Nov 13, 2025 6 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Goldman Unmasks China Humanoids

Plus: Waymo Hits the Freeway, US Banking 2.0 Era

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

Goldman’s investigation shows China’s humanoid surge is running on ambition rather than orders.

ROBOTICS

Goldman Tours China’s Humanoid Boom and Finds No Buyers, Only Factories

👀 What’s the move: Goldman Sachs went through China’s humanoid-robot supply chain expecting to find the next industrial supercycle. Instead it found an industry building for a demand curve that does not exist. Zero confirmed large orders, zero credible production timelines, yet a nationwide race to add capacity.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t an early-market wobble. It looks like an ecosystem engineered for subsidies, not shipments. China’s robot makers are scaling like they are chasing Tesla-level demand, but the terminal market is barely moving two thousand units a quarter. When output ramps without orders, you aren’t selling into a market — you’re selling a story to governments and equity holders. The “humanoid gold rush” reads less like an industrial revolution and more like a beautifully organized scam with CNC machines.

⛵ Key takeaway: When a country builds million-unit robot factories without a single million-unit buyer, that’s not optimism; that’s subsidy arbitrage dressed as innovation.

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Responsive review
SOLO adapts to your feedback and direction in real-time. When you review plans, update docs or adjust your directions, it immediately incorporates your input and aligns its work accordingly.
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Responsive context
SOLO responds to context shifts dynamically. Through the visible tool panel on the right, you see and control exactly what the agent accesses—which files, tools, and information are in scope. When you add or remove any context, the agent reacts by reengineering its approach.
This approach solves the problems of both context loss and context pollution, ensuring the agent always operates with precisely the right context for the task at hand.
Responsive multi-tasking
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ROBOTAXI

Waymo Hits the Freeway

👀 What’s the move: Waymo just rolled out freeway driving for public riders across Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix — the first autonomous network in the U.S. to officially go highway-scale. After millions of on-road test miles, Waymo cars can now merge, overtake, and exit at full speed, connecting city streets with freeways inside a continuous 260-square-mile service zone that even includes airport pickups at San Jose International.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Freeways are the missing link between autonomy and scale. Mastering them means a robotaxi can finally operate like a true end-to-end service — not just a downtown novelty. Once the system safely handles high-speed traffic, the same tech stack can power airport routes, intercity shuttles, and even freight corridors. In effect, Waymo just built the backbone every robotaxi startup dreams of but hasn’t yet delivered.

⛵ Key takeaway: Waymo’s freeway launch isn’t the finish line; it’s the on-ramp to a fully autonomous mobility grid where robotaxis stop testing cities and start connecting them.

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BANKING

SoFi Just Dragged US Banking Into Its 2.0 Era

👀 What’s the move: SoFi became the first nationally chartered US bank to roll out retail crypto trading — not through a loophole, but squarely inside federal rules after the OCC relaxed its stance. The bank is also prepping its own fully backed stablecoin, SoFi USD, and plans to weave blockchain rails directly into payments, lending, and settlement.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This is the moment crypto stops living at the edge of finance and starts rewiring the core. When an OCC-regulated national bank steps directly into trading, settlement, and stablecoin issuance — a threshold Coinbase and Circle can’t cross — it signals that the US has quietly flipped the switch on Banking 2.0: deposits that can move like software, payments that clear without card networks, and lending that rides programmable money instead of batch files. SoFi isn’t “adding crypto”; it’s turning blockchain into the new operating system of American retail finance.

⛵ Key takeaway: When a chartered bank goes on-chain, it’s not disruption — it’s the new standard.

STARTUP SPOT

🧘🏻‍♀️ SKIMS
“Solutions for every body.”
A direct-to-consumer shapewear and apparel brand founded in 2019 that expanded into loungewear, menswear, activewear, and beauty—leveraging inclusive sizing, skin-tone ranges, celebrity marketing, and strong drop-driven product strategy.
→ Founded by Kim Kardashian, Jens Grede & Emma Grede; recently raised USD 225 million at a USD 5 billion valuation, with expected net sales of over USD 1 billion in 2025.

👨🏻‍💻 Clad Lab
“Vibe-coding meets AI workflows.”
An AI-native code editor developed by Clad Labs (YC F25) that lets developers integrate entertainment (TikTok, Tinder, mini-games, even gambling) directly into the IDE to fill downtime during code-generation.
→ Founded by Richard Wang (Caltech, AI researcher) and Kevin Le (ex-Meta & UIUC), based in San Francisco, launched fall 2025 in closed beta.

🌐 Parallel
“The web built for AI-agents.”
An infrastructure startup offering APIs that enable AI agents to perform real-time web search, extract structured content, and integrate live web data—optimised for downstream AI workflows rather than human browsing.
→ Founded by Parag Agrawal (former CEO of Twitter) in circa 2023/2024; announced ~$30 M early funding, and in Nov 2025 raised a $100 M Series A at a ~$740 M valuation, led by Kleiner Perkins & Index Ventures.

BAY AREA MEMOS

RWE beat profit forecasts after selling a UK data center project built on a former coal plant, benefiting from the AI-driven surge in global power demand.
Google will invest $6.4 billion in Germany between 2026 and 2029 to expand its cloud and data centers, creating about 9,000 jobs and strengthening its European footprint.
The US has minted its final penny, triggering unexpected retail and legal complications despite the coin’s near-obsolete status.
Kim Kardashian’s Skims raised funding at a 5 billion dollar valuation to speed up global store expansion, likely delaying its IPO.
Starlink launched a new $40-per-month unlimited plan capped at 100 Mbps, though availability is limited.

TOGETHER WITH US

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