Zach Hamed

🎉 Some very exciting news: @meshhq has been acquired by @automattic! Clay will live on as a standalone product and continue to grow—with our entire team remaining at the helm, more resources, and broader reach. Automattic is the parent company of @WordPress (which powers over 40% of the internet) and other fantastic products like @beeper, @tumblr, @dayone, @pocketcasts, and more. Clay has 150 million relationships under management and growing, with everyone from Fortune 500 execs to students using it daily. We’re very thankful to our talented team, amazing investors, and loyal members for being the true champions of this tremendous milestone. I also need to pause here and specially thank my co-founder @Achariam, whose product vision, design excellence, and dedication turned Clay from an idea into the product and business it is today. Building a company is hard. Building one with a co-founder and friend like Matt is a rare gift. That said, we’re not going anywhere! A few things: 1️⃣ Our product and team will be growing, unlike every previous app or product in this space. We started Clay because we had been burned by spending days adding people and notes into apps that eventually shut down. Plaxo, Contactually, Connected, Refresh, Rapportive, Accompany, Brewster, Humin, Xobni, Gist, Cobook, Soocial, RelateIQ — all abandoned or shut down. Clay is a paid product where you are the customer. And Automattic has a number of beautifully-designed, continually-maintained, privacy-conscious apps like Beeper, Day One Journal, and Pocket Casts that have the same philosophy. We are joining the pantheon of beautifully-designed, privacy-respecting, tech-advancing apps. Automattic is celebrating its 20th anniversary this month. It thinks in 100 year increments, and keeps apps running for decades. 2️⃣ We are your best choice for anything contacts, network, or CRM related. If you believe in any part of our mission, join us. Our team is obsessed with building a great product for your people and relationships, and we ship daily. If you’ve ever wanted a better way to send gifts to friends, or remember birthdays, or scan business cards, or intro people to each other, or search your LinkedIn connections with AI, we either do it today or we will soon. Sign up for free, and say hi at care@clay.earth! 3️⃣ Digital identity and relationship graphs are more important than ever. As AI continues to power our everyday software, your contacts, network, messages, people, and relationships are the last, most sensitive piece of the puzzle. That information shouldn’t be part of LLM training data, ever. But when done locally, just for you, with your permission, it can unlock magical product experiences that bring us closer together. We’re excited to have you with us on this journey, and we look forward to building a brighter, more connected world together. So — thank you for being a part of the Clay community. Let’s build something extraordinary together.

@RobertJBye @MeshHQ unfortunately they are still very, very popular - particularly in japan and other asian cultures (plus, ideally it works anywhere contact info shows up like restaurant signs, screenshots, scanned mail, etc.)

@zmh @MeshHQ Is this satire? I haven’t seen a business card in a decade.

calling it now, business card scanning will be the most-used feature of iOS 27 (~2 years after we shipped this in @MeshHQ...)

Want a private social network just for friends & family? @josephscott and I built a simple way to do it on WordPress.com as part of Automattic’s AI build month: wordpress.com/blog/2026/04/2…

New work with @AlecRad and @DavidDuvenaud: Have you ever dreamed of talking to someone from the past? Introducing talkie, a 13B model trained only on pre-1931 text. Vintage models should help us to understand how LMs generalize (e.g., can we teach talkie to code?). Thread:

Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see. @eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)

I have built a spreadsheet. It has 847 rows. Each row is a community bank in the United States with a market cap below $200 million, a price-to-tangible-book ratio under 0.85, a non-performing loan ratio below 0.4%, and a CEO who has been in the role for at least twelve years. I update it every Sunday from 6 AM to 11 AM while my family attends church without me. I have visited the headquarters of nineteen of these banks in person. I have eaten a complimentary lobby cookie at each one. The cookies are how you can tell. A bank with a good cookie is a bank that respects its depositors. A bank with a stale cookie is a bank that will be acquired within 36 months at a 40% premium. I am never wrong about the cookies. The cookies have never lied to me. The cookies are the only thing left that tells the truth.

mesh · new person by @meshhq

@mhdempsey yesssss

pneuma.mhdempsey.xyz password: public

when software had a soul there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive. the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine. software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive. the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different. nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making. somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth. A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing. now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off. and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman. now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero. which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch. when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void. this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out. here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point. AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence. the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice. if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it. that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.

this is excellent >GitLab founder diagnosed with rare cancer (osteosarcoma) >standard care works but cancer comes back later >medical team says there's not much else to do >"It became my own job to keep myself alive. Nobody else was going to do it for me at this point" >starts researching, assembles his own medical team, uses AI for deep research >“I’ll talk to anyone, I’ll go anywhere, and I can be there anytime" to collect information >does as many diagnostic tests as he can find as often as he can (maximal diagnostics) >develops his own therapeutic ladder with repurposed drugs, personalized medicine, etc >Sid’s cancer currently in remission

@GeoffPeterson @jameswlepage @automattic Thanks Geoff! Happy to chat more - I'm zach [at] me.sh

Mesh looks very interesting. It's something I wish I had access to years ago. Definitely looks like a companion for sales and marketing. I'm curious how you're looking to build out the team, grow it all out in the key areas. I've worked in the technology space and in AI for years. Happy to connect further.

Check out me.sh, an @Automattic project, and A central nervous system for your relationships in an AI era.

Introducing Mesh! Everything you know and love, now called Mesh. Same team, same mission, new name.

@brackin @GradientVC get this guy on your cap table stat congrats sir 🎉

I joined @GradientVC at the start of 2024 after 10 years as an operator or founder at Jobr, Newfront, and Vial. I wasn’t sure if venture would be for me, but the chance to build the best platform for early AI founders was too compelling to miss. Today marks another step in that journey; we’re launching Fund V: $220M, as a fully independent firm. We sit in a unique spot: we take bets before ideas are obvious, lead rounds, and partner closely with founders through the highs and lows of building. Our team is all former operators and engineers, so we bring real empathy for how insanely hard it is and a lot of curiosity for what’s next. It's an absolute pleasure to work with @darian314 @thezbg, @Cdpetty, @denise_teng25, @EylulKayin, @jackie_eicholz, @kylerduffy, @vigsachi, and devon jarred! fortune.com/2026/03/17/goo…

@cjpedregal yay! can't wait to integrate this with @meshhq

There are some tweets out there saying that Granola is trying to lock down access to your data. Tldr; we are actually trying to become more open, not closed. We’re launching a public API next week to complement our MCP. Read on for context. A couple months ago, we noticed that some folks had reversed engineered our local cache so they could access their meeting data. Our cache was not built for this (it can change at any point), so we launched our MCP to serve this need. The MCP gives full access to your notes and transcripts (all time for paid users, time restricted for free users). MCP usage has exploded since launch, so we felt good about it. A week ago, we updated how we store data in our cache and broke the workarounds. This is on us. Stupidly, we thought we had solved these use cases well enough with our MCP. We’ve now learned that while MCPs are great for connecting to tools like Claude or chatGPT, they don’t meet your needs for agents running locally or for data export / pipeline work. So we’re going to fix this for you ASAP. First, we’ll launch a public API next week to make it easier for you to pull your data. Second, we’ll figure out how to make Granola work better for agents running locally. Whether that’s expanding our MCP, launching a CLI, a local API, etc. The industry is moving quickly here, so we’d appreciate your suggestions. We want Granola data to be accessible and useful wherever you need it. Stay tuned.

Don’t miss the hottest ticket in NYC for applied AI! dev/ai/nyc, an evening exploring the future of the open web and human-centered AI, returns on Thursday, March 26. @stephen_wolfram joins @photomatt for a can’t-miss panel. Snag your spot, the last one was standing-room-only!

@addyosmani holy wow thank you

Introducing the Google Workspace CLI: github.com/googleworkspac… - built for humans and agents. Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. 40+ agent skills included.

I wanted to share something I built over the last few weeks: isometric.nyc is a massive isometric pixel art map of NYC, built with nano banana and coding agents. I didn't write a single line of code.

@rjonesy @Flighty Wow fuck yeah

United CEO on @Flighty. 🙏 Impressive clarity and customer focus throughout the interview. stratechery.com/2026/an-interv…

what the hell is going on at Ramp Labs and how can I get in on this