Hey Founders,

☕️ Welcome back to the Kernal Newsletter: one of the few startup emails still written by a human at midnight powered by 3 red bulls vs boring AI tools

📰 Latest tech news: GPT-4 is all the hype. SVB’s under government control. Gates dropped his AI thoughts. Adobe shipped an AI platform for creatives called Firefly. TikTok’s CEO got the Harvey Spector treatment. Amazon and Meta are laying off ~20K staff. Netflix’s building a cloud gaming service. Berkshire spent $1.8B on buybacks in 2023. Balaji bet someone $1m dollars Hyperinflation’s gonna happen in 3 months. Spring is in the air, and Kernal ideators are on a tear.

Pour yourself a cup of french press and let’s dive into the goods 👇

✨ Partner of the week

Have you met our friends at Loom? They sit at the cool kid’s table. Why? B/c their software (worth over $1.5B) helps startups record quick videos to update their team to cut down meetings by 29%. Let’s be honest. We all hate pointless meetings. So if you wanna spend more time watching Ted Lasso and less time joining dumb meetings get your team on Loom.

P.S. They have a free level in case you’re low on sales revenue this quarter.

👀 Shoutout of the Week

Texts like these make our flipping day:

P.S. Here’s the funeral startup idea if you’re curious. Hit Ari with a Kernal comment if you’re game to get involved.

🍽 Today's Menu:

• 📈 How MrBeast became a learning machine

• 💡 Startup ideas riper than the perfecttttt avocado

• 🐦 Tweets of the week that’ll make you smirk or smile

📈 How MrBeast Became a Lucrative Learning Machine

Founders, I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess you’ve heard the name “Mr. Beast.” My second guess is that you know he shares Youtube videos that go viral.

But my third guess is: you have no clue just how impressive his business empire is, and the learning frameworks he lives by to execute his ideas.

So, Imma help you out. Why? Because Mr Beast’s the youngest and most powerful content creator on the planet. And there’s dozens of lessons everyday founders can take from how he operates.

Let’s double-tap on what you likely DON’T know about Mr. Beast:

• 24 years young

• human name is Jimmy

• started a Youtube page when he was 12 and now it’s the #1 Youtube channel in the world with 221 million subscribers

• has a few hundred staff that work for him across multiple business entities including a 50,0000-square-foot production studio

• launched a burger and chocolate brand

• the business empire he built was last valued at a billion dollars

• andddd Mr. Beast is an absolute learning machine*

*This last part is what we’ll dive into today.

You see, at Kernal university, we believe the best founders are those that learn and execute at rapid speed. And if you don’t hone that skill set, your customers end up saying “bye-byeeee” (in J-Cal’s All in Podcast voice) and flocking to the company that is quicker, faster and more effective at the problem they want solved.

This great newsletter on Mr. Beast written by Henrik was a riveting read. But it took a while to read and I know all of you are pretty damn busy.

So we summed up the TL;DR:

• so you can skim it,

• soak in the goods

• and get back to building

Let’s dougie:

🧠 5 Founder Frameworks MrBeast Lives By

1. Prioritize raw input over superficial advice: why? he claims most success is hard to apply across the board. You can’t just listen to a playbook from a podcast and execute it perfectly. Each success is different. It’s personal. It’s industry-specific. So he recommends over-indexing on your own experience vs being brainwashed by the superficial advice from others.

   

2. Stop thinking, start iterating: Mr. Beast once said “Stop sitting there and thinking for months and months on end, and just get to work and start uploading.” Instead, he says you “should make 100 videos and improve something every single time.” In other words, get your daily dose of Gladwell’s 10,000 hours by iterating on progress each day. Stop the scrolling, do. the. WORK.

3. Work in public: if you grow up in a small town (like Mr. Beast did in Greenville, North Carolina) build relationships online. How? Pull up a chair, pour a coffee and get typing on your laptop/phone. Your work posted online is a search query to meet fascinating people. All you gotta do is show up, just like you would in person.

4. Peer learnings > solo learning: Mr. Beast was chatting with Lex Friedman in an interview about the power of shared learning. He said: “You learn from your mistakes. In two years, you may learn from 20 wrong moves. But if you have four friends who are also messing up, and when they learn from their mistakes they teach you what they learn. Hypothetically . . . two years down the road you have learned like five times more (4x) what you’d have alone. 1 + 1 = 3. Super powerful visual.

   

5. A strong feedback loop is your best friend: before Mr. Beast was the most followed creator on Youtube he was a C student in high school studying every viral video on the platform. Before he was running a couple hundred-person team, he was on video calls with other 10K subscriber creators trying to figure out strategies to make good content. Before he was running five companies, he was obsessing over the best edits, filters and caption tactics for making a video go viral. At every step, he measured his results and iterated 100x until his results were where he wanted them to be. Wherever you wanna be in 1, 5 or 10 years, make sure you have the right feedback loops to evaluate your iterations.

People rave about Mr. Beast’s success today but they often forget he’s been executing every day for over a decade.

Could people say the same about you? If not, use Kernal to be the time stamp to prove it to them.

If you liked this deep dive, don’t thank me. Thank Henrik. He wrote this original deep dive on Mr. Beast and my notes above are a simple recap of the brilliant piece he created.

To recap:

• Prioritize raw input over superficial advice

• Stop thinking, start iterating

• Work in public vs alone

• Peer learning > solo learning

• A strong feedback loop is your best friend

Now, the main show you’ve been waiting for. The startup ideas catching eyes this week…

Bruce, cue the lights 🍿

✨Fresh Startup Ideas✨ 

~3 million deaths per year in North America.

Existing alternatives = Sending family cards, flowers, gift cards, and homemade food.

What if instead, families could create a registry with things they actually wanted while they were mourning? Then other people wouldn't have to guess as to how to support them.

But wait, there’s more. Check out these other ideas catching eyes:

• Interact and analyze data through language search

• Build powerful AI apps without code

• Digital family backpack and user interface

Got a startup idea of your own?

Share it by tapping below.

📩 Community News

• Joe Lee (building SupaDemo) was featured in our early days blog

• Sonia’s attending NextWeb Valencia, drop her DM if you wanna meetup

• Great video from our friends at YC on how to build an MVP

• Open VC wrote about a great idea validation framework

• 9 Actually Practical Ways Founders Can Leverage GPT-4

• How to become an idea machine

• Interview with the OpenAI Founders

• The Distribution Advantage: How Anyone Can Quickly Grow A Newsletter or Podcast

• Some YC changes that happened

• Stan is doing cool stuff with spysaas.com; give it a look

• Payments giant Stripe raises $6.5 billion at a $50 billion valuation

🐦 Tweets of the Week

Enough reading. Have an awesome weekend.

💚 The Kernal Fam

P.S. if you liked the newsletter, you’ll love our new referral program. We’re hungry to hit to 20,000 subscribers but we’ll need your help to get there.

So, we’re giving away gifts. And they get sweeter with every referral.

Refer your first friend below and watch what we send to your inbox as a thank you.

Let’s just say, there’s something fun waiting for the first person to hit 10 referrals…

And if you have a gift idea you want us to add in, tweet us and we’ll add it in.