GoKawiil
Tech News
Opalite Health, a physician-led startup building real-time medical interpretation technology, is hiring its first go-to-market employee to lead enterprise sales into hospitals and health systems. The company, founded by veterans of Apple, Meta, and Codex, wants someone to build its sales motion from scratch, covering everything from outbound strategy to contracting.
The RIAA reported that US recorded music revenue hit $6 billion in the first half of 2026, a 6.9% increase over the prior year. Physical formats led the growth, with CD sales jumping 58.6% and vinyl climbing 17.7%, while streaming still dominated overall revenue at $4.9 billion, up 4.7%.
The RIAA reported that 17.5 million CDs were sold in the US during the first six months of 2026, up from 12 million a year earlier, generating $171.1 million in revenue. Vinyl sales also grew nearly 21 percent to 26.5 million units, while other physical formats like cassettes and DVDs rose over 73 percent to 1.6 million units. Streaming still dominates overall, growing 4.7 percent to $4.9 billion in revenue, far outpacing physical formats combined.
Victoria's Secret has closed 38 stores globally this year as part of an effort to reshape its store network. Despite the closures, the retailer raised its full-year sales guidance, signaling the cuts are strategic rather than a sign of weakening demand.
An Entrepreneur contributor argues that while AI coding agents have been rapidly embraced by software teams, autonomous agents for go-to-market functions like sales and marketing remain underused. The piece attributes this gap not to AI capability limits but to fragmented, duplicated sales data that lacks connection to reliable external signals needed for commercial decisions.
An entrepreneur who runs a company selling farmer-invented products describes reviewing dozens of pitches a year and finding that a product's cleverness rarely predicts commercial success. Instead, the deciding factor is whether the inventor is personally committed enough to invest their own money and time into building and fulfilling demand once it arrives.
SoundCloud is launching a feature that lets musicians sell tracks straight from their profile pages, starting with a beta test involving 200 US-based Artist Pro subscribers before wider rollout this fall. The company won't take a percentage of sales, though artists still cover payment processing fees and taxes, and can track earnings through existing Artist Studio and Fan Support tools.
A contributor to Entrepreneur argues that growth-stage CEOs who attribute weak Q3 numbers to a seasonal 'summer slump' are masking deeper flaws in their scaling systems. The piece calls on leaders to use the quieter summer months to audit sales funnels, delivery processes and leadership workflows rather than waiting passively for business to pick up in Q4. It also cites Alex Hormozi's '$100M Leads' as a reference point for building predictable lead-generation systems.