Good Morning, this is Napkin Notes: where we weave together the latest celebrity news and startup advice to fire you up to go build your million dollar startup idea.

Wanna know who else is fired up this week? Travis Kelce Our 5 founders that pitched at Wednesday’s event. But we’ll get into that later.

Our Starting Line-Up Today

• 🤩 Highlights from our Startup Teardown Event

• 👂 Help us vote on some juicy startup ideas

• 💡 Exploding topics you should look into

• 🤣 Swipes of the week

📰 News You Missed: OpenAI’s newest valuation is $90 Billion. Shaan Puri’s on TikTok. Cisco acquired Splunk for $28B. Bill Gurley got a 4-minute standing ovation for his All-In Summit talk. Q4 officially starts Sunday. And My First Million was officially crowned Kernal’s favourite startup podcast. 👑

Missed our event and want proof? Click below and skip to minute 28:10. Side note, I think some of the MFM team subscribes to this newsletter so if you see this, reply and give us a holler! 🤠

🎟 Highlights From Our Startup Event

This Wednesday was a whirlwind and a half. In all the best kinda ways. As you know, we’re obsessed with startup ideas at Kernal. And for the most part, we only get to jam on them a-sync.

But this last week, we did something different. We finallyyyy got to meet belly-to-belly to riff on 5 brilliant startup ideas from our readers (aka you). It was awesome. Then we had 3 smart panellists (Joanna, Saba and Andrew) share:

• what they like 👍

• what they hate 🙈

• and their advice to make the idea a billion dollar business 💸

Then everyone (including the audience) voted at the end to share if they love it or hate.

It was a super great way to crystallize the feedback for each of the founders into if the idea was worth scaling or not.

We heard from:

• Tanveer’s personalized newsletter startup idea

• Samuel’s “Grow Now, Pay Later” childcare startup idea

• Denny’s Ubereats for homemade food products

• Mina’s productivity app for ADHD professionals

• Maciej’s subscription-based toy rental startup idea

Wanna guess which big idea was voted on as the top pitch of the day?

It was Tanveer’s newsletter idea 🏆

Here’s a double click on his juicy idea if you wanna read it:

I’m curious to ask, for those who were there, what was your favourite pitch?

What about your favourite panellist?

Some other highlights from the event:

• 136 comments during pitches,

• 100+ actions to meet, invest or share feedback

• all from ~80 attendees who showed up for one hour to listen

If you’re feeling guilty you missed it, don’t sweat it. Just mark your calendar for our next one. It’s happening Tuesday, November 7th. It’ll be a rager, so be sure to save a seat.

📈 4 Trends Popping Off Lately

If you’re less into startup ideas and more into trends, we also got your back. Our friends at Exploding Topics do a killer job of highlighting the top trends of the month that are seeing a crazy uptick in search each week.

Here are a few interesting trends that recently came across our desk:

Grounding Mat (up 333%)

Freelance Visa (up 259%)

Co Ord Set (Up 1900%)

Threat Hunting (up 62%)

Interested in any of those trends? Well, go post a startup idea on Kernal already and get your business plan validated.

🍷 Swipes of the Week

💚 The Kernal Fam

P.S. You’re awesome, thanks for reading our newsletter.