good morning legends! Another fine welcome to the Leaderboard. In today's issue we're taking a look at a tool that can spot the AI slop before our parents think its real, a sun tracker for those of us in colder climates (and vampires), a project management tool for leaner teams, and of course, the top products. Let's dive in.
Meta’s Video-SEAL: A state-of-the-art, open-source model for video watermarking.
Video-SEAL attempts to provide a programmatic way to authenticate genuine content in a world increaasingly inundated with deepfakes. It isn’t the first technology of its kind — Google DeepMind and Microsoft have both developed their own — but Meta’s researchers claim their approach is more efficient at scale and uniquely robust against video compression. It’s great to see an open-source solution to the deepfake slop problem, but I’m not sure how Meta plans to promote widespread adoption of this. How are they thinking about incentivizing makers using proprietary watermarking technology to switch?
SunSeek: A sunshine and vitamin D tracker for iOS.
Winters in Ireland mean a lot of grey, a bit of rain, and the occasional teasing hint of sunlight—just enough to remind you what you’re missing. By February, I’m practically begging the clouds for some vitamin D. SunSeek claims it can help, nudging you to grab what sunlight you can and tracking it along the way. I like the idea of turning those rare moments of brightness into a small win—especially when my energy’s running low. Sure, the clouds might still have the upper hand most days, but if even a little more sunlight makes a difference, I’m in.
HowsThisGoing: AI project manager for Slack
HowsThisGoing feels like a must-have tool for smaller teams managing chaos and various verticals demanding their attention. Automated project management keeps things moving smoothly, while the analytics aspect appears to give you clear insights to improve your project goals - and who doesn’t like data backing up their work? While the workflows and summaries are also a welcome addition, I’m interested to see what other tools or productivity aspects the team decides to include later on.
In an era where AI is reshaping how businesses operate, the journey of building an early-stage startup has never been more dynamic—or complex. How do founders navigate finding product-market fit, delegation, and scaling, all while adapting to technological innovations?
Join on January 14 at 3 pm PT for a fireside chat with Christina Cacioppo, CEO and Co-founder of Vanta, and Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and Founder of LTSE, as they explore the journey of the modern startup founder.
Eric and Christina will discuss: