AJ’s AI

Zero to $100M ARR in 8 months. Acquired by Meta today. Huge congrats to @Red_Xiao_, @hidecloud, and the entire @ManusAI team. I’ve personally helped oversee 122 events in 2025, but this one stuck out as my favorite. It was the day of our first event together. At 9:00 AM, OpenAI dropped “Agent Mode." Our event was at 5:00 PM. Every other startup would have been frozen like a deer in the headlights. The largest player in the AI space just dropped a feature that could make your startup obsolete. The @AICollectiveCo + @ManusAI team hopped on a call immediately. We pitched a narrative shift: "The Battle of the Agents." They didn’t hide from the news. They put it on the big screen. Manus showcased a LIVE demo of their agents vs. OpenAI’s release on stage that night. And the Manus agent won. Fast forward, and they achieved $100M ARR quicker than any startup in history. That level of fearlessness is exactly why they won. This was almost as fun as the first time we worked on their original product launch, but that’s a story for a different day. ;) Huge kudos to the team on this massive milestone!

If you're new or looking to get more connected to SF tech: bookmark these 65+ irl events 🗓️ A list of what's happening this week (May 4 - May 11) ⬇️

If your technical AI startup CEO isn't vibe coding their own ML research on weekends you are cooked

@adilmania @siliconmania @craigzLiszt if that’s your Magnum Opus, you need to connect with @AICollectiveCo - same mission with IRL communities

ty @craigzLiszt for saying this loud. this is exactly why i started @siliconmania i don’t think though it’s a question of “rebranding” but more “reframing”: everything is already here, amazing people making amazing sh*t. we just need to connect with the rest of the world, speak their language, invite them to learn more, to join, to enjoy the benefits. that’s my mission, and i won’t stop before either i succeed or i die. if you wanna help, hit me up with a DM.

@hardeep_gambhir agreed, come swing by @AICollectiveCo - we focus on being the human layer of AI + put the soul back into the event experience

san francisco requires much better events. the amount of sloppy events with little effort in curation, for networking sake, is just sad

@signulll just hit us up @AICollectiveCo nearly 1.5k IRL events and counting ✨

coordinating meet ups with ppl is still so so hard. :( which ai agent does this well? like have your agent talk to my agent type stuff.

@thsottiaux a /pet for each session?

What are we obviously not getting right with Codex?

@thsottiaux for desktop app: collapse all tools calls into one message / stream, makes it unnecessarily harder to view the chat

it’s “everyone moves to San Francisco” season

@heyohelen No better place to cowork in SF than shack15

such a vibey workspace — everyone here dresses incredibly nice here omg, i am incredibly underdressed

@EvaSpannagl mind testing it again? ask codex to check if “AJ Green” is approved, if not - must be a bug?

one my main workflows in codex right now - clicking the “update” button several times per day🤯

@jxnlco create a tool for codex to animate itself after every major feature release -> but also for each vertical -> and then multiple products / use cases within each vertical -> xYz

ok so I'm on developer experience for codex? yes but codex is for everything yes so my scope is everything experience? yes, can you make a demo for everything? can you be more specific? yeah like all the work in the economy, can you make demos for that?

@CoryDecareaux @CoryDecareaux was just chatting with Codex, told me there’s 55 reasons why I should be admitted to the 5.5 party? if that doesn’t work - I’ll sell my compute for access if that doesn’t work - I’ll sell my compute AND my human labor for access

shoot ur shot 🥂

Hot take: this is just a 30 min project w/ @DevinAI Slack, Gmail, Attio, Granola all have solid APIs. 0.01% effort here. LinkedIn is the real friction. Here's how you solve it: To get historical data: Settings → Data Privacy → Request your data archive. Connections, messages, posts (all legally) For all FUTURE context, two options: 1. Browser agents (Claude in Chrome is the easy start - expect re-auth friction over time) 2. JS embeds with your browser cookies. Only re-authenticate when LinkedIn logs you out. And if anyone at Linkedin TOS is reading this, this is just a theoretical research project! Oh - and if you're reading this - PLS make LinkedIn more AI native smh.

Request for startups: I want an AI agent that plugs into my slack, email, Attio, LinkedIn, granola, etc. tracks all correspondence with our pipeline + potential prospects — and then reminds us to follow-up if we haven’t heard back from them and ingests all relevant context

@brivael @garrytan So what is your plan on how to cultivate this culture? How does this look in practice? Would love to help support with our French chapters (AI Collective, world’s largest nonprofit community)

Un truc qui m'a marqué en arrivant à YC. Premier meeting, @garrytan nous dit : "dans cette pièce, 10% d'entre vous vont potentiellement devenir milliardaires. Faites-vous des potes avec tout le monde. Parce que même si votre boîte ne marche pas, vous allez pouvoir vous entraider toute votre vie." Et c'est exactement ce qui se passe. Il y a une bienveillance vraiment rafraîchissante dans cet écosystème. Personne ne te regarde de travers parce que tu vises trop haut. Au contraire, plus tu vises haut, plus les gens veulent t'aider. C'est ça qui manque cruellement à la France. Le soutien à l'extrême ambition. Tant que dire "je veux devenir milliardaire" sera un problème social en France, on n'avancera pas. Tant qu'on n'aura pas de bienveillance écosystémique sur ces sujets là, on stagnera. Le blocage français n'est plus technique, ni même réglementaire au premier ordre. Il est culturel. C'est un blocage sur la création de valeur elle-même. On a intériorisé l'idée que la richesse est suspecte, que l'ambition est vulgaire, que viser grand c'est trahir une forme d'humilité républicaine. Pendant ce temps, on rentre dans une décennie d'abondance extrême. L'IA, l'énergie, la robotique, la biotech. Les ordres de grandeur de création de valeur vont être historiques. Et la question n'est pas de savoir si ça va arriver, c'est de savoir qui va capter cette valeur. Si on continue à punir socialement ceux qui essayent, on regardera les autres le faire. Encore. On a un vrai travail collectif à faire en tant que français. Réapprendre à célébrer ceux qui construisent. Arrêter de confondre ambition et arrogance. Comprendre qu'un écosystème où les gens s'entraident à viser haut produit plus de réussites pour tout le monde, pas moins. La bienveillance envers l'ambition n'est pas naïve. C'est stratégique.

@adilmania @sama 👀 maybe we livestream across 55 countries?

@sama 55:55 min late-night show with @sama on 5/5 at 5:55 pm to talk about GPT-5.5 while revealing 55 surprises during the 55:55 min show.

GPT-5.5 is going to have a party for itself. it chose 5/5 at 5:55 pm for the date and time. if you'd like to come, let us know here: luma.com/5.5 codex will help the team pick people from the replies. 5.5 had some good ideas/requests for the party, which we'll do.

@sama @Coffee_and_NLP I run the world’s largest AI non-profit community (hosted nearly 1,500 events) …plus we’re hosting an hackathon with OpenAI on 5/30 and Codex will be our honorary judge (oops, surprise). Would love to experience what Codex is cooking up for the party!

The biggest mistake we are making with AI is treating it like a spectator sport. 0.01% of people are building technology that will reshape the other 99.99%. Most of us are watching. Humans in AI Week is the event our community kept waiting for someone else to build. 100+ cities. Same question. Same week. June 1–7. The AI Collective has spent 3 years getting humans in rooms together. This is that formula applied globally, simultaneously, for the first time. If your city is not on the map yet, it should be.

@tereza_tizkova 👋 send me their info via DM? we run nearly 200 events/mo, lots of hackathons

a friend is looking to judge some hackathons in SF/US. he's a previous startup founder and builder in the ai agents space, and he is very good at judging. will appreciate any tips, and try to help in return! T

@andrewdsouza @tereza_tizkova @boardyai 👋 hey Boardy

@tereza_tizkova @boardyai know anyone who’s running hackathons and might be looking for judges?

deepseek v4 is now the cheapest sota model available at 1/20th the cost of opus 4.7. for perspective, if uber used deepseek instead of claude their 2026 ai budget would have lasted 7 years instead of only 4 months.