👋 Howdy to the 2,321 new legends who joined this week! You are now part of a 252,278 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

⚙️ Why AI Is Easy To Demo And Hard To Trust. An interview with Hamel Husain, Founder at Parlance Labs.
🚀 Hyperbound Goes Hyperdrive: A Zero To One. Creating the AI-sales training industry and taking names along the way.
⚡️ Launching Athyna Intelligence. An interview with Bill Kerr, Founder & CEO at Athyna.

PARTNERS 💫

As payment flows grew more complex, Europe’s leading second-hand marketplace turned to Temporal to simplify orchestration at scale.

By replacing brittle background jobs with durable Workflows, Vinted runs 10M+ executions daily with higher reliability, clearer logic, and lower infrastructure costs, proving that resilient systems can also move fast.

Join Vanta for a session on how to make compliance work at your pace, without slowing momentum, stalling deals, or putting revenue at risk. We’ll cover essential steps you can take now to prepare for your first audit in 2026—and enter the new year ready to earn customer trust (and deals).

• Tips on identifying the right framework(s) for your startup

• Advice on how to work security into your budget

• Security best practices to implement now so you’re audit-ready next year

_{Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.}

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Alright, I’m just going to come out and say it: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode four was as good as anything I’ve seen in the Game of Thrones universe. It’s rated 9.7 on IMDb. Putting that into perspective, there are only four Thrones episodes that rank higher: Battle of the Bastards, Hardhome, The Winds of Winter (when Cersei blows up The Great Sept), and the most shocking moment in television history, The Red Wedding, in the episode titled The Rains of Castamere.

SPOILER WARNING: The back-to-back-to-back of the knighting of Raymun Fossoway, “Are there no true nights among you?” and Prince Baelor riding in to the Game of Thrones music to tell that world, “I will join Sir Duncan’s side” was absolute cinema. The Tales of Dunk & Eggs are the favorite stories from the author G.R.R. Martin himself, and it’s no wonder why.

INBOXED 📨 

Inboxed: Tech Partnership, Tech Poaching

Partnerships between tech companies can be rocky, to say the least. But for companies trying to gain market share, it’s sometimes inevitable to partner with competitors. Think of the famous Apple and Google partnership.

Previously arch-rivals in the smartphone market, Apple's iOS and Google's Android have maintained a complex relationship that blends competition with cooperation. It’s worked well for them so far, particularly for Apple, which pockets about $20 billion to allow Google to be the default browser on the iPhone.

But there is one common theme that sticks a big, fat wedge in between the most promising of partnerships. The corporate equivalent of hitting on your roommate’s girlfriend. The poaching of talent. Today, we’ll be diving into key partnerships in big tech and the cases of talent thievery that nearly derailed them.

“One of us must change our policy” - Steve

In 2005, Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, sent an email to Bruce Chizen, then CEO of Adobe. He was upset at Adobe's continued attempts to recruit Apple employees. Jobs was protective of Apple's talent and took a strong stance against what he perceived as poaching.

Jobs' email is a masterclass in communication and negotiation. In just a few short sentences, he shows why he was considered one of the most formidable business leaders of his time.

The email opens with striking directness, immediately addressing the issue of Adobe recruiting Apple employees. Jobs wastes no time with pleasantries, setting a tone of urgency and importance. By stating specific facts, "They have hired one person already and are calling lots more," he shows he's well-informed, leaving no room for denial or ambiguity. Masterclass.

Next, he cleverly establishes a moral high ground by mentioning Apple's policy of not recruiting from Adobe. This move says that Adobe's actions are unethical, putting them on the back foot from the start. And the key phrase, "One of us must change our policy," is a brilliant piece of negotiation. It presents an ultimatum without aggression, implying potential consequences if Adobe doesn't comply.

The demand for action, "Please let me know who," requires a concrete response from Chizen. The brevity and firm tone show he is not messing around, while calling Bruce by his first name keeps a personal touch despite the confrontational context. Here is how the rest of the conversation played out.

It took just 63 words in the opening email for Steve to assert dominance, apply pressure, and demand action, resulting in the resolution he sought. It's a stunning example of effective business communication.

Google has it’s feelings hurt

The year is 2008, Facebook’s heyday. The best tech talent wanted to work for Zuckerberg, including techies employed by Google. It was the natural progression of a free market, albeit to the chagrin of Jonathan Rosenberg, then one of Google’s SVPs.

We can see from an email exchange between Rosenberg and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg that frustration was building, primarily on Google’s side. “Broader relations seem to be at Defcon 2 at the corporate level,” as far as Rosenberg was concerned. The problem—Google claimed Facebook was ‘poaching’ their employees, breaking a quasi-no-poachy-poachy understanding between the two companies.

Sandberg, to her credit, dispels most of the frustration and de-escalates the situation. And by that I mean it seems she doesn’t consider the ‘issues’ issues at all. In her words, “We are not specifically trying to hire from Google. To the contrary, on the margin, we hire less, not more, from Google as we want our hiring to be broad-based. We hire mostly from the school directly, and we want to continue that. On experienced hires, we want varied experience.”

Regardless, cooler heads prevailed between the two sometimes allies thanks to Sandberg's handling of the interaction, with her final statement, “We really do want to work together along all of these lines if we can,” putting a nice bow on the interaction.

“If you hire a single one of these people, this means war” - Steve (again)

In 2005, the talent war between tech giants reached a boiling point. Google, developing its mobile OS—soon to be called Android—set its sights on Apple's iPhone team. This crossed a line for Steve Jobs.

Jobs, as mentioned earlier, is known for his intensity, and didn't hesitate to confront the issue directly. He picked up the phone and called Sergey Brin.

Brin would share the news internally that he receiving an "irate call from Steve Jobs" about the recruitment coup. Jobs made it clear: he viewed Google's actions as a betrayal and demanded they stop targeting Apple employees immediately.

“I told we were not building a browser and that to my knowledge we were not systematically going after the Safari team in particular,” the likely petrified Brin would tell his team. “I did not mention we may release an enhanced version [of Mozilla Firefox] but I am not sure we are going to yet,” he said. But Steve was not finished.

Sergey would go on to say, “So a compromise would be to continue with the offer we have made but not to make offers to any of the others unless they get permission from Apple.” In Walter Isaacson's biography, Jobs said he was willing to go to "thermonuclear war" with Google over the Android platform, which he saw as a "stolen product."

Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin employed very different tactics in this talent war. Jobs took his usual direct, confrontational approach, using explicit threats and leveraging personal relationships to protect Apple's talent pool.

Brin, on the other hand, seemed to adopt a more diplomatic strategy. While persistent in Google's hiring efforts, he tried to balance the company's need for top engineers with keeping a workable relationship with Apple, not an easy task given Jobs' intense reactions.

This confrontation led to informal ‘no-poach’ agreements between the biggest of big tech, which later faced legal scrutiny. The incident became a pivotal moment in Silicon Valley, highlighting the high stakes of the talent war and the personal nature of business in tech.

💡 Note: If you don’t want to have to go to war for talent, remember you can always hire AI and ML talent through my startup, Athyna.

Fun facts

• Microsoft rescued Apple: In 1997, Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple, helping it through a financial crisis and ensuring the development of Microsoft Office for Mac.

• Apple Maps debut: Apple replaced Google Maps with Apple Maps in 2012, but initial glitches led to a public apology from CEO Tim Cook.

• No-poaching pact: Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe had secret no-poaching agreements in the 2000s, leading to a $415 million settlement in 2015.

• AWS and Azure are the best of frenemies: Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure compete fiercely in cloud computing, but also collaborate on many open-source projects.

Extra reading

• No-Poach Scandal: Unredacted Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Paul Otellini Emails - January, 2012

• August 6, 1997, the day Apple and Microsoft made peace - August, 2018

• A masterclass in Leadership from Sheryl Sandberg - June, 2024

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Framer*—the site builder trusted by startups to Fortune 500.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀