🐶 Your dog says hi

Plus: Keeping solo-living safe, D&D for sandwiches, and more.  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  

You're just 3 referrals away from earning a Hustle Essentials kit. Check out all of our prizes here. Share your link: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Share The Hustle: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Check your referral progress & prizes here 👋  Good morning. Special shoutout to our readers born in 1976. You're celebrating a big birthday alongside some iconic products this year: Apple computers, the Big Gulp, Jelly Belly Jelly Beans, and Whac-a-Mole will all turn 50 in 2026. While random, it does feel like those products could be combined for a pretty epic birthday celebration.  STARTING UP Can chemical herbicides be weeded out? ❌  The problem: The chemical sprays used to kill weeds are costly, labor-intensive, and potentially dangerous.   💡  The pitch: Naware uses computer vision to spot weeds and kills them with precision steam instead of harmful chemicals. Its system can be mounted onto lawn mowers, tractors, or ATVs. While the company's founder told TechCrunch he first experimented with 200-watt lasers and drones, steam offered a safer solution. 🚀  The outlook: The startup is eyeing future customers that care for athletic fields and golf courses, conducting paid pilots of its tech, and in talks with lawn-care operators and equipment makers to make sure the grass is always greener. NEWS FLASH   Stay toasty: Michigan startup LuxWall developed windows that, per Fast Company, use a vacuum to block heat transfer, much like a travel mug does to keep drinks cold or hot. They cut energy use by up to 45% when compared to single-pane windows. Speak your truest truth: Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike is back with Confer, an open source AI assistant that encrypts conversations and can't trace users back to their real-world identities. Marlinspike told Ars Technica that users have reported "life-changing conversations" because they weren't worried about their data being harvested. Talk to a bot: Deepgram, a Bay Area startup that makes AI models to enable voice agents to hold real-time conversations, raised $130m for a valuation of $1.3B, which it will use to expand internationally, develop new models, and explore acquisitions. But if you're tired of AI, maybe pick up "Warhammer." Games Workshop, maker of the popular game franchise, has banned AI use in content production and design. The company also saw a ~$44m YoY increase in revenue in the six months ending in November 2025, despite tariffs and a decrease in licensing profits. A LITTLE HELP Please… let AI do more of the legwork This is 100% not the time for you to be some against-the-grain, anti-AI/innovation stan.  The latest bots are honestly boons (especially if you're building by yourself). Here are 150+ prompts for squeezing good scripts and doing less soul-sucking stuff.  Options for marketing/sales/service/strategy all included. Save the spread for tons of simple tricks. Cut-paste-chop-chop   THE BIG IDEA Your dog has something to say. The market is listening.    Remember Lassie? The superintelligent collie who saved children in trouble?    The fictional concept of communicating with dogs is closer to reality than you'd think.   Pet tech startup Traini, maker of a $700 "smart collar" that translates dogs' emotions into human language, closed a $7.5m funding round in December.    Here's how it works: Traini's collar tracks signals like barks and heart rate and feeds them to AI models trained on behavioral data and insights from 2m+ dogs and hundreds of peer-reviewed studies. The AI compares those signals to recordings of humans expressing similar emotions.  A companion app translates those signals into plain language — relaying statements like "I'm anxious" or "I want to play" with 94% accuracy, according to the company.  The tech is unique, but the company doesn't operate in a vacuum (and not just because they scare dogs).    Animal translation projects are in the works across industries:  The nonprofit Earth Species Project made the first large audio-language model for bioacoustics, making headway on dictionaries for animal sounds.   Baidu, owner of China's largest search engine, recently filed a patent for a system that could potentially translate animal vocalizations to human language.  The Coller-Dolittle Prize offers a $10m equity investment or $500k in cash to researchers who create tech that passes the "Turing test for animals."  Interesting as these organizations are, the science behind them can be contentious.     What does that mean?   Some animal behavioral specialists and AI experts are skeptical of companies touting models that offer one-to-one animal sound-to-human language translations.    Others point out there's no guarantee animals could understand anything we say back.   Still, the global pet economy is estimated to eclipse $500B by 2030, and many consider their furry friends to be furry family — so any product that offers a viable perspective on what dogs think is potentially lucrative.   The fact that there's a bit of an arms (or paws) race to develop that tech makes sense.     🔗 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED   Still thinking of the teddy bear that got away? A professional claw machine player probably snatched it — and filmed it for millions of viewers to watch. NEWSWORTHY NUMBER How much it costs to download Are You Dead?, a safety platform for checking in on people who live alone that's currently the No. 1 paid app on Apple's App Store in China and No. 6 in the US, per Gizmodo. Users simply add an emergency contact to the app, then push a green button to check in each day; if they fail to do so for two consecutive days, the app notifies their emergency contact via email.  As morbid as it sounds, the app addresses the safety concerns of the millions of people who live alone in countries like China, where the solo-living rate is expected to surpass 30% by 2030, and the US, where ~30% of people were already living solo as of 2020. HOW YOU HUSTLE Let's check in on what you're building. Here's our weekly spotlight on a Hustle reader working on something big.   Who: Nick Spilger What: Siip The elevator pitch: "Siip is a personalized coffee subscription that sends your perfect 'bean match' each month, freshly roasted direct from roasters who prioritize responsibly sourced coffees." The problem they're solving: "More people than ever care about drinking great coffee. But as choice and information have exploded, buying a bag has turned into decision overload. Most people want the same thing: to enjoy excellent coffee without harming the planet or the people who grow it, but making that choice confidently still requires deep industry knowledge." One truly innovative thing they're doing: "Unlike wine, which has long benefited from structured classifications, coffee data has historically been unstructured and inconsistent, making it difficult to translate quality and taste into something consumers can act on. We built a structured system that connects coffee details to real preferences, powering recommendations that feel intuitive instead of overwhelming." What are you working on? Tell us here. AROUND THE WEB 📆  On this day: In 1794, Jesse Bennett performed the first C-section. Though believed to have studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, he acted out of necessity. The patient was his wife, who survived and delivered a healthy baby girl. 🥪  Haha: A game where you can choose "Dungeons & Dragons" alignments for various sandwiches. 🗞️  Newsletter: Start every weekday with Quartz Daily Brief for intriguing global business news. 👃  That's interesting: Why we have two nostrils. 🐶  Aww: Future influencer. SHOWER THOUGHT A multibillionaire's phone can't really do anything yours can't. SOURCE Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Singdhi Sokpo, and Jay Fuchs. Editing by: Sara "All bark, no bite" Friedman.   Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. Working on something big? We've got a whole library of business-building resources for you. Subscribe to our other newsletters Stay up-to-date on AI: Mindstream  |  Expert insights: Masters in Marketing  |  Sell better: The Science of Scaling Follow The Hustle on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. HubSpot Media, 2 Canal Park, Cambridge, MA, 02141, USA, +1 888.482.7768 Never want to hear from us again? Break our hearts and Unsubscribe.