April 2025 Startup News: Spies, AI Bubbles & Buy Now Eat Later

Corporate espionage at HR startups. A convicted-by-narrative founder raising hundreds of millions. A $34B AI company with no product. April 2025 proved Silicon Valley has fully absorbed Wall Street's appetite for drama—and then some.

Key Facts

• Adam Neumann's new raise: $100M at a $2.5B valuation for a residential property startup (Pablo Srugo)
• Safe Super Intelligence valuation: $34B with zero revenue (Jack Kuveke)
• ChatGPT 'please & thank you' GPU cost: ~$10M per month in extra compute from polite users (Pablo Srugo)
• Klarna x DoorDash: Consumers can now split food delivery orders into flexible monthly installments (Pablo Srugo)
• Deel-Rippling spy salary: The planted employee earned ~$62,000/year from Rippling's Ireland office (Jack Kuveke)

Adam Neumann Is Back—And VCs Are Still Saying Yes

Neumann raised $100M at a $2.5B valuation for a residential property startup. Critics call it WeWork 2.0, but Jack Kuveke argues it may simply be a landlord play dressed in tech narrative—and VCs fund Neumann because chaos generates attention, not just returns.

Adam Neumann's return is less surprising when you understand what VCs are actually buying. As Jack Kuveke explained, Neumann functions like 'the bad boy that your sister dates'—irrational on paper, magnetic in practice. A16Z and other backers gained enormous brand visibility from the WeWork saga. Funding Neumann again is less about conviction in the business and more about buying into a cultural moment.

The underlying business may be more defensible than it appears. Kuveke noted that Neumann is essentially 'buying a bunch of residential properties and renting them to people who are too broke to buy homes on their own'—a model that mirrors what BlackRock has been executing at scale. Unlike WeWork's commercial office bet, which Covid destroyed, residential rental demand is structural. People still need somewhere to live.

Pablo Srugo acknowledged the tension: 'Really what he's doing, as far as I can understand, is the exact same thing as WeWork, but instead of for businesses, it's for residential.' Neumann's superpower has always been storytelling—he invented 'community adjusted EBITDA' to reframe a simple real estate business as a movement. Whether that narrative survives contact with reality a second time remains the open question.

"Adam Neumann is like the bad boy that your sister dates. VCs don't want just some guy who promises reasonable returns, who's honest and safe. Adam Newman's like the exciting investment." — Jack Kuveke

"It'll be BlackRock and Adam Newman that are gonna be owning all of the homes in America. And who better to be alongside the biggest financial demon organization of all time than Adam." — Jack Kuveke

The Deel-Rippling Spy Saga: Corporate Espionage Comes to SaaS

Deel allegedly recruited a Rippling employee earning ~$62K/year to steal sales and marketing data from internal Slack channels. Rippling's CEO caught the spy using a honeypot document, after which Deel's CEO reportedly flew to Dubai while deposition requests piled up.

The two most valuable HR SaaS companies—Deel and Rippling—turned April into a corporate thriller. According to the episode, Deel allegedly found a Rippling employee and planted them inside the company. The spy's job was simple: access Slack channels and extract sales and marketing intelligence, then pass it to Deel's leadership.

Rippling's CEO set a trap. As Jack Kuveke described it: 'He put a document that says, if you read this, you'll make a billion dollars into a Slack channel. And the guy opened it like 480 times in the span of 24 hours.' The honeypot worked. The spy was identified, and the story went public.

What makes this case notable beyond its absurdity is what it signals. Kuveke observed that the kind of scheming once associated with Wall Street has migrated fully into tech: 'Finance wasn't cool, then finance became cool, and then people started scamming. Now all that money's flowed into tech—so that's the space for the scam artists.' The spy risked his entire career for access to B2B SaaS sales memos—what Kuveke called 'the lamest thing you could possibly ever' get caught stealing.

"Did you ever read Paul Graham's article that says, do things that don't scale? They were just doing a couple things that didn't scale. So be it." — Jack Kuveke

"To become unhirable over just getting access to sales memos from an HR startup—I mean, hats off to that guy. He's never gonna be able to get a job in tech ever again." — Jack Kuveke

• Planted employee earned ~$62K/year from Rippling's Ireland office
• Honeypot document opened ~480 times in 24 hours—exposing the spy
• Deel's CEO reportedly relocated to Dubai amid deposition requests
• A16Z, as a Deel backer, found itself indirectly on the spy's side

Safe Super Intelligence and the $34B Pre-Revenue Club

Safe Super Intelligence—founded by former OpenAI CTO Ilya Sutskever—raised at a $34B valuation with zero revenue and no product. The bet is purely on founder pedigree and the possibility that AGI becomes the most valuable technology ever built.

Safe Super Intelligence (SSI) represents the logical extreme of the founder-as-asset investment thesis. Jack Kuveke summed it up bluntly: 'It's basically just 20 guys in a room with unlimited amounts of money and no pressure to generate revenue.' The company's entire value proposition rests on the credibility of its founders—former OpenAI leadership—and the thesis that whoever builds artificial general intelligence first wins everything.

The naming strategy itself drew laughs. Kuveke noted: 'They just called their app safe. So they're gonna build an AI model that replaces human intelligence and is smarter than any human. Everyone's like, it's Terminator 2, this is gonna kill all of us. And they're like, people are gonna think that. So let's just call it Safe Superintelligence.' Meanwhile, Mira Murati's new company, Thinking Machines Lab, was raising a $2B seed round at a $10B valuation with, per a TechCrunch quote cited in the episode, 'no product or revenue to speak of.'

Srugo offered historical context: Instagram sold for $1B in 2012 with no revenue, shocking everyone. WhatsApp sold for $19B. Those numbers look quaint now. The question isn't whether $34B is large—it's whether the outcome distribution justifies it. If AGI is real and SSI captures even a fraction of that value, early investors win massively. If it isn't, they don't.

"They have what they lack in revenue, product and business acumen—they make all up in just vision, which is to build an AI agent that passes super intelligence." — Jack Kuveke

"It used to be you needed something more than just people to get that kind of valuation—crazy user growth, revenue, whatever. Now it's just like, dude, I'm one of the founders of OpenAI. Boom, here's a billion." — Pablo Srugo

Marc Andreessen's Tone-Deaf Take: VCs Are the Last Job Standing

Marc Andreessen publicly claimed venture capital will be the last profession replaced by AI—while actively funding companies designed to automate everyone else's jobs. The contradiction was not lost on observers.

Few April moments generated more disbelief than Marc Andreessen's podcast appearance where he argued that after AI automates the workforce, the one job left standing will be his. Jack Kuveke captured the reaction perfectly: 'I couldn't stop laughing this morning. I was dying. I was like, how tone deaf are you? When you make that statement, be like, yeah, I just think the only thing you couldn't possibly replace is me—but everyone else you can replace. And I'll fund them.'

The irony runs deep. A16Z is actively backing AI companies whose explicit mission is workforce automation. Andreessen is the one choosing where that capital flows. Srugo noted the practical conflict: any founder pitching 'AI for VCs' would presumably not get funded by the person most motivated to keep that category human-powered.

The episode also touched on Mechanize, a startup whose founder openly stated his goal is replacing all human workers everywhere—a level of candor that Srugo admitted was at least honest. Whether or not that mission is achievable, the juxtaposition of Mechanize's transparency with Andreessen's self-exemption was the month's sharpest bit of unintentional comedy.

"The only job that's gonna be left after I deploy all the capital in my fund is my job. That's the greatest thing." — Jack Kuveke

"He just gave money to a factory AI company that's gonna get rid of everyone that works in car factories in America. But the good news is, my job is safe." — Jack Kuveke

Klarna + DoorDash: Financing Ice Cream Is Where Consumer Debt Ends Up

Klarna's partnership with DoorDash lets consumers split food delivery orders into monthly installments. It's the logical endpoint of decades of expanding consumer credit—from mortgages to car loans to credit cards to now financing Ben & Jerry's.

Jack Kuveke's account of America's consumer debt arc is worth quoting at length: 'In the 1940s, the only thing you could get a loan for was a house. If you wanted to buy something that was worth $50, you had to ask yourself, do I have $50? If you had $49, you just couldn't buy anything.' Since then, car loans, credit cards, student debt, and BNPL have each expanded the frontier of what Americans borrow to afford.

The Klarna-DoorDash deal is, in Kuveke's framing, the cultural endpoint of that arc: 'In the split second that you almost notice that your life is indebted, Katy Perry comes out with a new song. You forget that you're in debt. And then right after you decide, man, I feel kind of bad about myself—you know what I should do? DoorDash Ben & Jerry's. But your credit card declines. That's where Klarna comes in. Now you can finance the Ben and Jerry's over 15 payments.'

Pablo Srugo added a comparative observation: in Latin America, installment payment prompts at point-of-sale are routine. The behavioral trap is identical—breaking a purchase into small monthly amounts makes it feel affordable in the moment while obscuring the total cost. As Srugo put it: 'In 12 months, you're paying for a movie you saw a year ago. He was still paying off ice cream.'

"Consumer debt has gotten so out of control that it doesn't even make sense. Everyone's in crippling debt. And now you can finance the Ben and Jerry's over 15 payments." — Jack Kuveke

"Everyone seems like they have it figured out and almost no one has anything figured out." — Jack Kuveke

• Consumer debt expanded from mortgages → car loans → credit cards → BNPL → food delivery financing
• Klarna x DoorDash lets users split meal orders into flexible monthly payments
• Social media creates constant comparison pressure that normalizes spending beyond one's means
• Kuveke: most people look richer than they are—'just broke as [expletive]' and deep in debt

April 2025 Startup Headlines: Signal vs. Noise