Nov 10, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Next Legacy Business

Plus: Rivian Lacks the Ambition, Peloton Breaks a Sweat Again

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

In the next legacy business, staying power—not ambition—may be the hardest muscle to train.

TELECOM

Starlink Just Went Terrestrial

👀 What’s the move: Elon Musk’s Starlink inked its largest direct-to-cell deal yet with telecom giant Veon, unlocking potential access to 150 million users across Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Uzbekistan. The rollout begins in late 2025, giving ordinary smartphones the ability to connect straight to Starlink’s orbital network — no ground towers needed.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t just another telecom deal; it’s another mass-market bridge between space and mobile networks. With 8 million users and 8,000 satellites (including 650 for direct-to-cell), Starlink now expands into high-growth regions before Amazon’s Kuiper or AST SpaceMobile even launch. The move pushes satellite internet from rural backup to core telecom layer, rewriting how coverage and data control work in emerging markets.

⛵ Key takeaway: Musk just turned “no signal” zones into Starlink territory — and maybe made cell towers the next legacy business.

TOGETHER WITH BYTEPLUS

Seedance 1.0 Pro Fast — Ultra-Fast, Pro-Quality AI Video Generation

Introducing Seedance 1.0 Pro Fast, the latest breakthrough from BytePlus that pushes the frontier of AI-driven video creation. Built for creators and enterprises demanding both speed and cinematic quality, Seedance redefines efficiency — generating an 8-second 720p video in just 26 seconds, making it up to 4× faster than Veo3 Fast while maintaining professional-grade realism and style consistency.

Powered by advanced semantic understanding and motion simulation, Seedance analyzes prompts, reference images, and scene logic to interpret intent, infer motion, and complete coherent storylines. The result is a video that feels natural, expressive, and emotionally engaging — not just rendered, but directed.

Compared with Veo3 Fast, Seedance delivers smoother motion control, stronger prompt adherence, and more physical realism, especially in complex or high-action scenes. Its multi-shot storytelling engine plans zooms, transitions, and perspective shifts automatically, enabling creators to achieve cinematic rhythm and flow without manual edits.

Supporting flexible output from 2–12 seconds at 480p, 720p, or 1080p, Seedance gives you the freedom to create faster, better, and more affordably — breaking the old speed–quality–cost triangle and setting a new benchmark for AI video generation.

Experience the Speed 👉

INCENTIVE

Rivian Copies Musk’s Playbook — Minus the Ambition

👀 What’s the move: Rivian just handed CEO RJ Scaringe a “Musk-style” pay package worth up to $4.6 billion over ten years — complete with stock milestones, profit targets, and a doubled base salary. But unlike Musk’s trillion-dollar moonshot, Rivian’s board quietly lowered the bar. The 2021 plan that was just canceled required shares to hit $110–$295; now, the bonuses kick in at just $40.

💡 Why it’s not boring: When your IPO was priced at $78 and your stock now sits at $15, “ambition” starts meaning something else. This plan isn’t about chasing Mars; it’s about clawing back losses. Rivian’s investors aren’t dreaming of empire-building — they’re just trying to make sure their CEO wants to make them lose less money.

⛵ Key takeaway: Rivian didn’t copy Musk’s vision of the future; it copied his paycheck and stapled it to a much lower ceiling.

FITNESS

Peloton Breaks a Sweat Again

👀 What’s the move: Once the face of at-home fitness, Peloton is recalling nearly 878,000 of its “Bike+” exercise bikes across the U.S. and Canada after reports that seat posts snapped during use. The affected models, built between 2019 and 2022, come after a 2023 recall of 2 million original bikes with the same defect. The company has promised free replacements, although the sense of déjà vu is impossible to miss.

💡 Why it’s not boring: For a brand built on “connected fitness,” these repeated hardware failures reveal a deeper weakness in its model. Peloton’s strategy depends on turning one-time hardware buyers into long-term content subscribers, yet each recall undermines the trust that supports that ecosystem. Investors once viewed Peloton as the Apple of fitness, but it is now beginning to resemble the Samsung Note 7 of home gyms, a product remembered less for its innovation than for the safety concerns that shattered consumer confidence.

⛵ Key takeaway: Peloton’s toughest workout is not on the bike but in rebuilding confidence that its products and business model can stay balanced.

STARTUP SPOT

🚴 Peloton
“Pedaling from hardware to habit.”
Connected-fitness pioneer turning bikes and treadmills into subscription-driven workout platforms powered by AI-personalized classes and live social training.
→ Founded 2012 by John Foley; once worth $50B, now rebuilding under CEO Peter Stern after 878k Bike+ recall; doubling down on software, retention, and profitable recurring revenue.

🧠 Moonshot AI
“Thinking longer, costing less.”
Beijing startup behind Kimi K2 Thinking, a trillion-parameter open-source model that reasons across 200–300 tool calls and runs natively on INT4 GPUs—achieving 44.9% on HLE, ahead of GPT-5 and Claude 4.5.
→ Founded 2023 by ex-DeepMind and ByteDance researchers; backed by Alibaba and top Chinese VCs; now valued ≈ $3.3 B as it pioneers China’s low-cost, high-IQ AI paradigm.

🔐 Wiz
“Securing the cloud from the inside out.”
Agentless platform that visualizes and protects every cloud asset—from code to runtime—using graph-based AI to surface real attack paths across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
→ Founded 2020 by ex-Microsoft and Adallom team Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy Reznik, Ami Luttwak; hit $350M ARR in 4 years; acquired by Google for $32B, the largest deal in its history.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Blue Origin scrubbed its second New Glenn launch due to weather and safety concerns, rescheduling for November 12.
YouTube TV is issuing a $20 credit to subscribers after a prolonged Disney channel blackout caused by a pricing dispute.
Apple is developing satellite features like third-party API access, offline Maps, and photo messaging to expand iPhone connectivity beyond cell networks.
Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital is raising a larger second nuclear fusion fund to double down on the next wave of clean energy breakthroughs.
The Nasdaq fell about 3% last week, its biggest drop since April, as eight major AI tech giants lost a combined $800 billion in market value.

TOGETHER WITH US

AI Secret Media Group is the world’s #1 AI & Tech Newsletter Group, boasting over 2 million readers from leading companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Our Newsletter Brands: