⚡ From Data Management to Fair Compensation: Insights for Founders in 2025
s4e7. Airbook for Startups, YouTube Music Reaches 125M Subscribers, and the Future of Programming with AI
Hello, dear readers! In this new issue of our newsletter, we'll look at how startups can overcome obstacles on their path to success. As they say, "a startup is not just a business, it's a marathon with obstacles." So let's overcome these obstacles together!
1. Startup Development: Airbook - A Comprehensive Solution for Data Management
Hoshang, CEO of Airbook, shares the success story of his product, which twice became #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt. The company discovered that data management is a major problem for startups. "We've learned that managing data operations is a major pain point for startups," notes Hoshang.
Data is scattered across various platforms - GA, HubSpot, Salesforce, Stripe, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, and others. First, you need to create channels to centralize this data, then teams use different tools for analysis, and when it's time to present this data, BI tools are used, which often lack context and explanations.
Airbook reimagined this workflow with a simple belief: "the best way to prove the ROI of data is by enabling growth directly from it," states the Airbook team. The platform offers a comprehensive solution: it easily synchronizes data from any business tool, allows collaborative exploration of insights, creation of dashboards, and setting up workflows to launch targeted growth campaigns.
For example, you can combine customer information from Salesforce, usage data from Mixpanel/PostHog, and purchase data from Stripe to identify upsell opportunities for specific customer segments and directly trigger personalized email campaigns - all within Airbook.
https://www.producthunt.com/products/airbook#airbook-2
2. VC: Fair Compensation for Early Startup Employees
Do early startup employees get fair equity compensation? "Fair is a tricky word here," notes Peter Walker from Carta. Startup founders want to attract the best talent, but they also recognize the problems that excessive equity dilution can create when raising funds from venture investors.
A study based on over 9,000 initial equity grants for the first 10 employees of startups in 2024 shows that the first hire receives an average of 1.5% of fully diluted company shares (this is the full 4-year percentage). "Wow, those medians fall off really quickly. By Hire 6, you're already seeing grants center around 0.3% or so," emphasizes Walker.
The total option pool usage for the first 5 employees, if you hire exactly at the median each time, would be 3.62%. Many companies will go through their first 10 employees without using even 5% of the total company equity.
Walker hopes that founders will more strongly incentivize their early, key employees with greater ownership. There are many ways to improve ownership for early employees: refresh grants, adjusted vesting schedules, RSAs vs ISOs, extended exercise periods, equity education, secondary liquidity (in the future).
3. Data: YouTube Music Reaches 125 Million Paid Subscribers
YouTube Music has reached a significant milestone of 125 million paid YouTube Music and Premium subscribers worldwide, including trials. This means that YouTube added +25 million subscribers over the past 12 months – which works out to slightly over 2 million subscribers per month on average – since its last subscriber announcement of 100 million in February 2024.
"I'm thrilled to announce that with your partnership, we've reached 125 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including trials – an incredible milestone that many laughed off as impossible when we first launched," wrote Lyor Cohen, YouTube's Global Head of Music.
For comparison, in the 12 months to the end of December, Spotify added +27 million net paying subscribers to reach 263 million paying users. Cohen added: "This momentum is critical to our goal of becoming the No.1 contributor of revenue to the industry, and we won't stop until we get there."
YouTube is also expanding its Premium Lite pilot to US users. This lower-priced Premium tier lets users watch "most videos on YouTube ad-free," though users may see ads on music content and Shorts, and as they search and browse. A Premium Lite subscription will cost $7.99 per month, while a full YouTube Premium subscription costs $13.99 per month for an individual plan in the United States.
4. Opinion: The End of Programming as We Know It
We are in the early days of inventing the future of programming. "We are in the early days of inventing the future," notes Tim O'Reilly. Even if we assume that AI co-developers make programmers ten times more productive, the "programmable surface area" of business, sciences, and our infrastructure will grow in parallel.
User expectations will also rise. Companies that simply use greater productivity to cut costs will lose out to companies that invest in harnessing new capabilities to build better services. "AI lets him 'be more ambitious' with his projects," notes Simon Willison, a longtime software developer cited by O'Reilly.
Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, noted that the value of AI to the enterprise is "in automation, in enterprise autonomy." But as he also pointed out, "Automation is limited by edge cases." "Workflow still matters," argues Sankar, and the job of the programmer will be to understand what can be done by traditional software, what can be done by AI, what still needs to be done by people, and how you string things together to actually accomplish the workflow.
In the world Sankar envisions, AI "actually going to liberate developers to move into the business much more and be much more levered in the impact they deliver." Meanwhile, the top-tier subject matter experts will become programmers with the help of AI assistants. "This is not the end of programming. It is the beginning of its latest reinvention," concludes O'Reilly.
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-end-of-programming-as-we-know-it/
5. Video: The Success Story of Grab and Its CEO Anthony Tan
In conclusion, I want to remind you: "A startup is not just a business; it's a marathon with obstacles." So be ready to overcome these obstacles, use data for growth, fairly compensate your early employees, and remember - even in the world of AI, programming isn't ending, it's just being reimagined! ❤️