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Anthropic onboarding day: Michael Scott introducing Karpathy like he just signed Wemby in free agency.
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blynn
379 posts
blynn
@blynn
Building | Past: @Google, @X, @Digits (valued $560M+), @Crashlytics (acq $100M+) | Investor @xAI @Apptronik @1x_tech @reflection_ai @UseReasoner
Katılım Nisan 2009
542 Takip Edilen1.8K Takipçiler
blynn retweetledi
More AI agent observations below (I keep adding to the list):
1. Hermes agents write to their own memory after every task. Which means starting today versus starting in 6 months is an unfair advantage for you.
2. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now
3. The real reason local models matter for founders: you can ship a product where the AI runs entirely on the customer's device and you never touch their data. Zero privacy concerns. Zero server costs. Zero compliance headaches.
That changes which industries you can sell to overnight. Healthcare, legal, finance, all the regulated verticals that won't send data to the cloud just opened up.
4. Every company needs to be rebuilt as a "second brain" before agents can be useful. That means every process, every decision, every piece of institutional knowledge has to exist in a format an agent can read. Most companies have none of this.
5. Agent costs are the new headcount. Won't be crazy for companies to spend 50%+ of their total headcount cost on tokens.
6. Agents are accidentally creating internal competition at companies. The marketing agent and the sales agent are optimizing for different metrics and working against each other without anyone realizing it. It took humans decades to develop cross-functional alignment. Nobody thought about it for agents.
7. The YAML config file is becoming the new org chart. Who reports to who, what permissions they have, what tools they access, all defined in a config file. The company's structure is literally a file you can version control, fork, and deploy. That's new.
8. The first agents that can smell a scam are going to be worth billions. Right now agents will happily wire money to a fake invoice because it matched the format. The trust layer is completely missing.
9. We're about to find out that most "expertise" was actually just memory. Knowing the tax code. Knowing the case law. Knowing which supplier charges what. When an agent holds all of that in context, the expert's value shifts from "I know things" to "I know which things matter." Much smaller group of people.
10. We're all running the same models. The differentiation is in what you feed them. Two founders with the same agent, same model, same tools will get wildly different results based purely on the quality of their knowledge base. Garbage context in, garbage output out. Forever.
11. The most underbuilt category in AI right now: agents for old people. 70 million boomers who need help with medical forms, insurance claims, and appointment scheduling.
12. Agent latency is the new page load speed. If your agent takes 45 seconds to respond, your customer already switched to one that takes
13. Skills files are the new apps. A SKILL.md that tells an agent how to do one thing well is more valuable than a SaaS subscription that does the same thing behind a login screen.
14. AI hardware... how do you create devices that are good businesses that people want? It'll be a $30 dongle you plug into existing dumb devices to give them an agent brain. Smart toaster doesn't need to be built from scratch. It needs a $30 brain attached to a $15 toaster.
15. Your agent can read faster than you can think. The bottleneck in every agent workflow is now the human approval step. We're the slow part. That's a strange thing to sit with.
16. Agents made the 80/20 rule violent. The 20% of work that matters is now the only work humans do. The 80% just disappeared. Entire job descriptions were hiding inside that 80%.
17. The thing I keep coming back to: the best businesses right now are being built by people who are just slightly ahead of their customers. Not 10 years ahead. 6 months ahead. That's the sweet spot. Far enough to lead. Close enough to be understood.
GREG ISENBERG@gregisenberg
My 30+ observations on the greatest opportunities in AI agents right now: And some ideas that are keeping me up at night. 1. The new buyer on the internet is an AI agent. Imagine billions of new customers showing up with money to spend but they only shop via MCP. That's what's happening. No MCP server means you're invisible to the fastest growing buyer on the internet. 2. Every franchise system in America (30,000+) needs an agent layer and none of them have one. One founder per franchise vertical. That's 30,000 businesses waiting. 3. Everyone said "distribution is the only moat" a year ago. Now I'd add that the only moat is distribution plus memory. The company that has your audience AND your agent's accumulated context is impossible to leave. 4. Consumer mobile is more interesting than it's been since 2012. Apps can finally DO things for you instead of showing you things. The next wave of $100M apps are being built right now. 5. The most interesting startup nobody has built is an agent marketplace where you rent access to someone else's trained agent. A recruiter spent 6 months training a sourcing agent on healthcare hiring. That agent is worth renting to every other healthcare recruiter on earth. The agent itself becomes the product. 6. A sorta strange phenomenon that's happening right now is agents are developing preferences. Give the same agent the same task 100 times and it starts developing patterns in how it approaches it. Nobody is studying this yet. But the agents that develop good patterns are worth more than the ones that don't. That's a new kind of asset. 7. Dead internet theory is about to become dead SaaS theory. Half the apps you use will quietly replace their support team, their onboarding team, and their content team with agents. You won't notice for months. Then you'll realize you haven't talked to a human at that company in a year. 8. The most valuable data in the world right now is sitting in the support tickets of small or mid tier SaaS companies. Every ticket is a customer telling you exactly what to build next. Mine this. 9. The most interesting pricing problem nobody has solved is how do you price a product when your costs change every time OpenAI or Anthropic updates their model pricing? Your margins can swing 40% overnight based on a decision made in San Francisco. The company that builds dynamic pricing infrastructure for agent-based businesses solves a problem every AI company has. 10. The best AI products feel like they're reading your mind. The worst ones feel like filling out a form with extra steps. 11. An interesting arbitrage I've noticed lately is hiring a human VA for $20/hour to supervise an AI agent that does $200/hour work. The human just checks the output. 12. The managed AI agent business is becoming the new agency model. $5k/month per client. You build it, run it, maintain it. The client gets a digital employee they never have to think about. This will be a $50 B+ category. 13. The first "shadow agent" scandals are about to drop. Employees running personal agents on company infrastructure without telling anyone. Using company API keys. Agents accessing internal docs. IT departments have little visibility into this right now. Lots of opportunity to build companies here. Definitely a painkiller not a vitamin type of business. 14. Right now there are probably millions of agents running on autopilot that their creators forgot about. Still burning tokens. Still sending emails. Still scraping websites. Still costing money. The "find and kill your zombie agents" tool is a product that writes itself. 15. Companies are starting to hire based on someone's agent portfolio instead of their resume. "Show me 3 agents you built that are running right now." It's REALLY early but it's starting. 16. Your Slack archive is a product. Every company's internal Slack has thousands of messages explaining how they actually do things. The company that lets you point an agent at your Slack history and auto-generate SOPs and agents from it will be enormous. 17. We're watching the cost of intelligence fall faster than the cost of distribution. Which means distribution is now the expensive thing. 18. The most underrated asset a human can have in 2026: the ability to sit in a room with another human, make eye contact, and have a real conversation. As AI handles more of the transactional stuff, the humans who can do the relational stuff become disproportionately valuable. The soft skills people used to dismiss as fluffy are becoming the hard skills. The hard skills people spent decades acquiring are becoming the soft ones. 19. There are MANY huge companies to be built around the fact that most people's agents are running on their personal laptops which they also use to browse the internet, check email, and download random files. The attack surface is enormous. One compromised Chrome extension and your agent's API keys, customer data, and workflows are exposed. 20. There's a new type of burnout forming that doesn't have a name. It's not from working too hard. It's from context switching between human work and agent work 50 times a day. Reviewing agent output, correcting it, approving it, reviewing again. The mental load of supervising agents is different from the mental load of doing the work yourself. Some founders are telling me they were less tired when they did everything manually because at least the cognitive pattern was consistent. 21. The cheapest form of market research: search "[your industry] spreadsheet template" on Google. Whatever people are tracking manually is your product. 22. Half the YC companies pivoted within 8 weeks of demo day. Not because they failed. Because agents let them test 5 ideas in the time it used to take to test one. The concept of "committing to an idea" is dissolving. Serial pivoting is becoming the default because 1) AI lets you move fast 2) the world is moving fast. 23. The loneliest job in tech right now is being the only person at your company who understands what the agents are doing. You can't explain it to your boss. You can't hand it off to a colleague. If you leave, everything breaks. You've become a single point of failure for an entire automated system. That person needs a title, a team, and a backup plan. Most companies haven't figured this out yet. 24. Your browser history is the most valuable training data you own and you're giving it away for free. Every site you visit, every product you research, every competitor you study, every pricing page you screenshot. That behavioral data, structured and fed to an agent, would make it understand your business better than any onboarding call. The company that lets you turn your browser history into agent context builds something nobody can replicate. 25. Everyone is building AI wrappers. Nobody is building AI unwrappers. The tool that takes an AI-generated document and tells you which parts a human wrote and which parts were generated. 26. Stripe just became the most important company in the agent economy and they barely had to do anything. Every agent that sells something needs Stripe. Every agent that buys something needs Stripe. They're the payment rail for the entire agentic internet by default. 27. The most undervalued API in the world right now is the US Postal Service address verification API. It's practically free. Every local business lead gen agent needs it. Every real estate agent needs it. Every direct mail agent needs it. Boring government infrastructure is quietly becoming the backbone of agent-native businesses. 28. The concept of "business hours" is for humans. Your agent closed a deal in Tokyo at 3am, processed the payment, sent the onboarding email, and updated the CRM before your alarm went off. 29. What happens when agents start recommending other agents? Your research agent finds that a competitor's sales agent is better and suggests you switch. Agent referral networks are forming organically. The first agent affiliate program is probably 6 months away. 30. Cal dotcom closed their source code. That's the canary. When open source companies start closing up, it means agents were cloning their product too easily. Every open source company is quietly asking the same question right now. 31. "AI for pet groomers" sounds like a joke and that's exactly why it will work. 150,000 of them in America. Zero tech. All scheduling by phone or IG DMs. The joke ideas always win. 32. The thing that will seem most obvious in hindsight: we spent 2025-2026 arguing about which model is best while the entire value was in the orchestration layer. The model is the CPU. Nobody buys a computer based on the CPU anymore. They buy it based on what they can do with it. Makes so much sense in hindsight. What else will be obvious in hindsight? I'll share more notes soon. I can't sleep with all that's going on. Maybe you too. What an incredible time to be building.
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No way I'm sharing this for free
I just found a tool that lets you drop a whole video template into Claude and it breaks it down for you clip by clip.
then Claude can swap the character for a new one rewrite the entire script in your tone even make the video longer if you want.
the crazy part is it does it all in one go from your conversation.
RT + comment "tool" and I'll send you the link
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The one constant here is that quality differs in an “idea guy” - there’re those who truly understood their customers, hustles, and would’ve likely been able to recruit a technical cofounder (though quality also varies here). And then there’re still those who think the idea is everything, have minimal skills and expect to have cofounders do everything for 1%.
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Sam Altman: "There was a time when we used to make fun of the “idea guy,” who only had an idea and needed someone technical to build it. But now, people who just really deeply understand their users and can’t code at all, I want to fund those people."
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blynn retweetledi
blynn retweetledi
Brian Chesky personally photographed every Airbnb listing in New York in 2009. He flew out with a camera, knocked on doors, watched hosts greet strangers, took notes on what felt awkward.
Airbnb is now worth $78 billion.
His framework was the 11-star experience. A 5-star stay: someone meets you at the door. 6 stars: champagne on arrival. 7 stars: the host pre-stocked your favorite groceries. Keep going. 11 stars: Elon picks you up at the airport in a SpaceX rocket. The exercise sounds ridiculous on purpose. You design the version no one would ever build, then walk it back to what's actually deliverable. The version you ship at the end is a 7. Every competitor ships a 5.
Most founders skip this entirely because it doesn't show up in a board deck. There's no metric for "the host left a handwritten welcome note." There's no A/B test for "the apartment smelled clean." Those details compound into something investors call brand and customers call the only company I trust with my kids.
Chesky's rule: you don't move to the second user until the first one loves it. You don't move to the millionth until the second one loves it. The hand-crafted phase looks like wasted time on a quarterly review. It's the only phase that creates a real moat.
Now look at 2026. The model layer is commoditizing. Every consumer AI app is wrapping the same three labs. Compute is a line item. The thing that decides who survives is whether someone obsessed over what the perfect experience looks like for one specific user before they tried to scale to a million. Cursor did that. Linear did that. Most VC-funded AI products did not.
Reverse-engineering an experience to scale takes weeks. Hand-crafting it for one person takes years and looks unproductive the entire time. Most founders refuse to sit in that phase. The few who do end up on the Stanford stage worth $78 billion.
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blynn retweetledi
blynn retweetledi
Paul Graham spent 20 years watching founders and found the visionary model was backwards.
Bill Gates built a BASIC interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Mark Zuckerberg built a website so Harvard undergrads could stalk each other. Neither one knew what they were going to become.
That is the opposite of how every startup school, pitch deck, and vision statement tells you to operate. You're supposed to walk in with a 10-year roadmap. TAM charts. A precise picture of the future you're building.
The people who built the biggest companies didn't have a precise vision. They had a direction. Gates had "microcomputers are interesting." Zuckerberg had "Harvard undergrads will use this." That was the entire thesis.
The math explains why. If your target is 10 years out and 100x bigger than anything that exists, every assumption in your model compounds error. Interest rates move. Hardware costs collapse. A competitor pivots. By year three the roadmap is a museum piece and you're optimizing for a world that never arrived.
Graham's analogy is Columbus. Columbus didn't have a map of the New World. He had "there's something to the west" and a boat. The destination was wrong, the continent was wrong, the math on how far was wrong. The direction was right, and the direction was enough.
The inversion every founder gets wrong: the popular image of the visionary is someone who sees the future precisely. Empirically, it's someone who sees it blurry and walks toward the blur while everyone else is drawing detailed maps of imaginary places.
Gates didn't set out to dominate microcomputer software for four decades. Zuckerberg didn't set out to build a universal vacuum for human time. They started with something small that worked, and the opportunity to move came later.
The VCs who fund vision decks and the founders who write them are playing the same game. The founders who actually built those companies weren't in the room.
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blynn retweetledi
announcement:
silicon valley spent 15 years worshipping polished founders with elite resumes and perfect narrative control.
that meta is dead.
the next decade belongs to founders with 3 things:
1) pain tolerance high enough to rebuild the company every 6 months
2) technical taste strong enough to know when model progress changes the product
3) cultural distribution so they can recruit, sell, and survive the chaos
most VCs still optimize for the old archetype because their entire social graph is built around credentialism.
they want safe weird, not real weird.
the cultural shift happening right now is that the internet no longer respects institutional permission.
people follow raw competence, speed, and proof of work.
if youre still building your company to impress a partnership meeting, youre already behind.
build it to dominate the feed, dominate the product, and dominate the labor market that agents are rewriting in real time.
thats the new founder stack.
not pedigree.
not polish.
not sandboxed ambition.
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blynn retweetledi
Jeff Bezos just told you exactly how to price AI.
Nobody listened.
Bezos: “AI is real and it is going to change every industry. In fact it’s a very unusual technology in that regard in that it’s a horizontal enabling layer.”
Horizontal enabling layer.
Three words that reprice the entire technology sector.
The iPhone was a vertical. One product. One new market.
Electricity was a horizontal. One substrate that rewired every market on Earth.
Wall Street is pricing AI like it is the next iPhone. Bezos is telling you it is the next electrical grid.
Right now, thousands of companies are trying to sell AI as a product.
A feature. A tool. A subscription tier.
Every single one of them will be priced to zero.
You do not sell a horizontal layer. You do not compete with it. You build on top of it or you disappear beneath it.
For a century, entire industries survived on one thing. Complexity.
The friction of navigating law, medicine, logistics, finance. That was the moat. If you could not memorize the maze, you could not compete.
A horizontal layer does not navigate the maze. It dissolves the walls.
Electricity did not compete with the candle industry. It erased the need for one.
The most dangerous part of a horizontal shift is how quiet it is. It moves underneath the economy. The surface looks normal. Revenue still holds.
Every day you operate on the old substrate, you accumulate a debt you cannot see and cannot repay.
The internet repriced distribution. AI is repricing cognition itself.
When intelligence becomes a utility that runs through the walls of every company on Earth, the premium on human expertise does not erode. It evaporates.
This is not a disruption. Disruptions replace products.
This replaces the ground you are standing on.
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blynn retweetledi
Steve Jobs gives a counterintuitive take on leadership:
"a CEO should be at the bottom of the hierarchy"
Most people think power flows downward in an organisation from the CEO to everyone else.
But Steve Jobs believed the opposite.
In the clip below, he explains what happens when you build a company around genuinely exceptional people (whether in technology or in creative work like Pixar):
"Incredibly talented people that are also rare and in demand — if you don't treat them right, they can go get another job in 10 minutes."
Because of that, something counterintuitive happens. The hierarchy of power inverts.
Jobs puts it plainly:
"The CEO is actually at the bottom. I sort of feel like I work for most of these people, because they're the ones doing all the brilliant work."
This isn't Jobs's modesty shining through. It's a structural insight about where value is actually created.
Whether in software, hardware, or creative production... the best people are extraordinarily hard to find. And they know it. Their leverage is real.
So what does management's job become?
"It's management's job to support them. Because they're on the front lines doing the work."
The leaders who build the most extraordinary things aren't the ones who command from the top — they're the ones who clear the path for the people doing the real work.
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blynn retweetledi
blynn retweetledi
You as a single person have more power today than a 20 person company of the past. That's insane. The internet gave you the ability to learn anything. Social media gave you the leverage to reach anyone. AI is giving you the ability to create almost anything. Please don't waste it
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blynn retweetledi
the "AI wrapper" critique assumes the wrapper is the easy part
But being the wrapper also includes figuring out:
- getting distribution without paying infinite CAC
- creating an amazing UX that's AI native, not derivative
- building a brand, trust in a very noisy landscape
- creating an ecosystem/community
- generating network effects
- making customer service great
- ... plus pricing, hiring, raising money, and everything else
these are not easy!
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blynn retweetledi
blynn retweetledi
The Secret Formula to $144M ARR in 5 Years: @giliraanan
4x, 4x, 3x, 3x.
Net new ARR.
First year: $1M.
Second Year: $4M.
Third Year: $12M
Fourth Year: $36M
Fifth Year: $144M
How have growth rate expectations on companies changed in the last 12 months and is the above even growing fast enough @kirbyman01 @chetanp @mmurph @jasonlk
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blynn retweetledi
Tobi Lutke explains what the VCs who passed on Shopify got wrong
Tobi recounts pitching Shopify to VCs on Sand Hill Road a few years after founding Shopify.
Investors passed because they thought the addressable market was too small. At the time, there were about 40,000-50,000 online stores, and even if Shopify captured 50% of the market, that still wouldn’t be a venture-scale business.
When Tobi ran into the VC partner a few years ago, the partner asked Tobi what he missed (Shopify is valued at almost $100 billion today).
Tobi explained:
“You were actually correct, but what you didn’t realize was that Shopify was the solution to the very problem you identified. The reason there was only 40,000 online stores was because it was hard, expensive, and everyone who tried ran into all these brick walls of complexity, which Shopify, one after another, smoothed over and made simple to do.”
Tobi believes this is a common mistake:
“What a lot of free-market thinkers don’t understand is that between the demand and eventual supply lies friction. And I actually think that friction is probably the most potent force for shaping the planet that people just generally do not acknowledge… That was my theory when I turned my snowboard store into Shopify: there was a lot more people like me except there was too much friction which we needed to solve. And Shopify has proven out that every time we make the process simpler, there’s more consumption. At this point, we have a million merchants on Shopify, which is a mind-blowing number. So friction is a major component, and it’s something that software is uniquely good at reducing.”
Video source: @danmartell (2019)
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Introducing One.
The simplest way to connect and monitor AI agents to hundreds of apps.
And we’re open-sourcing the world’s largest integration database powering it: 47,000 agentic actions across 250+ apps.
RT + comment “One” for access & 1M free API requests/month.
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VEO 3 + Ad Factory = $750k/month
No actors.
No studios.
No endless editing cycles.
- 124% higher ROAS
- 8.7x engagement
- 89% cheaper than creative teams
AI UGC is scaling brands faster than ever.
Comment ''AD'' & I’ll DM you the full system
(must be following)
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