Brandon Jacoby

in an era of slop, the product yearns for an interface from a human touch

@yrechtman dude don’t forget about the jibjorbs and bleepbloops

Build it in Cursor. Vibe it in Windsurf. Spin it up on Lovable. Try Bolt. It’s just Claude Code. Use Aider. It’s a Goose app. Run it in Zed with three MCPs. Bro it’s a Glorp harness. Native to Crundle. Open Beepo. Vibe it in Jorb.

@gaby_goldberg @lulumeservey so excited for you, gaby!

Some bittersweet news: I’ve wrapped up my apprenticeship at Rostra. I’m incredibly grateful to @lulumeservey for taking a chance on me two years ago as Rostra’s first hire. When I took the job, I had a pretty good feeling that I'd learn a great deal from Lulu, and that I’d love working with the founders in our cinematic universe. Coming from a career in venture, I had no idea if I’d love comms. Now, looking back, I know I hit a home run on all three. Working at Rostra has been the education and experience of a lifetime. I am a better writer, a better operator, and a more honest critic of my own thinking as a result. Looking ahead, I’m very excited for my next chapter — more on that soon.

@zeroxjackson expensive haircut

I just paid my barber in Bitcoin

@jmj some of us just can't stay away from fintech, regardless of how hard we try

Sometimes your portfolio becomes thematic by accident. You make a few early bets in a sector, some of them go well, and that pulls you toward the next opportunity, and the next. That’s what happened to us with financial services as one of our investment themes. My original reason for investing in the category was simple - the products were terrible. Finance was clearly the largest category that hadn’t been consumerized yet & was a massive market where people were stuck using products they hated. Huge TAM, miserable NPS. As an angel, I was one of the first investors and an early advisor at @atlascardhq. @patrickmro took product design as seriously as anyone I’d ever worked with, and he was applying that taste to building a new kind of consumer card product. I was also lucky to get into the early rounds of @mercury, where @immad was just as thoughtful & bringing that same design rigor to startup banking. We were seed investors in @FlexSuperApp, one of the most underrated financial services companies out there and only getting better. They focus on small and medium-sized business owners, and @zaidrmn has built an incredible product that Silicon Valley hasn’t fully appreciated yet. More recently, we invested in @ether_fi, which brought consumer-grade financial products to crypto and became the fastest-growing crypto neobank in the world. When all is said and done, I think @MikeSilagadze will go down as one of the best crypto founders of his generation. And we’ve been lucky to partner with @ereborbank, who are building financial products for the innovation economy & serving deep tech across defense, manufacturing, robotics, and other industries they understand at a deep level. I don’t think of myself as a fintech investor, and I never planned to go this deep on the category. But one thing leads to another, and suddenly you’ve gone down a rabbit hole that turns into a career-long passion. I still feel that way about financial services today, and I hope to keep backing founders building innovative products in the space for years to come.

@bran_don_gell @round Happy to help.

who are the best NY based designers you know? Every needs them.

@owenbjennings drop the token budget

1.5 wks in - my mongeese are working for me 24/7, learning, and proactively prompting me to do things that I should let's go

@usernatebrown 🐐

ARNELL

@evanjconrad 👀

we've done such an objectively terrible job at explaining ourselves at sfcompute, this is the year we fix that

@emmettshine @jameygannon @jordihays it's in my roots (some deep 14yr old brandon lore) 😂

@JacobyBrandon @jameygannon I love this. Its got all the makings of a pre TBPN @jordihays idea

@emmettshine @jameygannon let’s all work on each others projects for a week

@jameygannon We should do a Trading Places / Freaky Friday summer swap 100%

@bradwrage I had to update the app despite getting notifications Classic internal test setup haha

@JacobyBrandon I’m getting notifications m, but clicking opens the app to my feed. Where are they!?

Instagram launched the feed, but it become too curated, and so… Instagram launched stories, but they became too curated, and so… Instagram launched instants, but…

@emmettshine 🤌

‘Sometimes you gotta show the models you still got it.’ - @JacobyBrandon

@SewerVeggies i'm invested in a company that is

@JacobyBrandon Why dont you do that then?

why is a humanoid a better form factor here versus a single robotic arm with some sort of vision

@truewagner if you made this a poll it would’ve basically been the electoral college

I have a unique opportunity to choose my next land-lord.. .

@designerdada @Iruhdam24 That should be table stakes for any designer. Forward deployed typically means embedding with a customer, adapting software to their specific needs.

@Iruhdam24 yes, if you talk to customers and attend sales calls

Can I be a forward deployed product designer?

@camworboys really cool

We still find Figma an incredibly helpful canvas to manage SOT and chat through comments async. But project teams have an internally hosted tracker that pulls progress from Slack, Figma, GitHub, and meeting notes into a single hub. It then generates weekly updates automatically.

Really good look at how our product dev process has evolved. → Builderbot enables designers to navigate our complex codebase with ease → the primary design artifact is increasingly code, not Figma → agents get us to 80%, designers review and edit the backlog of draft PR

@snake_case_jim @rahulbhadoriiya yes. the industry has twisted the meaning of design to be process over results (for the past 10ish yrs)

@JacobyBrandon @rahulbhadoriiya I think it’s a deeper question. Did Rahul stroke the brush in this case? He was articulate with instructions maybe. Is writing considered “design”?

Question to my fellow designers: This is an app icon I made using AI. The process was actually very similar to how I normally design. I collected multiple references, explored directions, and built the visual. The only difference? Instead of using Blender, I used a node-based AI tool. Now here’s my question: Do you think this is good or bad? Personally, I like the result, but it didn’t feel satisfying. I’ve spent hours in Photoshop extending backgrounds or tweaking tiny details. This one, I could’ve also made in Blender in maybe 2–3 hours. So now I’m wondering: Is this still design?