Good morning & happy Thursday! Today, we're diving into Ramp's bid for a national trust bank charter to see why the $60B fintech now wants to hold its customers' money, not just track how they spend it (what the charter allows and what it doesn't, the Stripe dependency it could remove, how its Vesto deal could pull corporate cash away from JPMorgan & BofA, & what to watch next + bonus deep dives into a16z's State of Markets 2026: The AI Playbook for Founders and Investors, and How AI Agents Reshaped Jobs, Hiring and Productivity at Anthropic inside), and breaking dow Claude Duet, Anthropic's new always-on agent that arrived last to the AI agent race and still leaves OpenAI with the most to worry about (why it undercuts Dots at a fifth of the entry price while inheriting everything you've already built in Claude, why refusing to move money even with your approval is its real pitch to small businesses, & what's next + bonus deep dives into Anthropic's new IPO prospectus & latest...
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