A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.
Good morning. It’s hard to keep up with the pace of change in AI. The best way I know how is to speak to smart people building in AI, from the solo vibe coders to serial startup founders.
My favorite founders are the ones who are using AI tooling to fix systemic problems in legacy industries, like recruitment.
Let’s dive in.
This week in AI:
Lovable hits $200M ARR
The vibe coding unicorn credits its success to staying in Europe. Move over SF.
Trump against AI “overregulation”
The President is calling for one federal standard for regulating AI, rather than leaving it up to the states.
Dow closes down nearly 500 points
AI bubble fears are growing, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 498 points.
Company background: Dex
Founded: February 2025
Team size: 9
Funding to date: $3.1 million, from a16z and Speedrun and Concept Ventures
MRR: Not disclosed
Growth metric: The average salary on Dex is between £100,000 and over a million.
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This a16z-backed AI founder is giving people access to opportunities he never had
When Paddy Lambros was a teen, his only career advice was “stay out of jail.” He was in and out of social housing, expelled from school, and written off by his teachers. There came a point when he realized no one was going to save him, and he had to make something of himself. Lambros got himself to university and graduated into a crappy job market. He started in recruiting, where he stayed.
Within three years, he landed a job in talent at Improbable – the hottest startup in the UK at the time. Andreessen Horowitz had just led Improbable’s Series A. It was their first check outside of the U.S. MIT called Improbable the 21st smartest company in the world.
“I was basically the one person who hadn’t been to Oxford, Cambridge or MIT. I was successful because I worked harder than anyone else.” He knew this was his big break.
Over the next three years, Lambros helped grow the team from 50 to 650 people, opened new offices around the world, and raised $600 million from SoftBank.
Lambros went on to lead people and talent at Sensat, before being poached by several VC funds in Europe. He then joined Atomico, the fund led by the founder of Skype, Niklas Zennström. As the Talent Director, Lambros looked after about 100 companies in the portfolio – flying all over Europe, dropping into teams and helping them hire, fire, and manage people. “People used to joke that I was the most experienced head of talent in Europe, because I was doing it for 20 companies at a time.”
He realized how hiring was every company’s main problem, and no one was doing it right. The whole system was broken.
The idea
Even the very best recruiters only know a few hundred people. 80% of the 30,000 recruitment companies have less than 10 employees, so it’s a fragmented market of a lot of small players.
Employees are fielding calls of people trying to sell them jobs, with no one to help them. “There’s a lot of talented people out there, unaware of their possibilities and potential.”
Every statistic relating to tenure, engagement, productivity and happiness are at all-time lows… and the labor force is in for a big awakening in the next few years, as AI wipes out jobs.
People will need help to completely reimagine themselves.
Lambros had an idea: To arm you with knowledge of your unique talents, unearth deep insights and motivations, and present opportunities you may never have considered (and couldn’t find yourself).
“The world’s greatest executive recruiter and career coach.”
Enter Dex, an AI-powered recruiter.
Dex uses voice AI to get people to talk about what’s important to them, what they’re most proud of, their top achievements etc.
Lambros said AI is being used all wrong in recruiting. E.g. Spamming out hundreds of applications, remixing a resume or interviewing candidates. Humans are wired for human interaction. Building products that remove humans is foolish, Lambros said. “Humans don’t want AI done to them.”
The build & go-to-market
Lambros quit his highly paid VC job and raised their pre-seed from Andreessen Horowitz – where his journey had started close to a decade prior. “We spent three months living in LA as part of the a16z program.
They decided to focus on software engineers, because there are 10,000 open engineering jobs in London right now. Dex now has 12,000 software engineers in the UK and U.S. on the platform and 50 of the world’s leading tech companies. Clients like big tech, hedge funds, and AI software brands such as Granola and Fyxer.
“The average salaries on the platform start at £100,000 and go over a million,” he said.
Scaling strategies
Most of it has been word of mouth and referrals, which he admits is quite unusual in tech. It’s more common for a company to be driven by paid, but that’s actually one of their smaller channels. Here’s an example of one of their paid posts.
On the candidate side, a lot of Dex’s traction has come from organic posting on social media. “Being in places where our target audience is, whether that’s Reddit, LinkedIn or somewhere else.
Dex has a podcast, a YouTube channel, and founder-led content.
“It’s really about building a delightful experience that customers and candidates realize is where the good opportunities are, and share it with their friends,” Lambros explained.
Takeaways
People don’t want AI done to them. We’re already moving into a phase where the fact that it’s AI is not interesting.
Most businesses focus on the how, not the what. No one cares about how you do it, as long as it’s good.
Word of mouth works, even with an AI startup.
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