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June 2026

In this issue: Are you backing a winner? / The companies challenging Nvidia in the LLM chip game / The Magnificent Seven are shrinking.

TALENT TRENDS

The 35-40% threshold tells you when you've backed a winner

AI-native scale-ups are racing ahead in a winner-takes-most dynamic. Cursor grew its workforce 600%+ in the last year. Lovable added 350%+. But the median company in the same vertical grew far less—and the gap between the breakouts and the rest is widening.

The clearest signal that an investor has actually backed a winner: when annual headcount growth crosses 35-40%.

Median and Average Growth Rates of Scale-Ups by Vertical

Below that line, scale-ups look remarkably similar on every talent quality measure. Above it, former founder density doubles, prestige-award winners concentrate sharply, and Big Tech alumni flow in disproportionately. That's the threshold where a company enters the virtuous circle—and where you can credibly claim a hit.

COMPANY INSIGHTS

The companies challenging Nvidia in the LLM chip game

The LLM chip race is attracting huge capital. But funding isn’t the leading indicator of success—talent is.

We analysed 60+ contenders  to identify early winners and losers. The clearest signal sits in insider talent: the engineers and leaders who’ve already built chips at Nvidia, Intel and AMD. These are the people every company is competing for—and the ones that ultimately determine whether they ship.

Graphcore is the cautionary tale. 

Net Flow of Insiders Joining and Leaving Graphcore

It started strong, hiring heavily from the same insider pool as today’s leaders. But six months before its partnership with Microsoft ended in October 2022, those insiders began to leave. Departures accelerated over the following year.

By July 2024, the company was sold to SoftBank at a steep discount. The signal came early. The market just didn’t act on it fast enough.

Today’s contenders—Etched, MatX, Positron AI and Taalas—are all following a similar early playbook: hiring high concentrations of insider talent. But the lesson from Graphcore is clear: it’s not just about attracting them. It’s about keeping them.

Sustained loss of insiders is one of the clearest red flags in this market—and one investors can’t afford to miss.

MARKET SIGNAL

The Magnificent Seven are shrinking. Where is its talent going?

For years, the Magnificent Seven were the destination for top researchers, engineers and GTM talent. That pull is reversing.

In 2025, scale-ups in the portfolio of A16Z, Sequoia and Salesforce Ventures grew their combined workforces more than the Magnificent Seven, for the first time. This wasn't a blip: since 2020 they've added headcount at 49% a year, against the Magnificent Seven's 3.5%.

Now Big Tech is cutting roles and freezing hiring as AI lifts productivity and budgets shift to compute. The experienced engineering and GTM talent that era built is heading back to market, and the scale-ups are ready.

On current trajectory, scale-ups are set to add over 100,000 roles in 2026, matching Big Tech's 2022 hiring peak.

Count of Increase in Current Workforce by Year at Scale-Ups and Magnificent Seven Companies 

For founders and investors, that reads as a deeper, higher-calibre talent pool opening up. But here's the catch: this talent is selective. It gravitates to scale-ups that have already proven their trajectory. Posting a role won't reach them. Matching them will.

That's what Zeki Talent Market is built for, we have growing waitlist of Magnificent 7 candidates looking to join scale-ups when we launch in July. Zeki Talent Market is invitation-only so request selection below.

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