PJ Celis

Recording of my talk in Toronto on how to scale to 500K merchants on the app store. I share how we think about our strategy and how we build an organisation to deliver it. youtube.com/watch?v=h57aq8…

Three days without reception, disconnect and exploring the Bolivian desert and salt flats. And through it all, I got to ask my best friend to be my wife ♥️

@MehtabKarta @tobi Oh we've let Shopify know, zero concern here, more commenting on the outrageous behavior by the app dev.

@celispj @tobi will fix

This is a first, app dev straight up copying our name for some free app store juice. Ridiculous.

So many @judgeme improvements this month: ✅ Reviews Grid ✅ AI Review Summary widget ✅ Web reviews confirmation ✅ Social proof banners ✅ 8 new integrations including @Mailchimp and @dotdigital youtube.com/watch?v=shFMol…

@levelsio What really annoys me is high end hotels where they give you a breakfast allowance instead of a buffet. So annoying to start the day signing the bill on even more spend. Breaks the feeling of the hotel being your sanctuary to start the day from.

Even bigger irony of getting rich is that everything expensive isn't that much better than when you paid normal for it Many things are even worse (most expensive luxury hotels are guaranteed worse than regular simple hotels, I know I tried most of them now) The real reason you wanna get rich is not to buy expensive things It's so that $1M invested gives you 3% to take out every year with no risk, which is $30,000/year Which you can use to travel for $1000/mo on a shoestring budget forever without having to back to some desk job with a shitty boss Aka FREEDOM

@kylebigley Opportunity cost my friend. You're too talented for BigCommerce.

@celispj their money is green and good here (the merchants) lolol

Every time I check in on BigCommerce it gets worse and worse.

Honestly in a world of AI prompts, why bother with design tools like Figma and Adobe? These companies are selling horse saddles in a car economy now.

@celispj still planning on building a bigcommerce integration xD

The real threat to your B2B app isn't AI agents or fewer seats. And it certainly isn't they will vibe code you awawy. It's that your customers are quietly doing more and more inside Claude instead. The storm circle is closing. Every month Claude can take over a little more of what your app does.

@newlinedotco @hardeep_gambhir "you are captured in the services budget which is 6x larger and much stickier" ... for now.

the sequoia piece by julien bek is the quietest signal with the loudest implications right now. the $1 for software vs $6 for services ratio is exactly why the saas era is hitting a ceiling and the agentic agency era is just starting. most founders are still obsessed with building the shovel , but the real margin is in selling the hole. if you sell a tool for $50 a month, you are at the mercy of churn and feature parity. if you sell the completed accounting cycle or the finished film edit for $5k, you are captured in the services budget which is 6x larger and much stickier. the ben affleck acquisition of interpositive by netflix is a perfect case study. they didnt just buy a general generative model. they bought a 16-person team that built a post-production engine specialized in dailies and cinematic logic. it is a software company that looks like a high-end vfx house. this is why ycombinator is pivoting so hard toward these ai-native agencies. in the w26 and p26 batches, we are seeing companies like noetic and korso that dont just give you a dashboard they take over the entire compliance or rfq-to-order workflow. they are hiring a remote workforce on the back end that happens to be 90% autonomous agents. the winners in this shift wont be the ones with the best raw inference. they will be the ones who can architect the most reliable internal agentic loops and wrap them in a brand that high-tier talent actually wants to work for. when

It’s happening. The bubble is popping. Went to a cafe in the absolute middle of nowhere today in Kyoto and a guy had Claude Code docs open there. Asked him what’s he using it for, he didn’t speak much English but said “Agents to automate university assignments” The world is going to go through an insane period of change and it is very close. YC is actively investing in agency model companies now. Sequoia recently published a blog with the title “the next $1 Trillion company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm” I am starting to become convinced, just through first principles that for the first time, the people who are going to win big in this market won’t be the tool makers But the people who leverage the tools, make the best tools internally and produce output that consumers and businesses will be pay $$ for While some tool companies certainly will win, it’s seeming it will unlock yet a whole another world of creator economy With everyone running their businesses using AI and selling their services to the world The people who will win in this new market would be who attract and retain the best talent in small teams Same as traditional startups. But this time A players would be actively working on figuring out how to automate themselves using agents. The way to win imo is to build exceptional communities and produce stories about your startup to attract the best talent. Being public about your values, your progress, your ambitions, your taste. And then work very very hard to make sure the talent you attract feels they are doing the work of a lifetime. A couple of these agencies would then truly dominate most contracts in the world in their own domains. Some of them may be acquired by traditional legacy businesses. Like Ben Affleck’s AI startup that got acquired for a supposedly $600 Million after Netflix backed out of the Warner Bros Acquisition What a time to be alive. What a time to be alive.

B Corps are the vegans of companies. Just create epic value for your customers, that *is* how you scale your talents into maximum value for society. Asking some committee to then start rating you morally on random "social impact" angles is missing the point entirely.

@howcanbobhelp Yeah this new way of working may be extremely good fit with hybrid setup with forced office days for collaboration and forced solo AI management days.

@celispj This is basically our week now. Monday: talk to humans about AI strategy. Tuesday through Friday: manage the AI agents solo.

The future of work will be both more siloed and more collaborative. Siloed (the work): managing your AI agents, with cross-functional info provided by AI. Collaborative (the meta): discussing with team humans how to re-engineer the organisation yet again based on latest AI.

@chamath Also effectively yet another tax on being married for successful men.

Here is what a tax like this does: 1) It excites people with zero agency and infinite envy. Beware of these people. 2) It will keep middle class people firmly in the middle class with no real chance of getting wealthy if they stay in Washington State. It should be clear that this IS the strategy. Learned helplessness of the electorate will keep Washington State’s current elected officials in office. 3) It will never allow the upwardly mobile of building any assets or real wealth unless they move. Capping the American Dream is a dystopian and malevolent scheme. It cannot be a valid strategy. But unless droves of middle and upper middle class people leave Washington State, this strategy will win.

Obviously true, in same way that starting a car company became harder over time as the car industry developed. The tech may be more straightforward, but minimum efficient scale is always going up in maturing markets.

How did I miss the news of Glen Coates moving to OpenAI ⁉️

@AndrewDurot It's a pre-Claude graph for sure.

@celispj Tbh it looks like the most ghetto graph that i would submit to a teacher when i forgot that i had an assignment

The shit we do is more elite than we think. Are these USA market metrics?