First Signal

There are thousands of apps built by brilliant people that will never get a meeting at a16z. Not because the product is bad. Because there’s no business behind it.

@rxhit05 Output wise no but the app is better I find

Is antigravity better than claude at UI/UX?

@dougboneparth I think you may be onto something

I am starting to think that our politicians might be corrupt.

@jmoserr We’re in a completely new era where the most exciting tech in the market will continually be given out the depreciated to give better performance to high paying customers. Can’t think of another time this happened

Claude got 10x worse and it instantly exposed how many people are already over reliant on AI.

@SaaShane_ @boardyai If you’re a founder with a great app and no idea how to monetize it — we want to talk.

@boardyai Building @FirstSignal_ — an operator-first studio that partners with indie app founders who built something great but have no business engine behind it. We bring the sales, monetization, and growth. They keep building the product. Revenue share, no capital required.

Founders, drop what you're working on in the comments I'll intro you to investors, co-founders, and engineers.

@auren Diagram visually and create a repository for both people and agents to reference

what are best practices on sharing AI skills in an organization?

@FirstSquawk Pretty wild. So the top enterprise orgs will get the real product and everyone else will get something inferior

ANTHROPIC SHIFTS TO USAGE-BASED BILLING, INCREASING COSTS FOR HEAVY USERS - TIF

@ecommerceshares They’ve nailed a few products in curious to see if they can continue the trend

These guys are just shipping 10x faster than anybody else right now. There seems to be a lack of both focus and urgency everywhere else. I don’t know why… but it’s a bit weird.

@satyanadella That’s the big update?

New in Word: Copilot now tracks changes, leaves comments, and more, working more like a coworker right inside your document, grounded in all your enterprise context with Work IQ.

Quick question for the dev crowd: Has anyone played around with Google Antigravity yet? That new agentic IDE from Google (the VS Code fork with autonomous agents that can plan, code, run terminals, and even control a browser to test stuff). It feels like it’s trying to push us into the full “agent-first” era. Curious what your experience has been: - Did the agents actually handle complex tasks end-to-end? - How does it compare to Cursor, Windsurf, or plain Gemini/Copilot? - Any wild wins… or hilarious failures? Drop your thoughts below 👇 (especially if you’ve built something real with it)

Mid-spring days like this remind me how much the small, consistent choices shape everything that matters — the quiet work we put in, the people we show up for, the way we keep choosing what feels right even when it's not loud or flashy. Grateful for the steady rhythm of it all.

@andrewchen Looking forward to it!

for startups/vcs interested in BOSTON/NEW YORK -- rsvp below for office hours with me and the Tech Week office hours this Wednesday to chat with new hosts about organizing events this year deadline for your new york and boston events are this week. Ton of the a16z speedrun team will be on the ground, attending events, saying hello come say hello! RSVP link below

Claude is becoming so hard to use even on Pro. You shut your computer off at 75% usage for the week and enter in prompt in the morning and you’re at 100% it makes no sense

@BigMarkBrown @jaydoggy22 @shiri_shh I’ve struck a nerve with the pool sales community

@jaydoggy22 @FirstSignal_ @shiri_shh Beat me to it

someone built an OpenClaw agent that SELLS pool installations on autopilot. finds $500k–$1.2M homes without pools renders a pool in their backyard and mails a before/after postcard.

Most fintech and consumer app founders chase broad marketing plays for their first customers. The ones who win start narrower: they find the small group of users already frustrated by the exact problem they're solving, then shape everything around how those users describe it. That raw language becomes sharper positioning and faster sales. No ad spend required — just real conversations

@LogicalBadger @TrendSpider Exactly. Enterprise orgs aren’t going to vibe code themselves off these platforms for years. These companies move much too slow

@TrendSpider Enterprise isn’t simply going to switch from big software platforms overnight. Companies have their entire systems and pipelines built to use these services. Currently ai is being CONNECTED to these services to streamline their use in new ways rather than REPLACE them.

At its cheapest valuation in company history while revenues maintain 20%+ YoY growth... Is $NOW the time?

@Observe_and_See @PresentWitness_ Exactly, these companies were built to sell software. You’d be shocked at how unsophisticated the internal tech stack and processes are

@FirstSignal_ @PresentWitness_ Spot on.. I believe this is correct. Hell most can’t even automate invoices.

Software experts, which would you buy and which would you sell?

@yield_maxxer @sickdotdev Interesting take. I agree from the standpoint of we can only go so far before it doesn’t make sense from a capital standpoint to get marginally better

@FirstSignal_ @sickdotdev also these companies keep throwing money at ai because Sam Altman has made AGI seem like the ultimate trillion dollar industry

AI succeeds → massive job losses AI fails → economy crashes AI is just hype → we wasted a decade which path are we actually on ?

@buildwithshyam Go out and find users that are passionate about your product and leverage what they have to say

Your SaaS has 0 users, What do you fix first? A) UI B) Features C) Landing page D) Talk to users