Welcome back to The Hypha Wire, and happy Friday! Spring was almost here, but alas, winter again.
Want to hear something relatable? I ran a little bit behind with my newsletter today.
Sometimes a day hits where you have what feels like 500 deliverables and not enough hours in the day (or hands) to complete them.
Where I would’ve panicked in the past, today I calmly assessed my tasks, made a list of priorities and went bit by bit.
As our CEO is fond of saying, “you can’t do the big things if you don’t do the little things.”
And here we are, newsletter in hand inbox. Just a little wisdom for you heading into the weekend.
-Sage Levene, VP of Marketing, Hypha HubSpot Development
Open Mic
Newsletters Still Work. Here’s Why—and How to Do Them Right
By Rebecca Albright, Senior Inbound Content Developer, Hypha HubSpot Development
You can be everywhere and still own nothing.
Most brands today are expected to show up across every channel—social, video, podcasts, search, partner platforms, and whatever AI-driven discovery surface shows up next. But broad distribution no longer buys you loyalty. Platform algorithms shift without warning, referral traffic has become less reliable, and more audience interaction happens without a click ever reaching you. The channels you’ve built on? You don’t own them.
That’s why owned channels have quietly become the most valuable real estate in content strategy.
The newsletter’s real job isn’t reach—it’s relationship.
Outside platforms do the discovery work. Your newsletter is where that attention becomes something stickier—a direct, repeatable, permission-based channel where you’re not competing with an algorithm for your own audience.
The goal isn’t building the biggest list you can. It’s building a smaller, more engaged one—readers who open consistently, value your perspective, and are more likely to buy, subscribe, or respond when you ask. Publish widely to get found, use the newsletter to be remembered. It’s the owned layer that makes everything else sustainable.
Know what you’re there to do: Every strong newsletter has a defined role: inform, curate, analyze, nurture, or drive action. “We send updates” isn’t a purpose. Get specific, and your editorial decisions get easier.
Write for a specific reader, not a general audience: The newsletters that work are built around a clear reader need—not a company content calendar. The more specifically you can picture who you’re writing for, the better.
Give them a reason to stay subscribed: Readers opt in for relevance. They stay for a point of view they can’t get elsewhere. Generic recaps don’t build that. A distinct editorial voice does.
Quality over list size, every time: A tight list of engaged readers is worth more than a bloated one that sits dormant. Optimize for the kind of relationship where your audience actually does something when you ask.
Make it a habit, not a surprise: Consistent format, tone, and cadence train readers to expect you—and make time for you. Predictability isn’t boring. It’s trust.
Design for the scanner, write for the reader: Strong subject lines, clean structure, and clear calls to action aren’t nice-to-haves. Most people skim before they read. Make it easy to catch the value fast.
Treat it like a two-way channel: Invite replies. Ask for feedback. When readers write back, that’s a signal you’re doing something right.
The best newsletter you’ll ever send is the one after you’ve been paying attention. Open rates, clicks, and replies tell you more than any best-practices list. Let what your audience actually responds to shape what comes next—and keep improving from there.
We all have to buckle up, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
“Friday’s shockingly weak jobs report showed a loss of 92,000 jobs in February across the broader economy, far below the expected gain of 55,000 jobs. After the release, economist Joseph Politano posted on X that the tech sector has had an especially rough couple of years.
“Tech job losses now outpace past downturns in 2008 and 2020, per Politano. Historically, Politano said, the US would usually be adding around 100,000 to 300,000 jobs in tech annually; even when there have been some pullbacks, there’s generally a quick rebound. But not this time.”
I find myself between a rock and a hard place re: age verification. On the one hand, setting boundaries for minors on social is important. On the other, I value privacy, and having to provide documentation to verify age is a slippery slope.
“Australia’s regulations, along with other countries’ proposals, aim to reduce the pressures and risks that young users may face on social media, which include cyberbullying, addiction, mental health issues, and exposure to predators.
“Of course, there are concerns about privacy regarding invasive age verification and excessive government intervention. Critics, including Amnesty Tech, have said such bans are ineffective and that they ignore the realities of younger generations. Despite this, many nations are moving ahead with proposed legislation.”
Hypha Highlights
Higher borrowing costs and stubbornly high entry multiples have rewritten the PE deal math. Bain captures this shift with the “12 is the new 5” concept: where 5% annual EBITDA growth used to be enough to make deals work, sponsors now need something closer to double that from the underlying business.
Instead of letting leverage and multiple expansion do most of the work, firms have to manufacture a much larger share of returns through operational improvement. That, in turn, pushes portfolio tech stacks—especially commercial and data infrastructure—from back-office hygiene to core value-creation focus.
This post walks through how GPs and operating partners can assess their portfolio company stacks and why HubSpot can serve as a go-to system of record and orchestration layer that materially sharpens execution across their portfolios.
“Breeze Assistant is your always available HubSpot helper! In this session of the HubSpot Admins HUG, Senior Director of Product Management Kolin Koehl will be explaining this ins and outs of this powerful AI tool and answering all your questions!”
AI in Action
News, updates and tools from the AI industry.
Let’s dive in!
Anthropic filed an emergency request to stay the Pentagon’s designation of its products as a supply chain risk, arguing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision—issued via social media without legal or factual explanation—will cause “irreparable harm” and violates due process protections. The designation prompted Trump to order all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s products, with the company’s CFO estimating potential revenue harm ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars as over 100 enterprise customers expressed concerns about working with the firm.
OpenAI announced it will acquire Promptfoo, an AI security platform used by over 25% of Fortune 500 companies that helps enterprises identify and remediate vulnerabilities in AI systems during development. The company plans to integrate Promptfoo’s technology into OpenAI Frontier, its platform for building AI coworkers, adding automated security testing and red-teaming capabilities to detect risks like prompt injections, jailbreaks, data leaks, and tool misuse, while providing integrated reporting and traceability to help organizations meet governance and compliance expectations.
Microsoft launched Copilot Cowork, a new AI tool that completes tasks and runs workflows on users’ behalf rather than just providing answers, automating actions like rescheduling meetings, preparing meeting packets, conducting company research, and creating launch plans across Microsoft 365 applications. The tool is powered by Work IQ and integrated technology from Anthropic’s Claude Cowork through Microsoft’s multi-model approach; it creates step-by-step plans that run in the background with user approval checkpoints.
AMI Labs, the new venture co-founded by Yann LeCun after leaving Meta, raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation to build world models—AI that learns from reality rather than just language. The startup, led by CEO Alexandre LeBrun with backing from investors including Nvidia, Samsung, Bezos Expeditions, and Eric Schmidt, will focus on fundamental research using LeCun’s Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and expects it could take years before world models transition from theory to commercial applications.
Meta acquired Moltbook, the viral social network designed for AI agents, bringing creators Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr into Meta Superintelligence Labs. Moltbook, which Schlicht built largely with the help of his personal AI assistant Clawd Clawderberg, established a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners, while existing Moltbook customers can continue using the platform temporarily.
Google rolled out new Gemini-powered AI capabilities to Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive that let users generate fully formatted drafts, spreadsheets, and presentations by pulling information from Gmail, Chat, and Drive with a single prompt. New features include “Help me create” in Docs for generating first drafts, “Fill with Gemini” in Sheets to auto-populate tables with real-time information from Google Search, AI-generated slides that match presentation themes, and “Ask Gemini in Drive” that provides AI Overviews summarizing information across documents without opening files.
Andreessen Horowitz released its sixth edition of the Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps, broadening the list to include any product where generative AI has become core to the experience, with ChatGPT maintaining dominance at 2.7x larger than Gemini on web and 2.5x on mobile despite growing competition from Claude and Gemini. Key trends include the emergence of horizontal agents like OpenClaw, the shift of creative tools toward video and music generation as image generation gets bundled into platforms, geographic fragmentation, and AI moving beyond browsers and apps into desktop tools.
“In this episode of The Deep View: Conversations, we talk with Olivia Moore, partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley’s flagship venture capital firms. At a16z, Olivia focuses on the rapidly evolving world of consumer AI apps. She tracks which tools are gaining traction, which ones are breaking out beyond early adopters, and which products are unlocking entirely new capabilities for everyday users.
“In this conversation, we explore the key trends shaping the next wave of AI apps, including the rise of personal AI agents, the growing importance of context and memory in AI systems, and the way new tools are changing how people build, create, and work.”
How can we help you?
Case Study: HubSpot CMS for Finance
An SEC-registered investment management firm needed live ETF performance data on their website, a growing library of investment documents managed at scale, and quarterly performance reports that update without a developer. The firm’s ETF data lived on an external server with no API, no native HubSpot integration, and security restrictions that ruled out standard solutions.
We built the system on HubSpot CMS. Custom JavaScript reads a CSV from the external domain, parses it, and renders daily ETF performance through a custom module—no middleware or API layer. A single HubDB table manages every published resource: strategy decks, fact sheets, videos, outlooks, and quarterly recaps. Adding a document means adding a row, not building a page. Quarterly strategy pages update with curated performance data as structured content operations, and compliance review sits directly in the publishing workflow.
The result: live data updates without developer involvement and a content infrastructure that handles financial services complexity on a single platform. New content types can be added without new templates, and quarterly reporting runs on a predictable cadence.
Running content operations across fragmented systems because someone said HubSpot couldn’t handle the complexity? Contact Hypha for a technical conversation about what’s realistic for your architecture.
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