Happy Thursday!
Today’s Squad
Oisin O'Connor & Aidan Thibodeaux (CEO, Recharge / CEO, Skio) → 12:40PM CT
Noah Tucker (Founder & CEO, Social Snowball) → 1:10PM CT
David Khandrius (Co-Founder, Peachy) → 1:45PM CT
Top Stories
Northbeam data shows how Meta CPCs are falling - Northbeam just dropped the chart everyone's been feeling: Meta CPCs hit 12-month lows but CVRs slid right alongside them — cheaper clicks, same broken math. David Herrmann's "no rhyme or reason" gut check from a café in Jeonju basically confirmed the operator mood: it's brutal out there, and nobody's quite sure why.
Cloudflare's CEO just said AI is coming for the measurers first - Cloudflare's Matthew Prince cut 20%+ of his workforce despite 30%+ growth because AI isn't coming for builders or sellers — it's coming for measurers, and middle managers are first on the chopping block. The bigger tell: nearly a million people applied for 1,111 internships, and the ones who got hired are all "AI-native."
Gemini x Capcut - CapCut just partnered with Gemini — soon you'll be editing images and video directly inside the Gemini app using CapCut's tooling. Translation: the AI assistant is becoming the creative suite, and every "AI-native creative" workflow your team just built is about to get a much bigger competitor.
Retatrutide is going to be the best-selling drug in history inside 24 months.
By Colin Dougherty // 2 min. read
Eli Lilly has a GLP-3 in phase 3 trials. It's called retatrutide. The main reason people dropped out of the clinical study? They were losing too much weight.
Blood sugar cut in half. Cholesterol cut in half. This is not Ozempic 2.0. This is a metabolic reset for whoever can afford it, and Eli Lilly is going to patent the hell out of it. My called shot: best-selling drug of all time within a year of launch.
Every consumer brand is downstream of this—most operators haven't noticed yet.
The Wall Street Journal already ran a piece this week on restaurants feeling the pinch. People aren't hungry. They don't want to go out. Multiply that by three when GLP-3 drops. Casual dining gets hollowed out, snacks, alcohol, and anything that runs on impulse appetite is on the wrong side of this trade.
Who's innovating based on this?
Bar Bruhis (Co-founder, Boostcous) got an email yesterday from a buyer who saw their ad on Words With Friends, watched the full clip, and bought because she's on a GLP-1 and needed easy protein that didn't make her queasy.
If you're building anything in food, beverage, or supplements, the next ten years bend around this drug class.
Highlight Reel: If your founder is the brand, this is a real revenue line. A take from Ben Corkery
Timeline: Town Square
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See you live,
Ecomm Cowboy Team