Hey OverExposed, welcome to the new drop of our newsletter! Double week this time!
At Exposure, 50+ elite builders across 17+ global cities gather weekly to talk about AI & startups. With each OverExposed drop, we mirror exactly what’s happening inside these meetings.
Below is the unfiltered signal from the top 1% of Turkish Diaspora.
In today’s OverExposed:
Everyone follows a few paths; doesn’t mean other ones don’t exist.
Deepseek back again! 20 tools/repos/news shared this week.
Massive boom in the new batch E2 with diverse founders!
Guest Session: Founder (CTO) of Ollang
Let’s dive in.
BIGGEST LEARNING OF THE WEEK
🎲 There’s Always a Third Path
Image generated by real Exposure Members
The Learning: Being a Founder isn’t a competition of who can sleep more days homeless in the streets of SF trying to sell B2B agentic workflows. The group houses all sorts of members along with AI folks, from PC game developers to the producers of the legendary Jacket of the red dragon.
A Fictional Scenario:
Jean is inspired by the freedom within the startup community. She decides to attend events to learn from founders & investors.
Jean is told that if she doesn’t commit to burning her savings on traveling to SF and selling AI workflows to large enterprise for the next 10 years, she will lose the race. She is told “speed is moat, taste is moat”.
Jean, who realised this will never be possible financially and dictates extreme sacrifice immediately, decides that she has to spend the rest of her life working 9-5.
She shuts doors to a new way of seeing reality, rejecting the uncomfortable yet potent strength that one gains by letting go of all predefined paths that people show them.
Takeaway: Even within the startup community of nonlinear people, there is a mainstream culture; this can drown out people coming into the ecosystem or prevent them from trying new ideas. Success isn’t defined by high burn rate or fighting hundreds of people competing in claude code clash. Do Things People Want.
TOOLS/REPOS OF THE WEEK
🚀 Deepseek is Back for Round 2!
20 Links (tools/repos/news) hit our radar this week. These are the top 3 high-signal picks. You can view the complete curated list here.
Deepseek V4 Pro/Flash: Everyone’s favorite open weight LLM is back with a new major version release. Used for workflows/coding by Exposure members, V4 Pro achieves daring performance (~4.6 sonnet). 1M token output is 3.48$/0.28$ for pro and flash versions respectively.
Meta Ads CLI: The moment it came out, it became a stable tool in the agents of the group. It’s exactly as it sounds: automate everything from campaign creation to ad performance analysis.
GPT Image 2: With extreme ability to adapt to styles, this is now the group’s pick for making video thumbnails/static ads/infomercials/logos and more.
Pi: Custom harnesses are taking github by a storm, with so many stars its difficult to determine which one is useful; Pi was the one that managed better for us (didn’t delete databases/ads campaigns because of a heartbeat).
🔥 Github Might be Cooked: The age old problem has resurged with the help of AI hype. You want 1000 github stars in your repo? that will be 80$.
💸 New Regulation in Türkiye: Zero tax on export sales of software for the next 20 years! We are as excited as you on this one!
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"Why did [the Swiss] decide to make their brand shout, after a century of whispering? Because they knew they weren’t going to beat the Japanese on performance. From now on they'd have to depend more on brand"
In this age of attention and speed, the most effective way of marketing/building/selling is being you. You must push through to put yourself, the strangeness and the brightness both, in front of the eyes of your crowd. They exist, and convincing them is far easier than someone who can’t understand your way.
Brand isn’t a color palette, a description and a logo: it’s the act of reaching people who understand your every action, and letting the others sift themselves through.
These Weeks at Exposure
Image Edited by GPT Image 2
Aziz Ulak joined our guest session.
Member launch: $200k+ revenue in a few months bootstrapped!
E2 Batch was opened due to overwhelming amount of applications!
8 distinct topics analyzed in a week
20 links shared in total
Feel free to reply to this email with any interesting ideas/tools you have.
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