Irina Menn @stempm

Rejection builds redirection and good things happen. I can relate

Sam Parr @thesamparr

2 days ago

We asked Aaron Levie about the 1st time someone tried to buy Box. Box was four guys living in Berkeley when Yahoo's corp dev team called. They sat around debating what number they'd take. The most they could imagine was $5 to $10 million. They agreed they'd definitely take five.

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Love

Michelle Dickinson PhD @medickinson

a day ago

Have you heard the term Physical AI yet? I've just come back from the @AutomateShow with @workr_official and Physical AI was talked about on so many booths. Every person I met selling it described it differently, which tells you a lot about how fast this space is moving. In

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@ashmaurya Nope, they are still in San Francisco. Because that’s where startups get funded. Even if you know what to build and how to build it and have deep customer insight, without funding lift your idea at the desk will stay at the desk

@sampullara @arrington 😂

@travisk Are you hiring?

@nireyal Your character is the driving factor that underlines all the other bullets on this list and not enough time is spent on discussing this

@nikitabier So soon. Condolences and best wishes to your family, @nikitabier

@DavidGeorge83 @andrewchen @elonmusk @SpaceX @a16z I wonder what @elonmusk shoes go for on StockX

And that is where the job of the Product Manager fits in.

Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal

2 months ago

The CEO of Take-Two, the company behind GTA, just said something the entire AI industry doesn't want to hear. And he said it without being anti-AI. Strauss Zelnick's argument is precise. AI is built on datasets. Datasets are backward-looking. Creativity is forward-looking. A

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@joshelman @JoshuaBaer Very sad. Condolences to the family and to the whole community

If you've adopted AI at your company but haven't seen any tangible results, read this 1990 article: "The Dynamo and the Computer" by Paul David. When electricity first arrived, factories that "adopted" it barely got faster. They just swapped the steam engine for an electric one and ran everything else exactly as before: same machine layout, same workflow, same management. Electricity in, no real gains out. The most common mistake with any new technology is to drop it into the old organization and then declare the transformation done. The real leap came decades later, when each machine got its own small motor. Suddenly machines no longer had to be lined up around one central drive shaft. They could be rearranged around the actual flow of work. The productivity gains didn't come from electricity. They came from REDESIGNING THE ENTIRE FACTORY around it. AI is the same. Bolting it onto your existing process gets you a faster steam engine. The payoff comes when you redesign the work itself. (link to paper in comments)

@edsgoode @paulg Congrats Ed, and congrats on the pregnancy! 🤰 That’s a much bigger accomplishment. If you listened to @paulg you wouldn’t have had either one

@steipete @mufcbacker And that is as rare as it ever was

@steipete That’s awesome

@steipete Is OpenClaw the WordPress of the agentic era?

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED. I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires. My takeaways: 1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices. 2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha. 3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda) 4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general. 5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million 6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works. 7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead. 8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one. 9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders. 10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time. 11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now. 12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly. 13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS. 14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here.... 15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all. 16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol. 17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet. It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED. But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building. We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real. What an incredible time to be building.

@nikitabier A set of baseball cards

@garrytan Is Y Combinator accepting restaurant chain idea applications? Please me know where to apply

Makes sense and a huge opportunity for consumer robotics together with the residential construction industry to rebuild for the next generation of smart homes. Or maybe we should call them intelligent?

TBPN @tbpn

2 months ago

.@mcuban says humanoid robots won't last more than 5-10 years. Instead, we'll "design the house to fit the robot, and design the robot to fit the house." "You could create a house where the pantry, the refrigerator, and the washing machines were hidden behind the garage, if you

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Crazy talent recognizes crazy talent. The boundary-breakers usually don’t look optimized on paper because their brains are wired for first-principles thinking, not consensus thinking. The hardest part isn’t finding them — it’s creating an environment that doesn’t sand down their edges and lets them thrive x.com/jawwwn_/status…