Yann Ranchere

Back in the builder seat. I have started @useMotley with my cofounders Egor (ex head of AI at Wise) and Artem. medium.com/motley-ai/motl…. Lots of discussions around systems of records. We are building the best way to interface with those, starting from a reporting automation.

Your brain was never evolutionary designed for reading. Fun fact: we’ve been reading and writing for less than 4% of our entire history as a species. A fighter pilot flying at 700 miles per hour does not read a paragraph to understand the situation. The cockpit delivers a heads-up display, color-coded and spatial, with everything critical processed in under a second. That design choice is purely functional. It is survival engineering. Hospital ICU monitors work on the same principle. A flatline is a waveform, a shape the brain reads before conscious thought catches up. The same logic applies everywhere humans need to act fast on complex information, and yet almost everywhere else, we are still sending paragraphs. We see this in our tech timeline for over four decades. Email was strictly plain text from its inception in 1971 until the early-to-mid 1990s. Eventually came YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, each platform shift moving communication toward shorter, faster, more visual formats. This thing we call language is simply a data transfer mechanism, and just like everything, it has its strengths and weaknesses. Here is what it means for founders building products, running teams, and trying to win attention:

Even better if it can write your QBRs, customer update, embedded customer messages and more. No reason for fixed templates, embedded variables in a world where an agent can understand context and reliably query your data in a transparent way. Try @useMotley

Here we go, want to generate a series of full Gamma presentations from data in your database …. in natural language? You can with @useMotley . More on how tomorrow.

There's a hidden tax on every knowledge worker in the world, and nobody talks about it: The design tax. You're a strategist, a sales lead, a marketer. You were hired for what you know. But every meeting, every pitch, every proposal expects you to show up with something that looks like a designer made it. I lived this. Before Gamma, I spent time in consulting and investment banking. I spent more hours formatting slides than the analysis that went into them. When my cofounders and I started Gamma, we asked: what if you never had to be a designer in the first place? Five years and nearly 100 million users later, we've refunded billions of hours of the design tax. Today, we're eliminating it for good with our biggest launch ever. Gamma Imagine — a powerful, AI-native visual creation tool directly in Gamma. Posters, logos, infographics, visuals from a single prompt. On brand, every time. AI-Native Templates. Templates were supposed to save you from design work. Instead you spent the time filling them in. So we completely rebuilt the template experience. Modify a whole deck with a single prompt, with your brand and style intact every time. Gamma Connectors. You're already thinking in ChatGPT and Claude. Now Gamma sits inside the most popular work apps in the world. No more context-switching. You were hired for your ideas, not to resize text boxes. Let Gamma pay the design tax.

@chrija Reporting and document generation are blending in our view, especially for customer reporting. Also, we are seeing a need (from our customers) for making reporting a part of the B2B solution, so that customers can directly generate what they will share internally.

Spending lots of time with Claude Code in the last months (+ OpenClaw more recently) has made it abundantly clear to me that every piece of SaaS hugely benefits from being infused with AI. All not new, this has become clear soon after the ChatGPT moment... but it's become a lot more tangible to me recently. Pretty much everything needs to be reimagined from the ground up. Here's a quick (Claude generated) summary. Only looking at the past, recent past, and near-term future here. Not even mentioning the mid/long-term, in which AI agents will do the majority of the actual work.

i turned this into a skill github.com/bentossell/vis…

@jasonlk @Kellblog You can also do that with Google slides and PPT

@Kellblog Yes but it can also dynamically edit all the content to be specific to each prospect / customer And pull that data from any source you want, including Saleforce etc

Companies like Gamma may be worth tens of billions of dollars but I'm the one sitting here saying 12 times to "change the expression on the reflected face in the mirror to be confident but not too confident, almost pensive." If you thought it was hard to make a PowerPoint slide, I'm not at all convinced that trying to explain one in a conversational interface is any easier

This is what always happen with pure usage based models, because being a pure cost of sales line item makes you to be optimized endlessly

👀

Congratulations @kwhanalytics , it has been an honor to be there along the way with @anthemis . Clap clap Richard and Jason, what a journey and a story of conviction and resilience.

This is one of the most insane sequence

youtu.be/rPaWW0IDurI?si… < why investing in post sales is one of the most underrated aspect of building companies: gross dollar retention is what matters.

@AkashBajwa96 @thinkymachines Data models are replicable for sure but I think we tend to undervalue how much owning it from a fully company standpoint : brand, marketing, sales, trust, reliability is an asset.

@AkashBajwa96 @thinkymachines Yes I agree determinism as computation problem is mostly a harness problem; I think though when they mention determinism they mix both determinism as a computation problem and the underlying trusted data model and all the rules attached to its access.

@mfishbein Thanks 🙏

@tek_fin DM'd!

I turned Claude Code into the ultimate slide deck agent. It runs our entire pipeline from discovery to client stand ups. My company Atherial is on track for a record quarter. Making demo decks, proposals, and kickoff decks became a full-time job. So I built this system that cut time by 83% and improved quality. It's 6 Slash Commands and 5 Skills that crush design and copy based on context from call recordings. No more 3am wake ups fiddling with spacing issues. Just text prompt Claude Code and it does everything for you in code. Here's what it does: - Run /new-demo-deck and it grabs client context, duplicates a template, applies copywriting and design system Skills, and builds every slide including a Mermaid architecture diagram. - Run /demo-proposal and it converts the demo deck into a proposal. It grabs the demo call recording transcript, extracts what changed, makes scope adjustments, and asks you questions on what else you want to propose. - Run /add-weekly-update and it builds a full standup deck: what we built, updated architecture diagram, open questions for the client, and what we're building next. - Every command reads the same Skills before writing a single word of copy or code. You update the skills once and every future deck inherits them. No more reminding AI not to use em dashes. How to build this: - Create a .claude/commands/ folder. Every .md file you put in it becomes a slash command that you can run from the Claude Code CLI. Write each command as a numbered workflow: what to ask you the user, what files to read, what to build, and where to save the output. - Create a .claude/skills/ folder for best practices docs. They get read by commands that need them. Copywriting rules, brand guidelines, pricing tiers, diagram patterns. Point every command at the same skills files and tell it to read them before writing. - Create templates with your design system and the standard content slide options. Currently, Gemini 3.1 is best for design and Claude Sonnet 4.6 is best for copy IMO. - Use a consistent content/ folder structure. proposals/[client]/ for deck configs. calls/[client]/ for transcripts and dev updates. Give every command the same folder conventions so everything is organized. - Push to GitHub + Vercel so you can share links with clients. Custom agents and tools like this are how we're building an AI-Native Agency. We're a team of 2 building a $2M company. Want a plan doc you can give to Claude Code to build this for you? Reply "DECK" and I'll DM you the .md file.

I am not a VC anymore, but I would have had so much fun and value using Claude Cowork as an investor. If you are interested in an onboarding / brainstorming sessions let me know (in exchange of portfolio companies intros for @useMotley)

@ohadsamet Yes, did some super early lovable stuff, I am sure it’s much better now’s That’s on app building, although I am setup on Claude code now and can more easily collaborate with the team so no reason to switch.

@tek_fin Try a better learning wheels solution like lovable for apps. Setting up clause code, hosting, all that stuff is boring and overkill for the first few thousands of users

Let's be real with the all agents wave. In the middle of all the sycophantic posts, my current, unfiltered state of Yann using AI agents. OpenClaw: tried a couple of weeks ago, got it up and running on a VPN. Dropped due to: - could not get to do all the recommended steps in terms of securing in the time I wanted to allocate: setting up SSL - wanted to have it run its own number / whatsapp for isolation: realised I need to buy a new mobile and prepaid line just for that .... Claude Code: - wrote and deployed a full app: value.motley.ai - stumbled through terminal, installing bash, deploying, probably burning a lot of tokens along the way for being a noob but got something through sheer persistence - of note: being the default provider per Claude Code is a massively valuable thing. I did not challenge any of those choices. Claude Cowork: - getting my head around it, most of what I do is a form of Chat+ creation where I pull data from internal apps + cross with external info easily - Got a bunch of workflows going with actual end of end processes, a lot of around emailing, creating or documenting in Notion or CRM. I can see the direction but it is still a bit hit or miss whether I am doing it the best way - Plugins are great because of connector + skills mean it kinda work for me. Building my own skills is still not clear how better that would be in the flow I have - I actually like when html output or docs are shown, turns out visual UI is great. - Scheduled task are the next big thing for me - feels it's a bit stuck in between being prescriptive for beginners and being open for experts, would love a bit more hand-holding to begin with. @AnthropicAI, I'm always happy to chat from the perspective of an average user. What should I read to get better? And please, not the Claude Cowork posts from content creators. Turns out not a lot of my job is spent writing posts.