Four Thousand Weeks
Building things that matter, philanthropy's $50b question, and the leadership gap that won't close
What we’re thinking about
This week, Rachel Yang, a Partner at Giant Leap, on why the hardest startup question isn’t how fast you can build, it’s why. An extended version of a piece first published in Startup Daily.
Optimising for what?
It started with a short film by Fifty Years, a San Francisco-based impact fund about people who build things that matter, not better ads, faster checkouts or more addictive feeds.
Watching it, I kept coming back to the same question: what’s actually worth doing with the time you’ve got on this earth.
Because in the long run, we’re all dead.
That is the grounding reality of Oliver Burkeman’s book, Four Thousand Weeks. The title represents the average lifespan of a human being. If you’re lucky and hit 90, you get closer to 4,700 weeks. It’s no wonder the longevity movement has taken off; the time we have on this earth, in Burkeman’s words, feels “absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short”.
In his book, Burkeman describes life on the productivity conveyor belt: “We’re obsessed with our overfilled inbox and lengthening to-do lists, haunted by the guilty feeling that we ought to be getting more done or different things done, or both.”
He notes a vicious paradox: “When you get tremendously efficient at answering emails, all that happens is that you get much more email.” By focusing entirely on velocity, are we actually getting the right things done, or just more things?
The “Why” vs. The “How”
In the age of AI, we are swimming in tools designed to maximise throughput; processing invoices instantly, automating code, and streamlining workflows. But to what end?
At a recent VC networking event, the conversation shifted towards hiring - the observation from some being that job losses weren’t the issue, the issue was not being able to hire quick enough. Hiring and onboarding are taking too long. What AI platforms are people using to automate the process?
It’s a valid operational pain point, but it skips right past the crucial question: What are we actually optimising for? If we use AI to screen, interview, assess and onboard candidates, two things happen. First, candidates will inevitably learn to game the algorithms. Second, and more dangerously, we flatten nuance. My definition of a great hire and your definition require entirely different corporate DNA. When you outsource that judgment to a standardised model, you lose alignment. By optimising purely for hiring speed, you risk rapidly scaling a culture that doesn’t actually fit your vision.
In the startup ecosystem, this forces an existential question for founders and backers alike: What is actually worth building? What is worth funding?
Many voices in the market would argue, “Just chase the capital, scale the numbers, and worry about the impact later.” But what if later never comes? What if your 4,000 weeks get cut short?
For investors, the playbook seems to increasingly be simplified to just accumulating wealth indefinitely. When Elon Musk passed the historic $1 trillion mark following the SpaceX IPO last month, it highlighted a jarring mathematical reality: if he spent $1 million a day, he would need roughly 35 lifetimes to get through his fortune. The world looks at that metric and declares him the most successful person on earth. Would you?
Stepping off the conveyor belt
If AI is handling the “how” of productivity, humans are left entirely responsible for the “why.”
True leadership today isn’t about running faster on a conveyor belt someone else built.
It’s about having the conviction to build and fund things that genuinely matter. There is never a perfect time to pivot toward the hard, meaningful problems.
But if you only have a few thousand weeks left on the clock, how do you want to spend your remaining weeks?
Who we actually back
More often than not, the founders we back are the ones who’ve lived inside the problem long enough to feel its exact shape: the specific friction, the failure everyone else has learned to absorb and move past.
Speed still matters, we’re a VC after all, but it’s a harder thing to fake. The founders we back can do both: walk you through the roadmap, and tell you, unprompted, exactly who gets hurt if they get this wrong, and why they can’t let that happen.
The other thing we look for is judgment: how a founder talks about the people their product is actually built for, whether they notice the gap between what it does in testing and what it does out in the world, what they do when something breaks. The founders worth backing sit with that, learn from it, and change course, rather than explaining it away.
The founders worth backing didn’t stumble onto their problem last quarter, chasing a trend or a funding cycle. They’ve been living inside it for years, sometimes without a name for what they were doing yet, because some part of them had already decided this was the thing worth spending their weeks on.
That’s the type of founder-market fit we’re looking for: not just knowledge of the problem, but a commitment that this is their life’s work, and that it’s worth however many of their four thousand weeks it takes.
If that’s you, we want to hear from you.
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.”
Joseph Campbell
For the road
💰 A historic wave of giving is coming, and most of the sector isn’t built to absorb it. GiveDirectly CEO Nick Allardice has a useful reframe: the constraint on philanthropy was never willing billionaires, it’s building interventions and organisations that can absorb serious capital and still work. He breaks it into a scorecard: market size, unit economics, speed and execution. The upside: the blueprint for doing this well already exists. It just needs backing.
🧠 A 17-year-old built an AI tool that reads autism and ADHD from a retina scan. Edward Kang calls it RetinaMind, and it flags autism spectrum disorder and ADHD from retinal images, both conditions with no physical test. The model hit 89% accuracy, and pointed Kang toward a real biological lead: a gene called ABCA4 showed up less active in his autism cell model. Not bad for what started as a school project.
🌾 Crops can’t evolve as fast as the climate is changing, so a wave of startups is rewriting their genetics instead. Maddie Mitchell, an investor at Tenacious Ventures, wrote a three-part series setting out the opportunity in crop resilience and why genetics is the exciting part of it: a $100 billion problem, with breeding cycles that currently take 7-10 years to produce a single new variety. The interesting part is finding the founders who’ve actually thought through who pays, who carries the risk and who sees the upside, rather than assuming good genetics sells itself. Worth the full read!
📊 The AI jobs apocalypse hasn’t shown up in the data yet. Australia’s first government report on AI and employment found no broad disruption to the labour market. The US picture is more granular: a Stanford study (note: paywall) found entry-level jobs in AI-exposed roles like software development down 16% for 22 to 25-year-olds since ChatGPT’s release, while headcount for the same roles kept growing for older workers.
That’s the objective read. Lenny Rachitsky’s 2026 tech work sentiment survey offers the subjective one: thousands of tech workers surveyed in 2026, split almost exactly down the middle between feeling amplified by AI and feeling shaken by it. Underneath both sits the same admission: nobody actually knows yet.
👩💼 We’ve made progress on how women in leadership are perceived. It just doesn’t feel that way anymore. The Harvard Business Review has tracked executive attitudes every 20 years since 1965, when many males said the executive suite simply wasn’t an appropriate place for women. That question is settled now.
But ask women how it feels to be there, and the picture splits: they feel judged far more harshly than men do, and under far more pressure to prove themselves exceptional just to be seen as adequate. Men haven’t clocked it, and the data suggests why: they’re three times more likely to be steered into the P&L roles that actually lead to CEO, and coached for it far more often. The ladder isn’t broken by attitude anymore. It’s broken by who gets pointed toward it.
🌡️ Extreme weather is about to become one of the biggest spending categories in the economy. Bloomberg Intelligence puts the total at over $20 trillion this decade, and the companies already positioned for it, reinsurers, cooling tech, resilient infrastructure, have beaten the broader market by 32% in the past year.
Helpful resources
⚡ Offtake to Online: How Corporates Drive Innovation - CTVC by Currence. A useful framework for how corporate demand turns into funded climate projects: the offtake structures involved (PPAs, take-or-pay, AMCs), when each gets used and the role corporate venture capital plays in it.
Giant leaps
✈️ FlyORO has signed an MoU with Menzies Aviation to bring its AlphaLite SAF blending technology to airports across Europe. Menzies handles fuel operations at over 347 airports worldwide, so this is a real shot at solving the industry’s actual bottleneck: getting sustainable aviation fuel from where it’s made to where planes need it.
🎓 HEX has been selected by LaunchVic, alongside MLAI and Stone & Chalk, to deliver VICTOR:AI, an 8-week pre-accelerator for Victoria’s next generation of AI-native founders, backed by $3.5 million in state funding.
🩺 Ovum has raised $4 million in a seed round to keep building its women’s health platform and the longitudinal dataset behind it. Users have logged more than 60,000 health insights and 113,000 AI health conversations so far, across everything from ADHD and endo to menopause.
🎧 Clean Slate Clinic co-founder Dr Chris Davis went on the Impact Boom podcast to talk about breaking addiction stigma through telehealth, and building the largest alcohol detox provider in Australia almost by accident.
New paths
🤖 Indi is hiring a Design Engineer and a Full Stack AI Engineer (Sydney).
🌱 Trace is hiring a Sales Development Representative (SDR) (Sydney, hybrid).
🧑⚕️ Kernl is hiring a Principal Product Designer (fully remote, Sydney/Melbourne/Hobart preferred).
⚡ Amber is hiring a Software Engineering Manager (UK/Europe), Mid-Level UX/UI Designer (Melbourne), Regulatory Compliance Manager (Melbourne), Full Stack Engineer (UK/Europe), Business Development Manager (Melbourne), and Customer Experience Specialist (Voice Team, Melbourne, casual).
🧻 Who Gives A Crap is hiring a Head of Growth Marketing (UK, remote), Head of Marketing (US, remote), National Account Manager - Aldi & New Business, 9-month contract (Australia, remote), Performance Creative Lead (US, remote), and Pricing & Revenue Manager (Australia, remote).
Save the date
📅 22 July: 77 Partners’ Y Combinator Insights for Australian Founders - online. Register here.
📅 28 July: In Great Company’s Founder Breakfast - Sydney. A fireside chat with Alexey Mitko, co-founder of Eucalyptus, on what it actually takes to build at scale. Register here.
📅 28 July: Impact Vibes’ Fireside Chat with Rye Smith, Claude Australia Ambassador - Melbourne. Register here.
📅 29 July: ANDHealth Unfiltered: Not Just Another AI Summit - Melbourne. Get your ticket.
📅 29 July: LiveHaus’ StartupHaus - Melbourne. Get tickets.
📅 30 July: Aussie Founder’s Club's In Her Company - Melbourne. A long-table Filipino feast for women and non-binary founders at any stage. Grab a seat.
Open for applications
📬 Open now: Future Frontier. A 10-week AI/deep-tech pre-accelerator for Victorian researchers and founders exploring commercialisation, run by Illume Ventures with Monash AI Institute and Innovation Victoria, with up to 100% grant-funded placements available. Apply here.
📬 19 July: Google for Startups Accelerator: Australia & New Zealand. A 10-week, equity-free program for AI/ML startups at Seed to Series A, with Google mentorship and cloud resources. Apply here.
📬 27 July: Edition’s $15,000 Female Founder Grant. For AU/NZ women building startups, covering brand, strategy and pitch support. Apply here.
📬 31 December 2027 (or fully allocated): SME Industrial Decarbonisation Fund. A $10m co-investment fund from AMGC helping Australian manufacturers switch to electric processes (surface treatment, steam, metals), with AMGC matching up to 50% on projects of $400k-$1m. Apply here.