Off The Record
Off The Record / FreeMaltaIndependent voice.
Open questions.

Everybody has
a press release.Here’s what didn’t
make it in.

Power, work, technology—and the inconvenient details between them. Some stories explain the world. Others make you wonder who wrote the explanation.

Open the file
By Ilhan Irem Yuce / Off The RecordOn the record, actually. With a point of view.

Not another content feed.
A place for the questions that survived the meeting.

The open secret:
there is always another layer.
Cold Mail Inbox Deliver
Partners

Don’t Use Resend for Cold Email.

I came here to find people. LinkedIn increasingly feels like a trade fair where everybody has brought a microphone. Someone has discovered the future of work. Someone else has...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Rhode’s gone masking campaign, showing two women wearing towel wraps and applying face masks in warm light.
Culture

The Kardashians, Rhode and $620 Jeans: My Saturday Off

I crossed the harbour. The internet came with me. Saturday began with thunder. Heavy rain woke me in Sliema, and quite a lot of it had found its way inside my seafront home. Outside,...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
empty armchair warm light night book headphones
Technology

Audiobooks Are Going Global. This One Feels Personal.

Eighty songs. And now, perhaps, a book. Yesterday, I put a Spotify playlist in the navigation of Gambity, my prediction-market newsroom. Eighty songs. I called it Journey to the End of...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
A small toy car sitting inside a supermarket shopping trolley.
Startups

Zach Yadegari Sold Cal AI. At 19, He’s Already Building What Comes Next.

Someone Still Has to Build the Thing. There is a particular kind of founder story the internet cannot resist. A teenager. Millions of dollars. A university that said no. Put those three...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Google Search Console Last Update
Web Intelligence

Google Search Console Last Update: 50 Hours Ago. Why Isn’t It Updating?

Google Knows Everything. Except What Happened to My Website Yesterday. Google Search Console currently has something to tell me. Last update: 50.5 hours ago. Thank you, Google. Very...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
A red-toned still life with a drinking glass and strong afternoon shadows.
Off The Record

David Beckham’s IM8: The Name Gets Your Attention. What Happens Next?

Beckham made me look. The brand made me stay. I became an IM8 ambassador yesterday. There. Commercial relationship disclosed before anyone needs to play detective. FreeMalta receives a...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
An abandoned telephone booth surrounded by trees.
Off The Record

I Couldn’t Find the Offer. Turns Out, Neither Could Their Budget.

Accepted on Wednesday. Back under review by Friday. On 6 October, I applied to Claude Startups. On 7 October, I received approval. On 8 October, I opened the portal and tried to find...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
A woman standing on a diving board above a swimming pool.
Off The Record

Who Is Jinger Zhao? The Two Sigma Veteran Behind the $300 Million Blackstone Story

I was watching reels. Then a name pulled me back into work. I know who Lisa Su is. She runs AMD. Chips, engineering, an actual business with actual products. Her name comes with...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
A disco ball hanging in a kitchen, scattering light around the room.
Off The Record

Billy Ocean, Sauron and the Kardashians. Yes, This Is Still Me.

Tonight, I Have Absolutely Nothing Useful to Teach You. No AI breakthrough. No founder lessons. No market analysis. No downloadable list of 100 family offices. Tonight, I want to talk...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
A road disappearing into thick fog at night.
Internet Culture

Did Elon Musk Pay $20 Million for Dot.com to Troll OpenAI? Where’s the Evidence?

The Internet Had the Punchline Before It Had the Receipt. Elon Musk. Sam Altman. A domain name. Twenty million dollars. You barely need to finish the sentence. People already know which...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Rows of empty red seats facing an illuminated theatre stage.
Internet Culture

What Is LinkedIn For Anymore? I’m Starting to Forget.

I Used to Enjoy Being Here. Over the past six months, I have started to hate LinkedIn. Yes, hate. I know the word I’m using. Sometimes I think my life would be better without it. Then I...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
A carousel glowing purple at night, its lights blurred by motion.
Automation

What Is Deel Akai? Growing the Business Without Growing the Busywork.

Business Is Growing. Unfortunately, So Is Everybody’s Workload. You land more customers. Excellent. Then come more invoices, more payment checks, more documents and more people asking...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
A person with red zone.
Work & Careers

What Is a Forward Deployed Engineer? The Person Who Makes the AI Demo Work on Monday.

Everybody Loved the Demo. Then Someone Asked It to Do Actual Work. Picture the meeting. The AI answers a question, summarises a document and produces something surprisingly useful...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Studio microphone in a warmly lit recording space.
AI & Agents

ElevenLabs v4 Is Here. These Two Really Don’t Know How to Stop.

The Words Were Fine. The Voice Ruined Everything. Say “I’m fine.” Now say it like someone who is absolutely not fine. Same words. Completely different conversation. That has always been...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Rows of server racks inside a data centre.
Markets

Why Is Nvidia Worth So Much? It’s Not Just About Chips.

Everyone Wants to Build AI. Someone Has to Supply the Machinery. Everyone has an AI idea now. An assistant. An agent. A platform that will apparently transform your business before...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Street signs pointing in different directions at a city intersection.
Technology

OpenAI Wants 15 Domain Extensions. Apparently One Website Wasn’t Enough.

I have bought and sold domain names before. You find a name you like, check whether it is available, look at the price and decide how much you believe in your own idea. Sometimes...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Open laptop beside a notebook and a cup of coffee on a desk.
Founders

Spaceship’s Domain Deal Is Tempting. So Is Starting Another Business.

Some people see a discounted domain name. I see a business that does not exist yet. Give it a decent name, imagine the logo, picture the website, and suddenly the whole thing feels...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Bosphorus with Istanbul’s waterfront in the background.
Finance

Revolut in Türkiye? The Banking App Won’t Be the Surprise.

I like Revolut’s chances in Türkiye. I also think it would be a mistake to arrive as though someone has finally brought banking into the twenty-first century. We have phones, thank you...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Traveller using a smartphone beside an airport window.
Finance

Wise Now Sells eSIMs. Your Money App Wants to Come on Holiday.

You land in another country. Your money is on your phone. Your hotel booking is on your phone. The address you need is, naturally, on your phone. Your internet connection has decided to...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Illustrating difficulty finding the Claude Startups API credits and free Team offer.
AI & Agents

Accepted into Claude Startups. Where Are My $1,000 Credits and Free Team Plan?

Claude Startups Approved, but No $1,000 Credits or Team Offer? You’re Not Alone. I applied to Claude Startups on October 6. On October 7, Fierce & Tame Limited was accepted. Before...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Hubspot layoff 7% of workflow.
Business

HubSpot Is Changing. Nearly 660 People Are Losing Their Jobs.

I admire Dharmesh Shah. I was an early YouSpot user. That makes this story more uncomfortable, not less. I like Dharmesh Shah. Let me put that at the beginning, before this becomes...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Claude Startups program to help founders build
Business

Claude Helped Me Build Four Platforms. Today, I Asked for More Than Credits.

Today I applied to Claude Startups. A few hours earlier, I was joking that Claude should go and make tea. Both things can be true. I have no interest in turning a software subscription...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Horowitz Andreessen Academy
AI & Agents

The School Silicon Valley Built for Itself

The School Silicon Valley Built for Itself a16z is not simply opening an academy. It is bringing the companies remaking work into the room where the next generation learns how to do it...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Melita and Epic: two operators, one street, one announcement. The MCCAA decides what comes next.
Malta

Melita Is Acquiring Epic. They Tried This in 2017. The Regulator Said No.

I live on Bisazza Street in Sliema. For years, I was an Epic customer. I left — not dramatically, just quietly, the way you leave a service provider when the frustration accumulates...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Google's AI Contribution Pilot turns content from a traffic source into an inference asset. The metric that matters is no longer the click.
AI & Agents

Google Is Paying Publishers for AI Training Data. The Debate About Zero-Click Is Already the Wrong Debate.

Google is paying for inference, not clicks. Publishers still arguing about zero-click traffic are solving last year's problem.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Greg Brockman — OpenAI co-founder, Forbes 400's richest new entrant in 2026. $25.5 billion. Sam Altman is worth $3.3 billion.
AI & Agents

He Wrote "How Do I Get to $1 Billion?" in His Diary. He Was Off by $24.5 Billion.

Greg Brockman co-founded OpenAI, built ChatGPT's infrastructure, and is worth $25.5 billion. Sam Altman is worth $3.3 billion. You've heard of Altman. This is the other one.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
The ghostwriter's job didn't disappear. It got harder.
Markets

Ghostwriting Is Dead. Storytelling Is What Replaced It.

Let me tell you something about LinkedIn ghostwriting that most people in the industry won't admit. The version of it that existed three years ago — "send me three bullet points about...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
LinkedIn: the platform that measures your success in metrics it invented for itself.
Business

LinkedIn Is Selling You Three Things. None of Them Work.

LinkedIn has a remarkable ability to make you feel like you are doing something productive while you are actually doing something that benefits LinkedIn. You are posting content to...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Malta Ai Engineer Jobs 2026
AI & Agents

The AI Engineer Jobs That Don't Exist.

Over the last few months, I've been watching something happen on LinkedIn that I couldn't quite name at first. Malta's iGaming companies — operators, suppliers, platforms — have been...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Elena Rybakina — US Open 2026 Champion. Born in Moscow. Playing for Kazakhstan. World Number One.
Business

Russia Didn't Want Her. Kazakhstan Did. Now She's World Number One.

Elena Rybakina won the US Open on Sunday. Discipline beat rage. But the story starts before the match — with a rejection from Russia and a Kazakh oligarch who saw what they missed.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Wonderful.ai co founders Bar Winkler and Roey Lalazar
AI & Agents

The Company That Made Me Stop Scrolling

I look at LinkedIn job postings the way people used to read newspaper classifieds. Not because I'm looking for work. Because the job postings tell you something the press releases...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
YouSpot AI-native solo CRM by Dharmesh Shah — HubSpot co-founder launches $1 product
AI & Agents

I Was Building This in My Head. Then Dharmesh Built It First.

For the last week I had been thinking about building something.</p> Not for FreeMalta. Not for a client. For myself — the kind of tool that doesn't exist quite right, so you start...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Best backlink sources for SEO and AI search visibility in 2026 — Crunchbase, GitHub, Substack, Wikipedia
Business

Your $500 Press Release Is Not the Best Backlink You Can Get

A friend of mine called me last week to tell me about a service he had just paid $500 for. Five hundred dollars. Five hundred articles. Distributed across a network that includes AP New…

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Cursor first message on Hacker News
AI & Agents

4 Points on Hacker News. $60 Billion to SpaceX.

January 20, 2022. A post appeared on Hacker News under the "Show HN" section — the part of the site where builders share things they've made, hoping for feedback from the people most...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Malta Taxbiex. Photo belongs to 9 Tom Fisk
Web Intelligence

SEO Is Not Dead. It Just Stopped Being Enough.

I was in Taxbiex. It was evening. I was sitting at the marina — the kind of evening where the water is flat and the light is doing something specific that only happens in Malta at that...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
How I Indexed 5,000 Pages in 3 Months
AI & Agents

How I Indexed 5,000 Pages in 3 Months

Search indexing has always run on a polite fiction. You publish something. You submit a sitemap. You wait. The crawler comes when it comes. It notices what it notices. It indexes what...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
ChatGPT Just Cut Reddit by 83%
Business

ChatGPT Just Cut Reddit by 83%. Good.

I want to tell you something about Reddit before I tell you about ChatGPT. When FreeMalta launched, I posted every single update there. Every feature, every design decision, every...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Linkedin AI Slop hit 1 million
Business

I Hate LinkedIn

I hate LinkedIn. I want to say that clearly, at the beginning, before I spend the next several hundred words writing about it — which is, I am aware, a contradiction I will have to live...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Hugging Face Is Worth $13 Billion. Here Is What You Are Actually Buying.
Web Intelligence

Hugging Face Is Worth $13 Billion. Here Is What You Are Actually Buying.

There is a website where three million AI models live. Researchers upload them there. Developers download them from there. Companies build products on top of them. Startups test their...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
He Bought OnlyFans for Almost Nothing. Then He Took $700 Million Out of It. Then He Died.
Business

He Bought OnlyFans for Almost Nothing. Then He Took $700 Million Out of It. Then He Died.

Tim Stokely built OnlyFans in 2016 in his spare room in London. His father helped finance it. The original idea was not what you think — it was a subscription platform for any kind of...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Global hiring compliance 2026 — the foundation everything is built on
AI & Agents

What Is Compliance? Nothing. Everything...

"We regret to inform you that we decided to move forward with another candidate." Everyone has received this email at least once. Some of us more than we'd like to admit. Half the time,...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Airbnb host only fee 2026 — 15.5% commission change explained for Malta and EU hosts
Business

The 3% Is Gone. Every Airbnb Host Pays 15.5% Now.

A friend of mine hosts on Airbnb in Malta. He's been doing it for a few years, knows the platform reasonably well, and considers himself an attentive host. He found out about one of the...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
SMS Marketing.
Automation

Signal House vs Twilio: The World Is Changed

Those who have seen The Lord of the Rings remember the opening three minutes. Galadriel's voice, over darkness: "The world is changed." She wasn't talking about SMS infrastructure. But...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Revolut Global Hire
Business

5 Best Employer of Record (EOR) Solutions for Global Hiring in 2026

A finance director at a London startup told me something last year that stuck with me. They had been paying a developer in Brazil for eight months. Wire transfer, every month, right on...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
ngram AI marketing video maker for Malta small businesses
AI & Agents

7 Best AI Marketing Video Makers for Small Businesses in Malta

Let's start with something the industry doesn't say loudly enough. AI video is not free. There is a persistent idea — amplified by demo reels and product launch posts — that you write a...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Deel Founders Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang
Business

You're Probably Hiring Internationally Wrong. Here's What It's Costing You.

Let's start with a scenario. You find a great developer in Brazil. You need her. She's available. You agree on a rate, sign a contract, pay her every month via wire transfer, and...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
New York Just Bet $36 Billion That Kalshi Is a gambling
Business

$36 Billion and a Simple Question Nobody Can Answer: Is This Gambling or Not?

I have been watching the prediction markets space for a while now. FreeMalta has a prediction markets page. Polymarket is featured there. I have written about Kalshi. I have applied for...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Gambling Addiction
Business

The Industry That Celebrates Numbers It Would Never Want in Its Own Home.

iGaming revenue is up. GGR is growing. The conference room is clapping. Nobody is asking what those numbers actually represent. I have lived in Malta for twelve years. I have watched this industry cel

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Monday.com cuts 620 jobs to focus on AI - FreeMalta.com
AI & Agents

The SaaSpocalypse Is Real. Monday.com Just Laid Off 620 People to Prove It.

Monday.com cut 20% of its workforce and called it an "AI-first strategy." HubSpot is down 52% in a year. Adobe down 26%. Salesforce down 27%. Figma down 35%. This is not a correction. This is an indus

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Ray Kroc: The Founder of McDonald’s
Business

McDonald's Doesn't Sell Burgers. The Burgers Are Just Bait.

There are two things I know about McDonald's with absolute certainty. The first is that a Chicken Mayo, consumed at approximately eleven in the morning after a night that went longer...

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Harvey Specter from Suits.
Malta

Harvey Specter Would Last 3 Days in Malta's Justice System.

My ex-wife loved Suits. She told me to watch it. I ignored her. Then I watched it six times — during the years we spent in Malta's courts fighting battles that had nothing to do with law and everythin

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Revolut and OpenAI partner to bring ChatGPT Go to users
Partners

Revolut Just Became an OpenAI Distribution Channel. Here's What That Actually Means.

Revolut is handing 75 million customers free access to ChatGPT. OpenAI gets tens of millions of new users in a single deal. The bank gets a shiny perk. The customer gets a year of AI. And FreeMalta, a

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Once Upon a Time, the Big 4 Was Actually 5.
Business

Once Upon a Time, the Big 4 Was Actually 5.

I sat in a room with Deloitte not long ago. The HR lead had been there twenty-eight years. I mentioned Enron. She looked at me blankly. I understood, in that moment, that I was in the wrong room.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Harvey Specter Called It First. Here's What the Fifth Amendment Actually Is.
Education

Harvey Specter Called It First. Here's What the Fifth Amendment Actually Is.

I have watched Suits six times. Harvey Specter says "plead the fifth" like it's the most natural thing in the world. I always knew what it meant in the show. I never quite understood where it came fro

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Peter Thiel, Paypal and Palantir Founder
Business

Peter Thiel Was There First. Every Single Time.

PayPal. Facebook. Palantir. OpenAI. Elon Musk's removal. Sam Altman's rise. Every time something important happened in the last twenty-five years of technology, Peter Thiel was already in the room. Th

Ilhan Irem Yuce
palantir founder alex karp
Business

They Named the Company After Sauron's Seeing Stones. That Was Not an Accident.

I have watched The Lord of the Rings approximately twenty times. I am, without apology, a Sauron obsessive. So when I tell you that Peter Thiel named his surveillance company after the Dark Lord's ins

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Open Ai new EU HQ Dublin
Business

OpenAI Just Chose Dublin. I Proposed There in 2013. The City Has Always Known Something.

In 2013, I visited Dublin for the first time and proposed to my then-girlfriend in a city I barely knew. This week, OpenAI announced it is moving its EU headquarters there. I am not surprised. Dublin

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon
Business

Amazon Didn't Plan AWS. It Stumbled Into the Biggest Business Idea in History.

There is a line in a book whose name nobody remembers: "Life unfolds before us all at once." Amazon's most profitable business was not built. It was discovered — accidentally, while trying to fix some

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Elon Musk Co-Founded OpenAI
AI & Agents

Elon Musk Co-Founded OpenAI. Then Sued It. The War Is Still Going.

In 2016, Jensen Huang personally delivered the world's first AI supercomputer to Elon Musk's door. Musk had co-founded OpenAI a year earlier. Today, he is suing the company he built and racing to dest

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Sam Altman, Y Combinator
AI & Agents

Sam Altman's First Company Failed. Nobody Remembers That Part.

Before ChatGPT. Before the board fired him on a Friday and he was back by Monday. Before all of it — Sam Altman built a company that didn't work. Paul Graham funded it anyway. That decision changed ev

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Bill Gates & Steve Jobs Together
Business

The Meeting That Saved Apple. Nobody Talks About the Other Side of It.

In 1997, Microsoft wired $150 million to Apple. Steve Jobs stood on stage and called it a partnership. The audience booed. They didn't understand what they were watching.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
a16z - Andreessen Horowitz
Business

Why is Andreessen Horowitz Called a16z? The Answer Was Hiding in Plain Sight.

Everyone in tech uses the name. Almost nobody knows why. And the reason, when you find it, is so simple it's almost embarrassing.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber
Business

Why Founders Lose Their Own Companies

Steve Jobs. Travis Kalanick. Sam Altman. The pattern is always the same — founder builds empire, board votes them out. FreeMalta took a different path. No investors. No board. No votes.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
ASML,  $1 trillion market capitalization
AI & Agents

Every AI Model You've Ever Used Runs on a Machine Only One Company Knows How to Build.

Somewhere in Veldhoven, a small city in the Netherlands that most people could not find on a map, a company called ASML is making the only machine in the world that can print the circuits that power e

Ilhan Irem Yuce
odyssey movie wallpaper
AI & Agents

Odysseus Didn't Guess. He Calculated.

Spain beat Argentina. Odyssey opened. Two of the most anticipated events of the summer — and in both cases, if you were paying attention, you already knew. AI is next. And the window to price it is ri

Ilhan Irem Yuce
FreeMalta Named OpenAI Select Partner
Business

FreeMalta Named OpenAI Select Partner

FreeMalta.com has been named an Official OpenAI Select Partner — joining the same global programme as Accenture, BCG and McKinsey. The only member based in Malta.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Sara Blakely, Spanx founder, first self-made female billionaire on Forbes list
Business

Sara Blakely Had $5,000, a Pair of Scissors, and No Idea She Was About to Change Fashion Forever

She cut the feet off her pantyhose. She wrote her own patent because no lawyer would take her seriously. She dragged a Neiman Marcus buyer into a toilet to prove her point. She became the first self-m

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Youtube CEO Neal Mohan
Business

Neal Mohan Built YouTube's Billions. Nobody Knew His Name.

Google paid $100 million to keep him. He stayed for fifteen years building the thing behind the thing — Shorts, Premium, the Creator Economy. When Susan Wojcicki stepped down in 2023, the man nobody h

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Denise Coates Built a £8 Billion Empire and You've Never Heard Her Speak
Business

Denise Coates Built a £8 Billion Empire and You've Never Heard Her Speak

She borrowed £15 million against a chain of betting shops her father owned, built a website from a portakabin on a car park in Stoke-on-Trent, and became the highest-paid CEO in British corporate hist

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Stripe founder Patrick Collison
Business

Patrick Collison's Quiet Revenge: The Irish Kid Who Is About to Buy PayPal

He was nineteen. He had a Limerick accent and a brother named John and an idea that payments on the internet were unnecessarily complicated. PayPal already existed. Everyone said so. Patrick Collison

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Malta Population hits 636.000 by 2030
Malta

Those Were the Days. Malta, What Happened to You.

I arrived twelve years ago. The island smelled different then. Felt different. PwC just published a population report. 636,000 people by 2030. I read it and felt something I wasn't expecting — grief.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Open Ai Partner Network
AI & Agents

FreeMalta Just Became an Official OpenAI Partner. Here's What That Actually Means — and Why Nobody Talks About How These Things Start.

OpenAI launched a partner network today with Accenture, McKinsey, BCG, and Bain. Also on the list: FreeMalta.com — a solo-built Malta intelligence platform that didn't exist eight months ago. This is

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Malta iGaming layoffs 2026
Malta

When Did We Forget How to Be Human.

A woman with 5.5 years at a Malta iGaming company was made redundant this week. She is 7.5 months pregnant. She received the legal minimum. The company's careers page still says "people first." This i

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Google CEO Sundar Pichai
AI & Agents

Sundar Pichai Grew Up in a Two-Room Apartment Without a Car, a Phone, or a Bedroom of His Own. Now He Runs Google.

The Google CEO story everyone knows: IIT, Stanford, Wharton, Chrome, CEO. The story fewer people know: Chennai, a two-room apartment, no telephone until age 12, sleeping in the living room, and a wife

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Airbnb Co-Founder Brian Chesky
Business

Airbnb Started With Three Air Mattresses, Two Unemployed Designers, and a Box of Obama-Themed Cereal.

Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn't pay rent. So they rented out their floor. When that didn't raise enough money, they sold election cereal for $40 a box. The cereal is what got them into Y Combinat

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Kendall Jenner, Founder of 818 Tequila
Business

Kendall Jenner Spent 3.5 Years Making Tequila in Secret. Then She Won a Blind Competition. Then She Told Everyone.

George Clooney did it with Casamigos. Kendall did it with 818. The Kardashian-Jenner family has figured out something about building a brand that most MBAs haven't. Also: Malta happy hours, gin tonic

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Jensen Huang, Nvidia founder
Automation

Everyone Thinks Jensen Huang Went From Denny's to Nvidia. There's a Bit They're Leaving Out.

The LinkedIn version of Jensen Huang's story goes: dishwasher at Denny's, founded Nvidia, became the world's most important CEO. Clean. Inspirational. Missing AMD, a reform school in Kentucky, a Japan

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Taavet Hinrikus and Kristo Käärmann, Wise Founders
Business

Wise Just Paid an Undisclosed Sum for a Website. It's the Smartest Thing They've Done.

Wise acquired Expatica — a 26-year-old expat information platform with 7 million annual visits. Not for the technology. Not for the revenue. For the moment. The moment before someone needs a bank acco

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot CTO and Founder
Business

HubSpot Made a Mistake. Dharmesh Said So Publicly. On LinkedIn, That's Now Considered Suspicious.

HubSpot quietly changed its terms to share customer data. Got caught. Reversed the decision in four days. Its co-founder said "sorry, we were wrong" on LinkedIn. And people spent the next week debatin

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson, founders of Supabase
AI & Agents

A System Without Supabase Is Like a Party That Ends at 11. You Leave, But You're Not Ready.

I first met Supabase while building the Hospitality Index. What I fell in love with wasn't the technology. It was the feeling that something genuinely complex could actually be simple. FreeMalta is bu

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Zeno Rocha, founder of Resend.com
AI & Agents

Billion Dollar Baby: The Email API That a16z, Figma, and Supabase All Bet On

Email is 50 years old. The biggest providers were all founded around 2009, all acquired, and all optimised for enterprise sales rather than developers. Zeno Rocha decided to fix that. In 30 months he

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Skello Founders Mathelin-Moreaux and Fauchier-Magnan
Business

Two French Founders Just Raised €200 Million. Then They Bought More of Their Own Company.

Skello just closed the largest HR tech round in France's recent history. The unusual part: co-founders Quitterie Mathelin-Moreaux and Emmanuelle Fauchier-Magnan used it to increase their own stake. Th

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Alexandr Wang
AI & Agents

Zuckerberg Paid $14 Billion for a 28-Year-Old. Here's Why That Still Might Not Be Enough.

Alexandr Wang dropped out of MIT at 19, became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 24, and sold half his company to Meta at 28 for $14.3 billion. The real question isn't about the money. It'

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic - Bloomberg Interview
AI & Agents

Dario Amodei Said "Straight Up Lies" on Camera. Here's What the Bloomberg Interview Actually Reveals.

A 70-minute Bloomberg interview with Anthropic's CEO covers why he left OpenAI, why he called Sam Altman a liar publicly, why he refused the Pentagon's deal — and what a $965 billion valuation actuall

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Winston Weinberg (CEO) and Gabriel Pereyra (President) of Harvey.ai
AI & Agents

They Named a $11 Billion Company After Harvey Specter. Then They Hired the Actor Who Played Him.

A former junior lawyer and a DeepMind researcher were LA roommates who watched Suits and thought: what if that was real? Three years later, Harvey AI is worth $11 billion and just partnered with Gabri

Ilhan Irem Yuce
€150,000 Scholarship Fund Relaunched For Students Studying AI And Emerging Tech
Malta

Malta Has €150,000 for AI Scholarships. It Also Has 20 Years of iGaming and Almost No SaaS to Show for It.

The Pathfinder Digital Scholarship just relaunched. €150,000 for students studying AI and emerging tech. It's a good thing. It's also not the problem.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, Nigerian Entrepreneurs and Paystack Founders
Business

Stripe Paid $200 Million for a Name It Had Already Considered and Discarded.

Before Patrick Collison named his company Stripe, he considered paystack.com. Two Nigerian engineers from Babcock University were already building something under it. In 2020, Stripe paid $200 million

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Revolut Delist USDT by 31st August 2026
Crypto

Revolut Is Delisting USDT. Its Own Licence Is What Forced It.

65 million customers lose the world's largest stablecoin on August 31. Not because Tether failed. Because Revolut succeeded — and the licence it spent years chasing is exactly what made the delisting

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, ElevenLabs founders
AI & Agents

ElevenLabs Is Worth $22 Billion. No New Money Came In.

Two Polish childhood friends built a $22 billion AI company from a complaint about badly dubbed films. Here's what the valuation number actually means — and why the mechanism behind it matters more th

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland.  Scrum and Agile Founders
Education

Scrum Didn't Kill Agile. Ceremony Did.

Scrum boards, sprint reviews, daily standups — the rituals survived. The thinking didn't. What Agile actually means in 2026, why iGaming is particularly bad at it, and what AI just changed about the e

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. Claude founders
AI & Agents

Claude Fable 5 Was Banned for 18 Days. Here's What Actually Happened — and Why Mythos Is Different.

A jailbreak, an export control order, 90 minutes to comply, and the US government pulling the kill switch on an AI model used by millions. The full story — and why Fable and Mythos are the same model,

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Silvio Schembri – Minister for the Economy, Enterprise and Strategic Projects
Malta

Malta's €235,400 Grant Is Real. The "Digital Transformation Experts" Chasing It Are Not.

Every time a government grant opens in Malta, a new generation of consultants discovers they've been AI experts all along. Here's what to ask before you sign anything.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook Founder, Meta CEO
Markets

Zuckerberg Tried to Buy the Future. It Said No.

Meta offered to buy Kalshi. Kalshi said no. Now Meta is building Arena — and the man who bought Instagram for $1 billion is about to find out whether you can copy a market the way you copy a social ne

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Revolut Co Founder Nikolay Storonsky
Business

Revolut Spent Zero on Marketing for Seven Years. Here's the Question Nobody Asked.

$75 billion. Zero paid ads. But the real story isn't about marketing budgets — it's about what Storonsky understood that every other fintech founder missed.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Mingxing "Star" Xu. OKX Founder
Markets

MiCA's Winners and Losers: OKX Got Malta's Licence, Binance Got Nothing

244 exchanges secured MiCA approval. Binance, the world's largest, wasn't one of them. Here's the full scoreboard — and why Malta ended up on the winning side of this particular regulatory arms race.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Gillian Lynch. Binance Head of Europe and UK for Lead Strategic Expansion
Markets

Binance Couldn't Get a MiCA Licence. Here's Who Just Moved Into Its House.

Today, July 1 2026, the largest crypto exchange in the world stopped serving EU customers. Not because it chose to. Because it had to. Here's the story nobody's telling clearly.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Shayne Coplan is the founder and CEO of Polymarket
Markets

From Papal Elections to Polygon: A Short History of Prediction Markets

In 1591, the Pope threatened to excommunicate anyone who bet on his successor. In 2025, a crypto platform took $3 million in wagers within hours of a Pope's death. Nothing about this category is actua

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Luana Lopes Lara. Founder and COO of Kalshi
Markets

Polymarket vs Kalshi: Inside the $15 Billion Rivalry

Excerpt: One platform runs on crypto rails and exists in a regulatory grey zone. The other is a fully licensed US exchange that just quietly overtook it. This is the fight nobody outside finance Twitt

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Ivan Montik, CEO & Founder SOFTSWISS
Markets

SoftSwiss, Prediction Markets and the Next iGaming Vertical

A major iGaming software provider just plugged prediction markets into existing sportsbook licences — no new regulatory approval required. That's not a feature launch. That's a land grab.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Robert Abela, 235.400 EUR Grant Digital Transformation
Markets

Is Malta Building the World's First Prediction Markets Legal Framework?

While the US argues whether prediction markets are gambling or finance, a 316-square-kilometre island appears to be quietly writing the rulebook everyone else will eventually copy.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Arjun Mahadevan. CEO & Founder of Doola
Web Intelligence

Wyoming vs Delaware: The Real Cost Difference for Non-US Founders

Delaware is the name everyone's heard. Wyoming is the one that actually saves non-resident founders money. Here's the real five-year math, not the marketing version.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Why a Malta Founder Might Still Need a US LLC
Web Intelligence

Why a Malta Founder Might Still Need a US LLC

You already have the better tax structure. Here's the part Malta's 5% effective rate doesn't solve — and why some founders form a second company anyway.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Jan Oberhauser, Founder and CEO of N8N
Web Intelligence

Self-Hosting N8N on Cloudflare Workers: A Real Guide

How to run N8N on infrastructure you actually own, for less than the price of one coffee a month — and why most people never bother.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic
Automation

How to Connect Claude API to N8N in 15 Minutes

The actual setup, no fluff. Plus why most people get this wrong and end up paying triple for the same workflow.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
The CEO of Make.com Fabian Q. Veit
Automation

N8N vs Make.com vs Zapier: The Honest Comparison for 2026

Three automation platforms, one real decision. Here's what actually changes depending on which one you pick — based on running both in production.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
Alen Delon with cigarette, black and white
Automation

The AI Agent Stack That Runs a Newsroom

How News Beast runs ten AI writers, twenty-two categories and forty editions a day without a single human editor.

Ilhan Irem Yuce
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