Choosing our heroes: Celebrating the founders who go on to do it all again
PLUS: Spark's major data centre sale and OpenAI faces very rocky GPT5 launch.
Welcome to mid week!
Good afternoon Caffeinators! Apologies for not being with you this morning, been slightly taken out by one of those nasty bugs floating around this winter but I simply couldn't let any level of sickness keep me from delivering your Daily Shot. Particularly when it features the latest from resident Scribbler Serge van Dam, would be a crime to keep that column from you.
Here’s what’s in your Daily Shot of news you don’t want to miss
Scribbles from the Startup Frontlines: Going Again
Spark makes half a billion dollar data centre business sale
Event: Tech Talk By Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Pod Pick: Business is Boring - The billion-dollar company that's just getting started
OpenAI rolls out GPT5, immediately faces backlash
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Finn & the Caffeine team
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Scribbles from the Startup Frontlines: Going Again
By Serge van Dam
Choosing Our Heroes
When speaking on the future of our country or species, I often make reference to ‘choosing our heroes’. We do this as leaders, as voters, as consumers and as a society. The obvious point to make is that more so than influencers or sportspeople or cultural icons; our real heroes are people who change the world. Most of those do so through companies, which as we all know, were at some point, a startup.
To make this vivid... Moderna is a pharmaceutical company founded in 2010 whose vaccine saved 20-100 million people globally (depending on how you count these). Cristiano Ronaldo is a great footballer with world-class abs. Bad Bunny is a singer who sells lots of albums. Winston Peters is our longest standing Member of Parliament. One of these is not like the others… I think you get the point.
And the best kind of these kinds of heroes are those who make a fabulous impact in the world, and then go again.
Paid subscribers can read the full article below
Choosing our heroes: Celebrating the founders who go on to do it all again
TLDR: We should celebrate founders, especially the ones who go on to do it all again!
Spark makes half a billion dollar data centre business sale: Major moves from Spark this week as it sells off 75% of its burgeoning data centre business to an Australia’s Pacific Equity Partners. Spark expects to receive cash proceeds of around $486 million at completion, with additional deferred cash dependent on performance targets by 2027 calendar year. The money will be used to pay down debt. As part of the transaction, Spark will move its data centre assets and operations into a new spinout company currently being referred to as ‘DC Co’, with its own board and management team. The race to build the A.I data centres required to power the future of well, everything, is underway and its good to see major moves on our home soil. Whether it’s even possible to build and power the number of data centres we are going to need in a sustainable economic or environmental sense is another question entirely. See more details in the full release from Spark here.
Event: Tech Talk By Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship: We love events aimed at aspiring young founders here at Caffeine at this one sound like a cracker. Hear real stories from tech entrepreneurs and innovators who are turning cutting-edge technologies into impactful solutions.
Join for an evening of powerful talks and candid discussions with founders and tech leaders who are pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Discover how they’ve harnessed tech to solve problems, drive change, and launch successful ventures.
This event is open to innovators and entrepreneurs from the University of Auckland and the wider community. Which sounds like literally everyone reading this.
Speakers:
Callum Quin - Product Development Engineer, Zuru
Ihshan Gumilar - AI Consultant, HCLTech
Tisha Patel - Technology Consulting Analyst, PwC
Tony Cui - Software Engineer, AWS
Xaviere Murray-Puhara - Co-Founder of kahu.code and Tech Taniwha
Sort tickets here.
Pod Pick: Business is Boring - The billion-dollar company that's just getting started: He’s one of the most insanely successful founders with an unbeatable CV at a very young age. Worse yet, he’s also a really nice guy. Shouting out this week’s Business is Boring where Simon Pound talks with Crimson founder Jamie Beaton about his path from acceptance into 25 of the world’s top universities to scaling a billion-dollar global education business. Check back later this week for my own conversation with Jamie which was an absolute delight but did make me feel like I was approximately 75 years old with nothing to show for it.
OpenAI rolls out GPT5, immediately faces backlash: We covered the tease of this a while back but now that GPT5 is launched things aren’t going great for the world’s leading AI company. I’ll cover my thoughts more in depth over the next few weeks but while GPT5 is undoubtedly an impressive piece of software, it has led to some pretty stark pushback and some embarrassing backtracks from OpenAI.
Sam Altman had to take to X almost immediately following launch to apologise for glitches and say they would explore letting people continue using 4o for the interim period. What’s been fascinating is how a lot of the push back hasn’t been on the technical side (though there’s plenty of that too) but more on the vibes side.
People just liked the style of 4o and had a personal attachment to it. I think as we look at replacing LLM models in the future, for many it will be less like a product being delisted and a beloved co-worker suddenly being fired.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co
