Podcasts about Twilio

College sports are going through massive changes—from athlete pay drama to superconference realignment and transfer portal chaos, not to mention the giant class action lawsuit playing out now.Matt Brown, the publisher behind Extra Points and one of the top experts on the business of college athletics, joined the show to break it all down. We walked through the full history of college sports, the current money dynamics, and where things could be headed. (00:00) Meet Matt Brown: Expert in College Sports Business(03:09) The Origins of College Sports(06:31) The Evolution of College Sports Broadcasting(14:53) Title IX and Its Impact on College Athletics(17:53) The 1984 Supreme Court Decision and Its Aftermath(20:03) The SMU Death Penalty Scandal(22:19) Conference Realignment and the BCS Era(28:22) The Rise of Conference Television Networks(30:23) The Arms Race in College Sports Facilities(34:41) The Role of Boosters in College Sports(36:03) Financial Breakdown of Major College Sports Programs(37:04) Understanding Nonprofit Accounting in College Athletics(38:20) Revenue Generation in College Sports(40:34) Athletics as Enrollment Management(42:04) The Flutie Effect and University Applications(44:37) Conference Realignment and Financial Instability(48:58) The O'Bannon Case and Video Game Licensing(53:59) The Northwestern Unionization Attempt(58:19) The Alston Case and Educational Awards(01:02:11) Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) Marketplaces(01:05:51) The Role of Collectives in College Sports(01:12:08) Dependability of Young Campaign Partners(01:13:03) Transfer Portal and Its Impact(01:15:56) Rise of NIL Agents and Handlers(01:17:40) Economic Incentives and Transfer Market(01:20:37) Challenges in NIL Enforcement(01:22:48) House Settlement and Future Implications(01:25:38) Allocation of NIL Funds by Universities(01:44:26) Potential Super Leagues and Investment Challenges(01:48:07) Concluding Thoughts on College SportsExecutive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin HrabovskyCheck out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA

In this episode, Derek Thompson (Writer, The Atlantic) delves into the tumultuous nature of Trump's trade policies, especially regarding tariffs, and how they impact American manufacturing and global markets. They discuss the constant changes in policy, the resulting uncertainty for industries like automotive and aerospace, and the mismatch between Trump's ‘madman strategy' and effective industrial policy. The conversation also explores the broader economic consequences, including stock market volatility, housing affordability issues, and the role of government in promoting economic growth and innovation.(00:00) Intro(00:20) Trump's Trade Policy and Its Implications(01:30) The Uncertainty of Tariff Policies(02:12) Impact on American Manufacturing(05:15) Stock Market Reactions(07:00) Debating the Effectiveness of Tariffs(10:02) Wall Street vs. Main Street(18:44) Housing and Healthcare Challenges(34:53) Historical Context of Housing Regulations(41:48) The Reality of Construction Jobs(42:35) The American Dream and Housing Costs(42:57) The 30-Year Mortgage and Its Impact(43:48) Comparing Home Ownership to Stock Market Investments(45:14) Political Reception of the Book 'Abundance'(46:17) Pro-Business Democrats and Government's Role(48:38) The Need for Aggressive Democratic Leaders(51:18) The Importance of Economic Growth(01:01:26) Debating Government's Role in Industrial Policy(01:03:34) Challenges in the Semiconductor Industry(01:13:19) The Housing Problem in New York City(01:15:26) Conclusion and Final ThoughtsExecutive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin HrabovskyCheck out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA

Debate between Keith Rabois and Zach Weinberg on what tariffs are actually trying to accomplish. One core theme: Tariffs aren't fully about “bringing back factories,” but rather a negotiation tool to eliminate foreign trade barriers - ultimately aiming to increase free trade, not restrict it.We also got into:- What each of them would do if they were in charge- Whether the trade deficit is a meaningful metric or just a misunderstood talking point- If tariffs could be part of an initiative to replace income tax — shifting toward a more consumption-based tax system- If tariffs could successfully be used as a non-military tool to reduce drug supply to the US- If there's a major disconnect between the new administration's rhetoric and the actual economic goals behind the policyOne of the deepest economic conversations from the show's recent history — and a rare debate where both sides had real logic behind their views.(00:00) Introduction and Host's Biases(00:46) Keith's Perspective on Tariffs(03:05) Zach's Perspective and Clarifying Questions(05:14) Debating Tariff Strategies(07:45) Economic Implications and Free Trade(13:31) Trump's Tariff Policies and Goals(16:57) Global Trade and Protectionism(25:52) Final Thoughts on Tariffs and Trade(29:16) Discussion on Trade Tariffs and Partners(30:17) Impact of Tariffs on GDP and Debt(31:20) Political Coalitions and Trade Policies(32:00) Tariffs as Consumer Taxes(33:30) Debate on Trade Deficit and Tariff Rates(36:53) Regulatory Reforms and Economic Policies(47:25) Fentanyl Crisis and Trade Negotiations(51:06) Closing Remarks and Future TopicsExecutive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin HrabovskyCheck out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA

Veteran and entrepreneur Chad Grills of National Capital League discusses his experience with Big Tech and how building anything meaningful and lasting will likely not come out of Silicon Valley or places like California. He explains how Silicon Valley was seeded by DOD, the Intelligence Community, and DARPA. The culture of Silicon Valley and most major cities will not allow anything original or good for humanity to emerge. He argues we have neither communism nor capitalism, but a monopolistic system that keeps the little guy out. He stresses a need for better governance, creating good culture, maintaining personal integrity, and is optimistic about the ability of America to reinvent itself. Watch on BitChute / Brighteon / Rumble / Substack / YouTube Geopolitics & Empire · Chad Grills: Is a 'Golden Age' Possible for America? #537 *Support Geopolitics & Empire! Become a Member https://geopoliticsandempire.substack.com Donate https://geopoliticsandempire.com/donations Consult https://geopoliticsandempire.com/consultation **Visit Our Affiliates & Sponsors! Above Phone https://abovephone.com/?above=geopolitics easyDNS (15% off with GEOPOLITICS) https://easydns.com Escape Technocracy course (15% off with GEOPOLITICS) https://escapethetechnocracy.com/geopolitics PassVult https://passvult.com Sociatates Civis (CitizenHR, CitizenIT, CitizenPL) https://societates-civis.com Wise Wolf Gold https://www.wolfpack.gold/?ref=geopolitics Websites National Capital League https://www.nclhq.com X https://x.com/ChadJGrills Short Stories: Veterans after War https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Veterans-after-War-ebook/dp/B0127DN39M Dustin Chambers: DOGE & America's Chance to Cut the Government Down to Size https://geopoliticsandempire.com/2025/01/02/dustin-chambers-doge-americas-chance-to-cut-the-government-down-to-size About Chad Grills Chad is the former founder and CEO of a company backed by Founders Fund and Sequoia. His previous clients include companies like: Salesforce (6x business units), Dell, Splunk, Twilio, and Government entities like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He was selected “Best of Year” by Apple for two podcasts he hosted. He has spoken at places like the Defense Foreign Language Institute, Coast Guard Academy, Salesforce World Tour, and the Spartan Up Podcast. He's a U.S. Army veteran with deployments to Iraq, Egypt, and has provided security for the 56th Presidential Inauguration. He's the author of three books. His upcoming book is on the Texas Miracle and the economic destiny of Texas. He founded the National Capital League as a studios and labs to build media and technology products. *Podcast intro music is from the song "The Queens Jig" by "Musicke & Mirth" from their album "Music for Two Lyra Viols": http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

Last year, after pressure from activist investors, Jeff Lawson stepped down from his perch as CEO from Twilio, the cloud communications company he co-founded. But he didn't spend any time twiddling his thumbs — that same spring, he bought the satirical news organization The Onion, and by the end of the year, they'd tried to buy Alex Jones' Infowars at a bankruptcy auction.  Jeff also stayed busy on the political front, continuing his work on DemocracyFirst, a political action committee he co-founded, in 2022, to support candidates committed to democracy.  So there was plenty to chew on when Kara interviewed Jeff last week at Democracy's Information Dilemma, a symposium hosted by the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. They discuss the tech founder mindset; how Jeff is remaking The Onion; why political satire is more necessary than ever; why DEI — which Jeff championed as a CEO — can sometimes do more harm than good; and how to fight for democracy during Trump 2.0. Questions? Comments? Email us at on@voxmedia.com or find us on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ile sprzedaży przecieka ci przez palce?Ile sprzedaży przecieka ci przez palce? Ten mój tekst pojawił się najpierw w Gazecie Ubezpieczeniowej, w cyklu 'Kowalik radzi'.Baza klientów ubezpieczeniowych pod kontroląZgłosiła się do mnie prężnie działająca właścicielka multiagencji. Ta przedsiębiorcza kobieta odrobiła już zadania domowe. Ma określone grupy docelowe, do których skutecznie dociera ze swoimi produktami ubezpieczeniowymi.Ona wie, z jakimi klientami chce pracować, ma powtarzalne wielokrotnie sukcesy sprzedażowe właśnie z tymi osobami. Wie też, jakie ubezpieczenia oferować, aby sprostać ich potrzebom. Ponadto wie, jakie produkty komplementarne proponować, aby zwiększać wartość klienta, ale też aby pełnić ważniejszą rolę w jego życiu – rolę doradcy.Jednak ta multiagentka zgłosiła mi swój duży problem. Spędza on jej sen z powiek. – Marcin, na pewno tracę dużo sprzedaży przez te kontakty, do których się w ogóle nie odezwałam albo o nich zapomniałam…Intencje dobre, więc skąd te nieszczelności?Zwróćmy uwagę, że bohaterka naszej opowieści to bardzo świadoma osoba. Ona już wie, że na pewno traci zarówno dużo sprzedaży, jak i nowych kontaktów przez sam fakt, że nie trzyma porządku w swoich bazach klientów. Podejrzewam, że większość agentów czy multiagentów ubezpieczeniowych pracujących z papierowym kalendarzem czy Excelem nie wie, ile sprzedaży przecieka im przez palce.Nawet jeżeli to klient wypełni formularz kontaktowy (powstaje lead), to nie zawsze oddzwaniamy w dogodnej dla klienta porze!Niech kamieniem rzuci pierwszy ten, komu nie zdarzyło się obiecać klientowi, że do niego oddzwoni, i nie oddzwonił zgodnie z obietnicą.Ktoś powinien też pilnować, żebyśmy robili kolejne follow-upy.Olbrzymi potencjał leży w dosprzedaży odpowiednich produktów, do odpowiednich klientów.To są wszystko dziury w procesach. Przez te dziury przecieka sprzedaż.Jak temu zaradzić? Stworzyć procesy i automatyzacje, które uszczelniają powyższe dziury.Co buduję dla zaprzyjaźnionej multiagentki?Na bazie moich wieloletnich doświadczeń w pozyskiwaniu leadów ubezpieczeniowych i optymalizacji procesów sprzedażowych tworzę automatyzacje, które mają za zadanie uprościć pracę agenta.Zaczynam z prostymi podstawami. Biorę system CRM Berg System, łączę go z kombajnem do automatyzacji – Zapierem, z systemami do wysyłki e-maili – Mailchimp i do wysyłki SMS-ów – Twilio. Dzięki temu:każdy potencjalny klient z konkretnymi potrzebami ubezpieczeniowymi ląduje w odpowiednim miejscu w CRM-ie,nie ma ani jednego klienta, o którym zapomnieliśmy, którego danych nie zapisaliśmy czy do którego nie oddzwoniliśmy,każdy z tych leadów od razu staje się szansą sprzedażową, a agentka wie, co dalej z tym leadem zrobić (analiza potrzeb, oferta, umowa itd.),właścicielka multiagencji może też nadzorować pracę pracowników oraz każdy z leadów na każdym z etapów,od razu wyliczają się prowizje dla handlowców,klienci są automatycznie informowani o potrzebach wznowienia polisy,CRM jest spięty ze skrzynką e-mail multiagentki,możemy ocenić skuteczność każdego z agentów, na każdym etapie procesu sprzedaży.Automatyzacje w ubezpieczeniachTeraz testujemy te automatyzacje i wdrożenie tego systemu CRM w multiagencji na tym dość zaawansowanym poziomie.W kolejnych krokach zepniemy system CRM z kontem na Instagramie poprzez Manychat, tak aby każdy klient komentujący konkretny post

What does it really take to make go-to-market teams more efficient? Our guest on this episode, Jen Igartua, works on answering this question every day. Jen is the CEO of Go Nimbly, a 60-person RevOps agency for Mid-Market & Enterprise SaaS companies. With an amazing roster of clients that includes Zendesk, Twilio, Snowflake, Intercom, and others, she and her team help companies solve what's getting in the way of growth.When you spend your days advising companies on how to operate more effectively, it's easy to think you've seen it all. But not Jen. She's a relentless learner. In our conversation, we demystify what GTM efficiency actually looks like behind the scenes, how her team is implementing AI in practical ways for clients, and why, despite all of Go Nimbly's success, she doesn't really focus on innovating internally within their business.Be sure to check out Go Nimbly's first conference, RevFest, on June 10 in Brooklyn: https://revfest.gonimbly.com/Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

In this freeform episode, Logan sits down with Zach Weinberg (Co-Founder and CEO of Curie.Bio) to break down two of the biggest storylines in tech: tariffs and AI.They banter through the core arguments for and against tariffs, including national security, domestic employment, and negotiation power. Plus, they revisit what's happened in past trade wars and share predictions on the real economic consequences this time around.Logan and Zach also discuss OpenAI's $40B raise and the broader race for AI dominance—can OpenAI maintain its lead against tech giants like Google and Apple? They debate the limits of product defensibility, the power of platform defaults, and the strategic moves OpenAI might need to make to stay ahead.Topics include:The arguments for and against tariffsWhat happened during past U.S. tariff cycles—and how this one comparesWhether OpenAI can maintain its edge in a world of native AI platformsA possible playbook for OpenAI to build user lock-in beyond utilityWhat this era of AI competition means for the U.S.—and what could derail ithttps://fdra.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Trade-War-Lessons-from-the-Past-2025.pdf?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosmacro&stream=business00:00 Intro01:35 Liberation Day and Global Trade02:13 Freeform Discussion on Various Topics02:44 Podcasting and VC Life03:32 Debating Tariffs and National Security11:26 Arguments Against Tariffs22:19 Historical Context of Tariffs26:58 Economic Predictions and Stagflation33:39 The Forgotten Lessons of Recessions36:02 The Fixed vs. Growth Mindset in Economics37:17 The Democratic Party's Shift on Economic Policies42:33 The Rise of Populism and Its Impact50:28 OpenAI's Explosive Growth and Challenges54:28 The Competitive Landscape of AI58:33 The Future of AI and Consumer Behavior01:07:20 The Role of Social Networking in AI's Future01:10:43 Wildcard: The Role of XAI and GrokExecutive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin HrabovskyCheck out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: / @redpointai

"Innovation isn't about shiny campaigns. It starts with people, process, and purpose." Joining us for a second time on the podcast is Nicholas Kontopoulos, VP of Marketing APJ at Twilio. We explored what real innovation looks like, how to align marketing and sales in global teams, and how Nicholas uses AI.

Andrew Cleland, Chief Investment Officer at Techstars, shares how the world's leading accelerator invests in early-stage startups. He breaks down what makes a great founder, how Techstars selects startups from tens of thousands of applicants, and why a strong technical differentiator is crucial. Andrew reveals the most common reasons startups get rejected and how Techstars mentors founders to avoid early mistakes. He also talks about the biggest themes shaping the future of venture capital.In this episode, you'll learn:[03:00] How Andrew's background in consulting, startups, and venture capital led him to Techstars [07:34] How Techstars selects startups from thousands of applications—what matters most[14:01] The #1 mistake founders make when applying to Techstars, and how to avoid[20:50] Why founders need to build investor relationships early when thinking about fundraising[26:04] Why the VC industry needs more transparency—and how that benefits foundersThe non-profit organization Andrew is passionate about: Magic BusAbout Andrew ClelandAndrew Cleland is the Chief Investment Officer at Techstars, where he oversees investment strategy, fundraising, and portfolio growth across Techstars' global network of accelerators. With over two decades in venture capital and early-stage investing, he previously led investments at Comcast Ventures and Time Warner Investments. An INSEAD MBA graduate, Andrew has backed dozens of high-growth startups and is focused on empowering the next generation of global founders.About TechstarsTechstars is one of the world's leading startup accelerators, backing thousands of early-stage companies across 50+ accelerator programs worldwide. Since 2006, Techstars has helped launch 20+ unicorns, including SendGrid, DigitalOcean, Uber, Twilio, DataRobot and Outreach. The program provides mentorship, funding, and global networks to help startups scale fast.Subscribe to our podcast and stay tuned for our next episode.

Oracle, Check Point, Twilio, Royal Mail, NYU and more are all in the hot seat this week!

Analysts Don Kellogg and Roger Entner are joined by Hermann Frank, CEO of Gigs, todiscuss the company's facilitation of MVNO creation for tech companies.00:24 Gigs platform overview 02:01 How Gigs actually works 04:24 Success stories 06:12 Smoothing the process 06:58 U.S. operating profile 08:04 What MVNO size is best? 09:07 Specialty MVNO cases 09:29 Gigs named as one of the World's Most Innovative Companies 10:05 Episode wrap-upTags:telecom, telecommunications, wireless, prepaid, postpaid, cellular phone, DonKellogg, Roger Entner, Hermann Frank, Gigs, MVNO, MVNE, carrier, tech,product-market fit, Nubank, Twilio, customers, Fast Company

Today we're thrilled to feature Ash Panjwani, the Head of Talent Development at Procore. Ash brings her wealth of experience from companies like Twilio and VMware to share;Her transformative approach to leadership developmentHer unique Define, Drive, and Develop frameworkHow the framework aligns leadership expectations to build ecosystems that nurture leaders on a large scaleWhether you're a talent development pro, a leader, or someone keen on organizational growth, this episode is loaded with actionable insights. Don't miss out on learning how Ash and her team are revolutionizing talent and leadership development. Tune in and elevate your understanding and capabilities within your organization!Ash Panjwani's journey began with a clear vision at an unusually young age. At just 16, while immersed in an AP Psychology course, Ash discovered a fascination with interpersonal dynamics and business operations. Growing up in a family with a small business owner father and a marketing executive mother, Ash was constantly surrounded by discussions about people, management, and workplace interactions. These daily conversations piqued Ash's interest in how these elements influenced business environments, sparking a lifelong passion for understanding the human aspect of business, even before fully grasping what the business world entailed.Connect with Andy Storch here:WebsiteLinkedInJoin us in the Talent Development Think Tank Community!Connect with Ash Panjwani here:LinkedIn

In this episode, Zachary Hanif, VP of AI, ML, and Data at Twilio, joins Amir to talk about the engine behind B2B AI innovation. From selecting the right tools to navigating the shift from POCs to production, Zachary offers an insider's look at how enterprises can thoughtfully and effectively integrate AI.We unpack:The danger of "boiling the ocean" with AIWhy chatbots aren't always the right starting pointWhat makes an AI POC actually valuableAnd why UX in the age of AI needs systems thinking

Carson Group's Ryan Detrick and Evans May Wealth's Brooke May break down the latest market trends and today's big rally. Morgan Stanley Global Chief Economist Seth Carpenter weighs in on the economy and impact of tariffs talk. Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler discusses AI's impact on business—and how the company is using AI internally to drive efficiency. Alan Ratner, Managing Director at Zelman & Associates, analyzes KB Home's earnings. Plus, former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger gives his first interview since being ousted from the helm of the chipmaker and an inside look at how China is courting US CEOs (again) with our Eunice Yoon.

Hinter Donald Trumps erratischem Vorgehen und Zollpolitik soll viel Größeres stecken. Er möchte so die US-Währung abwerten. Robert und Rüdiger analysieren, ob an dem "Mar-a-Lago-Accord" etwas dran sein könnte.Erwähnte Titel: VW, Strabag, Steyr Motors, Twilio, TeslaAlle Folgen finden Sie auch auf KURIER.at und kronehit.at.Weitere Podcasts finden Sie unter KURIER.at/podcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Some of the most successful technology companies—like AWS, Stripe, Twilio, and GitHub—have built platforms that developers don't just use but genuinely love. So, what sets these platforms apart from those that developers avoid? In this episode, we break down three key trends that make a platform indispensable: deep customer empathy, an iterative approach to product management, and a culture of empowerment.  Through real-world case studies, including stories from Integral's work with automotive and commercial vehicle clients, as well as insights from industry leaders like Stripe, GitHub, and Netflix, we explore what it takes to create platforms that drive innovation and efficiency. From GitHub's early days embedding in developer communities to Stripe's hands-on support of its first users, and Netflix's culture of autonomy and accountability, we uncover the strategies behind their success.  Whether you're building an internal platform for your company or a developer-focused product for the market, these lessons can help you increase adoption, reduce friction, and build something that developers truly love. Inside the episode... Why platforms like Stripe, GitHub, and AWS succeed while others struggle The three trends that define highly adopted developer platforms A case study from Integral: building a flexible payments platform for an automotive company How GitHub revolutionized version control by embedding in developer communities Stripe's hands-on early approach to supporting developers—and why it worked The role of iterative product management in successful platform adoption Netflix's "Freedom and Responsibility" principle and how it drives internal innovation Practical tips for increasing platform adoption in your own organization Mentioned in this episode Netflix Culture Deck: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture Unlock the full potential of your product team with Integral's player coaches, experts in lean, human-centered design. Visit integral.io/convergence for a free Product Success Lab workshop to gain clarity and confidence in tackling any product design or engineering challenge. Subscribe to the Convergence podcast wherever you get podcasts including video episodes to get updated on the other crucial conversations that we'll post on YouTube at youtube.com/@convergencefmpodcast Learn something? Give us a 5 star review and like the podcast on YouTube. It's how we grow.   Follow the Pod Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/convergence-podcast/ X: https://twitter.com/podconvergence Instagram: @podconvergence  

As tariff drama continues to heat up, Ryan Petersen, CEO of Flexport (one of the hottest freight forwarders in the world) came on the show to unpack the impact. Ryan also dives deep into the hidden world of US shipping, opportunities for AI automation in logistics, reflections on building Flexport, and some supply chain conspiracy theories.(00:00) Intro(01:16) Flexport's Mission and Operations(02:28) Impact of Tariffs on Businesses(05:15) Navigating New Duties and Regulations(09:19) Flexport's Strategic Response(14:39) Challenges in U.S. Shipping Policies(28:21) Union Influence on Port Automation(40:35) National Security and Trade Negotiations(41:06) Tariffs and Business Planning Challenges(42:16) Investment Opportunities in Ports(44:02) Port Automation and AI Integration(45:09) Flexport's Big Tech Launch(47:02) AI's Role in Supply Chain Management(53:14) Digitizing Freight Contracts(58:18) Lessons from Flexport's Growth(01:09:13) Conspiracy Theories in Shipping Executive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA

For Founders and Funders and those supporting the startup ecosystem, this episode was a kool convo around all things fundraising, founder journey, cap tables, dilution and more. For the chat with Peter of Carta, I am joined by Startup Guru Bobby Napiltonia, the Managing Partner @TheGTMFirm and former head of the AppExchange at @Salesforce and @Twilio's first CRO.  See https://www.thegtmfirm.com/ Subscribe and Share!

Jordan Burton is an executive assessor and interview trainer, working with top VC/PE investors and high-growth startups to hire the best of the best. He has trained over 3,000 executives and investors on hiring and interviewing skills, working with companies like Sequoia Capital, TH Lee, Insight Partners, Twilio, and Scale AI, and over 50 venture-backed startups. He was formerly a Partner at leadership advisory firm ghSMART, a consultant at Bain & Company, and he holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.Mentioned on the ShowConnect with Jordan Burton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanwburtonLearn more about Talgo Team Building and Training: https://www.talgo.io/Listen to futurist Alexandra Levit on People Business: https://peoplebusinesspodcast.com/alexandralevit/________________________Connect with O'Brien McMahon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/obrienmcmahon/Learn more about O'Brien: https://obrienmcmahon.com/Timestamps(1:44) - Welcoming Jordon(2:17) - How does one become an expert in interviewing?(3:27) - How should you structure different types of interviews?(5:03) - What makes a good candidate? (10:53) - Are there any counterintuitive aspects of the interview process?(16:05) - How and What questions vs. Why questions (24:34) - When it comes to hard skills, how do we create good problem-solving interviews?(27:24) - Is there a similar way to test soft skills?(38:50) - The importance of motivation and will. (32:03) - How do we assess the actual skills required in real-time?(35:14) - What are your thoughts on the statement  "hire for attitude, train for skills"?(42:12) - Tips for candidates and interview teams to get organized and prepare(45:13) - How do we decide the best questions to be asked?(45:07) - How does an individual prepare for an interview?(46:19) - How do you analyze an interview?(49:09) - How do we develop our gut instincts? (52:32) - What is disciplined decision-making? (55:02) - Track, with honesty, which decisions worked out.(58:46) - Can you share a crazy interview story?

Twilio is a customer-engagement platform that combines cloud-based communications tools with contextual customer data, analytics and AI that are used by brands like Nike, Dominos and Toyota. The company is expanding beyond its historical focus on cloud-based communications platform-as-a-service software to allow its clients to more narrowly target their customer communications and increase the ROI on their marketing investment. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Khozema Shipchandler, CEO of Twilio, speaks with Bloomberg Intelligence tech analyst John Butler about recent organizational changes intended to accelerate the company's evolution, expand its addressable market and drive higher revenue growth as it broadens its offerings.

Today's episode is with Paul Klein, founder of Browserbase. We talked about building browser infrastructure for AI agents, the future of agent authentication, and their open source framework Stagehand.* [00:00:00] Introductions* [00:04:46] AI-specific challenges in browser infrastructure* [00:07:05] Multimodality in AI-Powered Browsing* [00:12:26] Running headless browsers at scale* [00:18:46] Geolocation when proxying* [00:21:25] CAPTCHAs and Agent Auth* [00:28:21] Building “User take over” functionality* [00:33:43] Stagehand: AI web browsing framework* [00:38:58] OpenAI's Operator and computer use agents* [00:44:44] Surprising use cases of Browserbase* [00:47:18] Future of browser automation and market competition* [00:53:11] Being a solo founderTranscriptAlessio [00:00:04]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we are very blessed to have our friends, Paul Klein, for the fourth, the fourth, CEO of Browserbase. Welcome.Paul [00:00:21]: Thanks guys. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I've been lucky to know both of you for like a couple of years now, I think. So it's just like we're hanging out, you know, with three ginormous microphones in front of our face. It's totally normal hangout.swyx [00:00:34]: Yeah. We've actually mentioned you on the podcast, I think, more often than any other Solaris tenant. Just because like you're one of the, you know, best performing, I think, LLM tool companies that have started up in the last couple of years.Paul [00:00:50]: Yeah, I mean, it's been a whirlwind of a year, like Browserbase is actually pretty close to our first birthday. So we are one years old. And going from, you know, starting a company as a solo founder to... To, you know, having a team of 20 people, you know, a series A, but also being able to support hundreds of AI companies that are building AI applications that go out and automate the web. It's just been like, really cool. It's been happening a little too fast. I think like collectively as an AI industry, let's just take a week off together. I took my first vacation actually two weeks ago, and Operator came out on the first day, and then a week later, DeepSeat came out. And I'm like on vacation trying to chill. I'm like, we got to build with this stuff, right? So it's been a breakneck year. But I'm super happy to be here and like talk more about all the stuff we're seeing. And I'd love to hear kind of what you guys are excited about too, and share with it, you know?swyx [00:01:39]: Where to start? So people, you've done a bunch of podcasts. I think I strongly recommend Jack Bridger's Scaling DevTools, as well as Turner Novak's The Peel. And, you know, I'm sure there's others. So you covered your Twilio story in the past, talked about StreamClub, you got acquired to Mux, and then you left to start Browserbase. So maybe we just start with what is Browserbase? Yeah.Paul [00:02:02]: Browserbase is the web browser for your AI. We're building headless browser infrastructure, which are browsers that run in a server environment that's accessible to developers via APIs and SDKs. It's really hard to run a web browser in the cloud. You guys are probably running Chrome on your computers, and that's using a lot of resources, right? So if you want to run a web browser or thousands of web browsers, you can't just spin up a bunch of lambdas. You actually need to use a secure containerized environment. You have to scale it up and down. It's a stateful system. And that infrastructure is, like, super painful. And I know that firsthand, because at my last company, StreamClub, I was CTO, and I was building our own internal headless browser infrastructure. That's actually why we sold the company, is because Mux really wanted to buy our headless browser infrastructure that we'd built. And it's just a super hard problem. And I actually told my co-founders, I would never start another company unless it was a browser infrastructure company. And it turns out that's really necessary in the age of AI, when AI can actually go out and interact with websites, click on buttons, fill in forms. You need AI to do all of that work in an actual browser running somewhere on a server. And BrowserBase powers that.swyx [00:03:08]: While you're talking about it, it occurred to me, not that you're going to be acquired or anything, but it occurred to me that it would be really funny if you became the Nikita Beer of headless browser companies. You just have one trick, and you make browser companies that get acquired.Paul [00:03:23]: I truly do only have one trick. I'm screwed if it's not for headless browsers. I'm not a Go programmer. You know, I'm in AI grant. You know, browsers is an AI grant. But we were the only company in that AI grant batch that used zero dollars on AI spend. You know, we're purely an infrastructure company. So as much as people want to ask me about reinforcement learning, I might not be the best guy to talk about that. But if you want to ask about headless browser infrastructure at scale, I can talk your ear off. So that's really my area of expertise. And it's a pretty niche thing. Like, nobody has done what we're doing at scale before. So we're happy to be the experts.swyx [00:03:59]: You do have an AI thing, stagehand. We can talk about the sort of core of browser-based first, and then maybe stagehand. Yeah, stagehand is kind of the web browsing framework. Yeah.What is Browserbase? Headless Browser Infrastructure ExplainedAlessio [00:04:10]: Yeah. Yeah. And maybe how you got to browser-based and what problems you saw. So one of the first things I worked on as a software engineer was integration testing. Sauce Labs was kind of like the main thing at the time. And then we had Selenium, we had Playbrite, we had all these different browser things. But it's always been super hard to do. So obviously you've worked on this before. When you started browser-based, what were the challenges? What were the AI-specific challenges that you saw versus, there's kind of like all the usual running browser at scale in the cloud, which has been a problem for years. What are like the AI unique things that you saw that like traditional purchase just didn't cover? Yeah.AI-specific challenges in browser infrastructurePaul [00:04:46]: First and foremost, I think back to like the first thing I did as a developer, like as a kid when I was writing code, I wanted to write code that did stuff for me. You know, I wanted to write code to automate my life. And I do that probably by using curl or beautiful soup to fetch data from a web browser. And I think I still do that now that I'm in the cloud. And the other thing that I think is a huge challenge for me is that you can't just create a web site and parse that data. And we all know that now like, you know, taking HTML and plugging that into an LLM, you can extract insights, you can summarize. So it was very clear that now like dynamic web scraping became very possible with the rise of large language models or a lot easier. And that was like a clear reason why there's been more usage of headless browsers, which are necessary because a lot of modern websites don't expose all of their page content via a simple HTTP request. You know, they actually do require you to run this type of code for a specific time. JavaScript on the page to hydrate this. Airbnb is a great example. You go to airbnb.com. A lot of that content on the page isn't there until after they run the initial hydration. So you can't just scrape it with a curl. You need to have some JavaScript run. And a browser is that JavaScript engine that's going to actually run all those requests on the page. So web data retrieval was definitely one driver of starting BrowserBase and the rise of being able to summarize that within LLM. Also, I was familiar with if I wanted to automate a website, I could write one script and that would work for one website. It was very static and deterministic. But the web is non-deterministic. The web is always changing. And until we had LLMs, there was no way to write scripts that you could write once that would run on any website. That would change with the structure of the website. Click the login button. It could mean something different on many different websites. And LLMs allow us to generate code on the fly to actually control that. So I think that rise of writing the generic automation scripts that can work on many different websites, to me, made it clear that browsers are going to be a lot more useful because now you can automate a lot more things without writing. If you wanted to write a script to book a demo call on 100 websites, previously, you had to write 100 scripts. Now you write one script that uses LLMs to generate that script. That's why we built our web browsing framework, StageHand, which does a lot of that work for you. But those two things, web data collection and then enhanced automation of many different websites, it just felt like big drivers for more browser infrastructure that would be required to power these kinds of features.Alessio [00:07:05]: And was multimodality also a big thing?Paul [00:07:08]: Now you can use the LLMs to look, even though the text in the dome might not be as friendly. Maybe my hot take is I was always kind of like, I didn't think vision would be as big of a driver. For UI automation, I felt like, you know, HTML is structured text and large language models are good with structured text. But it's clear that these computer use models are often vision driven, and they've been really pushing things forward. So definitely being multimodal, like rendering the page is required to take a screenshot to give that to a computer use model to take actions on a website. And it's just another win for browser. But I'll be honest, that wasn't what I was thinking early on. I didn't even think that we'd get here so fast with multimodality. I think we're going to have to get back to multimodal and vision models.swyx [00:07:50]: This is one of those things where I forgot to mention in my intro that I'm an investor in Browserbase. And I remember that when you pitched to me, like a lot of the stuff that we have today, we like wasn't on the original conversation. But I did have my original thesis was something that we've talked about on the podcast before, which is take the GPT store, the custom GPT store, all the every single checkbox and plugin is effectively a startup. And this was the browser one. I think the main hesitation, I think I actually took a while to get back to you. The main hesitation was that there were others. Like you're not the first hit list browser startup. It's not even your first hit list browser startup. There's always a question of like, will you be the category winner in a place where there's a bunch of incumbents, to be honest, that are bigger than you? They're just not targeted at the AI space. They don't have the backing of Nat Friedman. And there's a bunch of like, you're here in Silicon Valley. They're not. I don't know.Paul [00:08:47]: I don't know if that's, that was it, but like, there was a, yeah, I mean, like, I think I tried all the other ones and I was like, really disappointed. Like my background is from working at great developer tools, companies, and nothing had like the Vercel like experience. Um, like our biggest competitor actually is partly owned by private equity and they just jacked up their prices quite a bit. And the dashboard hasn't changed in five years. And I actually used them at my last company and tried them and I was like, oh man, like there really just needs to be something that's like the experience of these great infrastructure companies, like Stripe, like clerk, like Vercel that I use in love, but oriented towards this kind of like more specific category, which is browser infrastructure, which is really technically complex. Like a lot of stuff can go wrong on the internet when you're running a browser. The internet is very vast. There's a lot of different configurations. Like there's still websites that only work with internet explorer out there. How do you handle that when you're running your own browser infrastructure? These are the problems that we have to think about and solve at BrowserBase. And it's, it's certainly a labor of love, but I built this for me, first and foremost, I know it's super cheesy and everyone says that for like their startups, but it really, truly was for me. If you look at like the talks I've done even before BrowserBase, and I'm just like really excited to try and build a category defining infrastructure company. And it's, it's rare to have a new category of infrastructure exists. We're here in the Chroma offices and like, you know, vector databases is a new category of infrastructure. Is it, is it, I mean, we can, we're in their office, so, you know, we can, we can debate that one later. That is one.Multimodality in AI-Powered Browsingswyx [00:10:16]: That's one of the industry debates.Paul [00:10:17]: I guess we go back to the LLMOS talk that Karpathy gave way long ago. And like the browser box was very clearly there and it seemed like the people who were building in this space also agreed that browsers are a core primitive of infrastructure for the LLMOS that's going to exist in the future. And nobody was building something there that I wanted to use. So I had to go build it myself.swyx [00:10:38]: Yeah. I mean, exactly that talk that, that honestly, that diagram, every box is a startup and there's the code box and then there's the. The browser box. I think at some point they will start clashing there. There's always the question of the, are you a point solution or are you the sort of all in one? And I think the point solutions tend to win quickly, but then the only ones have a very tight cohesive experience. Yeah. Let's talk about just the hard problems of browser base you have on your website, which is beautiful. Thank you. Was there an agency that you used for that? Yeah. Herb.paris.Paul [00:11:11]: They're amazing. Herb.paris. Yeah. It's H-E-R-V-E. I highly recommend for developers. Developer tools, founders to work with consumer agencies because they end up building beautiful things and the Parisians know how to build beautiful interfaces. So I got to give prep.swyx [00:11:24]: And chat apps, apparently are, they are very fast. Oh yeah. The Mistral chat. Yeah. Mistral. Yeah.Paul [00:11:31]: Late chat.swyx [00:11:31]: Late chat. And then your videos as well, it was professionally shot, right? The series A video. Yeah.Alessio [00:11:36]: Nico did the videos. He's amazing. Not the initial video that you shot at the new one. First one was Austin.Paul [00:11:41]: Another, another video pretty surprised. But yeah, I mean, like, I think when you think about how you talk about your company. You have to think about the way you present yourself. It's, you know, as a developer, you think you evaluate a company based on like the API reliability and the P 95, but a lot of developers say, is the website good? Is the message clear? Do I like trust this founder? I'm building my whole feature on. So I've tried to nail that as well as like the reliability of the infrastructure. You're right. It's very hard. And there's a lot of kind of foot guns that you run into when running headless browsers at scale. Right.Competing with Existing Headless Browser Solutionsswyx [00:12:10]: So let's pick one. You have eight features here. Seamless integration. Scalability. Fast or speed. Secure. Observable. Stealth. That's interesting. Extensible and developer first. What comes to your mind as like the top two, three hardest ones? Yeah.Running headless browsers at scalePaul [00:12:26]: I think just running headless browsers at scale is like the hardest one. And maybe can I nerd out for a second? Is that okay? I heard this is a technical audience, so I'll talk to the other nerds. Whoa. They were listening. Yeah. They're upset. They're ready. The AGI is angry. Okay. So. So how do you run a browser in the cloud? Let's start with that, right? So let's say you're using a popular browser automation framework like Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium. Maybe you've written a code, some code locally on your computer that opens up Google. It finds the search bar and then types in, you know, search for Latent Space and hits the search button. That script works great locally. You can see the little browser open up. You want to take that to production. You want to run the script in a cloud environment. So when your laptop is closed, your browser is doing something. The browser is doing something. Well, I, we use Amazon. You can see the little browser open up. You know, the first thing I'd reach for is probably like some sort of serverless infrastructure. I would probably try and deploy on a Lambda. But Chrome itself is too big to run on a Lambda. It's over 250 megabytes. So you can't easily start it on a Lambda. So you maybe have to use something like Lambda layers to squeeze it in there. Maybe use a different Chromium build that's lighter. And you get it on the Lambda. Great. It works. But it runs super slowly. It's because Lambdas are very like resource limited. They only run like with one vCPU. You can run one process at a time. Remember, Chromium is super beefy. It's barely running on my MacBook Air. I'm still downloading it from a pre-run. Yeah, from the test earlier, right? I'm joking. But it's big, you know? So like Lambda, it just won't work really well. Maybe it'll work, but you need something faster. Your users want something faster. Okay. Well, let's put it on a beefier instance. Let's get an EC2 server running. Let's throw Chromium on there. Great. Okay. I can, that works well with one user. But what if I want to run like 10 Chromium instances, one for each of my users? Okay. Well, I might need two EC2 instances. Maybe 10. All of a sudden, you have multiple EC2 instances. This sounds like a problem for Kubernetes and Docker, right? Now, all of a sudden, you're using ECS or EKS, the Kubernetes or container solutions by Amazon. You're spending up and down containers, and you're spending a whole engineer's time on kind of maintaining this stateful distributed system. Those are some of the worst systems to run because when it's a stateful distributed system, it means that you are bound by the connections to that thing. You have to keep the browser open while someone is working with it, right? That's just a painful architecture to run. And there's all this other little gotchas with Chromium, like Chromium, which is the open source version of Chrome, by the way. You have to install all these fonts. You want emojis working in your browsers because your vision model is looking for the emoji. You need to make sure you have the emoji fonts. You need to make sure you have all the right extensions configured, like, oh, do you want ad blocking? How do you configure that? How do you actually record all these browser sessions? Like it's a headless browser. You can't look at it. So you need to have some sort of observability. Maybe you're recording videos and storing those somewhere. It all kind of adds up to be this just giant monster piece of your project when all you wanted to do was run a lot of browsers in production for this little script to go to google.com and search. And when I see a complex distributed system, I see an opportunity to build a great infrastructure company. And we really abstract that away with Browserbase where our customers can use these existing frameworks, Playwright, Publisher, Selenium, or our own stagehand and connect to our browsers in a serverless-like way. And control them, and then just disconnect when they're done. And they don't have to think about the complex distributed system behind all of that. They just get a browser running anywhere, anytime. Really easy to connect to.swyx [00:15:55]: I'm sure you have questions. My standard question with anything, so essentially you're a serverless browser company, and there's been other serverless things that I'm familiar with in the past, serverless GPUs, serverless website hosting. That's where I come from with Netlify. One question is just like, you promised to spin up thousands of servers. You promised to spin up thousands of browsers in milliseconds. I feel like there's no real solution that does that yet. And I'm just kind of curious how. The only solution I know, which is to kind of keep a kind of warm pool of servers around, which is expensive, but maybe not so expensive because it's just CPUs. So I'm just like, you know. Yeah.Browsers as a Core Primitive in AI InfrastructurePaul [00:16:36]: You nailed it, right? I mean, how do you offer a serverless-like experience with something that is clearly not serverless, right? And the answer is, you need to be able to run... We run many browsers on single nodes. We use Kubernetes at browser base. So we have many pods that are being scheduled. We have to predictably schedule them up or down. Yes, thousands of browsers in milliseconds is the best case scenario. If you hit us with 10,000 requests, you may hit a slower cold start, right? So we've done a lot of work on predictive scaling and being able to kind of route stuff to different regions where we have multiple regions of browser base where we have different pools available. You can also pick the region you want to go to based on like lower latency, round trip, time latency. It's very important with these types of things. There's a lot of requests going over the wire. So for us, like having a VM like Firecracker powering everything under the hood allows us to be super nimble and spin things up or down really quickly with strong multi-tenancy. But in the end, this is like the complex infrastructural challenges that we have to kind of deal with at browser base. And we have a lot more stuff on our roadmap to allow customers to have more levers to pull to exchange, do you want really fast browser startup times or do you want really low costs? And if you're willing to be more flexible on that, we may be able to kind of like work better for your use cases.swyx [00:17:44]: Since you used Firecracker, shouldn't Fargate do that for you or did you have to go lower level than that? We had to go lower level than that.Paul [00:17:51]: I find this a lot with Fargate customers, which is alarming for Fargate. We used to be a giant Fargate customer. Actually, the first version of browser base was ECS and Fargate. And unfortunately, it's a great product. I think we were actually the largest Fargate customer in our region for a little while. No, what? Yeah, seriously. And unfortunately, it's a great product, but I think if you're an infrastructure company, you actually have to have a deeper level of control over these primitives. I think it's the same thing is true with databases. We've used other database providers and I think-swyx [00:18:21]: Yeah, serverless Postgres.Paul [00:18:23]: Shocker. When you're an infrastructure company, you're on the hook if any provider has an outage. And I can't tell my customers like, hey, we went down because so-and-so went down. That's not acceptable. So for us, we've really moved to bringing things internally. It's kind of opposite of what we preach. We tell our customers, don't build this in-house, but then we're like, we build a lot of stuff in-house. But I think it just really depends on what is in the critical path. We try and have deep ownership of that.Alessio [00:18:46]: On the distributed location side, how does that work for the web where you might get sort of different content in different locations, but the customer is expecting, you know, if you're in the US, I'm expecting the US version. But if you're spinning up my browser in France, I might get the French version. Yeah.Paul [00:19:02]: Yeah. That's a good question. Well, generally, like on the localization, there is a thing called locale in the browser. You can set like what your locale is. If you're like in the ENUS browser or not, but some things do IP, IP based routing. And in that case, you may want to have a proxy. Like let's say you're running something in the, in Europe, but you want to make sure you're showing up from the US. You may want to use one of our proxy features so you can turn on proxies to say like, make sure these connections always come from the United States, which is necessary too, because when you're browsing the web, you're coming from like a, you know, data center IP, and that can make things a lot harder to browse web. So we do have kind of like this proxy super network. Yeah. We have a proxy for you based on where you're going, so you can reliably automate the web. But if you get scheduled in Europe, that doesn't happen as much. We try and schedule you as close to, you know, your origin that you're trying to go to. But generally you have control over the regions you can put your browsers in. So you can specify West one or East one or Europe. We only have one region of Europe right now, actually. Yeah.Alessio [00:19:55]: What's harder, the browser or the proxy? I feel like to me, it feels like actually proxying reliably at scale. It's much harder than spending up browsers at scale. I'm curious. It's all hard.Paul [00:20:06]: It's layers of hard, right? Yeah. I think it's different levels of hard. I think the thing with the proxy infrastructure is that we work with many different web proxy providers and some are better than others. Some have good days, some have bad days. And our customers who've built browser infrastructure on their own, they have to go and deal with sketchy actors. Like first they figure out their own browser infrastructure and then they got to go buy a proxy. And it's like you can pay in Bitcoin and it just kind of feels a little sus, right? It's like you're buying drugs when you're trying to get a proxy online. We have like deep relationships with these counterparties. We're able to audit them and say, is this proxy being sourced ethically? Like it's not running on someone's TV somewhere. Is it free range? Yeah. Free range organic proxies, right? Right. We do a level of diligence. We're SOC 2. So we have to understand what is going on here. But then we're able to make sure that like we route around proxy providers not working. There's proxy providers who will just, the proxy will stop working all of a sudden. And then if you don't have redundant proxying on your own browsers, that's hard down for you or you may get some serious impacts there. With us, like we intelligently know, hey, this proxy is not working. Let's go to this one. And you can kind of build a network of multiple providers to really guarantee the best uptime for our customers. Yeah. So you don't own any proxies? We don't own any proxies. You're right. The team has been saying who wants to like take home a little proxy server, but not yet. We're not there yet. You know?swyx [00:21:25]: It's a very mature market. I don't think you should build that yourself. Like you should just be a super customer of them. Yeah. Scraping, I think, is the main use case for that. I guess. Well, that leads us into CAPTCHAs and also off, but let's talk about CAPTCHAs. You had a little spiel that you wanted to talk about CAPTCHA stuff.Challenges of Scaling Browser InfrastructurePaul [00:21:43]: Oh, yeah. I was just, I think a lot of people ask, if you're thinking about proxies, you're thinking about CAPTCHAs too. I think it's the same thing. You can go buy CAPTCHA solvers online, but it's the same buying experience. It's some sketchy website, you have to integrate it. It's not fun to buy these things and you can't really trust that the docs are bad. What Browserbase does is we integrate a bunch of different CAPTCHAs. We do some stuff in-house, but generally we just integrate with a bunch of known vendors and continually monitor and maintain these things and say, is this working or not? Can we route around it or not? These are CAPTCHA solvers. CAPTCHA solvers, yeah. Not CAPTCHA providers, CAPTCHA solvers. Yeah, sorry. CAPTCHA solvers. We really try and make sure all of that works for you. I think as a dev, if I'm buying infrastructure, I want it all to work all the time and it's important for us to provide that experience by making sure everything does work and monitoring it on our own. Yeah. Right now, the world of CAPTCHAs is tricky. I think AI agents in particular are very much ahead of the internet infrastructure. CAPTCHAs are designed to block all types of bots, but there are now good bots and bad bots. I think in the future, CAPTCHAs will be able to identify who a good bot is, hopefully via some sort of KYC. For us, we've been very lucky. We have very little to no known abuse of Browserbase because we really look into who we work with. And for certain types of CAPTCHA solving, we only allow them on certain types of plans because we want to make sure that we can know what people are doing, what their use cases are. And that's really allowed us to try and be an arbiter of good bots, which is our long term goal. I want to build great relationships with people like Cloudflare so we can agree, hey, here are these acceptable bots. We'll identify them for you and make sure we flag when they come to your website. This is a good bot, you know?Alessio [00:23:23]: I see. And Cloudflare said they want to do more of this. So they're going to set by default, if they think you're an AI bot, they're going to reject. I'm curious if you think this is something that is going to be at the browser level or I mean, the DNS level with Cloudflare seems more where it should belong. But I'm curious how you think about it.Paul [00:23:40]: I think the web's going to change. You know, I think that the Internet as we have it right now is going to change. And we all need to just accept that the cat is out of the bag. And instead of kind of like wishing the Internet was like it was in the 2000s, we can have free content line that wouldn't be scraped. It's just it's not going to happen. And instead, we should think about like, one, how can we change? How can we change the models of, you know, information being published online so people can adequately commercialize it? But two, how do we rebuild applications that expect that AI agents are going to log in on their behalf? Those are the things that are going to allow us to kind of like identify good and bad bots. And I think the team at Clerk has been doing a really good job with this on the authentication side. I actually think that auth is the biggest thing that will prevent agents from accessing stuff, not captchas. And I think there will be agent auth in the future. I don't know if it's going to happen from an individual company, but actually authentication providers that have a, you know, hidden login as agent feature, which will then you put in your email, you'll get a push notification, say like, hey, your browser-based agent wants to log into your Airbnb. You can approve that and then the agent can proceed. That really circumvents the need for captchas or logging in as you and sharing your password. I think agent auth is going to be one way we identify good bots going forward. And I think a lot of this captcha solving stuff is really short-term problems as the internet kind of reorients itself around how it's going to work with agents browsing the web, just like people do. Yeah.Managing Distributed Browser Locations and Proxiesswyx [00:24:59]: Stitch recently was on Hacker News for talking about agent experience, AX, which is a thing that Netlify is also trying to clone and coin and talk about. And we've talked about this on our previous episodes before in a sense that I actually think that's like maybe the only part of the tech stack that needs to be kind of reinvented for agents. Everything else can stay the same, CLIs, APIs, whatever. But auth, yeah, we need agent auth. And it's mostly like short-lived, like it should not, it should be a distinct, identity from the human, but paired. I almost think like in the same way that every social network should have your main profile and then your alt accounts or your Finsta, it's almost like, you know, every, every human token should be paired with the agent token and the agent token can go and do stuff on behalf of the human token, but not be presumed to be the human. Yeah.Paul [00:25:48]: It's like, it's, it's actually very similar to OAuth is what I'm thinking. And, you know, Thread from Stitch is an investor, Colin from Clerk, Octaventures, all investors in browser-based because like, I hope they solve this because they'll make browser-based submission more possible. So we don't have to overcome all these hurdles, but I think it will be an OAuth-like flow where an agent will ask to log in as you, you'll approve the scopes. Like it can book an apartment on Airbnb, but it can't like message anybody. And then, you know, the agent will have some sort of like role-based access control within an application. Yeah. I'm excited for that.swyx [00:26:16]: The tricky part is just, there's one, one layer of delegation here, which is like, you're authoring my user's user or something like that. I don't know if that's tricky or not. Does that make sense? Yeah.Paul [00:26:25]: You know, actually at Twilio, I worked on the login identity and access. Management teams, right? So like I built Twilio's login page.swyx [00:26:31]: You were an intern on that team and then you became the lead in two years? Yeah.Paul [00:26:34]: Yeah. I started as an intern in 2016 and then I was the tech lead of that team. How? That's not normal. I didn't have a life. He's not normal. Look at this guy. I didn't have a girlfriend. I just loved my job. I don't know. I applied to 500 internships for my first job and I got rejected from every single one of them except for Twilio and then eventually Amazon. And they took a shot on me and like, I was getting paid money to write code, which was my dream. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very lucky that like this coding thing worked out because I was going to be doing it regardless. And yeah, I was able to kind of spend a lot of time on a team that was growing at a company that was growing. So it informed a lot of this stuff here. I think these are problems that have been solved with like the SAML protocol with SSO. I think it's a really interesting stuff with like WebAuthn, like these different types of authentication, like schemes that you can use to authenticate people. The tooling is all there. It just needs to be tweaked a little bit to work for agents. And I think the fact that there are companies that are already. Providing authentication as a service really sets it up. Well, the thing that's hard is like reinventing the internet for agents. We don't want to rebuild the internet. That's an impossible task. And I think people often say like, well, we'll have this second layer of APIs built for agents. I'm like, we will for the top use cases, but instead of we can just tweak the internet as is, which is on the authentication side, I think we're going to be the dumb ones going forward. Unfortunately, I think AI is going to be able to do a lot of the tasks that we do online, which means that it will be able to go to websites, click buttons on our behalf and log in on our behalf too. So with this kind of like web agent future happening, I think with some small structural changes, like you said, it feels like it could all slot in really nicely with the existing internet.Handling CAPTCHAs and Agent Authenticationswyx [00:28:08]: There's one more thing, which is the, your live view iframe, which lets you take, take control. Yeah. Obviously very key for operator now, but like, was, is there anything interesting technically there or that the people like, well, people always want this.Paul [00:28:21]: It was really hard to build, you know, like, so, okay. Headless browsers, you don't see them, right. They're running. They're running in a cloud somewhere. You can't like look at them. And I just want to really make, it's a weird name. I wish we came up with a better name for this thing, but you can't see them. Right. But customers don't trust AI agents, right. At least the first pass. So what we do with our live view is that, you know, when you use browser base, you can actually embed a live view of the browser running in the cloud for your customer to see it working. And that's what the first reason is the build trust, like, okay, so I have this script. That's going to go automate a website. I can embed it into my web application via an iframe and my customer can watch. I think. And then we added two way communication. So now not only can you watch the browser kind of being operated by AI, if you want to pause and actually click around type within this iframe that's controlling a browser, that's also possible. And this is all thanks to some of the lower level protocol, which is called the Chrome DevTools protocol. It has a API called start screencast, and you can also send mouse clicks and button clicks to a remote browser. And this is all embeddable within iframes. You have a browser within a browser, yo. And then you simulate the screen, the click on the other side. Exactly. And this is really nice often for, like, let's say, a capture that can't be solved. You saw this with Operator, you know, Operator actually uses a different approach. They use VNC. So, you know, you're able to see, like, you're seeing the whole window here. What we're doing is something a little lower level with the Chrome DevTools protocol. It's just PNGs being streamed over the wire. But the same thing is true, right? Like, hey, I'm running a window. Pause. Can you do something in this window? Human. Okay, great. Resume. Like sometimes 2FA tokens. Like if you get that text message, you might need a person to type that in. Web agents need human-in-the-loop type workflows still. You still need a person to interact with the browser. And building a UI to proxy that is kind of hard. You may as well just show them the whole browser and say, hey, can you finish this up for me? And then let the AI proceed on afterwards. Is there a future where I stream my current desktop to browser base? I don't think so. I think we're very much cloud infrastructure. Yeah. You know, but I think a lot of the stuff we're doing, we do want to, like, build tools. Like, you know, we'll talk about the stage and, you know, web agent framework in a second. But, like, there's a case where a lot of people are going desktop first for, you know, consumer use. And I think cloud is doing a lot of this, where I expect to see, you know, MCPs really oriented around the cloud desktop app for a reason, right? Like, I think a lot of these tools are going to run on your computer because it makes... I think it's breaking out. People are putting it on a server. Oh, really? Okay. Well, sweet. We'll see. We'll see that. I was surprised, though, wasn't I? I think that the browser company, too, with Dia Browser, it runs on your machine. You know, it's going to be...swyx [00:30:50]: What is it?Paul [00:30:51]: So, Dia Browser, as far as I understand... I used to use Arc. Yeah. I haven't used Arc. But I'm a big fan of the browser company. I think they're doing a lot of cool stuff in consumer. As far as I understand, it's a browser where you have a sidebar where you can, like, chat with it and it can control the local browser on your machine. So, if you imagine, like, what a consumer web agent is, which it lives alongside your browser, I think Google Chrome has Project Marina, I think. I almost call it Project Marinara for some reason. I don't know why. It's...swyx [00:31:17]: No, I think it's someone really likes the Waterworld. Oh, I see. The classic Kevin Costner. Yeah.Paul [00:31:22]: Okay. Project Marinara is a similar thing to the Dia Browser, in my mind, as far as I understand it. You have a browser that has an AI interface that will take over your mouse and keyboard and control the browser for you. Great for consumer use cases. But if you're building applications that rely on a browser and it's more part of a greater, like, AI app experience, you probably need something that's more like infrastructure, not a consumer app.swyx [00:31:44]: Just because I have explored a little bit in this area, do people want branching? So, I have the state. Of whatever my browser's in. And then I want, like, 100 clones of this state. Do people do that? Or...Paul [00:31:56]: People don't do it currently. Yeah. But it's definitely something we're thinking about. I think the idea of forking a browser is really cool. Technically, kind of hard. We're starting to see this in code execution, where people are, like, forking some, like, code execution, like, processes or forking some tool calls or branching tool calls. Haven't seen it at the browser level yet. But it makes sense. Like, if an AI agent is, like, using a website and it's not sure what path it wants to take to crawl this website. To find the information it's looking for. It would make sense for it to explore both paths in parallel. And that'd be a very, like... A road not taken. Yeah. And hopefully find the right answer. And then say, okay, this was actually the right one. And memorize that. And go there in the future. On the roadmap. For sure. Don't make my roadmap, please. You know?Alessio [00:32:37]: How do you actually do that? Yeah. How do you fork? I feel like the browser is so stateful for so many things.swyx [00:32:42]: Serialize the state. Restore the state. I don't know.Paul [00:32:44]: So, it's one of the reasons why we haven't done it yet. It's hard. You know? Like, to truly fork, it's actually quite difficult. The naive way is to open the same page in a new tab and then, like, hope that it's at the same thing. But if you have a form halfway filled, you may have to, like, take the whole, you know, container. Pause it. All the memory. Duplicate it. Restart it from there. It could be very slow. So, we haven't found a thing. Like, the easy thing to fork is just, like, copy the page object. You know? But I think there needs to be something a little bit more robust there. Yeah.swyx [00:33:12]: So, MorphLabs has this infinite branch thing. Like, wrote a custom fork of Linux or something that let them save the system state and clone it. MorphLabs, hit me up. I'll be a customer. Yeah. That's the only. I think that's the only way to do it. Yeah. Like, unless Chrome has some special API for you. Yeah.Paul [00:33:29]: There's probably something we'll reverse engineer one day. I don't know. Yeah.Alessio [00:33:32]: Let's talk about StageHand, the AI web browsing framework. You have three core components, Observe, Extract, and Act. Pretty clean landing page. What was the idea behind making a framework? Yeah.Stagehand: AI web browsing frameworkPaul [00:33:43]: So, there's three frameworks that are very popular or already exist, right? Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium. Those are for building hard-coded scripts to control websites. And as soon as I started to play with LLMs plus browsing, I caught myself, you know, code-genning Playwright code to control a website. I would, like, take the DOM. I'd pass it to an LLM. I'd say, can you generate the Playwright code to click the appropriate button here? And it would do that. And I was like, this really should be part of the frameworks themselves. And I became really obsessed with SDKs that take natural language as part of, like, the API input. And that's what StageHand is. StageHand exposes three APIs, and it's a super set of Playwright. So, if you go to a page, you may want to take an action, click on the button, fill in the form, etc. That's what the act command is for. You may want to extract some data. This one takes a natural language, like, extract the winner of the Super Bowl from this page. You can give it a Zod schema, so it returns a structured output. And then maybe you're building an API. You can do an agent loop, and you want to kind of see what actions are possible on this page before taking one. You can do observe. So, you can observe the actions on the page, and it will generate a list of actions. You can guide it, like, give me actions on this page related to buying an item. And you can, like, buy it now, add to cart, view shipping options, and pass that to an LLM, an agent loop, to say, what's the appropriate action given this high-level goal? So, StageHand isn't a web agent. It's a framework for building web agents. And we think that agent loops are actually pretty close to the application layer because every application probably has different goals or different ways it wants to take steps. I don't think I've seen a generic. Maybe you guys are the experts here. I haven't seen, like, a really good AI agent framework here. Everyone kind of has their own special sauce, right? I see a lot of developers building their own agent loops, and they're using tools. And I view StageHand as the browser tool. So, we expose act, extract, observe. Your agent can call these tools. And from that, you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about generating playwright code performantly. You don't have to worry about running it. You can kind of just integrate these three tool calls into your agent loop and reliably automate the web.swyx [00:35:48]: A special shout-out to Anirudh, who I met at your dinner, who I think listens to the pod. Yeah. Hey, Anirudh.Paul [00:35:54]: Anirudh's a man. He's a StageHand guy.swyx [00:35:56]: I mean, the interesting thing about each of these APIs is they're kind of each startup. Like, specifically extract, you know, Firecrawler is extract. There's, like, Expand AI. There's a whole bunch of, like, extract companies. They just focus on extract. I'm curious. Like, I feel like you guys are going to collide at some point. Like, right now, it's friendly. Everyone's in a blue ocean. At some point, it's going to be valuable enough that there's some turf battle here. I don't think you have a dog in a fight. I think you can mock extract to use an external service if they're better at it than you. But it's just an observation that, like, in the same way that I see each option, each checkbox in the side of custom GBTs becoming a startup or each box in the Karpathy chart being a startup. Like, this is also becoming a thing. Yeah.Paul [00:36:41]: I mean, like, so the way StageHand works is that it's MIT-licensed, completely open source. You bring your own API key to your LLM of choice. You could choose your LLM. We don't make any money off of the extract or really. We only really make money if you choose to run it with our browser. You don't have to. You can actually use your own browser, a local browser. You know, StageHand is completely open source for that reason. And, yeah, like, I think if you're building really complex web scraping workflows, I don't know if StageHand is the tool for you. I think it's really more if you're building an AI agent that needs a few general tools or if it's doing a lot of, like, web automation-intensive work. But if you're building a scraping company, StageHand is not your thing. You probably want something that's going to, like, get HTML content, you know, convert that to Markdown, query it. That's not what StageHand does. StageHand is more about reliability. I think we focus a lot on reliability and less so on cost optimization and speed at this point.swyx [00:37:33]: I actually feel like StageHand, so the way that StageHand works, it's like, you know, page.act, click on the quick start. Yeah. It's kind of the integration test for the code that you would have to write anyway, like the Puppeteer code that you have to write anyway. And when the page structure changes, because it always does, then this is still the test. This is still the test that I would have to write. Yeah. So it's kind of like a testing framework that doesn't need implementation detail.Paul [00:37:56]: Well, yeah. I mean, Puppeteer, Playwright, and Slenderman were all designed as testing frameworks, right? Yeah. And now people are, like, hacking them together to automate the web. I would say, and, like, maybe this is, like, me being too specific. But, like, when I write tests, if the page structure changes. Without me knowing, I want that test to fail. So I don't know if, like, AI, like, regenerating that. Like, people are using StageHand for testing. But it's more for, like, usability testing, not, like, testing of, like, does the front end, like, has it changed or not. Okay. But generally where we've seen people, like, really, like, take off is, like, if they're using, you know, something. If they want to build a feature in their application that's kind of like Operator or Deep Research, they're using StageHand to kind of power that tool calling in their own agent loop. Okay. Cool.swyx [00:38:37]: So let's go into Operator, the first big agent launch of the year from OpenAI. Seems like they have a whole bunch scheduled. You were on break and your phone blew up. What's your just general view of computer use agents is what they're calling it. The overall category before we go into Open Operator, just the overall promise of Operator. I will observe that I tried it once. It was okay. And I never tried it again.OpenAI's Operator and computer use agentsPaul [00:38:58]: That tracks with my experience, too. Like, I'm a huge fan of the OpenAI team. Like, I think that I do not view Operator as the company. I'm not a company killer for browser base at all. I think it actually shows people what's possible. I think, like, computer use models make a lot of sense. And I'm actually most excited about computer use models is, like, their ability to, like, really take screenshots and reasoning and output steps. I think that using mouse click or mouse coordinates, I've seen that proved to be less reliable than I would like. And I just wonder if that's the right form factor. What we've done with our framework is anchor it to the DOM itself, anchor it to the actual item. So, like, if it's clicking on something, it's clicking on that thing, you know? Like, it's more accurate. No matter where it is. Yeah, exactly. Because it really ties in nicely. And it can handle, like, the whole viewport in one go, whereas, like, Operator can only handle what it sees. Can you hover? Is hovering a thing that you can do? I don't know if we expose it as a tool directly, but I'm sure there's, like, an API for hovering. Like, move mouse to this position. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you can trigger hover, like, via, like, the JavaScript on the DOM itself. But, no, I think, like, when we saw computer use, everyone's eyes lit up because they realized, like, wow, like, AI is going to actually automate work for people. And I think seeing that kind of happen from both of the labs, and I'm sure we're going to see more labs launch computer use models, I'm excited to see all the stuff that people build with it. I think that I'd love to see computer use power, like, controlling a browser on browser base. And I think, like, Open Operator, which was, like, our open source version of OpenAI's Operator, was our first take on, like, how can we integrate these models into browser base? And we handle the infrastructure and let the labs do the models. I don't have a sense that Operator will be released as an API. I don't know. Maybe it will. I'm curious to see how well that works because I think it's going to be really hard for a company like OpenAI to do things like support CAPTCHA solving or, like, have proxies. Like, I think it's hard for them structurally. Imagine this New York Times headline, OpenAI CAPTCHA solving. Like, that would be a pretty bad headline, this New York Times headline. Browser base solves CAPTCHAs. No one cares. No one cares. And, like, our investors are bored. Like, we're all okay with this, you know? We're building this company knowing that the CAPTCHA solving is short-lived until we figure out how to authenticate good bots. I think it's really hard for a company like OpenAI, who has this brand that's so, so good, to balance with, like, the icky parts of web automation, which it can be kind of complex to solve. I'm sure OpenAI knows who to call whenever they need you. Yeah, right. I'm sure they'll have a great partnership.Alessio [00:41:23]: And is Open Operator just, like, a marketing thing for you? Like, how do you think about resource allocation? So, you can spin this up very quickly. And now there's all this, like, open deep research, just open all these things that people are building. We started it, you know. You're the original Open. We're the original Open operator, you know? Is it just, hey, look, this is a demo, but, like, we'll help you build out an actual product for yourself? Like, are you interested in going more of a product route? That's kind of the OpenAI way, right? They started as a model provider and then…Paul [00:41:53]: Yeah, we're not interested in going the product route yet. I view Open Operator as a model provider. It's a reference project, you know? Let's show people how to build these things using the infrastructure and models that are out there. And that's what it is. It's, like, Open Operator is very simple. It's an agent loop. It says, like, take a high-level goal, break it down into steps, use tool calling to accomplish those steps. It takes screenshots and feeds those screenshots into an LLM with the step to generate the right action. It uses stagehand under the hood to actually execute this action. It doesn't use a computer use model. And it, like, has a nice interface using the live view that we talked about, the iframe, to embed that into an application. So I felt like people on launch day wanted to figure out how to build their own version of this. And we turned that around really quickly to show them. And I hope we do that with other things like deep research. We don't have a deep research launch yet. I think David from AOMNI actually has an amazing open deep research that he launched. It has, like, 10K GitHub stars now. So he's crushing that. But I think if people want to build these features natively into their application, they need good reference projects. And I think Open Operator is a good example of that.swyx [00:42:52]: I don't know. Actually, I'm actually pretty bullish on API-driven operator. Because that's the only way that you can sort of, like, once it's reliable enough, obviously. And now we're nowhere near. But, like, give it five years. It'll happen, you know. And then you can sort of spin this up and browsers are working in the background and you don't necessarily have to know. And it just is booking restaurants for you, whatever. I can definitely see that future happening. I had this on the landing page here. This might be a slightly out of order. But, you know, you have, like, sort of three use cases for browser base. Open Operator. Or this is the operator sort of use case. It's kind of like the workflow automation use case. And it completes with UiPath in the sort of RPA category. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I would agree with that. And then there's Agents we talked about already. And web scraping, which I imagine would be the bulk of your workload right now, right?Paul [00:43:40]: No, not at all. I'd say actually, like, the majority is browser automation. We're kind of expensive for web scraping. Like, I think that if you're building a web scraping product, if you need to do occasional web scraping or you have to do web scraping that works every single time, you want to use browser automation. Yeah. You want to use browser-based. But if you're building web scraping workflows, what you should do is have a waterfall. You should have the first request is a curl to the website. See if you can get it without even using a browser. And then the second request may be, like, a scraping-specific API. There's, like, a thousand scraping APIs out there that you can use to try and get data. Scraping B. Scraping B is a great example, right? Yeah. And then, like, if those two don't work, bring out the heavy hitter. Like, browser-based will 100% work, right? It will load the page in a real browser, hydrate it. I see.swyx [00:44:21]: Because a lot of people don't render to JS.swyx [00:44:25]: Yeah, exactly.Paul [00:44:26]: So, I mean, the three big use cases, right? Like, you know, automation, web data collection, and then, you know, if you're building anything agentic that needs, like, a browser tool, you want to use browser-based.Alessio [00:44:35]: Is there any use case that, like, you were super surprised by that people might not even think about? Oh, yeah. Or is it, yeah, anything that you can share? The long tail is crazy. Yeah.Surprising use cases of BrowserbasePaul [00:44:44]: One of the case studies on our website that I think is the most interesting is this company called Benny. So, the way that it works is if you're on food stamps in the United States, you can actually get rebates if you buy certain things. Yeah. You buy some vegetables. You submit your receipt to the government. They'll give you a little rebate back. Say, hey, thanks for buying vegetables. It's good for you. That process of submitting that receipt is very painful. And the way Benny works is you use their app to take a photo of your receipt, and then Benny will go submit that receipt for you and then deposit the money into your account. That's actually using no AI at all. It's all, like, hard-coded scripts. They maintain the scripts. They've been doing a great job. And they build this amazing consumer app. But it's an example of, like, all these, like, tedious workflows that people have to do to kind of go about their business. And they're doing it for the sake of their day-to-day lives. And I had never known about, like, food stamp rebates or the complex forms you have to do to fill them. But the world is powered by millions and millions of tedious forms, visas. You know, Emirate Lighthouse is a customer, right? You know, they do the O1 visa. Millions and millions of forms are taking away humans' time. And I hope that Browserbase can help power software that automates away the web forms that we don't need anymore. Yeah.swyx [00:45:49]: I mean, I'm very supportive of that. I mean, forms. I do think, like, government itself is a big part of it. I think the government itself should embrace AI more to do more sort of human-friendly form filling. Mm-hmm. But I'm not optimistic. I'm not holding my breath. Yeah. We'll see. Okay. I think I'm about to zoom out. I have a little brief thing on computer use, and then we can talk about founder stuff, which is, I tend to think of developer tooling markets in impossible triangles, where everyone starts in a niche, and then they start to branch out. So I already hinted at a little bit of this, right? We mentioned more. We mentioned E2B. We mentioned Firecrawl. And then there's Browserbase. So there's, like, all this stuff of, like, have serverless virtual computer that you give to an agent and let them do stuff with it. And there's various ways of connecting it to the internet. You can just connect to a search API, like SERP API, whatever other, like, EXA is another one. That's what you're searching. You can also have a JSON markdown extractor, which is Firecrawl. Or you can have a virtual browser like Browserbase, or you can have a virtual machine like Morph. And then there's also maybe, like, a virtual sort of code environment, like Code Interpreter. So, like, there's just, like, a bunch of different ways to tackle the problem of give a computer to an agent. And I'm just kind of wondering if you see, like, everyone's just, like, happily coexisting in their respective niches. And as a developer, I just go and pick, like, a shopping basket of one of each. Or do you think that you eventually, people will collide?Future of browser automation and market competitionPaul [00:47:18]: I think that currently it's not a zero-sum market. Like, I think we're talking about... I think we're talking about all of knowledge work that people do that can be automated online. All of these, like, trillions of hours that happen online where people are working. And I think that there's so much software to be built that, like, I tend not to think about how these companies will collide. I just try to solve the problem as best as I can and make this specific piece of infrastructure, which I think is an important primitive, the best I possibly can. And yeah. I think there's players that are actually going to like it. I think there's players that are going to launch, like, over-the-top, you know, platforms, like agent platforms that have all these tools built in, right? Like, who's building the rippling for agent tools that has the search tool, the browser tool, the operating system tool, right? There are some. There are some. There are some, right? And I think in the end, what I have seen as my time as a developer, and I look at all the favorite tools that I have, is that, like, for tools and primitives with sufficient levels of complexity, you need to have a solution that's really bespoke to that primitive, you know? And I am sufficiently convinced that the browser is complex enough to deserve a primitive. Obviously, I have to. I'm the founder of BrowserBase, right? I'm talking my book. But, like, I think maybe I can give you one spicy take against, like, maybe just whole OS running. I think that when I look at computer use when it first came out, I saw that the majority of use cases for computer use were controlling a browser. And do we really need to run an entire operating system just to control a browser? I don't think so. I don't think that's necessary. You know, BrowserBase can run browsers for way cheaper than you can if you're running a full-fledged OS with a GUI, you know, operating system. And I think that's just an advantage of the browser. It is, like, browsers are little OSs, and you can run them very efficiently if you orchestrate it well. And I think that allows us to offer 90% of the, you know, functionality in the platform needed at 10% of the cost of running a full OS. Yeah.Open Operator: Browserbase's Open-Source Alternativeswyx [00:49:16]: I definitely see the logic in that. There's a Mark Andreessen quote. I don't know if you know this one. Where he basically observed that the browser is turning the operating system into a poorly debugged set of device drivers, because most of the apps are moved from the OS to the browser. So you can just run browsers.Paul [00:49:31]: There's a place for OSs, too. Like, I think that there are some applications that only run on Windows operating systems. And Eric from pig.dev in this upcoming YC batch, or last YC batch, like, he's building all run tons of Windows operating systems for you to control with your agent. And like, there's some legacy EHR systems that only run on Internet-controlled systems. Yeah.Paul [00:49:54]: I think that's it. I think, like, there are use cases for specific operating systems for specific legacy software. And like, I'm excited to see what he does with that. I just wanted to give a shout out to the pig.dev website.swyx [00:50:06]: The pigs jump when you click on them. Yeah. That's great.Paul [00:50:08]: Eric, he's the former co-founder of banana.dev, too.swyx [00:50:11]: Oh, that Eric. Yeah. That Eric. Okay. Well, he abandoned bananas for pigs. I hope he doesn't start going around with pigs now.Alessio [00:50:18]: Like he was going around with bananas. A little toy pig. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. What else are we missing? I think we covered a lot of, like, the browser-based product history, but. What do you wish people asked you? Yeah.Paul [00:50:29]: I wish people asked me more about, like, what will the future of software look like? Because I think that's really where I've spent a lot of time about why do browser-based. Like, for me, starting a company is like a means of last resort. Like, you shouldn't start a company unless you absolutely have to. And I remain convinced that the future of software is software that you're going to click a button and it's going to do stuff on your behalf. Right now, software. You click a button and it maybe, like, calls it back an API and, like, computes some numbers. It, like, modifies some text, whatever. But the future of software is software using software. So, I may log into my accounting website for my business, click a button, and it's going to go load up my Gmail, search my emails, find the thing, upload the receipt, and then comment it for me. Right? And it may use it using APIs, maybe a browser. I don't know. I think it's a little bit of both. But that's completely different from how we've built software so far. And that's. I think that future of software has different infrastructure requirements. It's going to require different UIs. It's going to require different pieces of infrastructure. I think the browser infrastructure is one piece that fits into that, along with all the other categories you mentioned. So, I think that it's going to require developers to think differently about how they've built software for, you know

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Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot (a $40 billion leader in the CRM space) shares how AI is transforming go-to-market strategies, the key lessons Yamini has learned as a first-time CEO, and the sales tactics she's mastered.She also discusses the challenges of navigating major business pivots, including how companies can successfully transition into AI-first businesses and what it takes to stay competitive in an evolving landscape.(00:00) Intro(00:56) Yamini Rangan's Background and Career Journey(02:33) Joining HubSpot and Early Challenges(03:49) Transition to CEO and Leadership Insights(07:33) Strategic Planning and Long-Term Vision(15:15) AI Transformation and Product Innovation(18:57) AI's Impact on CRM and Future Prospects(28:51) Content Strategy and Customer Engagement(37:34) Contextual AI Features for Better Usage(38:13) Human Expectations and AI(39:36) AI in Daily Productivity(42:54) The Art and Science of Sales(51:05) The Role of Curiosity and Resilience in Sales(53:23) Evolving Company Culture(55:27) Leadership Style and Management Lessons(58:27) Scaling Startups: Lessons from Workday(01:02:54) The Future of AI and Incumbents(01:14:10) Concluding Thoughts Executive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA

Andy is the founder of Artisanal Ventures and Artisanal Talent, one of Silicon Valley's top search firms. He's helped build leadership teams at companies like Databricks, Snowflake, Confluent, Abnormal Security, AcuityMD, and many more.In this episode, he shares…- How founders can differentiate in the talent war today- Maximizing the success rate of executive hires- Why interviews are a waste of time- The best ways to do references- How to choose the right search firm& more (00:00) Intro(02:02) Andy Price's Background and Career Journey(03:20) The Role of Founders in Hiring(04:32) Challenges in Early Stage Hiring(10:08) Importance of Venture Capital Brand(12:14) Effective Search Processes and Candidate Evaluation(23:27) Backchannel References and Networking(29:10) Identifying Key Players in Sales Growth(29:44) The Importance of Minimal Disruption(30:40) Effective Founder-Executive Relationships(30:57) The Role of Soak Time in Differentiation(31:52) Hiring Strategies for Rapid Growth(33:42) Common Failure Modes in Hiring(34:32) Aligning Founder and Executive Expectations(38:26) Building a Strong Talent Acquisition Team(40:51) The Talent Wars and Hiring Choke Points(44:24) Balancing Skill Sets and Company Culture(47:29) Evaluating and Upleveling Team Members(49:59) The Importance of Forecasting and Planning(51:34) Handling Executive Transitions Smoothly(59:09) The Art of Firing: Best Practices(59:32) Handling Employee Terminations with Dignity(01:02:19) Negotiating with Candidates: Tips and Tricks(01:06:31) Understanding Compensation Trends(01:08:18) Avoiding Common Founder Mistakes(01:11:28) Scaling Operations in Hypergrowth(01:15:00) Navigating the Current VC and Talent Ecosystem(01:23:34) The Importance of Specialized Search Firms(01:28:03) Adapting to the New Market Realities(01:30:46) Final Thoughts and Reflections Executive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA

Jefferies Chief Market Strategist David Zervos and RBC Capital Markets Head of US Equity Strategy Lori Calvasina join to break down the market landscape after a wild week. Our Kristina Partsinevelos digs into Nvidia's latest 13F filing and its shifting investments. Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler discusses the company's earnings results and what kind of AI return the company is seeing in an exclusive interview. Jefferies' Michael Yee weighs in on Moderna, biotech, and the potential RFK impact on markets. Plus, John San Marco previews Walmart's earnings and the retail outlook amid tariff concerns.

curaJOY is making waves in the world of AI, and it's all thanks to its AI-driven behavioral healthcare platform. Learn about why this leading non-profit organization was named a winning honoree for Twilio's AI Startup Searchlight 2.0 Award. Learn more at https://curajoy.org/solutions curaJOY City: Las Vegas Address: 304 South Jones Boulevard Website: https://www.curajoy.org

In this episode of 'Tame the Mobile Beast,' Tom Butta hosts Chris Koehler, Chief Marketing Officer of Twilio, in a discussion about the intricacies of orchestrating seamless customer experiences across multiple channels. Chris highlights the complex challenge brands face in integrating new technologies, evolving user needs, and vast data streams, emphasizing that creating cohesive and delightful customer journeys requires more than just advanced technology—it calls for strong internal alignment and a well-thought-out strategy. The conversation underscores the importance of viewing customer experience as a holistic journey rather than a series of isolated interactions, warning that disjointed experiences across touchpoints can undermine customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.Additionally, the conversation would not be complete without touching on the potential of AI, specifically how it can be leveraged to enable personalization at scale. By leveraging a unified data profile and activating it across communication channels, AI can generate more relevant content, offers, and experiences. However, he cautions that success hinges on a deliberate strategy to avoid pitfalls like poor AI management, which could lead to negative customer experiences and increased skepticism. Finally, Chris shares his insights on balancing the digital and human elements in customer interactions and the future impact of AI on marketing and customer experience strategies. His advice underscores the importance of creating value-driven and efficient customer journeys that are deeply rooted in rich, contextual data.—Guest Quote"There's so many different ways to interact with your customers across your brand. Keeping that consistent, contextual experience - it's just really, really hard. And there's very few brands that are doing this.”  – Chris Koehler—Time Stamps 01:01 Meet Chris Koehler, CMO of Twilio01:35 Beast of the Week: Customer Journey Irchestration02:45 The challenge of consistent customer experience03:49 The role of technology and organizational challenges09:53 The importance of data in customer experience12:04 AI: The future of personalization at scale20:16 Rapid Fire Questions—LinksConnect with Chris Koehler on LinkedInCheck out TwilioConnect with Tom Butta on LinkedInCheck out the Airship Website

The recent controversy between WordPress and WP Engine put Matt Mullenweg (Co-Founder of WordPress, CEO of Automattic) under intense online scrutiny. In our conversation, he shared lessons from the controversy and managing through crisis, as well as this thoughts on the future of open source AI and more.(00:00) Intro(01:17) Controversy with WP Engine(03:36) Understanding Open Source and Trademarks(04:36) Automattic's Role and Contributions(08:26) Navigating Legal Battles and Community Relations(18:27) Leadership and Personal Resilience(21:49) The Impact of Social Media on CEOs(31:22) Future Outlook and Reflections(32:42) Exploring the Quinn Model and Open Source Innovations(33:17) The Evolution of AI Interfaces and User Interactions(35:36) AI as a Writing and Coding Partner(38:07) The Power of Open Source in AI Development(40:00) Commoditizing Complements: A Business Strategy(41:39) The Battle with Shopify and Open Source Models(42:33) The Impact of Open Source on Market Dynamics(43:55) USB-C Transition and Gadget Recommendations(47:53) The Benefits of Sabbaticals(53:34) The Future of WordPress and Automattic(59:12) Employee Ownership and Liquidity Programs(01:04:33) Conclusion and Final Thoughts Executive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 

Send us a textIn this thought-provoking episode, Mike Sabat, Enterprise Account Executive at Twilio, unveils practical strategies for leveraging AI in customer success and account management. He shares groundbreaking approaches to AI implementation, including using it as a virtual coworker and harnessing tools like Google Gemini for comprehensive account research. The discussion reveals how AI can dramatically reduce research time while improving the quality and depth of account planning.Detailed AnalysisThe episode delves deep into the practical application of AI in customer success, highlighting several transformative approaches:The conversation begins with Mike's innovative perspective on overcoming "AI writer's block" by treating AI as a collaborative coworker rather than just a search tool. This approach helps professionals move past the initial hesitation of not knowing how to integrate AI into their workflow.A significant portion focuses on Mike's revolutionary approach to account planning using AI. He introduces the concept of "meta prompting" - using AI to create comprehensive prompts for deeper research. This method, particularly when combined with Google Gemini's advanced research capabilities, transforms what was previously a days-long research process into a matter of minutes.The discussion highlights the importance of responsible AI usage, with Mike emphasizing the need to be cautious with proprietary information. He provides practical guidelines for maintaining confidentiality while maximizing AI's research capabilities.The episode concludes with insights into how AI can serve as a preparation tool for client meetings, allowing professionals to practice handling potential objections and scenarios before actual client interactions.The transformative impact on time management is particularly noteworthy, with tasks that previously took days now being completed in minutes, allowing for deeper, more comprehensive account research and planning.Now you can interact with us directly by leaving a voice message at https://www.speakpipe.com/CustomerSuccessPlaybookPlease Like, Comment, Share and Subscribe. You can also find the CS Playbook Podcast:YouTube - @CustomerSuccessPlaybookPodcastTwitter - @CS_PlaybookYou can find Kevin at:Metzgerbusiness.com - Kevin's person web siteKevin Metzger on Linked In.You can find Roman at:Roman Trebon on Linked In.

Send us a textSummaryIn this thought-provoking discussion, Mike Sabat from Twilio shares his perspective on the potential convergence of Customer Success Management (CSM) and Account Executive (AE) roles in enterprise technology. The conversation delves into how consumption-based pricing models and increasing product complexity are driving this transformation, with particular emphasis on revenue responsibility and customer relationship management in the modern tech landscape.Detailed AnalysisThe episode explores the shifting dynamics of customer-facing roles in enterprise technology, highlighting several key trends and implications:Consumption-Based EvolutionThe discussion begins with an examination of how enterprise software is moving from seat-based to consumption-based pricing models, similar to those employed by major players like AWS, Google Cloud, and OpenAI. This fundamental shift is reshaping how companies structure their customer-facing teams and responsibilities.Role Convergence DriversSabat presents compelling arguments for the merger of CSM and AE roles, particularly in growth-oriented companies. The traditional model of AEs making promises and CSMs cleaning up afterward is becoming obsolete, replaced by a more integrated approach where responsibility for both sales and delivery rests with the same individual.Revenue ResponsibilityA crucial point emerged regarding revenue responsibility in customer success roles. The panel agrees that CSM teams must evolve beyond being cost centers to become revenue generators, either through direct sales responsibility or through packaged services offerings.Specialized ModelsThe discussion acknowledges that while convergence is likely in some areas, specialization will continue to exist. The "hunter" role focused on new logo acquisition will remain distinct, while the "farmer" role may see the most convergence between AE and CSM functions.Future ImplicationsThe conversation concludes with insights into how this evolution might affect organizational structure, skill requirements, and customer relationship management in the coming years, particularly in enterprises with complex, consumption-based products.Now you can interact with us directly by leaving a voice message at https://www.speakpipe.com/CustomerSuccessPlaybookPlease Like, Comment, Share and Subscribe. You can also find the CS Playbook Podcast:YouTube - @CustomerSuccessPlaybookPodcastTwitter - @CS_PlaybookYou can find Kevin at:Metzgerbusiness.com - Kevin's person web siteKevin Metzger on Linked In.You can find Roman at:Roman Trebon on Linked In.

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Wie kommst du von Software Idee zu ersten Nutzern und Kunden ohne dich zu verzetteln?Marc Klingen baut mit seinem Team Langfuse. Langfuse ist eine Open-Source Software für die Entwicklung von Tools basierend auf Large Language Models (LLMs).Mehr als 4 Millionen Dollar haben unter anderem Y Combinator, La Famiglia und Lightspeed Venture Partners in das Berliner Startup investiert.Aus Berlin heraus bedient das Langfuse Team Kunden in der ganzen Welt und unser Gast Host Mike Mahlkow (2-facher Y Combinator Gründer) spricht mit Marc über den Aufbau der Firma.Du erfährst alles über die Herausforderungen der frühen Produktentwicklung, wie man erste Kunden gewinnt, warum Geschwindigkeit wichtiger ist als Perfektion und wie man aus Feedback iteriert, um echten Mehrwert zu schaffen. Was du lernst:Wie Langfuse Unternehmen wie Khan Academy, Twilio und Merck hilft, ihre LLM-Anwendungen effizienter zu entwickeln und zu testen.Warum der Fokus auf Geschwindigkeit und ein kleiner Scope in der frühen Phase entscheidend sind.Wie man Champions und Economic Buyer in großen Unternehmen identifiziert und mit ihnen arbeitet.Warum es wichtig ist, Kundenfeedback strukturiert zu nutzen und iterativ zu arbeiten.Wie Open-Source-Ansätze und Partnerschaften helfen können, Nutzer zu gewinnen und zu skalieren.Welche Unterschiede es gibt, wenn man an Startups vs. Enterprise-Kunden verkauft und wie man sich darauf vorbereitet.ALLES ZU UNICORN BAKERY:https://zez.am/unicornbakery Mehr zu Marc:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcklingen Website: https://langfuse.com/ Mehr zu Co-Host Mike:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemahlkow/ Website: https://fastgen.com/ Join our Founder Tactics Newsletter:2x die Woche bekommst du die Taktiken der besten Gründer der Welt direkt ins Postfach:https://www.tactics.unicornbakery.de/ Kapitel:(00:00:00) Welches Problem löst Langfuse(00:11:17) Von Idee zu ersten Kunden(00:21:54) Kunden von der Nutzung überzeugen(00:25:18) Der AHA-Moment bei Langfuse: Hallo, User 1!(00:37:56) How to: An größere Unternehmen verkaufen (B2B & Enterprise Sales)(00:48:06) Die Relevanz von Mehrwert & Nutzen: Beispiel Figma(00:51:35) How to: von 1 auf 10 Nutzer skalieren(00:58:42) Unterschied zwischen B2B und B2C-Produkten(01:00:39) Wann sollte man aufhören?(01:08:36) How to: von 10 auf 100 Nutzer skalieren(01:18:25) ... doch was, wenn ich viel länger bauen muss? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Skippy and Doogles answer listener mail on Cathie Wood's underperformance. Skippy tells Visa to stop performing so well so they don't get shut down. Doogles talks through career lessons from David A. Patterson. Skippy is enamored by Warren Buffett's cash pile and it's market crash predictions. The episode wraps with a discussion about Twilio and Brazilian equities.Join the Skippy and Doogles fan club. You can also get more details about the show at skippydoogles.com, show notes on our Substack, and send comments or questions to skippydoogles@gmail.com.

Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4aP37nC ----------------------- Rate Insights Unlocked and write a review If you appreciate Insights Unlocked, please give it a rating and a review. Visit Apple Podcasts, pull up the Insights Unlocked show page and scroll to the bottom of the screen. Below the trailers, you'll find Ratings and Reviews. Click on a star rating. Scroll down past the highlighted review and click on "Write a Review." You'll make my day. ----------------------- In this episode of Insights Unlocked, Michelle Engle sits down with Andy O'Dower, Twilio's VP of Product Management, to dive into the company's game-changing approach to customer communication. From simplifying complex communication systems for developers to using AI to deliver personalized experiences, Twilio is leading the way in reshaping how businesses engage with their customers. Andy shares how Twilio's platform enables real-time, omnichannel communication at a massive global scale, helping brands create trusted, seamless, and smart interactions. He also sheds light on how advancements in conversational AI, sentiment analysis, and voice intelligence are revolutionizing customer engagement and support. What You'll Learn in This Episode: How Twilio empowers developers with simple APIs to integrate voice, video, email, and messaging capabilities. How AI tools like transcription, sentiment analysis, and virtual agents are redefining customer experiences. Why trust and privacy are essential in building AI-driven communication systems. The role of autonomous agents in creating personalized, frictionless interactions with customers. Twilio's vision for the future of customer engagement, with AI and data at its core.

Megh Gautam, Chief Product Officer at Crunchbase, is one of the sharpest product minds in Silicon Valley. With a track record that includes leadership roles as Head of Product at Twilio and Director of Product Management at Dropbox and Hearsay Systems, Megh has honed his expertise in driving innovation and growth. An active angel investor, Megh combines his industry insights with a passion for supporting emerging talent and ideas. He holds a Master of Science in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology from the National Institute of Technology Durgapur in India.In this conversation, we discuss:How Crunchbase is leveraging AI and proprietary data to provide predictive insights for startups and investors.The balance between enhancing data accuracy and maintaining ethical transparency in AI-driven decision-making.The emergence of AI marketplaces that empower creators to monetize their content while preserving ownership rights.Why trust and attention are the scarcest resources today, and how Crunchbase ensures both through innovation and responsibility.The importance of skepticism in the age of LLMs and how to foster critical thinking in a generation growing up with AI.Megh's reflections on his journey as a product leader and how mentorship has shaped his career at top tech companies like Twilio, Dropbox, and Hearsay Systems.Resources:Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter: https://aiandwork.beehiiv.com/subscribeConnect with Megh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meghbartma/ AI fun fact article: https://pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/news-publisher-ai-deals-lawsuits-openai-google/ On how SambaNova became the first generative AI unicorn and accelerated LLM advancements with open-source AI: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/13151659 

“We really sort of sit at an interesting intersection of CPaaS providers like Twilio, SignalWire, and Plivo, where you get a platform,” says Tim McCain, Commio's Director of Marketing. Commio has announced that it has joined other cloud communications industry leaders as a member of the Cloud Communications Alliance (CCA) based in Delray Beach, Florida. The CCA is the world's premier peer association dedicated to the advancement of the cloud communications industry. In this podcast we learn more about the Commio story. “There is a communications layer for the voice and messaging that connects you to the carriers, but it's kind of an afterthought. There's not a lot of redundancy there. People have trouble with that. We bring your own carrier solution for Twilio, SignalWire, Plivo, and all those great things to get better connectivity. And then there's also, at the very bottom, people who will sell you desk phones and VoIP service, but we also provide cloud voice services. We're sort of that powerful value-added carrier layer for voice and text messaging. We have a lot of folks that are sending and registering 10 DLC campaigns, long code, short code, all those great things, 10 DLC. But then we're very well known for our voice products. People who need to send a lot of calls with a lot of calls per second with high quality and taking over total control of both the voice and messaging piece, to make sure that things are running, that there's good transparency, good redundancy. People love us for that.” The CCA works to move the industry forward by supporting and advising service providers on the best ways to build, sell, and scale their cloud communications solutions and businesses. Just a few of the CCA's initiatives include providing research, education, and networking opportunities; representing the interests of its members in influencing policy; and building consistency across the globe. Read the membership announcement https://telecomreseller.com/2025/01/29/commio-joins-the-cloud-communications-alliance/ About Commio Commio is a cloud voice and text messaging API platform that enables VoIP providers to deliver rich omnichannel customer conversations at scale. Commio is unique as the only CPaaS that gives customers total control and transparency, plus reliable, high-quality, cost-effective communications. Commio is the essential ingredient that makes our partners' products, services and experiences, better. Commio's smart, reliable solutions are easy to implement and scale with you, so you can deliver more calls and texts, be more competitive, and save money. Intelligent call routing with multiple layers of voice carrier redundancy mean less worry and more happy customers—plus lower costs. See beyond the Voice API to gain visibility into every call, then take control of routes and carriers to improve call delivery and quality. That's Commio peace of mind!

Send us a textIn this compelling episode of the Customer Success Playbook podcast, Mike Sabat, Enterprise Account Executive at Twilio, shares his expertise on effectively incorporating upsells into account reviews. He discusses how the increasing complexity of modern products creates opportunities for account managers to deliver additional value through strategic guidance and optimization recommendations. Mike emphasizes the importance of being a trusted advisor, particularly in consumption-based pricing models, and shares practical examples of how understanding customer usage patterns can lead to cost savings and improved outcomes.Detailed AnalysisThe discussion delves into the evolving landscape of customer success and sales, particularly in complex, consumption-based product environments. Mike Sabat provides valuable insights into how account reviews can serve as natural opportunities for meaningful upsell conversations that benefit both the customer and the vendor.Several key themes emerge from the conversation:Product Complexity as an Opportunity The increasing complexity of modern software solutions, particularly those involving data and multiple use cases, creates a natural need for guided optimization. This complexity provides account managers with opportunities to demonstrate value through expert guidance and strategic recommendations.Consumption-Based Model Dynamics Mike highlights the unique characteristics of consumption-based pricing models, using Twilio's messaging services as an example. In these models, understanding usage patterns and optimization opportunities becomes crucial for both cost management and value maximization.Data-Driven Advisory Approach The episode emphasizes the importance of leveraging usage data and industry insights to provide valuable recommendations. Mike shares how analyzing trends in customer usage patterns can uncover opportunities for optimization and cost savings.Cross-Industry Learning A significant portion of the value comes from sharing relevant experiences across similar customers while maintaining confidentiality. This knowledge transfer helps customers benefit from proven solutions and avoid common pitfalls.Human Element in Customer Success The discussion underscores the continued importance of human interaction in enterprise customer success, even as AI advances. The ability to understand unique customer environments and adapt solutions accordingly remains a crucial human skill.The conversation provides practical examples, including how understanding regulatory changes in messaging services led to cost savings for a healthcare client through number type optimization. This demonstrates how technical knowledge combined with customer understanding can create tangible value.For customer success professionals, the episode offers valuable insights into:Structuring account reviews to naturally incorporate upsell opportunitiesBuilding trusted advisor relationships through expertise and industry knowledgeBalancing customer success with business growth objectivesAdapting strategies for consumption-based pricing modelsPlease Like, Comment, Share and Subscribe. You can also find the CS Playbook Podcast:YouTube - @CustomerSuccessPlaybookPodcastTwitter - @CS_PlaybookYou can find Kevin at:Metzgerbusiness.com - Kevin's person web siteKevin Metzger on Linked In.You can find Roman at:Roman Trebon on Linked In.

In this episode, David Betts, leader of Twilio's developer platform team, shares how Twilio leverages developer sentiment data to drive platform engineering initiatives, optimize Kubernetes adoption, and demonstrate ROI for leadership. David details Twilio's journey from traditional metrics to sentiment-driven insights, the innovative tools his teams have built to streamline CI/CD workflows, and the strategies they use to align platform investments with organizational goals.Mentions and links:Find David on LinkedInMeasuring developer productivity with the DX Core 4Ask Your Developer by Jeff Lawson, former CEO of TwilioDiscussion points:(0:00) Introduction(0:49) Twilio's developer platform team(2:03) Twilio's approach to release engineering and CD(4:10) How they use sentiment data and telemetry metrics(7:27) Comparing sentiment data and telemetry metrics(10:25) How to take action on sentiment data(13:16) What resonates with execs(15:44) Proving DX value: sentiment, efficiency, and ROI(19:15) Balancing quarterly and real-time developer feedback

Twilio shares surged last week to multi-year highs, Rachel Dashiell walks through the technical levels to watch on the 1-year chart, and takes a long-look back to see where the stock's long-term resistance may be on the chart. ======== Schwab Network ======== Empowering every investor and trader, every market day. Subscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribe Download the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185 Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7 Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watch Watch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-explore Watch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/ Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetwork Follow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetwork Follow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/ About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about

At new all-time highs, the market's valuation concerns aren't going away anytime soon. But they're also not keeping big money from being committed to artificial intelligence. (00:44) Jason Moser and Asit Sharma discuss: - The S&P 500s new highs, what to make of the market's valuation and what some of the big names on The Street have to say about it. - Stargate, the new $500B planned joint venture between OpenAI, Softbank, and some of the biggest names in tech. - Fantastic earnings reports from Netflix, GE Aerospace, and Twilio. (19:03) Tim Beyers talks with Frances Schwiep, a partner at Two Sigma Ventures, about where the biggest early-stage opportunities are right now in the AI ecosystem and what to look for in great founders. AI Summit interview with Frances Schwiep: https://www.fool.com/premium/4056/coverage/2025/01/15/ai-summit-2025-interview-with-frances-schwiep (32:30) Asit and Jason check in on their new year's resolutions and offer up two stocks on their radar: Nike and Garmin. Stocks discussed: MSFT, NVDA, ORCL, NFLX, GE, TWLO, NKE, GRMN Host: Dylan Lewis Guests: Asit Sharma, Jason Moser, Tim Beyers, Frances Schweip Engineers: Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Fitbod. Get 25% off your Fitbod subscription or try out the app for FREE when you sign up: fitbod.me/TWIST Squarespace. TWiST listeners: use code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain: https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST Horatio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial set up. Today's show: Jason and Alex cover Twilio's team size compression, DeepSeek's scary good AI for only $6M and the GameOn fraud saga that sounds too crazy to be true. Timestamps: (0:00) Alex and Jason kick off the show (6:27) Rundown of potential topics (7:10) Twilio's team size strategy and AI's impact on workforce (9:40) Fitbod. Get 25% off your Fitbod subscription or try out the app for FREE when you sign up: fitbod.me/TWIST (14:52) Entrepreneurship in the AI era and automation concerns (19:30) Squarespace. TWiST listeners: use code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain: https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST (22:49) Meta's investment in data centers and surplus compute power (26:36) Technology's potential to solve humanity's problems (30:12) Horatio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial set up. (32:01) Empathy for workers displaced by automation (34:11) DeepSeq's role in reducing AI industry costs (37:27) Game On startup fraud case and due diligence in startups (53:13) Venture capital's role in startup oversight (55:36) OpenAI's Operator announcement and AI autonomy risks Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: (9:40) Fitbod. Get 25% off your Fitbod subscription or try out the app for FREE when you sign up: fitbod.me/TWIST (19:30) Squarespace. TWiST listeners: use code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain: https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST (30:12) Horatio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial set up. Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Two weeks after Oura CEO Tom Hale started tracking and improving his sleep, he recalls, “It was like walking out of a black-and-white movie into a 4K technicolor movie… I've been missing this for 30 years.” The experience of feeling 20 again every day inspired him to apply for the Oura CEO role. Now, nearly 3 years into the job, he sat down to discuss what all founders and CEOs should consider when it comes to avoiding burnout and maximizing health and productivity. We covered his experiences with tools like continuous glucose monitoring, his thoughts on the future of wearables, and how AI insights will help us take better control of our health. (00:00) Intro(00:53) The Journey with Oura Ring(01:47) Sleep Optimization and Health Trends(05:06) Behavioral Changes for Better Sleep(09:33) Tom Hale's Professional Background(12:47) Challenges and Opportunities at Oura(22:50) The Importance of Sleep(26:05) Health Benefits of Quality Sleep(28:38) Oura's Unique Position in the Market(36:47) Consumer Choice and Healthcare Disruption(40:59) Unexpected Insights from HSA and FSA Spending(41:36) The Future of Insurance and Wearable Data(44:40) Preventative Care and Employer Incentives(47:21) The Impact of Small Choices on Health(48:52) Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare(54:08) The Role of Continuous Glucose Monitors(59:50) Expanding Oura's Market and Product Strategy(01:12:04) Navigating Leadership and Company Culture(01:19:22) Future Opportunities and Global Expansion(01:23:43) Closing Remarks and Reflections  Executive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA

Chris Sacca is the co-founder of Lowercarbon Capital and manages a portfolio of countless startups in energy, industrial materials, and carbon removal. If it's unf**king the planet, he's probably working on it. Previously, Chris founded Lowercase Capital, one of history's most successful funds ever, primarily known for its very early investments in companies like Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Twilio, Docker, Optimizely, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Stripe. But you might just know him as the guy who wore those ridiculous cowboy shirts for a few seasons of Shark Tank. To purchase Chris's ranch, schedule a viewing at FivePondsRanch.com.P.S. This episode features a special, one-of-a-kind introduction that Chris recorded of yours truly. :) Sponsors:MUDWTR energy-boosting coffee alternative—without the jitters: https://MUDWTR.com/Tim (between 15% and 43% off) Helix Sleep premium mattresses: https://HelixSleep.com/Tim (Between 20% and 27% off all mattress orders and two free pillows)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim's email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim's books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Barbara Doran of BD8 Capital Partners and Crossmark Global Investments' Bob Doll give their playbook for the market as earnings ramp up. Earnings from CSX and Texas Instruments. Susquehanna's Christopher Rolland joins to dissect TXN earnings and the chip sector, while Sheila Kahyaoglu from Jefferies on Boeing Q4 preannouncement.Jon Fortt sits down exclusively with Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler on the company's new growth targets. Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures on the Trump economy, Musk vs. Altman, and the future of Stargate. 

Paul Klein is the Founder and CEO of Browserbase, building infrastructure for AI browsers.Our conversation gets into the future of software and AI agents, why authentication is a huge problem in AI, how the best infrastructure companies become product companies, and the memo he wrote that convinced him to start Browserbase despite not wanting to build another company.A year ago, Paul was a relatively unknown commodity, and definitely did not want to raise venture capital again. He shares the playbook he used to go from zero to raising $27 million in nine months “as a non-famous person” (his words).He shares all his lessons learned in the arena as he's processing them, like what he thinks will unlock better AI agents, why you should like your own tweets, and how Browserbase competes with incumbents.Timestamps:(00:00) Intro(02:39) How LLMs unlock automation online(08:34) The future of software (AI agents)(11:21) Why AI agents need better authentication(12:59) Lessons from Twilio on building an infrastructure company(17:27) Learnings from his first startup(19:56) Bubbles, and how they drive innovation(20:37) Reasons this moment in AI is special(29:58) Why technical founders love post-PMF(31:55) The memo that started Browserbase(34:09) Why a startup should be a means of last resort(36:53) Being a solo founder(42:24) Importance of in-person culture(45:56) The best place to find engineers(48:34) How Paul hired a contractor army to build Browserbase(50:16) Why you can't hire mercenaries(54:28) The power of emojis in marketing(57:39) Browserbase's early growth playbook (3 videos)(01:04:00) Benefits of sharing an office with other startups(01:06:00) Sales lessons from his parents(01:08:07) Why startups are like video games(01:13:43) Successful founders work the hardest and are shameless(01:18:44) Customer support is a startups greatest differentiator(01:22:06) Paul's playbook that raised $27m in nine months as a non-famous person(01:29:03) How investors make decisions(01:33:10) Risks help startups avoid competition(01:36:37) Great infrastructure needs its own frameworks(01:39:05) Long-term thinking in LLMs will enable mass AI agents(01:42:21) Avoiding tech debt with AI moving so fast(01:43:48) Infrastructure companies need to become product companies(01:46:54) The Sine Wave philosophy to startupsReferenced:Browserbase: https://www.browserbase.com/ An Internet Browser for AI: https://memos.hawkhill.ventures/p/an-internet-browser-for-ai Rise of the Product Engineer: https://memos.hawkhill.ventures/p/rise-of-the-product-engineer Death to the Backend: https://memos.hawkhill.ventures/p/death-to-the-backend The three Browserbase marketing videosPre-Seed: https://x.com/pk_iv/status/1775183751800377344 Seed: https://x.com/pk_iv/status/1798731220005883935 Series A: https://x.com/pk_iv/status/1851270308701106383Follow Paul:Twitter: https://x.com/pk_iv LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkleiniv/Follow Turner:Twitter: https://x.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/ 

Jay Chaudhry is the definition of a self-starter. Born in the Himalayas with no running water or electricity until high school, Jay has now scaled Zscaler to a $30B public company. He and his wife went all in many times over—betting their life savings and quitting their jobs to launch their first venture, Secure IT, which became a huge success. Jay then parlayed that into building multiple more self-funded, successful cybersecurity companies before founding Zscaler.In this episode, Jay shares his playbook for building disruptive companies, how he picks a market, and insights on using AI to combat modern breaches—plus his perspectives on life, family, and money. Executive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA

Episode Summary: Join us for an inspiring conversation with Vanessa Larco, Partner at NEA, one of the world's largest venture capital firms. In this episode, Vanessa shares her career journey from working at leading tech companies like Microsoft, to becoming a prominent VC investor. She dives into her investment philosophy, the importance of strong leadership, leveraging data-driven decisions, and fostering diversity in venture capital. Whether you're an entrepreneur, aspiring VC, or tech enthusiast, this episode offers invaluable insights on building successful businesses and networks while taking calculated risks. Key Discussion Points: Vanessa's career journey: From tech product management to venture capital. Lessons learned from her time at Microsoft, Box, and other leading companies. How to spot and capitalize on transformative insights in business. The critical role of a strong CEO in company success and investment decisions. The importance of data, analytics, and metrics in decision-making. Balancing risk-taking with calculated strategy in your career. Building and maintaining a network outside the VC world. Lessons from failure and advice for those navigating similar challenges. Highlighted Questions: What led you to pursue a career in venture capital after working in product management? How do you evaluate leadership when considering an investment? Can you share a time when you took a significant career risk and how it paid off? How do you maintain work-life balance in a high-pressure role? What advice would you give to those looking to build a career in VC or entrepreneurship? About Vanessa Larco: Vanessa specializes in Series A and B investments in both B2B and B2C companies. She's passionate about leveraging technology to empower people and has led investments in innovative companies like Assembled, Mejuri, and Cleo. Her background in product management at companies like Box, Twilio, and Disney provides her with a unique perspective in evaluating businesses. Event Details: This episode was recorded during a live event on Thursday, December 5, 2024, at 1895 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, California. The event featured networking opportunities, an in-depth interview with Vanessa, and an engaging audience Q&A session. Connect with Vanessa Larco: LinkedIn: Vanessa Larco on Vanessa Larco | LinkedIn Learn more about NEA: http://www.nea.com  

Sagar Gupta, who oversees Anson Fund's activism activities, discusses why sector specialization is vital for an activist, and he also talks about recent campaigns at Twilio, Globalstar and Lionsgate.

In this episode, Marc Benioff (CEO, Salesforce) responds to Satya Nadella's recent predictions and shares his thoughts on the current reality of Agi. He dives into the rise of digital labor, the multi-trillion-dollar potential of agentic technology, and what the future split between software and agentic revenue might look like. Marc also discusses why CEOs need to stay grounded in delivering actionable solutions, and he emphasizes the moral obligation businesses have to retrain employees and invest in communities as AI continues to evolve.(00:00) Intro(01:45) Salesforce's AI Impact on Business(03:03) The Future of Digital Labor(05:28) Agentic AI and Customer Success(07:42) Salesforce's Competitive Edge(11:48) Marc Benioff's Response to Satya Nadella(14:16) The Role of AI in Enterprise Software(20:14) The Balance of AI and Human Labor(28:34) Salesforce's Philanthropic Efforts(36:24) The Future of AI and Regulation(40:24) Conclusion and Farewell Executive Producer: Rashad AssirProducer: Leah ClapperMixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA