Over 13,000 brands including Net-a-Porter, Vice, Facebook and the BBC have signed up to a new creative networking platform which is being positioned as the 'LinkedIn for creatives'. The Dots, which launched in the UK today, will aim to help creative individuals and companies showcase their work, network, collaborate and connect with commercial opportunities. The platform is set to launch in the UK first, before branching out to the rest of Europe, as well as the US, in the near future.
You know that sinking feeling when you realize you've been using a phrase that makes you sound less intelligent than you actually are? I had one of those moments a few years back during a pitch meeting for my startup. I was presenting to potential investors, and I kept saying "I think" before every point I made. "I think our user acquisition strategy will work."
A colleague and I launched a new company after our previous employer closed. We divided responsibilities so she handled manufacturing and distribution while I managed digital content and marketing. My side of the business grew steadily. But within six months, her operational area began to falter. I began to step in to keep physical projects moving, and key infrastructure on her side wasn't maintained. Despite having access to shared digital project management tools, she frequently framed it as a communication problem.
Fintechs are increasingly adopting stablecoins-a non-volatile type of cryptocurrency typically pegged to the US dollar. When it comes to payments and money transfers, stablecoins offer clear advantages but developing the infrastructure to support them can be slow and costly. This is where Levl wants to fill the gap. The startup aims to build a platform where digital wallets and other fintechs can seamlessly send money around the world using stablecoins.
I've spent my career straddling the structured discipline of Fortune 500 companies and the entrepreneurial scrappiness of startups. Each side has its strengths. Startups move fast, fueled by creativity and urgency. Corporations scale big, built on systems and predictability. But the future of leadership belongs to those who can bridge the two; leaders who think like founders and lead like CEOs.
Big ideas do not always arrive with attention or applause. Often, they are shaped quietly through experience, discipline, and persistence. That is how Thirukumaran Sivasubramaniam approaches his career. As Co-Founder and COO of Fintex Inc. in Toronto, he is known for turning complex ideas into working systems. His leadership style is practical, steady, and grounded in lived experience. It is a style shaped long before his professional career began.
Entire's tech has three components. One is a git-compatible database to unify the AI-produced code. Git is a distributed version control system popular with enterprises and used by open source sites like GitHub and GitLab. Another component is what it calls "a universal semantic reasoning layer" intended to allow multiple AI agents to work together. The final piece is an AI-native user interface designed with agent-to-human collaboration in mind.
From the outside, many entrepreneurs appear to be thriving. The business is stable or growing. Experience has replaced early uncertainty. Decisions are sharper than they used to be. By most traditional measures, things are working. Yet internally, something feels off. Energy feels flatter. Wins don't land the way they once did. The work feels heavier, even when results are strong.
Benjamin Nasberg is a Canadian entrepreneur and the CEO of Carbone Restaurant Group. He is known for building scalable hospitality businesses while staying closely connected to the people and communities behind them. His career reflects a steady focus on growth, culture, and practical leadership. Nasberg began working in restaurants at the age of 16. Those early roles gave him a ground-level understanding of operations, teamwork, and customer experience.
Apply to lead a roundtable session Roundtables at TC Founder Summit are built for depth, not decks. Each session is a 30-minute, informal discussion led by up to two speakers, with no slides or video - just meaningful dialogue and practical insight. These intimate conversations create space for founders to ask real questions and connect directly with experts who've been there before.
So I made a commitment to myself at the start of [month] to actually ship things instead of endlessly tweaking projects in private. I called it "Vibe Coding" - basically just building whatever feels useful in the moment without overthinking. In the first month, I managed to launch two tools: 1. Names Combiner ( https://namecombiner.us/, the better version of namescombiner com because people cretezcize me toooooooooooooo much Combines two names to create unique name mashups.
You can have all the markers of success-the steady job, the decent apartment, friends who think you're crushing it-and still feel like you're playing life on easy mode when you know you could handle expert level. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after a conversation with someone who, from the outside, looked like they had everything figured out. Good career, great relationship, traveled regularly. But over drinks, they admitted they felt like they were sleepwalking through their own life.
Her payment form wasn't connecting to the payment processor, and every attempt ended in an error message that made no sense. I understood her frustration. As a founder myself, I was acutely aware of the pain of trying to run a business and feeling like nothing was going your way. When I dug into her form, I found the problem a few minutes later: a mismatch between test mode and live credentials.
Silicon Valley is having an anti-college moment due to sky-high education fees, AI lowering the barrier to entry for skills like coding, and the shifting political and social landscape. But three young founders who dropped out of college told Business Insider that they weren't motivated by expenses or politics, but by timing. Each spotted an opportunity in the market that they couldn't resist, leading them to quit college and go all in on entrepreneurship.
Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify's director of engineering for payments, is building a solution that could eliminate these backend infrastructure headaches for non-technical creators. Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapiom, a startup developing the financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data, and compute - essentially creating a payment system that lets AI automatically buy the services it needs.
Because startups typically don't have a track record of success to attract potential clients, they can offer a trial of their platform for free or at a lower cost to showcase what their platform can do and how reliable it is. The enterprise - a potential client - can test the newest technologies without the worry of committing to a complete and often costly rollout.
The founder of one of our portfolio companies created a company with approximately $200 million in revenue purely on instinct. The founder had spent a large amount of time around the products and relationships with customers, so that he could literally go out onto the production floor and identify the machine that would be broken down in a week, and he would reject a price recommendation from his financial staff because "it didn't feel right!"
AIDAR is building the future of artist scouting. We help A&Rs and music professionals discover artists that truly fit their creative vision - using personalized AI agents that scout the global music landscape 24/7. The product is live, the beta is working, and we already have paying customers and EXIST AI Transfer funding. Role Now, we're hiring a Senior Full-Stack Engineer (m/w/d) to join AIDAR as our core technical hire.
But after years of chasing success in all the wrong places, I finally get what he meant. My first startup was everything I thought I wanted. We had funding, a slick office, and all the right buzzwords in our pitch deck. I was working 80-hour weeks, convinced that grinding harder would somehow make me love what I was doing. Spoiler alert: it didn't.
Too many founders get stuck in reactive mode, buried in meetings and fire drills. But if you're always reacting, you're not really leading. You must move from reactive operator to strategic leader, which requires a mindset shift. Understand that you're not the firefighter - you're the architect. Ask yourself: If you disappeared for two weeks, what would break? That's where your real work begins.
The first light hasn't broken yet, but somewhere in London, New York, or Silicon Valley, a millionaire is already awake. The coffee is brewing, steam curling up in the darkness. Outside, the streets are empty except for the occasional delivery truck. Inside, there's just the quiet hum of possibility-those precious hours before the world starts demanding attention. I discovered this myself when I started running my own company.
I was a CFO myself for five years previously before going into venture [...] We had thousands and thousands of customers, and we would have several people in my team that were basically just replying to queries and chasing people all day.
