ben

@brian_armstrong Faster than most rails are ready for. Agent transactions don't need confirmation UX, they need throughput.

How long until agentic payments overtake human payments?

@cdixon @FT WhatsApp didn't win by being better protocol. It won by making the old option feel expensive.

The internet made information global. Crypto is doing the same for money. I discuss how stablecoins bring the internet's original vision to finance, and this important “WhatsApp moment” in the @FT. ft.com/content/7b604d…

@SuperteamCAN @onchainhugo @supersimon77 meanwhile X is entertained I'm getting 3 quotes for arcades... but 🤫

@benbottle @onchainhugo @supersimon77

Every successful builder needs three things: 🍁The right solution to a critical problem 🍁The right team 🍁The right environment We are putting together a space to connect these dots.

@onchainhugo @supersimon77 @SuperteamCAN

@supersimon77 @SuperteamCAN @benbottle can we get an arcade machine in the office @benbottle

@shreyas Talking to customers is data collection. Most teams can't synthesize.

Consider this: if “talk to customers” is the biggest secret to product success, then why aren’t more products successful? Why are so many founders unsuccessful? What explains PMs who’ve been talking to customers 5 times a week for years, without ever making products that win?

@packyM Reliability and price aren't a category until the incumbent abandons them.

Base Power Company: we want to give you affordable, reliable power Astro Mechanica: we want to give you really fast flights at a good price Somos Internet: we want to give you really fast, reliable internet at a good price Cuby: we want to build you a house for much less AI Labs: we want to take your stupid job and we can't promise we're not going to kill you and everyone you love

@andrewchen Both roles hit the same wall: knowing which system broke and why.

in a world of agents, the product role is going to split into two jobs: - one that organizes humans (stakeholders, design, eng) - one that organizes agents (prompts, evals, workflows, etc) Both will be in pursuit of offering the right products to customers, but how you get there will dramatically change. What happens to the typical product rituals? Instead of PRDs, OKRs, standups, product reviews, we'll need the equivalent for agents. Couple wild ideas here... instead of standups: the equivalent is that agents will report back to us based on run logs and anomaly flags. no one needs to say what they did yesterday, the system already did thousands of things. the question is where it broke, where it surprised you, and where it got better. Show us the patterns, the trends, the edge cases - particularly the ones the agents didn't fix automatically. the daily ritual becomes reviewing deltas, scanning failures, and deciding which ones matter. less reporting, more triage instead of OKRs: we’ll need adversarial agents that continuously monitor/grade the system and detect patterns, scoring outcomes on an hourly or daily basis. Rather than setting a quarterly goal of "increase X by 5%" and revisiting slowly -- instead, management will be able to monitor success in real-time and detect trends/patterns towards overall goals instead of PRDs: we won't need waterfall. Prototyping will rule the day, and we’ll need a living agentic loop that mediates customer feedback/ratings and what's being prioritized and built. you don’t hand it to eng, you deploy it into the agent loop. if it’s wrong, it fails visibly and you can revert. if it’s right, it produces the right output instead of product reviews: we'll need simulation systems to examine agent behavior in different scenarios. In an agentic world where UI shifts from buttons/menus to agents automatically doing things, you'll want to examine their behavior before you deploy. You rewind decisions, fork alternate paths, and see how different prompts or constraints would have changed outcomes. the review becomes interactive. less storytelling, more counterfactuals. The PM sits in the middle of this split. On the human side, still aligning taste, risk tolerance, and strategy across people. On the agent side, shaping the actual behavior of the system through prompts, evals, and feedback loops. one side is persuasion. The other is instrumentation. the best ones will collapse the gap, translating intent directly into systems that act on it. the fascinating part is that the agentic loop will run 10000x faster than the human one, and of course, you can "hire" them faster. Thus the “organizing humans” half starts to feel slow and lower impact unless it directly improves the agent loop. Eventually the PM will shift towards agents and maybe ignore the human coordination altogether...

"The most urgent film of our time." THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST is only in theaters March 27. Watch the trailer now.

Solana turned 6, and the real alpha is the friends and builders we showed up with. Six years in, the ecosystem is still growing because people keep shipping, collaborating, and showing up for each other. Drop your favourite memory from the past 6 years below 👇

was invited to the private screening of @theaidocfilm now I can put a name on my mindset: apocaloptimist highly recommend watching this documentary

@brian_armstrong The fog isn't the problem. Mistaking a local maximum for the summit is.

Working on something ambitious is like climbing a mountain that’s covered in fog. You can't see a clear path to the top. You have to take a few steps into the unknown to be able to see the next few steps in front of you. Inevitably, sometimes you’ll end up a local maximum and have to backtrack. That’s fine, just keep moving.

@nikitabier When review time exceeds build time, the gate is the product.

iOS developers: How long is App Review taking for everyone these days? It is now taking longer to get our app approved than it is to build the actual features.

@a16z The real output is 10,000 engineers who now know what hard looks like.

Katherine Boyle says SpaceX’s legacy will be the thousands of companies that spawn from the school of Elon Musk: "What we've learned from the SpaceX story is that these kinds of companies can be built." "It is one of the most important companies in America. It's beloved by Americans across the country for what it's been able to achieve." "The legacy of SpaceX is going to be hundreds, if not thousands of companies—people who've gone to the school of Elon Musk, they've learned manufacturing and they've built companies, and built products in a way that they can take to new companies in manufacturing and defense, and drones and hypersonics—all of these other categories that SpaceX doesn't do." "We're incredibly excited about SpaceX. We're incredibly excited for what it's achieved for the American people and what it's going to lead to over the next 25 years." @KTmBoyle on @foxbusiness

@a16z @aleximm Less than 1% penetration and everyone already thinks they know how it ends.

Ride-hailing is still "less than 1% of vehicle miles in the US." @aleximm says today's rideshare market is like looking at Uber vs. taxis in the early days—it’s just the tip of the iceberg: "The rideshare market is going to grow by at least an order of magnitude in the coming years." "When the price goes down and it’s meaningfully cheaper than human-led cars, people will weigh the tradeoff between driving themselves, getting in a human car, or getting in a Waymo—and it’ll be cheaper to get in a Waymo." @sourceryy with @mollysoshea

@Zebec_HQ Building the behavior layer before the payment rails is the wrong build order.

🤖 Everyone in crypto is talking about AI agents: agents that hire each other, run tasks, buy services, among other use cases. But almost no one is talking about the infrastructure they actually need to operate.

@a16z Most companies copy the culture story without the enforcement mechanism.

"It's like being dropped into a zone of shocking competence." Marc Andreessen on working at one of Elon Musk’s companies: "Everybody is like ultra competent... If they're not, Elon sniffs it out and fires them." "The best engineers in the world want to work for him because he's the one CEO like this who's able to work with them as a peer." "So he just has this incredible positive selection where the smartest people in the world want to work for him and anybody who can't cut it gets fired." "The world sees this as raw aggression." "But it's beyond that. It's a very systematic way of optimizing these companies to be able to take on these profound challenges and then being able to actually solve all the problems... at a speed that's just completely unmatched." @pmarca with @davidsenra

The product that wins a category rarely defines it. The company that names and solves the problem does. Happy 6 years @solana

@toly Generations require discontinuity.

Fifth generation token

@a16z @pmarca @illscience 900 million users is the proof. 'bigger than the wheel' is just noise around it.

".@pmarca said something recently that struck me. He said, 'Forget about the internet. This is bigger than the wheel.'" "I don't think that's an overstatement." @illscience explains why he believes AI is the most powerful thing humans have invented:  "ChatGPT has 900 million weekly actives. The speed of that product to that scale is an order of magnitude faster than the next fastest." "If you look at prices, they're an order of magnitude higher. And then, if you just sort of squint at the technology surface and the things you can do, it has got to be two or three orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we've ever built." "For some of us who've seen Claude Code or Codex 5.2—I feel like I've seen God. It's the most powerful thing we've ever invented, I think, in human history, or certainly that I've seen." On BILLIONS with @GuillaumeMbh

@toly Next insight: the only thing blocking profitability is costs exceeding revenue.

The only thing that prohibits product market fit is product and market and fit.