🐕 Find my ashes

Plus: Two days without lungs, the best video essays of 2025, 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. If you've already started your Super Bowl Sunday prep, here's something that might not be on your shopping list. Heinz launched KegChup, a 19.5-inch keg that holds 114 ounces of red, sticky ketchup. The extremely American invention was a response to NielsenIQ data suggesting that 84% of consumers make their own game day snacks and that Super Bowl Sunday is the second-largest food holiday of the year. Now all we need is a giant chicken tender… STARTING UP The startup putting a speech coach in your pocket  ❌  The problem: Around 70% of the world's 1.5B English speakers aren't native speakers, but research suggests that accents can lead to unfair bias in the workplace.  💡  The pitch: Y Combinator–backed BoldVoice wants to level the playing field for non-native English speakers. The startup's AI-powered app has users take a speech test before analyzing their accent and generating a customized curriculum to improve pronunciation. While a human speech coach might cost $150-$400 for a single session, BoldVoice has memberships ranging from $25 a month to $200 a year.  🚀  The outlook: The startup has already amassed 5m+ downloads, reported $10m in annual recurring revenue, and is hoping to expand into other accents and languages. NEWS FLASH Rivian goes Hollywood: Rivian modified one of its Commercial Vans to create a custom electric ambulance for "Grey's Anatomy." It's much quieter on set than a traditional ambulance, plus it doesn't emit exhaust fumes that could be harmful to cast and crew.  Honda partnered with the Ohio Department of Transportation on a two-year pilot to see if cars equipped with cameras and lidar could inform road repair needs, per Gizmodo. The system successfully identified damaged or hidden signs 99% of the time and scored 89% for potholes.  The curse persists: Gokce Guven, founder of tech startup Kalder Inc. and 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 Marketing & Advertising honoree, has been accused of defrauding investors out of ~$7m via faked financial documents and brand partnerships, then using those same misrepresentations to apply for a US visa. The rogue gallery of Forbes honorees later accused of fraud includes Charlie Javice, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Elizabeth Holmes.  Robotics startup Figure released a video of its Figure 02 humanoid robot unloading a dishwasher, putting the clean dishes away, then loading dirty dishes. At four minutes, Figure said it believes the demo marks the "longest horizon, most complex task completed autonomously by a humanoid robot to date." MAXIMUM PRODUCTIVITY See the world through the eyes of Steph    Longtime readers know Steph Smith as the architect of Trends. Since then, she's taken her predict-the-future playbook to a16z and Nvidia (via acqui-hire of Groq).   100+ Digits is one of her most ambitious data projects yet, spanning era-defining signals across business, tech, energy, and health.    Find opportunity everywhere:  Human legos: Microplastics are ~0.5% of our brains. Most of us merrily consume about a credit card's worth of plastic each week.   Liquid gold: Water desalination costs have fallen over 50% since 2000.  Cyber crime vectors: "Pig butchering" is a $75B crypto scam industry… and "face swap hacks" have risen by 700%. Space junk: Jettisoned debris litters Earth's atmosphere, dinging (or perforating) innocent satellites and rooftops. City infrastructure: Over 17k New York state bridges (99.97%!) need some repairs. But a few of them are fine. Visit the digits   THE BIG IDEA Pet deathcare is getting digitized    Great news for recently bereaved pet owners: An emerging platform applies Amazon-style logistics to pet cremation, ensuring the ashes in your pug's urn aren't from some random corgi. Angelpaw works with 10k+ vets to cover 100k+ pets per month on the world's largest pet cremation tracking platform — essentially Find My Friends for pet remains.  Here's how it works: When a pet dies, vets scan a waterproof RFID tag that stores all pet and owner data digitally. Fixed antennas and handheld scanners track the pet through every crematorium station. Owners receive updates at each step, from pickup to when the ashes are ready. Ruff-ly speaking, how big is its market? The pet cremation industry has historically run on trust and clipboards — a bit surprising for a $2.4B market projected to hit $3.2B by 2032.  Owners often wound up with the wrong ashes: a tough look when 51% of US pet owners say their pets are as much a part of their family as siblings or parents.  "Pet humanization" offerings — like premium food, DNA tests, and veterinary telehealth — are becoming increasingly popular. Angelpaw is a natural extension of that. If we treat pets like family in life, why wouldn't we do so in death? Other businesses play into that as well: CodaPet is a marketplace connecting families with vets who perform in-home euthanasia. Obituary Assistant now includes a plug-in for pet memorials, letting owners create digital tributes for fallen furry friends — not just human obituaries. Woof! Any concerns? Angelpaw is building a data layer on top of 100k monthly pet deaths. That volume could raise eyebrows over data privacy. And some might find applying Amazon-style logistics to grief unsettling or distasteful. Does radical transparency help mourning, or does it industrialize the last intimate act we perform for a pet? Still, the business case is clear: Americans spent an estimated $157B on pets in 2025, and death is a life stage we haven't overhauled.  Digitizing the moment all dogs go to heaven could be lucrative.   🔗 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED   Future-proof your leaders: The sales team of the future is being reshaped by AI. Here's how to build one that will last. NEWSWORTHY NUMBER Hours a man lived without lungs thanks to some serious science. A 33-year-old man with influenza B and an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection was in such bad shape that his lung tissue was turning into liquid, per Ars Technica. With no way for oxygen to reach his blood, everything was shutting down, and he was too ill for a lung transplant. So, surgeon/researcher Ankit Bharat and his team at Northwestern University did something pretty wild: They took his lungs out — this is considered a last resort — and replaced them with a device they'd engineered to mimic them. This, plus other tactics to keep his heart working, allowed the man to live until the sepsis in his body resolved and a lung transplant could be completed. Though the paper documenting this case is new, the surgery actually occurred two years ago. And, yes, the patient is doing just fine.  AROUND THE WEB 📅  On this day: In 1953, J. Fred Muggs, a chimpanzee, debuted on NBC's "Today Show," where he acted as mascot until 1957.  👀  That's cool: The 255 best video essays of 2025, according to the British Film Institute's international voters.  📰  Newsletter: Subscribe to The Donut to start your day on the right foot. 🚀  Hey, founders: Series A startups are now eligible for a 90% first-year discount for HubSpot's CRM platform and AI credits.  🐱  Aww: So sleepy. SHOWER THOUGHT The first Who's On First routine was when Odysseus told the cyclops his name was Nobody.  SOURCE Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Singdhi Sokpo, and Jay Fuchs. Editing by: Sara "Can I hug your pug?" 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: Marketing Against the Grain |  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.