Ruxandra Mazilu

That's one of the things I went down a rabbit hole on for Edition #53, which went out this Sunday, to celebrate last week's World Poetry Day

Diana Ferrus was studying in the Netherlands when she wrote a poem about Sarah Baartman, a South African woman whose remains had been held in Paris for nearly two centuries. The poem became so powerful it was eventually incorporated into French law and helped bring Baartman home.

The news dropped yesterday: OpenAI is shutting down Sora, their AI video app, six months after launch. The Disney $1B deal is off, and the API is going away, too.

The arc is fascinating if you zoom out. The app launched in September 2025, hit the top of the App Store within a day, and reached 1M downloads faster than ChatGPT did. By January, downloads had dropped 45%, and the whole thing had made roughly $2.1M in in-app purchases over its lifetime.

This starts with a story:

In the summer, one founder of a VC-backed startup approached me to manage his LinkedIn profile, through which he acquires clients (personal brand building).

It was a classic job interview, where the assumption is to create a conversion (you are active on someone's account, building their personal brand, as the account grows, people are noticing you, write to you, you arrange a call, and maybe close a sale)

I asked if there was a possibility of getting equity in this position, because the other positions they had advertised (whether tech, GTM, sales, some small percentage of equity) did offer even a small %...

The answer was "No, this position does not include equity."