Ian Smith

It is unbelievably hard to build a product that people want. But it is *especially* difficult to build one that engineers clamor over. Yesterday, we launched v1 of Zoo Design Studio—an evolution in CAD software over two years in the making 👇

Fuck it, $RVI Much shade at the IPO, similar to USVC. Prefer this route.

Agents need more than one kind of context to actually help users. Zep produces 5 distinct types in every Context Block: facts, entities, episodes, thread summaries, and the user summary. Each captures something the others can't. Here's what each is for 🧵

When your agent acts on bad context, the first question is: where did that come from? Most context systems don't track this. Zep does, enabling: → Audit trails from response to source → Inspectable debugging paths → Agents scoping their own context by source Here's how 🧵

@ankurnagpal @naval

@ankurnagpal @naval didn't xai already get acquired by spacex? it shows "acquisition pending" on your website. were the xai shares converted to spacex shares and the "acquisition" refers to the spacex ipo...?

Announcing my new thing: I'm launching a new public venture fund USVC is built by AngelList with @naval shaping our investment strategy in the technology companies building our future And unlike traditional venture funds, everyone can invest along with just $500:

@wadefoster Do you use a graph for memory/context?

TBPN asked me how Zapier keeps AI from drowning in data. Short answer: we built it a brain. Three layers: 1. Company-level source of truth (strategy, values, ICP). Curated by me and a handful of senior leaders 2. Team-level context that cascades down 3. Individual context, private to each person. Meeting transcripts, Slack threads, project docs, etc. So when anyone at @Zapier talks to AI, they're not starting from scratch. They point the SDK at specific documents against the backdrop of that brain. Better inputs, better AI. Thanks to @TBPN for having me on

@levie Agents need better memory for them to be useful long term

Software going headless is inevitable in a world where agents use the tools 100X more than people do. And the reality is for a lot of software this is actually a huge boon to potential use-cases for these platforms. Software business models have largely been predicated on selling to the number of seats that are in the company in a given function, and the usage of your software is constrained by how much people can do in a given day. This means that your technology is often vastly underutilized relative to what it actually can power for the customer. Enter: agents. Agents can work 24/7, run in parallel, and string together work across systems. This is a big deal because now the agent can do far more than people ever could with these tools. Instead of reviewing contracts one by one, the agent will review all of them. Instead of manually moving data between marketing systems and across campaigns, the agent will let you run 10X more of them. Instead of being rate limited in a client onboarding process by human steps, agents accelerate these. Agents end up using these underlying platforms far more than people ever did, which opens up use-cases that the platform couldn’t go after before. Now, not every software market has the same amount of positive sum use-cases between people and agents, but I’d argue that a significant portion of systems of record, for instance, can be used far more than they are today. Your Salesforce data can be leveraged 100X more to do vastly more customer targeting and sales automation. Your documents can be turned into structured data and analyzed for insights and knowledge to automate other workflows. And so on. Now, of course you have to find a way to make this all commercially attractive, but it’s not hard to picture the revenue from API and agent consumption on these platforms becoming a rich component of revenue streams over time. Seats for the people, consumption for the agents. Lots of upside here for the companies that embrace this trend.

@gregisenberg And the smart ones will be using @zep_ai to ensure their agents actually have memory and context that doesn’t suck

There’s $1T up for grabs for agent-first startups and this window is WIDE open. Probably 10,000+ niches. How it plays out: 1. Every SaaS company follows salesforce and goes headless within 18 months 2. a new category of "agent-native" startups emerges that treat salesforce, HubSpot, workday etc as dumb backends. the startup IS the agent. the SaaS is just the database. 3. the entire consulting/services industry around enterprise SaaS gets compressed into software. the agent replaces the implementation team. 4. outcome-based pricing becomes default. nobody pays per seat when the "seat" is an agent making 10,000 API calls a minute. you pay when revenue hits your account. 5. the winning founders are ex-operators who understand a vertical workflow cold. the code is the easy part. knowing that a property manager spends 14 hours a week on lease renewals? that's the insight worth $100M. 6. distribution becomes the moat. when anyone can wire agents to APIs, the company with the audience and the brand wins. media + agents is the new SaaS. There’s a rush to incubate live/short form shows. 7. Silicon Valley goes all influencer. Roy lee gets this. Pat Walls gets this. Sam Parr gets this. 8. the first $1B agent-native company in each vertical will look nothing like the SaaS it replaced. smaller team, higher margins, no implementation cost, no churn from bad UX because there is no UX. the fastest path to wealth right now: find an industry that still runs on dashboards, phone calls, and spreadsheets. build the agent-native version. charge per outcome. own the workflow end-to-end. someone reading this right now is going to build a $100M company off this exact shift. tell me about it on the @startupideaspod when you do. Im rooting for you. Less reading, less bookmarking, more building. the last wave rewarded people who built pretty interfaces on top of ugly data. I think this wave rewards people who build smart agents on top of exposed APIs. Or who just build the APIs themselves Here we go

@NBA What in the hell

THE BRACKET IS SET 🍿

@HoustonRockets Kinda 1 of 2 really

1️⃣ of 1️⃣ Amen Thompson is the first Rockets player in franchise history to record 40+ PTS, 5+ REB, and 5+ AST in a game on at least 75% shooting 👏 📊 41 PTS | 9 REB | 7 AST | 2 STL | 77.3 FG% for a historic night

@zenorocha @resend Awesome service y’all are crushing

we just crossed 2,000,000 users on @resend. just 4 months ago, we were celebrating 1M users. the definition of a "developer" is changing, and it's changing fast.

anthropic running the exact same marketing playbook with every release. “our model is so capable and dangerous, ahh we are afraid to release it”. just put the model in the bag lil bro.

@jalehr @uncorkcap done ✅

@SkyCapture @uncorkcap make sure you sign up on the website! we'll update your credits

We raised $72M from Sequoia/YC and hit 8-figures in ARR. Then we shut it all down & rebuilt the company from scratch. Today we’re launching the new Mutiny: the first AI agent for GTM teams to create anything customer-facing, in minutes. Comment "Mutiny" to get 3X free credits.

so let me get this straight all of ai twitter was telling people to buy a mac mini to run openclaw, which is literally just a framework, an orchestration layer that sends api requests to actual ai models. something you can run on a $5/month vps. which is exactly what i do btw but when google drops gemma 4, an actual large language model that you can run and fine-tune locally on that same mac mini, with no api costs, no subscriptions, no third party dependencies, completely yours under apache 2.0 the ai community is silent you were buying $800 hardware to run a wrapper but ignoring the actual ai model that would justify that hardware this tells you everything you need to know about the average iq of ai twitter

@Lindy00sKid I had old coworkers who would signal whenever they were restarting their computers it drove me crazy

@KhalidWarsa Grifter barrier to entry has been reduced by 1,000x in the LLM era

We’re seeing a collapse in morals and ethics in the tech industry. Someone is LARPing and grifting everywhere you look. Fake users, fake MRR, fake testimonials, fake client badges, etc. Words don’t mean anything anymore. They’re making it all up. I hate this.

@MichLieben I don’t think you under what TAM means. You don’t grow your TAM, your TAM grows (or shrinks) itself

Most agencies build 80 Clay tables for 80 clients. We build one. Here's the full architecture:

@mahaniok Stamp?

Is there a good, AI-first, modern (2026) email client? Superhuman was good in 2024. But it feels extremely obsolete today.

@regyperlera In hindsight, that might be a massive undertaking. But this looks cool! Would totally use something like this. Home Assistant is the shit though

@regyperlera Are you gonna connect it to Home Assistant?

Two years later, I'm building the home dashboard I've always wanted. A single place for: - Household finances - Mortgage, insurance, & property tax details - Equipment, services, & maintenance reminders - Home improvement project tracking - RAG powered search Beta opens soon 🏡