America

🌎 HQ in Toronto, with clients and partners worldwide

🖥️ Website: league.com

The competition and how League compares

League competes in the broader health benefits and digital health space. In Canada, its competition comes from traditional insurers like Sun Life and Manulife, who are building their own digital tools. Globally, players like Accolade, Virgin Pulse, and even tech giants like Amazon (with Amazon Clinic) are eyeing digital health platforms.

League’s advantage is focus. Instead of being an insurance provider, they’re a platform enabler. That lets them partner with insurers, pharmacies, and enterprises without competing with them directly. So although those traditional insurers are listed as competitors, they can technically go to them and be like hey, let’s work together to give your clients a way better experience when it comes to getting their health benefits.

Partnering for the future of healthcare

League recently announced a major partnership with TELUS to advance Canadian healthcare innovation using sovereign AI — a big step in shaping the future of how data and healthcare intersect in Canada.

Through this collaboration, TELUS Health and League plan to develop secure, AI-driven solutions that improve how health information is managed and accessed, all while keeping data governance within Canada. The goal is to create smarter, more efficient systems that enhance patient outcomes, reduce administrative friction, and strengthen Canada’s position in the global digital health space.

It’s a powerful example of how League’s Health OS can evolve beyond employee benefits, serving as a national foundation for health innovation. By combining TELUS’ network infrastructure and healthcare expertise with League’s technology and data capabilities, the two companies are setting the stage for a more connected, AI-enabled healthcare ecosystem built around privacy, security, and accessibility.

My take

League is one of the most ambitious Canadian startups out there. Healthtech is messy, regulated, and difficult to disrupt, but League has found a wedge by being the infrastructure rather than trying to own everything.

I actually use League in my day to day at work, since StackAdapt provides that to me. It’s actually an awesome platform, making going to a doctors appointment or getting some new contact lenses a breeze. I also like that League has been able to land partnerships with household names like Shoppers and Manulife. That tells me they’re not just a startup with a sleek app, but a trusted backbone for organizations that millions of people rely on.

If you’re interested in healthcare, digital transformation, or Canadian companies making a global impact, League is a great one to keep on your radar.

🧭 League Roles

Senior BDR @ League
Senior Product Designer @ League
Director, Growth Enablement @ League

These are some pretty cool roles at League in the moment. Although not much, I encourage you to keep in tune with future LaunchPad job posts to see any new exciting roles that pop up at League and many other cool firms!

That’s a wrap on Spotlight #17

Here’s to building something cool, or better yet, joining something cool. 🚀

If this post helped you, consider sharing it to your friends to “launch” their tech career: