🍭 AI VC's Feeling the Burn (Rate) 🔥

Good morning. AI ate the VCs lunch and solopreneurs are still stuck in purgatory.

Will AI ever be profitable?
Will you ever get your questions answered?

Let’s dig in.

What’s Cookin’:

• All key Google I/O announcements.

• AI swallowing VC cash  

• Solopreneurs still have a chance

• 4 tools to write make slides, proofread them, and make a video about it.

• Steal This Prompt: Airbnb Icons (with sound)

When the Tools Aren’t the Problem
⚒️ 3 Reasons Businesses Hesitate to Adopt AI

The Bite: You can be brilliant, resourceful, even drowning in AI tools… and still be stuck.

Most solopreneurs aren’t blocked by effort.

They’re blocked by silence.

By the lack of feedback, structure, or a single person to say, “Hey, here’s how this actually works in a real business.”

We’ve seen this up close:

The blockers don’t live in the code.
They live in the control room.

3 Things Keeping Businesses From Adopting AI:

🔒 Fear of Losing Control

→ They’re afraid the AI will go rogue.
→ Say something off-brand. Output something weird.
→ Worse: they don’t know how to stop it if it does.

🏛️ No Governance

→ Who picks the tools? Who trains them?
→ Who’s responsible when it breaks?
→ Most companies don’t have internal answers, so they default to “do nothing.”

👀 Lack of Visibility

→ If leadership can’t see what’s happening, it’s not happening.
→ No audit trail. No preview layer. No greenlight. No redlight

Why it bites: If you’ve ever felt like you’re pushing AI uphill while everyone around you clutches their old processes like a security blanket…

Or if you feel like you’ve got something brilliant.

But need help with that last 5%. Pushing it over the finish line.

This might help.

🍭 Steal this Prompt
Airbnb Icons with Sound

Make icons like Airbnb — but yours, and with sound.

Use the reference image to generate cute, animated icons in the Airbnb style — then give them a personality with sound inside Kling.

🎨 Output: Playful motion-loop icon with ambient audio
🧠 Acts like: Illustrator + animator + sound designer
✨ Use it for: UI moodboards, product concepts, vibe-driven content

1. Hit this link (prompt + reference image included)

2. Swap “#” with whatever you want to iconify

3. Run the result through Kling to animate it

4. Inside Kling, add sound with a simple prompt that matches your icon

5. Export your new animated icon — ready to use anywhere

One prompt. One loop. Instant charm.👇

🍭 Try the prompt on Snack Prompt 🍭

Together with Coderabbit
CodeRabbit: Free AI Code Reviews in VS Code

CodeRabbit brings AI-powered code reviews directly into VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf. Get free, real-time feedback on every commit, before the PR, helping you catch bugs, security vulnerabilities, and performance issues early.

• Per-commit reviews: Identify issues faster and avoid lengthy PR reviews;

• Context-aware analysis: Understand code changes deeply for more accurate feedback;

• Fix with AI and get AI-driven suggestions to implement code changes;

• Multi-Layered Reviews: Benefit from code reviews both in your IDE (free) and in your PR (paid subscription).

Google
🤓 What Just Happened at Google I/O

🌐 AI & Gemini

• Gemini 2.5 Pro gets “Deep Think” for complex reasoning + coding

• Gemini 2.5 Flash = fast, light, speed demon model

• Gemini Live = camera + voice + web in real-time. It’s giving AGI intern.

• New AI subs: Pro = $20/month. Ultra = $250/month. 👀

🔍 Search & Productivity

• AI Mode in Search is now live across the U.S. — like ChatGPT, but Googlier

• Project Mariner = agentic AI to automate tasks on autopilot

• Gmail Smart Replies mimic your tone now (yes, even the passive-aggressive kind)

• Google Meet gets real-time speech translation in multiple languages

🧠 Generative Media

• Imagen 4 = sharper, smoother image gen

• Veo 3 = realistic video with synced audio (think mini-movies on command)

• Flow = full AI filmmaking app for creators who hate editing

🕶️ XR & Wearables

• Android XR platform debuts for smart glasses + immersive apps

• Smart Glasses built with Gentle Monster + Warby Parker (yes, really)

• Google Beam (ex-Project Starline) = 3D video calls like FaceTime on steroids

📱 Android & Devices

• Android 16 brings Linux terminal, adaptive apps, and Material 3 Expressive design

• Android Auto gets video, browsers, and more weather apps for some reason

👩‍💻 Dev Tools

• Gemma 3n = new open-source multimodal model (audio, text, image, video)

• Jules = AI coding sidekick to accelerate dev workflows

• Firebase Genkit beta helps devs add genAI to apps in like… 6 clicks

🛒 Shopping Graph

• Personalized product recs + price tracking = AI-infused shopping assistant

Venture Capital
💰 AI: Burning Cash and Turning Into "Zombiecorns”

The Bite: According to a new report from Silicon Valley Bank, nearly half of all U.S. venture funding last year went to AI startups. 

That’s great… if you’re OpenAI.

But it’s leaving everyone else starving and giving rise to a new class of startups: the ‘zombiecorns’.

Zombie company + (former)Unicorn = Zombiecorn
[🧟‍♀️ + 🦄 = 🧟‍♀️🌽]

“A ‘zombiecorn’: Startup with a valuation >$1B without sustainable growth or profitability after the funding runs out. Such unicorns have no product-market fit.”

If startup lore is your thing, you can read about Zombiecorns here.


Snacks: 

• 40% of startup funding in 2023 came from AI-focused VCs (up from 10% in 2021)

• AI made up 45% of all enterprise software VC investment in 2023

• “Zombiecorns” = startups with big valuations but poor growth/unit economics

• If you remove AI from the pie chart, Venture funding stayed flat.

Why it Bites: Obviously AI is hot. Hot enough to turn the rest of the (non-AI) startup world into a desert.

And with so many bets. You’re gonna have some L’s.

Actually, it’s not that simple. What defines a Winner?
Profits for the VCs, right?

But why does "Big Capital” keep dumping money into OpenAI…?
…while they burn $5b/yr….

Don’t get me wrong, OpenAI is cooking.
You and I use it more than we want to admit.

Altman’s great.

But at some point, “visionary” just means you’re really good at spending other peoples money.

Tool Box
🧰 Trending AI Tools

🧪 Algebras AI – Ship fast, skip proofreading

Open-source dev tool to scale apps in any language with any LLM. Built for speed, tuned for Next.js, and ready for chaos.

🔍 Super – Your team’s brain, but smarter

Connect all your tools, search everything instantly, and build AI workflows on top. Enterprise-grade, startup-friendly.

🎬 Google Flow – AI filmmaking with Veo 3

A new creative playground combining Veo, Imagen, and Gemini. Built with and for storytellers who dream in frames.

📊 Snapdeck for Figma – Slides from vibes

Generate fully styled presentations inside Figma with a single prompt. Zero context-switching. 100% Figma-native. Big deck energy.

Referral Program
Invite Friends & Earn Some Freebies 🔍