Links from Ned and Mike: No. 113
Throughout the week we discover interesting links about self-improvement and building and operating startups.
Hello -
This is Mike and Ned. You know one or both of us. We’re partners at Enjoy the Work.
What we read this week:
How To Earn a Billion Dollars (Paul Graham)
Does Money Buy Happiness? A Princeton Nobel laureate said no above $75,000. A Penn researcher with 1.7 million data points said yes. They got together to settle the fight, and the answer they reached will change how you think about your own life.
Uneven Frontiers (a16z) How AI will transform biopharma—and why the sequence of change matters
Ned-ism of the week:
Intensity impresses; consistency wins
Good X’s/Tweets
Adam Shuaib@adamshuaib
A significant portion of unicorn founders we met were rejected over 50 times before finding a VC that was willing to be anti-consensus and lead the round. We met one unicorn founder who was turned down 100 times during their seed raise because the product vision sounded like a
9:05 PM · Jun 19, 2026 · 18.2K Views
27 Replies · 20 Reposts · 276 Likes
Reads with Ravi@readswithravi
I’m in love with this sentence:
“Your future is shaped by the habits you repeat, not the goals you set.”
3:28 AM · Jun 19, 2026 · 638K Views
178 Replies · 7.15K Reposts · 38.7K Likes
John Hu@JayHoovy
If you're a founder who's great at building product but terrible at managing people, read Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson.
3 things from this book I use constantly to manage my team of 50+:
→ Writing a "working with me" doc: this is a doc about everything you care
7:30 PM · Jun 16, 2026 · 35.1K Views
12 Replies · 17 Reposts · 484 Likes
Bryan Beal 🎧@bryanrbeal
Microsoft is doing absolutely every single thing they can to bail out of their OpenAI partnership. It’s quite something to witness.
And without Microsoft, OpenAI is the Yahoo of AI companies. They will be a pure play consumer business built around ads and subscriptions.
Financelot @FinanceLancelot
In a major blow to Sam Altman, Microsoft plans to move $MSFT Copilot to usage-based pricing with open-source AI model DeepSeek instead of OpenAI due to costs
2:25 AM · Jun 17, 2026 · 1.05K Views
5 Replies · 2 Reposts · 10 Likes
Ken Cao-The China Crash Chronicle@KenCao_onChina
Ten years ago, Elon Musk and Jack Ma both looked like avatars of the future.
Musk was building electric cars, rockets, satellites, and AI. Jack Ma was building Alibaba, the crown jewel of China’s internet economy.
Fast forward a decade: Musk is worth $1.1 trillion.
Jack Ma was
YCC Macro @YCCMacro
On June 12, 2026, SpaceX, Elon Musk’s flagship company, went public and its stock surged 19.2%, pushing the company’s market capitalization to $2.1 trillion. Musk’s personal net worth also climbed to $1,109.4 billion, surpassing the $1.1 trillion mark and making him the first
3:21 PM · Jun 14, 2026 · 1.41M Views
349 Replies · 1.02K Reposts · 4.59K Likes
Ihtesham Ali@ihtesham2005
Does money buy happiness? A Princeton Nobel laureate said no above $75,000. A Penn researcher with 1.7 million data points said yes. The day they sat down together to settle the fight, the answer they reached should change how you think about your own life.
The Nobel laureate is
3:30 PM · Jun 15, 2026 · 225K Views
52 Replies · 395 Reposts · 1.37K Likes
voided intern@voidedintern
MrBeast reveals why a 10% better video gets you four times the views, not 10% more
"I mentor YouTubers a lot. One of the people I've been mentoring recently, he was doing $24,000 a month and then he recently had a $400,000 a month on YouTube."
"He was doing 4 million views a
3:15 PM · Jun 14, 2026 · 2.44M Views
108 Replies · 299 Reposts · 9.02K Likes
voided intern@voidedintern
Kevin O'Leary reveals the one habit Steve Jobs and Elon Musk both have in common
"What was so brilliant about Jobs that I tell every CEO now, and I don't care if you're an S&P 500 CEO or you're just starting a business, his vision of Signal was the top three to five things you
7:20 AM · Jun 16, 2026 · 3.39K Views
3 Replies · 11 Reposts · 45 Likes
Derek Thompson@DKThomp
This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.
In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:
- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented
Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil
This is actually insane.
97% of people taking the standard of care for metastatic solid tumor got worse by seven years.
But with lorlatinib, that number was only 45% in the same time!
This is an ENORMOUS jump in the quality of cancer care. https://t.co/pDQsf7SoyR
3:38 PM · May 31, 2026 · 2.7M Views
209 Replies · 1.9K Reposts · 11.6K Likes