Podcasts about YC

YC alum Tamar Blue joins us to unpack how her HIPAA-compliant platform, MentalHappy, is turning virtual support groups into a lifeline for 1,500+ providers and the communities they serve. Topics discussed include the stigmas behind metal health, the toll of therapist burnout, and the power behind group therapy.

En este episodio de Indie vs Unicornio, Lucas y Cristóbal analizan la posibilidad de que surja la primera empresa valuada en mil millones de dólares gestionada por un solo founder y sin empleados. Este concepto, que hasta hace pocos años parecía imposible, ahora parece más cercano gracias al avance de las compañías basadas en inteligencia artificial. A partir de esto, exploran cómo algunos founders están escalando sus empresas de manera minimalista, usando tecnología para maximizar ganancias sin aumentar el equipo .Además, discuten el enfrentamiento entre Y Combinator y Google, donde YC acusa a Google de prácticas monopolísticas que han congelado la innovación en sectores clave como la búsqueda web y la inteligencia artificial. Lucas comparte detalles sobre cómo YC sugiere abrir el índice de búsqueda de Google para fomentar la competencia, y cómo estas acciones podrían cambiar el panorama para startups emergentes en AI ..0:00 – Introducción y contexto del episodio5:15 – Un unicornio sin empleados? La teoría detrás del próximo gran éxito12:30 – Google vs. Y Combinator: Prácticas anticompetitivas o estrategia de mercado?20:10 – AI y la nueva era de las startups minimalistas32:00 – Empresas que prosperan sin grandes equipos42:00 – Reflexiones finales y cierre del episodioLinks del episodio:Open AI: https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-remain-under-non-profit-control-change-restructuring-plans-2025-05-05/Founder Billionaire: https://palle.substack.com/p/the-1b-dollar-single-person-companyPalle Broe: https://substack.com/@palle/note/c-96583285Delivering Happiness: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6828896-delivering-happinessZappos:https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/surprise-will-of-late-zappos-ceo-adds-new-twist-for-his-fortune-66b2c5aa?st=qJfSB1&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalinkRecomendación de Lucas: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54659324-dungeon-crawler-carl__Muchas gracias a nuestro Sponsor, Analytics Town por apoyar este episodio!¿Quieres crear un producto basado en inteligencia artificial pero no sabes por dónde empezar?En Analytics Town te ayudamos a diseñar tu nuevo producto y modelo de negocio, desde la estrategia hasta la ejecución del software con módulos de IA.Descubrimos oportunidades para tu empresa y validamos tu idea.Armamos el diseño funcional y el modelo de negocio.Diseñamos y desarrollamos tu producto potenciado con Inteligencia Artificial.Te acompañamos en todo el proceso, desde la idea hasta convertirlo en negocio rentable...Si mencionas que vienes de Indie vs Unicornio, te damos un 25% de descuento en el desarrollo de tu primer MVP.

Venture capital is much fancied today.Is this job which looks like cutting cheques for products and founders you like, for everyone?As for any work, there are traits you should have and some which won't help you on the job.We have with us Kushal Bhagia (All In Capital), Karthik Prabhakar (Peer Capital), and Rajan (Upekkha).Three people who interestingly all began as engineers and took different career paths to today become Fund managers of leading VC firms.All In Capital's $24M pre-seed fund backing early-stage founders,Peer Capital's $75M early-stage fund investing in tech-first Indian startups from seed to Series A,Upekkha's $40M Capital's accelerator-style fund supporting B2B SaaS startups.Tune in!01:53 – Why builders shouldn't become VCs?03:12 – Why best VCs sell well & stay curious05:12 – How the VC job is like Flying a plane07:48 – How parental instincts enable VCs?10:42 – Is fundraising harder than ever?14:12 – What makes people write VC cheques?18:03 – Where do India's rich family offices invest?20:30 – Why India still doesn't have its own YC?22:55 – The OG YC when startups weren't cool28:00 – Can YC's numbers ever be replicated?33:03 – David v/s Goliath of Small vs large funds39:02 – Zepto's first $50k cheque40:22 – Sectors VCs won't touch41:35 – Story-driven v/s numbers-driven Fundraising44:36 – How we missed Swiggy, Postman & Zepto?46:18 – The best VCs48:24 – What needs to change in Indian VC?49:47 – Founders we'd invest In (But not work for)51:25 – Unlearnings as an Investor-------------​​India's talent has built the world's tech—now it's time to lead it.This mission goes beyond startups. It's about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.What is Neon Fund?We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that's done it before.Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we're doing it all at Neon.-------------Check us out on:Website: https://neon.fund/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect with Siddhartha on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7-------------This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.Send us a text

What happens when Apple hints that Google's search dominance may be cracking, triggering a $155 billion wipeout in Alphabet's value?Many still think Google search is untouchable, but a shift in user behavior and a few lines in DOJ testimony may signal otherwise.In this episode, Chris Saad, Yaniv Bernstein, and Amir Shevat explore how Apple's revelation about declining Safari search traffic could mark a turning point for Google, what's really behind Trump's Middle East ‘AI investment tour,' and how YC's latest startup wishlist shows where the next wave of disruption will come from.In this episode, you will:Understand why Apple's testimony may be a warning shot for Google SearchLearn how AI is reshaping the definition—and monetization—of ‘search'Analyze Trump's Saudi tech tour and its real impact on US innovationEvaluate the shift from ad-driven to subscription-based AI business modelsExplore why Y Combinator wants startups to go ‘full stack' instead of selling to incumbentsUnpack the risks of shiny-object AI ideas vs. defensible startup modelsDiscover which overlooked AI sectors still have white space for new foundersFrom Google's search slowdown to Trump's headline-grabbing AI deals and YC's startup roadmap, this episode gives you the strategic insight founders need to navigate tech's shifting landscape.The Pact Honor the Startup Podcast Pact! If you have listened to TSP and gotten value from it, please:Follow, rate, and review us in your listening appSubscribe to the TSP Mailing List to gain access to exclusive newsletter-only content and early access to information on upcoming episodes: https://thestartuppodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Secure your official TSP merchandise at https://shop.tsp.show/ Follow us here on YouTube for full-video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNjm1MTdjysRRV07fSf0yGg Give us a public shout-out on LinkedIn or anywhere you have a social media followingKey linksThe Startup Podcast is sponsored by Vanta. Vanta helps businesses get and stay compliant by automating up to 90% of the work for the most in-demand compliance frameworks.With over 200 integrations, you can easily monitor and secure the tools your business relies on. For a limited-time offer of US$1,000 off, go to www.vanta.com/tsp .Get your question in for our next Q&A episode: https://forms.gle/NZzgNWVLiFmwvFA2A The Startup Podcast website: https://www.tsp.show/episodes/Learn more about Chris and YanivWork 1:1 with Chris: http://chrissaad.com/advisory/ Follow Chris on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrissaad/ Follow Yaniv on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ybernstein/Producer: Justin McArthur https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-mcarthurIntro Voice: Jeremiah Owyang https://web-strategist.com/

In this episode of The SaaS CFO Podcast, I'm joined by Anna Berger, founder and CEO of Trayd—a game-changing construction payroll and compliance software. Anna shares how her career in marketing and personal roots in the construction industry inspired her to tackle the toughest back-office challenges specialty contractors face, from HR and scheduling to payroll and compliance. We dive into Anna's journey from working at top ad agencies and Marriott International to becoming a two-time founder and YC alum. She opens up about the challenges and wins of building Trayd, raising $4.5 million in seed funding, and the importance of customer retention and consistent branding in SaaS growth. If you're passionate about SaaS, vertical solutions, or just love a good founder story, you won't want to miss this conversation. Tune in to learn how Anna and her team are streamlining complex operations for contractors and driving rapid growth in an industry that's overdue for innovation! Show Notes: 00:00 Diverse Founder Background Advantage 03:31 Unified Construction Software Solution 06:38 Family-Driven Construction Insight 10:56 Startup Fundraising Journey 14:39 CEO Focus: Retention and Growth Metrics 16:37 "Dogfooding to Improve Customer Experience" Links: SaaS Fundraising Stories: https://www.thesaasnews.com/news/trayd-raises-4-5-million-in-seed-round Anna Berger's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annajberger/ Trayd's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/traydinc/ Trayd's Website: https://www.buildtrayd.com/ To learn more about Ben check out the links below: Subscribe to Ben's daily metrics newsletter: https://saasmetricsschool.beehiiv.com/subscribe Subscribe to Ben's SaaS newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/df1db6bf8bca/the-saas-cfo-sign-up-landing-page SaaS Metrics courses here: https://www.thesaasacademy.com/ Join Ben's SaaS community here: https://www.thesaasacademy.com/offers/ivNjwYDx/checkout Follow Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benrmurray

Despite courtroom chaos, Rippling is still going full steam ahead. The HR tech startup at the center of an increasingly dramatic legal battle with rival Deel just raised a fresh $450 million in funding at a $16.8 billion valuation, and launched a new “Startup Stack” to woo early-stage companies—winning over Y Combinator as both an investor and a client. The funding lands amid the company's high-profile legal fight with Deel, which Rippling accuses of movie-worthy corporate espionage, complete with secret crypto payments and decoy Slack channels. Deel has denied the claims and fired back with its own lawsuit, calling Rippling's accusations a “distraction.” Today on Equity, Mary Ann Azevedo and Charles Rollet are digging into the HR tech showdown from legal drama to IPO implications and global intrigue. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: The alleged spy, Rippling's evidence, and Deel's denials YC's involvement in Rippling's latest project, and why the move is raising eyebrows The potential impact on IPOs for both companies  Equity is TechCrunch's flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.  Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode overview: In this conversation, Verto co-founder and CEO Ola Oyetayo shares the journey of building a cross-border payments platform that tackles the unique challenges African businesses face when making international transactions. Since graduating from Y Combinator in 2019, Verto has established itself as what Oyetayo describes as a profitable and cashflow positive fintech serving multiple African markets. Incidentally, the company recently made headlines after winning the prestigious $1 million Milken-Motsepe Prize in FinTech. He discusses his team's pragmatic approach to addressing payment barriers in emerging markets, why traditional financial institutions have failed to serve these regions effectively, and how technology can disrupt traditional banking networks that have historically excluded certain markets. Andile Masuku engages Oyetayo on the evolution of fintech in Africa, the role of privilege and networks in business success, and the future potential of stablecoins to revolutionise cross-border payments in ways that might prove more transformative for emerging markets than developed ones. Key topics: - Verto's position in the cross-border payments landscape - The strategic decision to focus on B2B rather than consumer payments - The untapped $286 billion trade flow between Africa and China - Why 96-97% of business cross-border payments still go through traditional banks - The innovator's dilemma Verto faces with the rise of stablecoins Notable points: 1. In 2018, Oyetayo launched Verto's business model alongside his co-founder Anthony Oduu after spotting a solutions gap for African businesses making international payments outside of traditional banks 2. Verto has been profitable and cash flow positive for approximately 18 months 3. How a chance meeting with legendary VC Vinod Khosla at YC in 2019 first turned him on to the stablecoin investment opportunity—years before they became mainstream 4. The company operates in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania and the Francophone region 5. Despite previous experience in institutional finance, Oyetayo admits "ignorance is bliss" helped him tackle a problem others saw as too risky 6. The potential of stablecoins to solve liquidity, volatility and capital control challenges in emerging markets Listen out for Oyetayo's take on Paystack's B2C play Zap, the fintech ecosystem implications of Moniepoint's "unicornification," and his contrarian insight that stablecoins will revolutionise emerging markets while having minimal impact in developed economies: "This is not a popular opinion... There's just no case for stablecoins in developed markets. People talk about, oh, it's going to disrupt Visa and MasterCard... I don't see that coming anytime soon." Image credit: Verto

Gros épisode qui couvre un large spectre de sujets : Java, Scala, Micronaut, NodeJS, l'IA et la compétence des développeurs, le sampling dans les LLMs, les DTO, le vibe coding, les changements chez Broadcom et Red Hat ainsi que plusieurs nouvelles sur les licences open source. Enregistré le 7 mai 2025 Téléchargement de l'épisode LesCastCodeurs-Episode-325.mp3 ou en vidéo sur YouTube. News Langages A l'occasion de JavaOne et du lancement de Java 24, Oracle lance un nouveau site avec des ressources vidéo pour apprendre le langage https://learn.java/ site plutôt à destination des débutants et des enseignants couvre la syntaxe aussi, y compris les ajouts plus récents comme les records ou le pattern matching c'est pas le site le plus trendy du monde. Martin Odersky partage un long article sur l'état de l'écosystème Scala et les évolutions du language https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2025/03/24/evolving-scala.html Stabilité et besoin d'évolution : Scala maintient sa position (~14ème mondial) avec des bases techniques solides, mais doit évoluer face à la concurrence pour rester pertinent. Axes prioritaires : L'évolution se concentre sur l'amélioration du duo sécurité/convivialité, le polissage du langage (suppression des “rugosités”) et la simplification pour les débutants. Innovation continue : Geler les fonctionnalités est exclu ; l'innovation est clé pour la valeur de Scala. Le langage doit rester généraliste et ne pas se lier à un framework spécifique. Défis et progrès : L'outillage (IDE, outils de build comme sbt, scala-cli, Mill) et la facilité d'apprentissage de l'écosystème sont des points d'attention, avec des améliorations en cours (partenariat pédagogique, plateformes simples). Des strings encore plus rapides ! https://inside.java/2025/05/01/strings-just-got-faster/ Dans JDK 25, la performance de la fonction String::hashCode a été améliorée pour être principalement constant foldable. Cela signifie que si les chaînes de caractères sont utilisées comme clés dans une Map statique et immuable, des gains de performance significatifs sont probables. L'amélioration repose sur l'annotation interne @Stable appliquée au champ privé String.hash. Cette annotation permet à la machine virtuelle de lire la valeur du hash une seule fois et de la considérer comme constante si elle n'est pas la valeur par défaut (zéro). Par conséquent, l'opération String::hashCode peut être remplacée par la valeur de hash connue, optimisant ainsi les lookups dans les Map immuables. Un cas limite est celui où le code de hachage de la chaîne est zéro, auquel cas l'optimisation ne fonctionne pas (par exemple, pour la chaîne vide “”). Bien que l'annotation @Stable soit interne au JDK, un nouveau JEP (JEP 502: Stable Values (Preview)) est en cours de développement pour permettre aux utilisateurs de bénéficier indirectement de fonctionnalités similaires. AtomicHash, une implémentation Java d'une HashMap qui est thread-safe, atomique et non-bloquante https://github.com/arxila/atomichash implémenté sous forme de version immutable de Concurrent Hash Trie Librairies Sortie de Micronaut 4.8.0 https://micronaut.io/2025/04/01/micronaut-framework-4-8-0-released/ Mise à jour de la BOM (Bill of Materials) : La version 4.8.0 met à jour la BOM de la plateforme Micronaut. Améliorations de Micronaut Core : Intégration de Micronaut SourceGen pour la génération interne de métadonnées et d'expressions bytecode. Nombreuses améliorations dans Micronaut SourceGen. Ajout du traçage de l'injection de dépendances pour faciliter le débogage au démarrage et à la création des beans. Nouveau membre definitionType dans l'annotation @Client pour faciliter le partage d'interfaces entre client et serveur. Support de la fusion dans les Bean Mappers via l'annotation @Mapping. Nouvelle liveness probe détectant les threads bloqués (deadlocked) via ThreadMXBean. Intégration Kubernetes améliorée : Mise à jour du client Java Kubernetes vers la version 22.0.1. Ajout du module Micronaut Kubernetes Client OpenAPI, offrant une alternative au client officiel avec moins de dépendances, une configuration unifiée, le support des filtres et la compatibilité Native Image. Introduction d'un nouveau runtime serveur basé sur le serveur HTTP intégré de Java, permettant de créer des applications sans dépendances serveur externes. Ajout dans Micronaut Micrometer d'un module pour instrumenter les sources de données (traces et métriques). Ajout de la condition condition dans l'annotation @MetricOptions pour contrôler l'activation des métriques via une expression. Support des Consul watches dans Micronaut Discovery Client pour détecter les changements de configuration distribuée. Possibilité de générer du code source à partir d'un schéma JSON via les plugins de build (Gradle et Maven). Web Node v24.0.0 passe en version Current: https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v24.0.0 Mise à jour du moteur V8 vers la version 13.6 : intégration de nouvelles fonctionnalités JavaScript telles que Float16Array, la gestion explicite des ressources (using), RegExp.escape, WebAssembly Memory64 et Error.isError. npm 11 inclus : améliorations en termes de performance, de sécurité et de compatibilité avec les packages JavaScript modernes. Changement de compilateur pour Windows : abandon de MSVC au profit de ClangCL pour la compilation de Node.js sur Windows. AsyncLocalStorage utilise désormais AsyncContextFrame par défaut : offrant une gestion plus efficace du contexte asynchrone. URLPattern disponible globalement : plus besoin d'importer explicitement cette API pour effectuer des correspondances d'URL. Améliorations du modèle de permissions : le flag expérimental --experimental-permission devient --permission, signalant une stabilité accrue de cette fonctionnalité. Améliorations du test runner : les sous-tests sont désormais attendus automatiquement, simplifiant l'écriture des tests et réduisant les erreurs liées aux promesses non gérées. Intégration d'Undici 7 : amélioration des capacités du client HTTP avec de meilleures performances et un support étendu des fonctionnalités HTTP modernes. Dépréciations et suppressions : Dépréciation de url.parse() au profit de l'API WHATWG URL. Suppression de tls.createSecurePair. Dépréciation de SlowBuffer. Dépréciation de l'instanciation de REPL sans new. Dépréciation de l'utilisation des classes Zlib sans new. Dépréciation du passage de args à spawn et execFile dans child_process. Node.js 24 est actuellement la version “Current” et deviendra une version LTS en octobre 2025. Il est recommandé de tester cette version pour évaluer son impact sur vos applications. Data et Intelligence Artificielle Apprendre à coder reste crucial et l'IA est là pour venir en aide : https://kyrylo.org/software/2025/03/27/learn-to-code-ignore-ai-then-use-ai-to-code-even-better.html Apprendre à coder reste essentiel malgré l'IA. L'IA peut assister la programmation. Une solide base est cruciale pour comprendre et contrôler le code. Cela permet d'éviter la dépendance à l'IA. Cela réduit le risque de remplacement par des outils d'IA accessibles à tous. L'IA est un outil, pas un substitut à la maîtrise des fondamentaux. Super article de Anthropic qui essaie de comprendre comment fonctionne la “pensée” des LLMs https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language-model Effet boîte noire : Stratégies internes des IA (Claude) opaques aux développeurs et utilisateurs. Objectif : Comprendre le “raisonnement” interne pour vérifier capacités et intentions. Méthode : Inspiration neurosciences, développement d'un “microscope IA” (regarder quels circuits neuronaux s'activent). Technique : Identification de concepts (“features”) et de “circuits” internes. Multilinguisme : Indice d'un “langage de pensée” conceptuel commun à toutes les langues avant de traduire dans une langue particulière. Planification : Capacité à anticiper (ex: rimes en poésie), pas seulement de la génération mot par mot (token par token). Raisonnement non fidèle : Peut fabriquer des arguments plausibles (“bullshitting”) pour une conclusion donnée. Logique multi-étapes : Combine des faits distincts, ne se contente pas de mémoriser. Hallucinations : Refus par défaut ; réponse si “connaissance” active, sinon risque d'hallucination si erreur. “Jailbreaks” : Tension entre cohérence grammaticale (pousse à continuer) et sécurité (devrait refuser). Bilan : Méthodes limitées mais prometteuses pour la transparence et la fiabilité de l'IA. Le “S” dans MCP veut dire Securité (ou pas !) https://elenacross7.medium.com/%EF%B8%8F-the-s-in-mcp-stands-for-security-91407b33ed6b La spécification MCP pour permettre aux LLMs d'avoir accès à divers outils et fonctions a peut-être été adoptée un peu rapidement, alors qu'elle n'était pas encore prête niveau sécurité L'article liste 4 types d'attaques possibles : vulnérabilité d'injection de commandes attaque d'empoisonnement d'outils redéfinition silencieuse de l'outil le shadowing d'outils inter-serveurs Pour l'instant, MCP n'est pas sécurisé : Pas de standard d'authentification Pas de chiffrement de contexte Pas de vérification d'intégrité des outils Basé sur l'article de InvariantLabs https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp-security-notification-tool-poisoning-attacks Sortie Infinispan 15.2 - pre rolling upgrades 16.0 https://infinispan.org/blog/2025/03/27/infinispan-15-2 Support de Redis JSON + scripts Lua Métriques JVM désactivables Nouvelle console (PatternFly 6) Docs améliorées (métriques + logs) JDK 17 min, support JDK 24 Fin du serveur natif (performances) Guillaume montre comment développer un serveur MCP HTTP Server Sent Events avec l'implémentation de référence Java et LangChain4j https://glaforge.dev/posts/2025/04/04/mcp-client-and-server-with-java-mcp-sdk-and-langchain4j/ Développé en Java, avec l'implémentation de référence qui est aussi à la base de l'implémentation dans Spring Boot (mais indépendant de Spring) Le serveur MCP est exposé sous forme de servlet dans Jetty Le client MCP lui, est développé avec le module MCP de LangChain4j c'est semi independant de Spring dans le sens où c'est dépendant de Reactor et de ses interface. il y a une conversation sur le github d'anthropic pour trouver une solution, mais cela ne parait pas simple. Les fallacies derrière la citation “AI won't replace you, but humans using AI will” https://platforms.substack.com/cp/161356485 La fallacie de l'automatisation vs. l'augmentation : Elle se concentre sur l'amélioration des tâches existantes avec l'IA au lieu de considérer le changement de la valeur de ces tâches dans un nouveau système. La fallacie des gains de productivité : L'augmentation de la productivité ne se traduit pas toujours par plus de valeur pour les travailleurs, car la valeur créée peut être capturée ailleurs dans le système. La fallacie des emplois statiques : Les emplois sont des constructions organisationnelles qui peuvent être redéfinies par l'IA, rendant les rôles traditionnels obsolètes. La fallacie de la compétition “moi vs. quelqu'un utilisant l'IA” : La concurrence évolue lorsque l'IA modifie les contraintes fondamentales d'un secteur, rendant les compétences existantes moins pertinentes. La fallacie de la continuité du flux de travail : L'IA peut entraîner une réimagination complète des flux de travail, éliminant le besoin de certaines compétences. La fallacie des outils neutres : Les outils d'IA ne sont pas neutres et peuvent redistribuer le pouvoir organisationnel en changeant la façon dont les décisions sont prises et exécutées. La fallacie du salaire stable : Le maintien d'un emploi ne garantit pas un salaire stable, car la valeur du travail peut diminuer avec l'augmentation des capacités de l'IA. La fallacie de l'entreprise stable : L'intégration de l'IA nécessite une restructuration de l'entreprise et ne se fait pas dans un vide organisationnel. Comprendre le “sampling” dans les LLMs https://rentry.co/samplers Explique pourquoi les LLMs utilisent des tokens Les différentes méthodes de “sampling” : càd de choix de tokens Les hyperparamètres comme la température, top-p, et leur influence réciproque Les algorithmes de tokenisation comme Byte Pair Encoding et SentencePiece. Un de moins … OpenAI va racheter Windsurf pour 3 milliards de dollars. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-06/openai-reaches-agreement-to-buy-startup-windsurf-for-3-billion l'accord n'est pas encore finalisé Windsurf était valorisé à 1,25 milliards l'an dernier et OpenAI a levé 40 milliards dernièrement portant sa valeur à 300 milliards Le but pour OpenAI est de rentrer dans le monde des assistants de code pour lesquels ils sont aujourd'hui absent Docker desktop se met à l'IA… ? Une nouvelle fonctionnalité dans docker desktop 4.4 sur macos: Docker Model Runner https://dev.to/docker/run-genai-models-locally-with-docker-model-runner-5elb Permet de faire tourner des modèles nativement en local ( https://docs.docker.com/model-runner/ ) mais aussi des serveurs MCP ( https://docs.docker.com/ai/mcp-catalog-and-toolkit/ ) Outillage Jetbrains défend la suppression des commentaires négatifs sur son assistant IA https://devclass.com/2025/04/30/jetbrains-defends-removal-of-negative-reviews-for-unpopular-ai-assistant/?td=rt-3a L'IA Assistant de JetBrains, lancée en juillet 2023, a été téléchargée plus de 22 millions de fois mais n'est notée que 2,3 sur 5. Des utilisateurs ont remarqué que certaines critiques négatives étaient supprimées, ce qui a provoqué une réaction négative sur les réseaux sociaux. Un employé de JetBrains a expliqué que les critiques ont été supprimées soit parce qu'elles mentionnaient des problèmes déjà résolus, soit parce qu'elles violaient leur politique concernant les “grossièretés, etc.” L'entreprise a reconnu qu'elle aurait pu mieux gérer la situation, un représentant déclarant : “Supprimer plusieurs critiques d'un coup sans préavis semblait suspect. Nous aurions dû au moins publier un avis et fournir plus de détails aux auteurs.” Parmi les problèmes de l'IA Assistant signalés par les utilisateurs figurent : un support limité pour les fournisseurs de modèles tiers, une latence notable, des ralentissements fréquents, des fonctionnalités principales verrouillées aux services cloud de JetBrains, une expérience utilisateur incohérente et une documentation insuffisante. Une plainte courante est que l'IA Assistant s'installe sans permission. Un utilisateur sur Reddit l'a qualifié de “plugin agaçant qui s'auto-répare/se réinstalle comme un phénix”. JetBrains a récemment introduit un niveau gratuit et un nouvel agent IA appelé Junie, destiné à fonctionner parallèlement à l'IA Assistant, probablement en réponse à la concurrence entre fournisseurs. Mais il est plus char a faire tourner. La société s'est engagée à explorer de nouvelles approches pour traiter les mises à jour majeures différemment et envisage d'implémenter des critiques par version ou de marquer les critiques comme “Résolues” avec des liens vers les problèmes correspondants au lieu de les supprimer. Contrairement à des concurrents comme Microsoft, AWS ou Google, JetBrains commercialise uniquement des outils et services de développement et ne dispose pas d'une activité cloud distincte sur laquelle s'appuyer. Vos images de README et fichiers Markdown compatibles pour le dark mode de GitHub: https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/how-to-make-your-images-in-markdown-on-github-adjust-for-dark-mode-and-light-mode/ Seulement quelques lignes de pure HTML pour le faire Architecture Alors, les DTOs, c'est bien ou c'est pas bien ? https://codeopinion.com/dtos-mapping-the-good-the-bad-and-the-excessive/ Utilité des DTOs : Les DTOs servent à transférer des données entre les différentes couches d'une application, en mappant souvent les données entre différentes représentations (par exemple, entre la base de données et l'interface utilisateur). Surutilisation fréquente : L'article souligne que les DTOs sont souvent utilisés de manière excessive, notamment pour créer des API HTTP qui ne font que refléter les entités de la base de données, manquant ainsi l'opportunité de composer des données plus riches. Vraie valeur : La valeur réelle des DTOs réside dans la gestion du couplage entre les couches et la composition de données provenant de sources multiples en formes optimisées pour des cas d'utilisation spécifiques. Découplage : Il est suggéré d'utiliser les DTOs pour découpler les modèles de données internes des contrats externes (comme les API), ce qui permet une évolution et une gestion des versions indépendantes. Exemple avec CQRS : Dans le cadre de CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation), les réponses aux requêtes (queries) agissent comme des DTOs spécifiquement adaptés aux besoins de l'interface utilisateur, pouvant inclure des données de diverses sources. Protection des données internes : Les DTOs aident à distinguer et protéger les modèles de données internes (privés) des changements externes (publics). Éviter l'excès : L'auteur met en garde contre les couches de mapping excessives (mapper un DTO vers un autre DTO) qui n'apportent pas de valeur ajoutée. Création ciblée : Il est conseillé de ne créer des DTOs que lorsqu'ils résolvent des problèmes concrets, tels que la gestion du couplage ou la facilitation de la composition de données. Méthodologies Même Guillaume se met au “vibe coding” https://glaforge.dev/posts/2025/05/02/vibe-coding-an-mcp-server-with-micronaut-and-gemini/ Selon Andrey Karpathy, c'est le fait de POC-er un proto, une appli jetable du weekend https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 Mais Simon Willison s'insurge que certains confondent coder avec l'assistance de l'IA avec le vibe coding https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/1/not-vibe-coding/ Guillaume c'est ici amusé à développer un serveur MCP avec Micronaut, en utilisant Gemini, l'IA de Google. Contrairement à Quarkus ou Spring Boot, Micronaut n'a pas encore de module ou de support spécifique pour faciliter la création de serveur MCP Sécurité Une faille de sécurité 10/10 sur Tomcat https://www.it-connect.fr/apache-tomcat-cette-faille-activement-exploitee-seulement-30-heures-apres-sa-divulgation-patchez/ Une faille de sécurité critique (CVE-2025-24813) affecte Apache Tomcat, permettant l'exécution de code à distance Cette vulnérabilité est activement exploitée seulement 30 heures après sa divulgation du 10 mars 2025 L'attaque ne nécessite aucune authentification et est particulièrement simple à exécuter Elle utilise une requête PUT avec une charge utile Java sérialisée encodée en base64, suivie d'une requête GET L'encodage en base64 permet de contourner la plupart des filtres de sécurité Les serveurs vulnérables utilisent un stockage de session basé sur des fichiers (configuration répandue) Les versions affectées sont : 11.0.0-M1 à 11.0.2, 10.1.0-M1 à 10.1.34, et 9.0.0.M1 à 9.0.98 Les mises à jour recommandées sont : 11.0.3+, 10.1.35+ et 9.0.99+ Les experts prévoient des attaques plus sophistiquées dans les prochaines phases d'exploitation (upload de config ou jsp) Sécurisation d'un serveur ssh https://ittavern.com/ssh-server-hardening/ un article qui liste les configurations clés pour sécuriser un serveur SSH par exemple, enlever password authentigfication, changer de port, desactiver le login root, forcer le protocol ssh 2, certains que je ne connaissais pas comme MaxStartups qui limite le nombre de connections non authentifiées concurrentes Port knocking est une technique utile mais demande une approche cliente consciente du protocol Oracle admet que les identités IAM de ses clients ont leaké https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/08/oracle_cloud_compromised/ Oracle a confirmé à certains clients que son cloud public a été compromis, alors que l'entreprise avait précédemment nié toute intrusion. Un pirate informatique a revendiqué avoir piraté deux serveurs d'authentification d'Oracle et volé environ six millions d'enregistrements, incluant des clés de sécurité privées, des identifiants chiffrés et des entrées LDAP. La faille exploitée serait la vulnérabilité CVE-2021-35587 dans Oracle Access Manager, qu'Oracle n'avait pas corrigée sur ses propres systèmes. Le pirate a créé un fichier texte début mars sur login.us2.oraclecloud.com contenant son adresse email pour prouver son accès. Selon Oracle, un ancien serveur contenant des données vieilles de huit ans aurait été compromis, mais un client affirme que des données de connexion aussi récentes que 2024 ont été dérobées. Oracle fait face à un procès au Texas concernant cette violation de données. Cette intrusion est distincte d'une autre attaque contre Oracle Health, sur laquelle l'entreprise refuse de commenter. Oracle pourrait faire face à des sanctions sous le RGPD européen qui exige la notification des parties affectées dans les 72 heures suivant la découverte d'une fuite de données. Le comportement d'Oracle consistant à nier puis à admettre discrètement l'intrusion est inhabituel en 2025 et pourrait mener à d'autres actions en justice collectives. Une GitHub action très populaire compromise https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/harden-runner-detection-tj-actions-changed-files-action-is-compromised Compromission de l'action tj-actions/changed-files : En mars 2025, une action GitHub très utilisée (tj-actions/changed-files) a été compromise. Des versions modifiées de l'action ont exposé des secrets CI/CD dans les logs de build. Méthode d'attaque : Un PAT compromis a permis de rediriger plusieurs tags de version vers un commit contenant du code malveillant. Détails du code malveillant : Le code injecté exécutait une fonction Node.js encodée en base64, qui téléchargeait un script Python. Ce script parcourait la mémoire du runner GitHub à la recherche de secrets (tokens, clés…) et les exposait dans les logs. Dans certains cas, les données étaient aussi envoyées via une requête réseau. Période d'exposition : Les versions compromises étaient actives entre le 12 et le 15 mars 2025. Tout dépôt, particulièrement ceux publiques, ayant utilisé l'action pendant cette période doit être considéré comme potentiellement exposé. Détection : L'activité malveillante a été repérée par l'analyse des comportements inhabituels pendant l'exécution des workflows, comme des connexions réseau inattendues. Réaction : GitHub a supprimé l'action compromise, qui a ensuite été nettoyée. Impact potentiel : Tous les secrets apparaissant dans les logs doivent être considérés comme compromis, même dans les dépôts privés, et régénérés sans délai. Loi, société et organisation Les startup the YCombinateur ont les plus fortes croissances de leur histoire https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/15/y-combinator-startups-are-fastest-growing-in-fund-history-because-of-ai.html Les entreprises en phase de démarrage à Silicon Valley connaissent une croissance significative grâce à l'intelligence artificielle. Le PDG de Y Combinator, Garry Tan, affirme que l'ensemble des startups de la dernière cohorte a connu une croissance hebdomadaire de 10% pendant neuf mois. L'IA permet aux développeurs d'automatiser des tâches répétitives et de générer du code grâce aux grands modèles de langage. Pour environ 25% des startups actuelles de YC, 95% de leur code a été écrit par l'IA. Cette révolution permet aux entreprises de se développer avec moins de personnel - certaines atteignant 10 millions de dollars de revenus avec moins de 10 employés. La mentalité de “croissance à tout prix” a été remplacée par un renouveau d'intérêt pour la rentabilité. Environ 80% des entreprises présentées lors du “demo day” étaient centrées sur l'IA, avec quelques startups en robotique et semi-conducteurs. Y Combinator investit 500 000 dollars dans les startups en échange d'une participation au capital, suivi d'un programme de trois mois. Red Hat middleware (ex-jboss) rejoint IBM https://markclittle.blogspot.com/2025/03/red-hat-middleware-moving-to-ibm.html Les activités Middleware de Red Hat (incluant JBoss, Quarkus, etc.) vont être transférées vers IBM, dans l'unité dédiée à la sécurité des données, à l'IAM et aux runtimes. Ce changement découle d'une décision stratégique de Red Hat de se concentrer davantage sur le cloud hybride et l'intelligence artificielle. Mark Little explique que ce transfert était devenu inévitable, Red Hat ayant réduit ses investissements dans le Middleware ces dernières années. L'intégration vise à renforcer l'innovation autour de Java en réunissant les efforts de Red Hat et IBM sur ce sujet. Les produits Middleware resteront open source et les clients continueront à bénéficier du support habituel sans changement. Mark Little affirme que des projets comme Quarkus continueront à être soutenus et que cette évolution est bénéfique pour la communauté Java. Un an de commonhaus https://www.commonhaus.org/activity/253.html un an, démarré sur les communautés qu'ils connaissaient bien maintenant 14 projets et put en accepter plus confiance, gouvernance legère et proteger le futur des projets automatisation de l'administratif, stabiilité sans complexité, les developpeurs au centre du processus de décision ils ont besoins de members et supporters (financiers) ils veulent accueillir des projets au delà de ceux du cercles des Java Champions Spring Cloud Data Flow devient un produit commercial et ne sera plus maintenu en open source https://spring.io/blog/2025/04/21/spring-cloud-data-flow-commercial Peut-être sous l'influence de Broadcom, Spring se met à mettre en mode propriétaire des composants du portefeuille Spring ils disent que peu de gens l'utilisaent en mode OSS et la majorité venait d'un usage dans la plateforme Tanzu Maintenir en open source le coutent du temps qu'ils son't pas sur ces projets. La CNCF protège le projet NATS, dans la fondation depuis 2018, vu que la société Synadia qui y contribue souhaitait reprendre le contrôle du projet https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/04/24/protecting-nats-and-the-integrity-of-open-source-cncfs-commitment-to-the-community/ CNCF : Protège projets OS, gouvernance neutre. Synadia vs CNCF : Veut retirer NATS, licence non-OS (BUSL). CNCF : Accuse Synadia de “claw back” (reprise illégitime). Revendications Synadia : Domaine nats.io, orga GitHub. Marque NATS : Synadia n'a pas transféré (promesse rompue malgré aide CNCF). Contestation Synadia : Juge règles CNCF “trop vagues”. Vote interne : Mainteneurs Synadia votent sortie CNCF (sans communauté). Support CNCF : Investissement majeur ($ audits, légal), succès communautaire (>700 orgs). Avenir NATS (CNCF) : Maintien sous Apache 2.0, gouvernance ouverte. Actions CNCF : Health check, appel mainteneurs, annulation marque Synadia, rejet demandes. Mais finalement il semble y avoir un bon dénouement : https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2025/05/01/cncf-and-synadia-align-on-securing-the-future-of-the-nats-io-project/ Accord pour l'avenir de NATS.io : La Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) et Synadia ont conclu un accord pour sécuriser le futur du projet NATS.io. Transfert des marques NATS : Synadia va céder ses deux enregistrements de marque NATS à la Linux Foundation afin de renforcer la gouvernance ouverte du projet. Maintien au sein de la CNCF : L'infrastructure et les actifs du projet NATS resteront sous l'égide de la CNCF, garantissant ainsi sa stabilité à long terme et son développement en open source sous licence Apache-2.0. Reconnaissance et engagement : La Linux Foundation, par la voix de Todd Moore, reconnaît les contributions de Synadia et son soutien continu. Derek Collison, PDG de Synadia, réaffirme l'engagement de son entreprise envers NATS et la collaboration avec la Linux Foundation et la CNCF. Adoption et soutien communautaire : NATS est largement adopté et considéré comme une infrastructure critique. Il bénéficie d'un fort soutien de la communauté pour sa nature open source et l'implication continue de Synadia. Finalement, Redis revient vers une licence open source OSI, avec la AGPL https://foojay.io/today/redis-is-now-available-under-the-agplv3-open-source-license/ Redis passe à la licence open source AGPLv3 pour contrer l'exploitation par les fournisseurs cloud sans contribution. Le passage précédent à la licence SSPL avait nui à la relation avec la communauté open source. Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) est revenu chez Redis. Redis 8 adopte la licence AGPL, intègre les fonctionnalités de Redis Stack (JSON, Time Series, etc.) et introduit les “vector sets” (le support de calcul vectoriel développé par Salvatore). Ces changements visent à renforcer Redis en tant que plateforme appréciée des développeurs, conformément à la vision initiale de Salvatore. Conférences La liste des conférences provenant de Developers Conferences Agenda/List par Aurélie Vache et contributeurs : 6-7 mai 2025 : GOSIM AI Paris - Paris (France) 7-9 mai 2025 : Devoxx UK - London (UK) 15 mai 2025 : Cloud Toulouse - Toulouse (France) 16 mai 2025 : AFUP Day 2025 Lille - Lille (France) 16 mai 2025 : AFUP Day 2025 Lyon - Lyon (France) 16 mai 2025 : AFUP Day 2025 Poitiers - Poitiers (France) 22-23 mai 2025 : Flupa UX Days 2025 - Paris (France) 24 mai 2025 : Polycloud - Montpellier (France) 24 mai 2025 : NG Baguette Conf 2025 - Nantes (France) 3 juin 2025 : TechReady - Nantes (France) 5-6 juin 2025 : AlpesCraft - Grenoble (France) 5-6 juin 2025 : Devquest 2025 - Niort (France) 10-11 juin 2025 : Modern Workplace Conference Paris 2025 - Paris (France) 11-13 juin 2025 : Devoxx Poland - Krakow (Poland) 12 juin 2025 : Positive Design Days - Strasbourg (France) 12-13 juin 2025 : Agile Tour Toulouse - Toulouse (France) 12-13 juin 2025 : DevLille - Lille (France) 13 juin 2025 : Tech F'Est 2025 - Nancy (France) 17 juin 2025 : Mobilis In Mobile - Nantes (France) 19-21 juin 2025 : Drupal Barcamp Perpignan 2025 - Perpignan (France) 24 juin 2025 : WAX 2025 - Aix-en-Provence (France) 25-26 juin 2025 : Agi'Lille 2025 - Lille (France) 25-27 juin 2025 : BreizhCamp 2025 - Rennes (France) 26-27 juin 2025 : Sunny Tech - Montpellier (France) 1-4 juillet 2025 : Open edX Conference - 2025 - Palaiseau (France) 7-9 juillet 2025 : Riviera DEV 2025 - Sophia Antipolis (France) 5 septembre 2025 : JUG Summer Camp 2025 - La Rochelle (France) 12 septembre 2025 : Agile Pays Basque 2025 - Bidart (France) 18-19 septembre 2025 : API Platform Conference - Lille (France) & Online 23 septembre 2025 : OWASP AppSec France 2025 - Paris (France) 25-26 septembre 2025 : Paris Web 2025 - Paris (France) 2-3 octobre 2025 : Volcamp - Clermont-Ferrand (France) 3 octobre 2025 : DevFest Perros-Guirec 2025 - Perros-Guirec (France) 6-10 octobre 2025 : Devoxx Belgium - Antwerp (Belgium) 7 octobre 2025 : BSides Mulhouse - Mulhouse (France) 9-10 octobre 2025 : Forum PHP 2025 - Marne-la-Vallée (France) 9-10 octobre 2025 : EuroRust 2025 - Paris (France) 16 octobre 2025 : PlatformCon25 Live Day Paris - Paris (France) 16-17 octobre 2025 : DevFest Nantes - Nantes (France) 30-31 octobre 2025 : Agile Tour Bordeaux 2025 - Bordeaux (France) 30-31 octobre 2025 : Agile Tour Nantais 2025 - Nantes (France) 30 octobre 2025-2 novembre 2025 : PyConFR 2025 - Lyon (France) 4-7 novembre 2025 : NewCrafts 2025 - Paris (France) 6 novembre 2025 : dotAI 2025 - Paris (France) 7 novembre 2025 : BDX I/O - Bordeaux (France) 12-14 novembre 2025 : Devoxx Morocco - Marrakech (Morocco) 13 novembre 2025 : DevFest Toulouse - Toulouse (France) 15-16 novembre 2025 : Capitole du Libre - Toulouse (France) 20 novembre 2025 : OVHcloud Summit - Paris (France) 21 novembre 2025 : DevFest Paris 2025 - Paris (France) 27 novembre 2025 : Devfest Strasbourg 2025 - Strasbourg (France) 28 novembre 2025 : DevFest Lyon - Lyon (France) 5 décembre 2025 : DevFest Dijon 2025 - Dijon (France) 10-11 décembre 2025 : Devops REX - Paris (France) 10-11 décembre 2025 : Open Source Experience - Paris (France) 28-31 janvier 2026 : SnowCamp 2026 - Grenoble (France) 2-6 février 2026 : Web Days Convention - Aix-en-Provence (France) 23-25 avril 2026 : Devoxx Greece - Athens (Greece) 17 juin 2026 : Devoxx Poland - Krakow (Poland) Nous contacter Pour réagir à cet épisode, venez discuter sur le groupe Google https://groups.google.com/group/lescastcodeurs Contactez-nous via X/twitter https://twitter.com/lescastcodeurs ou Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/lescastcodeurs.com Faire un crowdcast ou une crowdquestion Soutenez Les Cast Codeurs sur Patreon https://www.patreon.com/LesCastCodeurs Tous les épisodes et toutes les infos sur https://lescastcodeurs.com/

Episode 704: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Blake Scholl ( https://x.com/bscholl ) about he went from high school dropout to Groupon to the founder of a supersonic jet startup.  — Show Notes: (0:00) Find your red line (4:29) Problems hidden in plain sight (13:00) The making of Boom Supersonic (23:00) No rules of thumb (29:13) Blake's favorite interview question (34:22) Demo Day at YC (38:13) Selling Richard Branson (47:46) Being a dark matter founder (52:14) What does the most ambition of yourself look like? (55:51) Progressively overturning of the skeptics (1:01:06) Working with Jeff Bezos at Amazon — Links: • Steal Shaan's $20M Pitch Deck: https://clickhubspot.com/wem • Boom - https://boomsupersonic.com/  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it's called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam's List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Knowledge Project: Read the notes at at podcastnotes.org. Don't forget to subscribe for free to our newsletter, the top 10 ideas of the week, every Monday --------- Most accelerators fund ideas. Y Combinator funds founders—and transforms them. With a 1% acceptance rate and alumni behind 60% of the past decade's unicorns, YC knows what separates the founders who break through from those who burn out. It's not the flashiest résumé or the boldest pitch but something President Garry Tan says is far rarer: earnestness. In this conversation, Garry reveals why this is the key to success, and how it can make or break a startup. We also dive into how AI is reshaping the whole landscape of venture capital and what the future might look like when everyone has intelligence on tap.  If you care about innovation, agency, or the future of work, don't miss this episode.  Approximate timestamps: Subject to variation due to dynamically inserted ads. (00:02:39) The Success of Y Combinator (00:04:25) The Y Combinator Program (00:08:25) The Application Process (00:09:58) The Interview Process (00:16:16) The Challenge of Early Stage Investment (00:22:53) The Role of San Francisco in Innovation (00:28:32) The Ideal Founder (00:36:27) The Importance of Earnestness (00:42:17) The Changing Landscape of AI Companies (00:45:26) The Impact of Cloud Computing (00:50:11) Dysfunction with Silicon Valley (00:52:24) Forecast for the Tech Market (00:54:40) The Regulation of AI (00:55:56) The Need for Agency in Education (01:01:40) AI in Biotech and Manufacturing (01:07:24) The Issue of Data Access and The Legal Aspects of AI Outputs (01:13:34) The Role of Meta in AI Development (01:28:07) The Potential of AI in Decision Making (01:40:33) Defining AGI (01:42:03) The Use of AI and Prompting (01:47:09) AI Model Reasoning (01:49:48) The Competitive Advantage in AI (01:52:42) Investing in Big Tech Companies (01:55:47) The Role of Microsoft and Meta in AI (01:57:00) Learning from MrBeast: YouTube Channel Optimization (02:05:58) The Perception of Founders (02:08:23) The Reality of Startup Success Rates (02:09:34) The Impact of OpenAI (02:11:46) The Golden Age of Building Newsletter - The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at fs.blog/newsletter Upgrade — If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of the episode, join our membership: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/membership⁠⁠ and get your own private feed. Watch on YouTube: @tkppodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Knowledge Project Key Takeaways Check out the episode pageRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgMost accelerators fund ideas. Y Combinator funds founders—and transforms them. With a 1% acceptance rate and alumni behind 60% of the past decade's unicorns, YC knows what separates the founders who break through from those who burn out. It's not the flashiest résumé or the boldest pitch but something President Garry Tan says is far rarer: earnestness. In this conversation, Garry reveals why this is the key to success, and how it can make or break a startup. We also dive into how AI is reshaping the whole landscape of venture capital and what the future might look like when everyone has intelligence on tap.  If you care about innovation, agency, or the future of work, don't miss this episode.  Approximate timestamps: Subject to variation due to dynamically inserted ads. (00:02:39) The Success of Y Combinator (00:04:25) The Y Combinator Program (00:08:25) The Application Process (00:09:58) The Interview Process (00:16:16) The Challenge of Early Stage Investment (00:22:53) The Role of San Francisco in Innovation (00:28:32) The Ideal Founder (00:36:27) The Importance of Earnestness (00:42:17) The Changing Landscape of AI Companies (00:45:26) The Impact of Cloud Computing (00:50:11) Dysfunction with Silicon Valley (00:52:24) Forecast for the Tech Market (00:54:40) The Regulation of AI (00:55:56) The Need for Agency in Education (01:01:40) AI in Biotech and Manufacturing (01:07:24) The Issue of Data Access and The Legal Aspects of AI Outputs (01:13:34) The Role of Meta in AI Development (01:28:07) The Potential of AI in Decision Making (01:40:33) Defining AGI (01:42:03) The Use of AI and Prompting (01:47:09) AI Model Reasoning (01:49:48) The Competitive Advantage in AI (01:52:42) Investing in Big Tech Companies (01:55:47) The Role of Microsoft and Meta in AI (01:57:00) Learning from MrBeast: YouTube Channel Optimization (02:05:58) The Perception of Founders (02:08:23) The Reality of Startup Success Rates (02:09:34) The Impact of OpenAI (02:11:46) The Golden Age of Building Newsletter - The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at fs.blog/newsletter Upgrade — If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of the episode, join our membership: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/membership⁠⁠ and get your own private feed. Watch on YouTube: @tkppodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steal Jess' Billion-Dollar Startup Playbook [for free]: https://clickhubspot.com/jhm Episode 702: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) boards the private jet of Jess Mah ( https://x.com/jessicamah ) to brainstorm business ideas and talk about her process for vetting which ideas to jump on.  — Show Notes:  (0:00) Buying a jet (5:37) Barn full of horses (8:44) Business ideas matrix (11:06) Idea: DOGE as a service (13:30) Idea: Vertical agents (16:52) Idea: Cargo ship coating (21:26) Idea: Holy Health (25:07) Building a team with digital twins (28:46) Jess's 0 - 1 framework (31:09) Worst advice from Silicon Valley (35:44) Find a starving crowd (37:55) Idea: Divorce.fund (38:36) Failures: Credboost (46:08) Ignorant of past, realistic of present, delulu of the future (49:58) Engineering serendipity (56:12) AI for medicine — Links: • Mahway - https://mahway.com/  • YC's Request for Startups - https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it's called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam's List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Spenser Skates is the Co-founder and CEO of Amplitude.Our conversation gets into the importance of data in product design and company building, how Amplitude is thinking about AI, and the future of user responsive software.We also get into the early days of building Amplitude, when to go multi-product, how to construct your board as a startup, hiring executives at various company stages, lessons from closing three acquisitions, lessons scaling to $300 million in ARR, inside Amplitude's 2021 IPO, and what most people get wrong about Founder Mode.Thanks to Numeral for supporting this episode, the end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance. Try it here: https://bit.ly/NumeralThePeelTimestamps:(4:45) Using data to build great products(8:31) Why data is existential to every business(13:14) How to go multi-product(15:48) Every startup becomes a distribution company(19:29) Lessons from three acquisitions(29:09) AI hasn't changed B2B SaaS yet(31:24) Challenges of incorporating AI in B2B SaaS(33:09) Amplitude's AI experiments(36:29) Navigating technology hype cycles as a public company(39:40) Amplitude's opportunity in LLMs(43:08) User responsive software(46:16) Surprising things that slow your speed of execution(51:27) What people get wrong about Founder Mode(59:48) Pivoting into Amplitude after YC(1:04:42) Nine months to raise Amplitude's first round(1:08:31) Surprises from closing the first customers(1:12:46) Two sales lessons for technical founders(1:13:44) Scaling to $300M+ ARR(1:17:14) How to choose board members(1:19:55) Inside Amplitude's IPO(1:21:56) “Stock price is an output of the business”(1:26:36) Evolving from startup founder to public company CEO(1:31:54) How hiring execs changes as you scale(1:34:32) Why DEI is important at Amplitude(1:39:46) Relevance of gaming and startupsReferencedTry Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/Careers at Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/careersMoxie Marlinspike's web3 article:https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.htmlSheep Logic: https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/Follow SpenserTwitter: https://x.com/spenserskatesLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spenserskatesFollow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

Most accelerators fund ideas. Y Combinator funds founders—and transforms them. With a 1% acceptance rate and alumni behind 60% of the past decade's unicorns, YC knows what separates the founders who break through from those who burn out. It's not the flashiest résumé or the boldest pitch but something President Garry Tan says is far rarer: earnestness. In this conversation, Garry reveals why this is the key to success, and how it can make or break a startup. We also dive into how AI is reshaping the whole landscape of venture capital and what the future might look like when everyone has intelligence on tap.  If you care about innovation, agency, or the future of work, don't miss this episode.  Approximate timestamps: Subject to variation due to dynamically inserted ads. (00:02:39) The Success of Y Combinator (00:04:25) The Y Combinator Program (00:08:25) The Application Process (00:09:58) The Interview Process (00:16:16) The Challenge of Early Stage Investment (00:22:53) The Role of San Francisco in Innovation (00:28:32) The Ideal Founder (00:36:27) The Importance of Earnestness (00:42:17) The Changing Landscape of AI Companies (00:45:26) The Impact of Cloud Computing (00:50:11) Dysfunction with Silicon Valley (00:52:24) Forecast for the Tech Market (00:54:40) The Regulation of AI (00:55:56) The Need for Agency in Education (01:01:40) AI in Biotech and Manufacturing (01:07:24) The Issue of Data Access and The Legal Aspects of AI Outputs (01:13:34) The Role of Meta in AI Development (01:28:07) The Potential of AI in Decision Making (01:40:33) Defining AGI (01:42:03) The Use of AI and Prompting (01:47:09) AI Model Reasoning (01:49:48) The Competitive Advantage in AI (01:52:42) Investing in Big Tech Companies (01:55:47) The Role of Microsoft and Meta in AI (01:57:00) Learning from MrBeast: YouTube Channel Optimization (02:05:58) The Perception of Founders (02:08:23) The Reality of Startup Success Rates (02:09:34) The Impact of OpenAI (02:11:46) The Golden Age of Building Newsletter - The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at fs.blog/newsletter Upgrade — If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of the episode, join our membership: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/membership⁠⁠ and get your own private feed. Watch on YouTube: @tkppodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adit Abraham is the co-founder and CEO of Reducto, which helps leading AI teams extract and structure data from complex documents and spreadsheets in their pipeline. Within 6 months of launching, Reducto went from 0→7 figures in ARR. Reducto has grown to process tens of millions of pages monthly for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 10 enterprises. They just announced a $24M Series A. Before Reducto, Adit was a Product Manager at Google, working on Ads and Search, and conducted machine learning research at MIT's Media Lab. --- In today's episode, we discuss: How listening to customers revealed an opportunity to pivot The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough Landing a Fortune 10 customer A technical founder's guide to sales Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey Advice for founders: “You're going to fail” Much more --- Referenced: Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/ Chetan Puttagunta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetanputtagunta/ Diana Hu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdianahu/ Liz Wessel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethwessel/ Raunak Chowdhuri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sauhaarda/ Reducto: https://reducto.ai/ Scale AI: https://scale.com/ Stripe: https://stripe.com/ Textract: https://aws.amazon.com/textract/ Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/ --- Where to find Adit: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditabraham/ --- Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson --- Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast --- Timestamps: (00:00) Hackathons, YC, and an unexpected pivot (05:23) The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough (09:11) How customer signal led to PDF processing (14:46) Landing a Fortune 10 customer (22:42) Building “transferable features” (25:58) How caring beats sales skills in startup growth (30:28) The strategy behind Reducto's horizontal expansion (36:18) Hire slow, go-to-market fast (41:45) A technical founder's guide to sales (43:45) “You're going to fail” (46:27) Why startups win (48:30) Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey (51:43) Less structure, more impact (55:00) How frustrations shaped Reducto's culture (57:35) The question you should always ask in meetings

Earth AI is discovering untapped critical metal deposits at half the cost in a fraction of the time. They combine machine learning and new modular drilling technology to move from detecting a prospect to drilling in just three to six months. They recently announced $20M in Series B funding in an oversubscribed round led by Tamarack Global and Cantos Ventures. Participating investors include Overmatch, Alpaca, Sparkwave Capital, Y Combinator, and Scrum Ventures.Roman is a YC alum, ex-PhD candidate at the University of Sydney,  and geologist with 10 years of industry and research experience in Europe, the Middle and Far East, and Australia.Here are 6 topics we covered in the podcast:1. The Problem The world faces a projected $10T demand for critical metals by 2050, yet new mineral discoveries have declined by 70% over the last decade. Current exploration methods are expensive, slow, and increasingly inefficient.2. AI-Powered Discovery Roman's team developed a machine learning model trained on 50 years of exploration data. The AI identifies geological proxies—subtle clues that indicate where valuable minerals may lie beneath the surface.3. Vertical Integration After realizing the industry wasn't ready to adopt their tech, Earth AI built its own exploration and drilling systems. This vertical integration slashed costs and sped up testing, allowing them to confirm mineral targets rapidly.4. Breakthrough Results Their AI led to the first-ever discovery of magnetic nickel on Australia's East Coast. They've since found lithium, silver, and lead deposits, securing land cheaply and unlocking high-value prospects.5. Founder Wisdom Roman emphasizes sustainable work habits and a strong internal compass. He credits storytelling as crucial to convincing investors and the broader industry of Earth AI's potential.--

Watch this episode on YouTube.Ross Geiger is Co-Founder & President at Ciro, a YC-backed tech startup. His LinkedIn says he is “On a journey to understand & elevate the craft of Sales.” And he participated in the 2024 Soulful Impact Vision Quest.If that combination makes you raise an eyebrow, you're not alone. Ross is a unique and deeply multifaceted individual. Which is part of why I was so excited to invite him onto the show.Through guiding Ross on his quest, I got to witness his incredible depth. I had the opportunity to walk beside him as he did a very scary and courageous thing. He stepped away from a very full life to spend several days alone in the wilderness with no food. He ceremonially released the control of his ego so that he could dive deeper within himself than ever before and connect with the truth at the center of his calling.The result was profound. I'm incredibly grateful to Ross for his willingness to share some of that experience with you directly through this episode.A core theme we explore in this conversation is how the setting and structure of the quest supported Ross in putting his ego aside, how this enabled a realization of his innate worthiness, and how that spark opened the door for his soul to speak.We also explore what integration has been like for him so far, what's alive for him now in this next layer of his journey, and how he's finding deep soulful alignment without needing to make major shake-ups to the external realities of his life (which is something people often expect to happen after a vision quest).In this way, Ross' story is a powerful example of how it's really the internal shift that counts. When we consciously live and act from a place of soul, we are guided to make soulful impact in beautiful and unexpected ways.Enjoy!Links & Resources* Connect with Brooks on Instagram or LinkedIn* Soulful Impact: soulfulimpact.co* Connect with Ross on LinkedIn* Check out Ross' company, CiroChapters00:03:28 Introduction and Journey Overview00:06:24 Personal Background and Call to the Quest00:09:30 Preparation for the Vision Quest00:12:31 Experiencing the Quest: Inner Work and Transformation00:15:22 The Role of Nature and Wilderness in Healing00:18:40 Insights Gained from the Quest00:21:28 The Importance of Authenticity and Self-Expression00:24:15 Messages from the Soul and Personal Craft00:27:21 Reflections on the Quest Experience00:30:32 Future Directions00:44:01 Believing You're Enough00:46:06 The Journey of Self-Discovery00:51:50 Nature as a Teacher00:53:43 Understanding Our Place in Nature00:59:51 The Power of Asking for Support01:04:51 Embodying Soul in Leadership01:10:36 The Importance of Personal Transformation01:14:40 Integration After the Quest01:20:33 Advice for Future Questers—Get newsletter updates & future episodes delivered to your inbox: Subscribe to Soulful Impact on Substack Get full access to Soulful Impact at www.soulfulimpact.blog/subscribe

一位没有任何不良违法记录的华人留学生，他的美国学生签证为什么会被突然取消？ 根据美国多家媒体在四月初的报道，特朗普政府近期发起了一场针对国际学生的签证审查行动，已有超过 1000 名在美国际学生的 F-1 或 J-1 签证被撤销，涉及 170 多所遍布多个州的大学。这些签证的取消往往没有明确的解释或正当程序，被影响的甚至包括一些仅有轻微违规行为（如交通违规）或无明显不当行为的学生。 而此前国务卿马尔科·卢比奥（Marco Rubio）也曾在接受采访时表示，政府正在每日审查签证持有者的行为，特别是那些参与亲巴勒斯坦抗议活动的学生。但显然，更多学生正在成为被殃及的池鱼。 本期节目的叙述者 YC 就遭遇了这一切，他的故事或许就是这些留学生经历的共同写照：在毫无预警的情况下突然收到合法身份被取消的通知，在一头雾水且焦虑的状态里寻求来自学校以及其他团体的帮助，同时不得不重新审视自己的未来该何去何从 …… 本期人物 徐涛，声动活泼联合创始人 YC，南加州大学研一学生 主要话题 [03:42] 来自国际学生办的一封紧急邮件 [07:30] 南加州大学提供的方案 [12:41] 没有任何缓冲期的「非法滞留」 [19:09] 一位没有任何不良记录的留学生为什么会遭遇这一切 [25:20] 巨大不确定性下被重置的人生选择 延伸阅读 什么是 SEVIS (https://www.ice.gov/sevis): SEVIS 是 Student and Exchange Visitor Information System（学生和交流访问者信息系统） 的缩写，是美国国土安全部（DHS）下属的移民与海关执法局（ICE）负责管理的一个信息系统，用于记录和跟踪在美国的国际学生（F 类和 M 类签证持有者）以及交流访问学者（J 类签证持有者）及其家属的信息。 The Trump Administration Revoked 800 Student Visas. Here Is What To Know. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/us/students-trump-ice-detention.html) 给声东击西投稿 如果你受到了美国近期关税政策的影响，欢迎向我们投稿，聊聊你的经历和感受。 如果你有其他主题相关的故事想要和我们分享，我们也很欢迎。 你的声音也可能出现在未来的节目当中，我们非常期待你的分享！ 投稿入口 (https://eg76rdcl6g.feishu.cn/share/base/form/shrcne1CGVaSeJwtBriW6yNT2dg) Untitled https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/8/8dd8a56f-9636-415a-8c00-f9ca6778e511/Ci7z6fz9.png 声动活泼年度新节目上线！ 这次，我们倾全团队之力为 AI 时代的青少年做了一件微小但重要的事。 每期 10 分钟，从一个青少年感兴趣的现象谈起，涉及商业科技、社会人文等话题，解读表象背后的深层逻辑，启发青少年提出自己的好奇。每周一、三、五早晨 6 点在各大音频平台准时更新。

Thomas Paul Mann is the cofounder of Raycast. I use Raycast every day as a replacement for Spotlight. For me, shortcuts are the most useful feature. I put curl requests I commonly use as well as random things like email snippets. It's a massive time saver and really well built.Raycast is a genuinely well built product so Thomas talks quality, getting feedback and how they ship features. We also talk about their unique YC experience and how they've been building AI into Raycast. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links:RaycastRaycast Extensions StoreTerminal Coffee x RaycastThomas on Twitter/X

In this Checkout episode, YC from Nespresso Australia reveals the personal tools, brands, and philosophies that fuel her success. She talks about her love for Carol Dweck's Mindset, the challenges of navigating Google's algorithm changes, and how GA4 has become a necessary ally in her data-driven decisions. YC also shares her admiration for Mecca, Go-To Skincare, and IKEA's cutting-edge personalisation strategies, proving that inspiration often comes from outside your industry. With candid insights into leading a global ecommerce team and delivering exceptional coffee experiences, YC's story offers a shot of inspiration for anyone looking to blend creativity with commerce.Check out our full-length interview with YC Eu here:Main episode linksThis episode was brought to you by… Deliver In PersonShopify PlusAbout your guest: YC Eu is the Head of eBusiness at Nespresso Oceania and Inside Retail's Top 50 people in eCommerce 2024. She drives the strategic direction for all owned digital touchpoints across Nespresso & Nespresso Professional in Australia and New Zealand. With over 20+ years in the retail space, she is passionate about leading her high performing team and delivering best in class user experience by being customer obsessed and making data driven decisions.About your host: Nathan Bush is the host of the Add To Cart podcast and a leading ecommerce transformation consultant. He has led eCommerce for businesses with revenue $100m+ and has been recognised as one of Australia's Top 50 People in eCommerce four years in a row. You can contact Nathan on LinkedIn, Twitter or via email. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Federal Compliant by RLG is a classic case of looking in the mirror. YC and WK both get left at the altar. The truth always comes out... and the WhoIsGilNegrete lawsuit? It's coming. Stay ready.

History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes. Vibe coded games, like a flight simulator from @levelsio, are reminiscent of early iPhone app store games like Flappy Bird and Paper Toss. How else are consumer tech cycles evolving? Lightspeed Partner Michael Mignano welcomes back investor Semil Shah for their quarterly check-in. They talk about the landscape of VC seed investing, the impact of AI on tech hubs like New York, LA, and the Bay Area, and whether accelerators like Y Combinator still have the same edge?Flight Simulator: fly.pieter.comEpisode Chapters:(01:22) LA vs NYC Tech Scenes(02:54) AI's Geographic Pull(05:37) Gaming as Future Consumer Tech(08:35) Vibe Coding(17:40) Seed Investing in the AI Era(25:13) The Series A Crunch(36:03) Rising Series A Standards(41:14) Bootstrapping vs VC for AI(45:26) Value of University Degrees(55:32) YC's Expanded Cohorts(57:52) Overlooked Seed TrendsStay in touch:www.lsvp.comX: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvpLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: generativenow.coEmail: generativenow@lsvp.comThe content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. For more details please see lsvp.com/legal.

This Week in Startups is brought to you by…Kyte - TWIST Listeners: Go to https://kyte.com/ and download the Kyte app today. Use code JASON to save 10% on your first rental.Atlassian - Head to https://www.atlassian.com/startups/twist to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months.Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twistToday's show: Jason and Alex go deep into the shocking new details about the Rippling vs. Deel corporate espionage scandal—where a self-admitted spy fed confidential product roadmaps and sales data to a rival CEO for €5K/month. Plus, they interview Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu about their bold comeback with their new “Intern” AI agent that builds entire apps from a single prompt - Jason calls it a breakthrough. And we kick off Pitch Madness with fierce Founder Friday pitch battles featuring AI podcast tools and women's sports communities. Spy drama, next-gen tech, and raw founder energy—don't miss it.Timestamps:(0:00) Teaser: Rippling vs. Deel Espionage Case(1:46) Podcast updates and listener engagement(2:31) Job openings at Launch and This Week in Startups(4:19) Rippling and Deel lawsuit details and espionage activities(9:58) Kyte - TWIST Listeners: Go to https://kyte.com/ and download the Kyte app today. Use code JASON to save 10% on your first rental.(11:31) Stolen information and the aftermath of the espionage case(16:21) Corporate espionage vs. corporate intelligence debate(19:38) Atlassian - Head to https://www.atlassian.com/startups/twist to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months.(23:07) Board independence, whistleblower protections, and CEO behavior(25:10) Y Combinator's culture of rule bending(28:41) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(30:02) Jesse Lu's YC experience and launch of Rabbit(34:48) Navigating the hype cycle as a founder and RabbitOS demo(45:02) Estate management and technology with Rabbit(48:39) Conclusion of interview with Jesse Lu(48:51) Launching Founder Friday pitch offs(50:43) Pitch: Snipd - AI-powered podcast app(53:29) Pitch: MedSimple - Medical education platform(57:10) Pitch: Trova - Workplace connection platform(58:45) Pitch: Osprey - Community for women in sports and entertainment(1:05:30) Analysis and decision: MedSimple vs Snipped and Osprey vs Trova(1:09:23) Discussion on Osprey's business model(1:10:33) Tips for improving pitch presentations(1:11:02) Announcement of Twist 500 competition(1:11:46) Closing remarks and social media call to actionSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpLinks from the show:Rabbit website: https://www.rabbit.tech/?srsltid=AfmBOorumixyS_kXbNPL2tDqLBsI08B4Hs3xUSZkOLS2nlKsatop5VG2Follow Jesse:X: https://x.com/jessechenglyuLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesselyu/Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(9:58) Kyte - TWIST Listeners: Go to https://kyte.com/ and download the Kyte app today. Use code JASON to save 10% on your first rental.(19:38) Atlassian - Head to https://www.atlassian.com/startups/twist to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months.(28:41) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twistCheck out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

In this episode of The Tech Trek, Amir Bormand sits down with Max Mergenthaler-Canseco, CEO and co-founder of Nixla, to explore the nuanced reality behind startup success. A multi-time founder with experience as both CEO and CTO, Max shares hard-earned lessons from his entrepreneurial journey—including why theoretical knowledge often clashes with real-world execution, how to build a resilient startup team, and the underestimated danger of survivorship bias in startup lore.From balancing optimism with statistical failure rates to knowing when to focus on strengths over weaknesses, Max delivers practical wisdom for anyone navigating the startup grind. Whether you're a first-time founder or on your third venture, this conversation will leave you thinking differently about what it really takes to succeed in tech.

In this episode we talk about getting started. Founding a company means you are constantly learning to do new things, like hiring and selling. How do you handle these new situations where you have no experience? How do you avoid mistakes? We are here to help! In this episode we answer questions including:How do I find a co-founder?How do I sell my first customers before my product is ready?How do I hire my first salesperson?All of these questions were submitted by listeners just like you. You can submit questions for us to answer on our website TheStartupHelpdesk.com or on X/Twitter @thestartuphd - we'd love to hear from you!Your hosts:Sean Byrnes: General Partner, Near Horizon www.nearhorizon.vcAsh Rust: Managing Partner, Sterling Road www.sterlingroad.comNic Meliones: CEO, Navi www.heynavi.comReminder: this is not legal advice or investment advice.Q1: How do I find a co-founder?Start by joining co-founder matching platforms like YC's co-founder matching, university mailing lists, and local meetups. Often, friends or friends of friends are the best connections.Talk about what you're building on social media at least three times a week.When you find a promising partner, work on a small project together first to test compatibility.Join hackathons, take on side projects, or participate in school challenges to build experience.Investigate problems that you are uniquely positioned to work on.Develop a durable skill set, especially in building products in emerging markets like AI.Q2: How do I sell my first customers before my product is ready?This is a great opportunity to create a design partnership.Consider offering a mix of services and software to get started.If they truly need your solution, they will be patient—it's a good test of urgency.Avoid endlessly delaying until you feel "ready"—perfection is a myth.Set a target date for release and keep them engaged along the way.Keep delivering value:Continue discovery—learn more about their specific needs.Provide access to prototypes and early versions.Offer no-cost pilots to keep them involved during final development stages.Q3: How do I hire my first salesperson?Seek advice from people who have hired salespeople before—they can guide you.Even if you don't fully understand sales, great people can help you hire the right person.Ensure you're actually ready—do you have a structured sales playbook to guide them?Write a clear sales playbook before hiring. If you can't, you're not ready yet.Post the job broadly to attract a wide range of candidates.Ask candidates to produce a sales deck or similar work sample as part of the screening process.Ash underscores how challenging it is to hire your first salesperson with this: hire three people, knowing that only one will likely be the right long-term fit.Tune into the full episode to learn how to navigate these challenging "getting started" moments!

In this episode, host I test Manus AI's ability to function as an AI co-founder by asking it to develop a million-dollar business idea focused on AI. The system analyzes Y Combinator startups and Reddit trends to identify opportunities, ultimately recommending an AI-powered micro-consulting platform for small businesses. Manus delivers a comprehensive business proposal including market validation, pricing strategy, and even designs a functional landing page.Timestamps:00:00 - Intro01:41 - Initial Prompt: Ideas for $1M Startup in 18 Months03:24 - Manus AI Processing Prompt06:25 - Alternative Use Cases of Manus AI13:14 - Results from First Prompt15:19 - Prompt 2: Focus on Niche Startup Opportunities 17:46 -  Results from Second Prompt23:15 - Prompt 3: Validate Ideas with data and trend analysis27:00 - Prompt 4: Refining data and trend analysis29:0` - Prompt 5: Creating a Landing Page with Manus34:23 - Reviewing results from Business Proposal37:35 - Results from Fifth Prompt39:25 - Final Thoughts on Manus AI and Startup IdeasKey Points:• I explore Manus AI's multi-agent capabilities to generate a viable startup idea that could make $1 million in 18 months• Manus AI analyzes YC's latest batch, Reddit trends, and market opportunities to identify niche AI business concepts• The AI recommends "AI-powered micro-consulting for SMBs" as the most promising opportunity• Manus creates a complete business proposal including landing page design, pricing strategy, and go-to-market plan1) I challenged Manus AI (a multi-agent AI system) to develop a complete business plan for an AI startup that could make $1M in 18 months.The goal: See if AI can identify REAL market trends and opportunities better than humans can.2) What makes Manus different from ChatGPT?• Multi-agent capabilities (can browse while chatting)• Can analyze multiple sources simultaneously• Performs complex research tasks independently• Creates actual code/designs, not just concepts3) The COOLEST use cases Greg discovered while testing Manus:• Converting unstructured data into organized tables• Analyzing financial reports like a JP Morgan analyst• Contract review (saving $1500+ lawyer fees)• Creating highlight reels from podcast audio• Building websites from scratch4) The AI identified these KEY TRENDS in the AI startup landscape:• Vertical-specific AI solutions for regulated industries• AI agents for specialized workflows• Infrastructure tools helping others deploy AI• No-code/low-code AI accessibility solutions5) The WINNING IDEA Manus proposed: "Spark Console AI" - an AI-powered micro-consulting platform for small businesses.The problem it solves? SMBs need expert consulting but can't afford $150-500/hour traditional services.The solution? $49-500/month AI consulting agents.6) What impressed me most: Manus VALIDATED the idea with ACTUAL DATA:• 47% growth in r/smallbusiness subscribers• Direct quotes from Reddit showing pain points:"I'd love expert advice but can't justify $200 consultants""Generic AI tools don't understand my industry challenges"7) Manus even built a COMPLETE landing page with:• Eye-catching design• Lead generation forms• Interactive business assessment• Pricing tiersAll without Greg needing to write a single line of code! 8) The LIMITATIONS Greg found:• You still need to ask the right questions• It's more like a "junior employee" than a true co-founder• Takes 10-15 minutes for complex tasks• You need to push back on some recommendations9) My takeaway: We're entering an era where the COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE isn't coding ability - it's knowing which QUESTIONS to ask AI.The winners will be those who can identify trends and direct AI to build solutions that ride those tailwinds.Notable Quotes:"In a world where anyone could create software... figuring out what is the brand, what is the landing page, what is the product, and what is the trend... is gonna help you actually build a business, not just build a product." - GregLCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.coFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

Pour l'épisode de cette semaine, je reçois Nabil Toumi, le CEO et cofondateur de Presti.Presti, c'est un SaaS qui permet aux marques de l'ameublement de générer des visuels produits ultra-réalistes grâce à l'IA, en quelques secondes, à partir de simples packshots.Dans cet épisode, Nabil revient sur son parcours, de ses années chez Uber à la création de Presti, en passant par un premier projet entrepreneurial autour de l'automatisation du support client. Il nous explique comment lui et ses cofondateurs ont identifié une opportunité claire dans la création de visuels produits pour le e-commerce, avant de verticaliser leur approche sur l'ameublement.On parle des enjeux techniques du produit – génération d'images, détourage, gestion des perspectives – mais aussi de go-to-market : design partners, outbound à grande échelle, participation à YC, et comment les salons pros américains sont devenus un levier d'acquisition très fort.Nabil partage aussi ses apprentissages sur la construction d'un produit complexe, le rôle central du discovery, les erreurs à éviter, et comment ils ont atteint 1M€ d'ARR en 10 mois seulement.Vous pouvez suivre Nabil sur LinkedIn.Bonne écoute !Mentionnés pendant l'épisode :The Mom TestYC (Y Combinator)PhotoroomStability AI (Stable Diffusion)Pour soutenir SaaS Connection en 1 minute⏱ (et 2 secondes) :Abonnez-vous à SaaS Connection sur votre plateforme préférée pour ne rater aucun épisode

Pranav Piyush, CEO and Co-Founder of Paramark, shares the moments that shaped his journey from scaling a YC startup to facing a co-founder breakup and battling imposter syndrome while fundraising. He reflects on the tough feedback that shook his confidence at Dropbox, the mindset shifts that kept him moving forward, and why resilience isn't just about working harder, it's about trusting your instincts, staying clear-eyed under pressure, and embracing the uncomfortable moments that lead to real growth.Pranav opens up about:The wake-up call that forced him to rethink how he navigated internal politicsHow his first startup experience ended in heartbreak but led to an even bigger opportunityWhy founders need a “reality distortion field” to sell their visionThings to listen for: (00:00) Pranav discusses his experience with YC and an unexpected rift with his co-founder (03:39) Developing persuasive skills through debate and their benefits in tech leadership (06:29) The accidental start of an entrepreneurial journey with a student job platform (08:05) Thanks to our sponsor Fullstory (10:08) Receiving tough feedback at Dropbox and its personal impact (24:27) The highs and lows of Pranav's first venture and parting ways with his co-founder (38:21) Viewing setbacks as part of the journey to success (39:36) Handling imposter syndrome during a challenging fundraising period (49:18) The role of manifestation and goal-setting in Pranav's life and work This episode is presented by: Fullstory: Surface User Sentiment with Behavioral Data. - https://fullstory.com/valueResources: Connect with Pranav: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pranavp/ Paramark: https://paramark.com/Connect with Andrew: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewcapland/ Hire Andrew as your coach: https://deliveringvalue.co/coaching

On this week's episode of More or Less, Jessica, Dave, Sam, and Brit tackle a chaotic week hashing out Waymo's Peninsula push, Sam's million-dollar Mars wager with Brit, and YC's agentic AI craze—fresh from ski season vibes and office debates.Also on the deck this episode:• Waymo's expansion has Jessica ditching Lyft (almost)• Sam vs. Brit: a million bucks on Mars colonization odds• TikTok's sale—Oracle's in, but ByteDance might still call the shots• Anthropic's CEO says AI will write all code soon—engineers aren't having it.Plus, recession drums beat louder, Jessica's tennis mag Racket swings big, and Sam's still trolling with billboards.We're also on ↓X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspodInstagram: https://instagram.com/moreorlessSpotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/moreorlesspodConnect with us here:1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit00:00 Trailer + Introduction01:46 Sam has another billboard!04:23 Waymo news09:12 New space age, flying motorcycles, tech CEOs14:21 Starlink, rockets, the space war use case19:56 More or Less bet: humans on Mars by 2040?24:34 Can this entity afford TikTok?27:53 Recession? Who cares?35:32 Startups are recession-proof42:30 Anthropic and vibe coding44:55 Billionaire free caltrain45:29 What's on our Instagram explore pages?47:42 Tennis magazine

Eric Simons is the founder and CEO of StackBlitz, the company behind Bolt—the #1 web-based AI coding agent and one of the fastest-growing products in history. After nearly shutting down, StackBlitz launched Bolt on Twitter and exploded from zero to $40 million ARR and 1 million monthly active users in about five months.What you'll learn:1. How Bolt reached nearly $40M ARR and 3 million registered users in just five months with a team of only 15 to 20 people2. How Bolt leverages WebContainer technology—a browser-based operating system developed over seven years—to create a dramatically faster, more reliable AI coding experience than competitors3. Why Anthropic's 3.5 Sonnet model was the critical breakthrough that made AI-generated code production-ready and unlocked the entire text-to-app market4. Why PMs may be better positioned than engineers in the AI era5. How AI will dramatically reshape company org charts6. Eric's wild founder story (including squatting at AOL's HQ) and how scrappiness fueled his innovation—Brought to you by:• Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments• Fundrise Flagship Fund—Invest in $1.1 billion of real estate• OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons—Where to find Eric Simons:• X: https://x.com/ericsimons40• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-simons-a464a664/• Email: Eric@stackblitz.com—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Eric Simons and StackBlitz(04:46) Unprecedented growth and user adoption(10:40) Demo: Building a Spotify clone with Bolt(15:28) Expanding to native mobile apps with Expo(19:09) The journey and technology behind WebContainer(25:03) Lessons learned and future outlook(29:15) Post-launch analysis(34:15) Growing fast with a small team(41:00) Prioritization at Bolt(45:51) Tooling and PRD's(48:42) Integration and use cases of Bolt(52:24) Limitations of Bolt(54:24) The role of PMs and developers in the AI era(59:56) Skills for the future(01:14:18) Upcoming features of Bolt(01:20:17) How to get the most out of Bolt(01:23:00) Eric's journey and final thoughts—Referenced:• Bolt: https://bolt.new/• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/• Wix: https://www.wix.com/• Squarespace: https://www.squarespace.com/• Dylan Field on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/• Evan Wallace's website: https://madebyevan.com/• WebGL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL• WebAssembly: https://webassembly.org/• CloudNine: https://cloudnine.com/• Canva: https://www.canva.com/• StackBlitz: https://stackblitz.com/• Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-1000-yc-startups• Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/• Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/• Dario Amodei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dario-amodei-3934934/• Linear: https://linear.app/• Notion: https://www.notion.com/• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/• Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/• Photoshop: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/• Figma: https://www.figma.com/• Greenfield projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_project• Gartner: https://www.gartner.com/• OpenAI researcher on why soft skills are the future of work | Karina Nguyen (Research at OpenAI, ex-Anthropic): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-soft-skills-are-the-future-of-work-karina-nguyen• Albert Pai on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertpai/• Bolt's post on X about “Bolt Builders”: https://x.com/boltdotnew/status/1887546089294995943• Sonnet: https://www.anthropic.com/claude/sonnet• ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/• Breaking the Rules: The Young Entrepreneur Who Squatted at AOL: https://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/eric-simons-interview-young-entrepreneur-squatted-at-aol.html• Imagine K12: http://www.imaginek12.com/• Geoff Ralston on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffralston/• AOL: https://www.aol.com/• Bolt on X: https://x.com/boltdotnew—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Jon Yoo's startup wasn't working. He pivoted mid-YC, spent five brutal weeks without signing a single customer, and then—right after raising his seed round—his co-founder left.Most startups die right there. Instead, Jon figured out how to land massive customers like FiveTran and Snowflake. He grew from $500K to $2M ARR in 6 months. Why you should listen:•Navigating a founder breakup – What happens when co-founders split and how to handle it.•The real YC experience – What worked, what didn't, and how they pivoted mid-program.•Landing major customers – How they got big logos like Snowflake.•Fundraising insights – What really matters to investors at the seed and Series A stages.•Why startups need forcing functions – The tactics that drove fast product development.•How to know if you have product-market fit – The signals John saw at Sugar.•Burn rate discipline – Why they raised millions but barely spent it.Keywordsentrepreneurship, startups, investment banking, Salesforce, Y Combinator, founder dynamics, product market fit, scaling, cloud marketplaces, business strategy, fundraising, startup, YC demo day, customer acquisition, product-market fit, founder dynamics, early stage startup, team building, scaling, challengesTimestamps(00:00:00) Intro(00:07:55) The Origin of Suger(00:13:30) Going All In(00:19:08) The first 10 customers(00:24:20) The Hardest Pain Point(00:30:29) Becoming Profitable(00:37:05) Celebrate The Small Wins(00:39:56) Finding Product Market Fit(00:42:27) A Piece of AdviceSend me a message to let me know what you think!

Episode 354: Justin Gordon interviews Shawn Sheikh, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Adly, about how he builds, acquires, and invests in companies. -- This episode is brought to you by Rho. With Rho, founders get: A single pane of glass they can use to run and scale their business from Day 1: Bank account, corporate cards to start running – and expense management, bill pay automation, and accounting to help you move fast as you scale. Rho is trusted by thousands of companies ranging from two-person YC companies to brands like Perplexity, Cal.com, Splitwise and more. The big thing with Rho: Every customer has a "person" at Rho. 24/7 customer support - phone, text, email - we will be there at every critical milestone in your startup's journey. To learn why startups choose Rho, visit www.rho.co today. -- This episode is also brought to you by TRIBE. TRIBE is a community for fast growing early to mid-stage entrepreneurs. It includes facilitated peer groups of 6, retreats, guest speakers, book club, forums, and more. Qualifications: Entrepreneurs generally doing between $500k and $15 million per year in revenue. Apply to TRIBE today and save $300 off the yearly membership price when you mention Just Go Grind! -- Show Notes:  00:00 What's coming in the episode… 01:14 Introduction 02:55 Shawn Sheikh's background 04:45 Starting Solve 09:15 Starting PivotCMO 11:29 Meeting Adly's co-founder, Fred Chiang 13:38 Selling PivotCMO 17:14 Moving on to company investment and acquisition 22:04 Raising capital 25:10 Shawn's goals and motivations 27:26 Adly's deal flow 29:30 What to look for in a deal 31:46 Red flags in a deal 34:21 Why is Adly winning the deals? 36:32 Next steps after the deal 38:45 Building Adly's team 40:06 Shawn's day to day at Adly 42:33 Adly's portfolio companies 44:17 Adly's purchase of Smodin AI 48:57 Shawn's approach to starting something new 50:50 What's next? 52:26 How to reach out to Shawn   Referenced:  Adly Solve (acquired by Blacklane) Pivot CMO (acquired by Conspiracy Theory and Unfold) DoubleList Smodin Guthy Renker   Connect with Justin:  Twitter: https://x.com/justingordon212 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justingordon8/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justincharlesgordon/   What Justin is working on:  Just Go Grind Newsletter: https://www.justgogrind.com/subscribe Running (Strava): https://www.strava.com/athletes/52394979 Hiring: https://partnerslink.athyna.com/pod Scouting: https://headline.com/

AGI remains a major focus for government officials and AI experts alike, and this week on The Artificial Intelligence Show, Mike and Paul weigh in with their insights. Our hosts break down the latest AGI news, the strategy behind superintelligence, OpenAI's rumored $20,000-per-month AI agents, Andreessen Horowitz's latest Top 100 Gen AI Apps, Google's AI overviews, and more in our rapid-fire segment. Access the show notes and show links here 00:04:08 —The Government Knows AGI Is Coming 00:26:08 — AGI and Jobs 00:35:28 — What to Do About AGI and Beyond 00:44:59 — This Scientist Left OpenAI Last Year. His Startup Is Already Worth $30 Billion. 00:48:48 — Ex-DeepMind Researchers' Aims for Superintelligence 00:54:35 — Human-to-Machine Scale for Writers Recap 01:00:11 — Google AI Overviews 01:03:57 — The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps 01:07:21 — 25% of startups in YC's batch have codebases that are nearly fully AI-generated 01:09:52 — The Humanoid 100: Mapping the Humanoid Robot Value Chain 01:13:12 — Listener Questions This episode is brought to you by our 2025 State of Marketing AI Report: Last year, we uncovered insights from nearly 1,800 marketing and business leaders, revealing how AI is being adopted and utilized in their industries. This year, we're aiming even higher—and we need your input. Take a few minutes to share your perspective by completing this year's survey at www.stateofmarketingai.com. Visit our website Receive our weekly newsletter Join our community: Slack LinkedIn Twitter Instagram Facebook Looking for content and resources? Register for a free webinar Come to our next Marketing AI Conference Enroll in AI Academy for Marketers

Startup capital accelerator and venture capital firm Y Combinator has a long history of backing healthcare startups, with a particular focus on technical founders tackling difficult problems. In this episode, YC partners Jared Friedman and Ankit Gupta share their insights on healthcare investment, the transformative potential of AI, and why they believe young, tactical founders will continue to disrupt the healthcare industry despite its challenges.We cover:

Matt Cohen and John Ruffolo dive into the growing exodus of Canadian talent to the U.S., breaking down why top founders and engineers are choosing Silicon Valley over homegrown opportunities. They discuss OpenAI's latest move to charge up to $20,000 per month for AI-powered research agents and how companies are rethinking hiring in light of these powerful tools. The conversation also covers the controversial CoreWeave IPO, highlighting its rapid $1.9B revenue surge, heavy reliance on Microsoft, and whether it signals a coming shake-up in cloud computing. On the political front, they analyze the potential for an early Canadian election, shifts in party leadership, and how economic policies—like capital gains tax hikes—are driving entrepreneurs out of the country.Canada's Tech Exodus: Why Founders Are Flocking to the U.S. (07:00)A striking rise in Canadian emigration has raised concerns about the country's ability to retain top talent. In 2024, 81,601 Canadians left the country, the highest number since 2017—half of them from Ontario.* Capital gains tax hikes pushing high-net-worth individuals and founders to relocate.* U.S. venture capital firms providing better funding opportunities for Canadian startups.* YC founder exodus: More Canadian founders are moving to the U.S. post-Y Combinator Demo Day, as confirmed by YC CEO Gary Tan.John Ruffolo's take:* Canada risks losing its top tech talent permanently if it doesn't address the capital and policy gaps driving this migration.* Founders aren't leaving out of convenience—it's about better market access, capital, and scaling opportunities.OpenAI's $20K/Month AI Agents: A Game-Changer? (18:00)OpenAI is rolling out three tiers of AI-powered assistants, capable of advanced research, software development, and business strategy—at a hefty price tag.Pricing breakdown:* $2K/month: Handles advanced knowledge worker tasks.* $10K/month: AI for software development.* $20K/month: PhD-level AI agents for deep research.Why this matters:* AI-powered coding tools like Cursor.dev have already grown to $100M ARR in 18 months.* Founders are increasingly opting for AI engineers over hiring multiple full-time developers.* This signals a shift in the labor market, potentially disrupting high-paid professional roles in tech, research, and consulting.CoreWeave's $2B Revenue IPO—Boom or Bust? (12:00)CoreWeave, a cloud computing startup that stockpiled NVIDIA GPUs early, is racing toward a high-profile IPO.Key numbers:* Revenue skyrocketed from $16M in 2022 to $1.9B in 2023.* Microsoft accounts for 62% of its revenue, sparking concerns over customer concentration.* The company holds $11B in debt, raising questions about profitability.* Founders cashed out $500M pre-IPO, raising red flags.John Ruffolo's analysis:* This looks like a high-risk, low-margin business that may struggle to justify its valuation.* Heavy debt financing and reliance on Microsoft contracts make it a shaky bet.* If public markets reject CoreWeave, it could be a warning sign for other AI and cloud IPOs.Will Canada See an April Election? (03:00)With Canada's Liberal Party leadership race heating up, rumors suggest an election could be called as early as March 16, with a vote on April 22.* The Liberals want a short election to limit Conservative fundraising advantages.* Mark Carney is positioned as the Liberal frontrunner, but he doesn't currently hold a parliamentary seat.* Coalition talks between Liberals, NDP, and the Green Party could reshape Canada's political landscape.Projected outcomes:* Conservative majority is still likely, but the margin has narrowed.* A left-wing coalition could prevent a Conservative landslide.The Bigger Picture: Where is Canada Headed?From AI disruption and talent migration to political uncertainty, this episode of Tank Talks dives into the forces reshaping Canada's future. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tanktalks.substack.com

Pastor Eric Souza speaks at YC 2025.

Techdirt has finally accepted the inevitable and gone full democracy blog—because let's face it, politics and tech are now the same dumpster fire. Google rolled out AI Mode for Search, proving once again that the internet is just Clippy with better branding. Meanwhile, Billy McFarland insists Fyre Festival 2 is totally happening, despite Mexican officials pointing out that his coordinates literally lead to the ocean. Speaking of fraud, Tesla sales are in freefall thanks to Elon's alt-right cosplay, and people are setting Teslas on fire in protest. And in rich-guy disconnect news, Google's Sergey Brin thinks engineers should work 60-hour weeks to build the AI that will replace them. That's some late-stage capitalism poetry right there.Elsewhere, Trump Media paid Don Jr. nearly a quarter of its revenue to show up twice, while indie musicians can't afford to tour, proving once again that grifting is more profitable than making art. Technicolor shut down overnight, stranding 10,000 workers because Hollywood's financial planning is apparently as stable as a Starship rocket launch. Oh yeah, SpaceX exploded another one.Meanwhile, Netflix's attempt to upscale A Different World turned it into a Lovecraftian horror show. A quarter of Y Combinator startups now run on “vibe coding,” meaning their software is basically a Ouija board with extra steps. The AI takeover continues as OpenAI plans to charge $20,000 monthly for specialized AI "agents," proving once again that the revolution will be monetized. Meanwhile, Moscow's Pravda network has been poisoning Western AI chatbots with Russian propaganda, because if you can't convince humans, just brainwash the robots that humans increasingly trust.On the bright side, hackers brought the Humane AI Pin back to life after it was bricked, transforming an overpriced paperweight into... a slightly less useless overpriced paperweight. ChatGPT can now directly edit code in macOS development tools, making it easier for AI to introduce bugs you never would have thought of yourself. Over At the Library, check out "The Tempest" by Peter Cawdron for your first contact fix, and if you're worried about where society is heading (and who isn't?), Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny" offers a survival guide for our slow-motion constitutional collapse. Finally, in "everything is fine" news, 82% of indie artists can't afford to tour anymore.Enjoy the dystopia, kids – at least we still have our sense of humor.Sponsors:DeleteMe - Head over to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use the code "GOG" for 20% off.Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month.SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!!1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1passwordShow notes at https://gog.show/687FOLLOW UPWhy Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)Google announces ‘AI Mode' as a new way to use Search, testing starts todayGovernment Officials for Announced Fyre Festival 2 Location Say Event “Does Not Exist”‘I'm selling the Nazi mobile': Tesla owners offload cars after Musk's fascist-style salutesTesla Just Got Even More Bad NewsTesla Just Got News About Its Sales in Germany, and It Shows That Elon Musk Has Seriously Messed UpArsonists Set Fire to a Dozen Teslas, Charging Stations Amid "Anti-Capitalist Coordination to Target Tesla"Google's Sergey Brin Says Engineers Should Work 60-Hour Weeks in Office to Build AI That Could Replace ThemEx-Amazon VP explains why rich a-holes with helicopters and personal assistants don't get why you hate your commuteTrump Media Paid Donald Trump Jr. Nearly A Quarter Of Its Annual Revenue. He Attended Just Two Board MeetingsIN THE NEWSCinema Giant Technicolor's Abrupt Shutdown Affects 10,000 Workers WorldwideUS employers cut more jobs last month than any February since 2009No part of Amazon is 'unaffected' by AI, says its head of AGIChatGPT doubled its weekly active users in under 6 months, thanks to new releasesHugging Face's chief science officer worries AI is becoming 'yes-men on servers'A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news' network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propagandaOnlyFans Model Amouranth Held at Gunpoint for Her Crypto in Home InvasionCrypto Soars Then Plunges Following Trump's Post About a Strategic ReserveFact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Establishes the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and U.S. Digital Asset StockpileTrump creates a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve one day ahead of White House crypto summitCFPB drops Zelle lawsuit in latest reversal under Trump administrationCanadian Municpalities and the Canadian Supreme Court to stop using twitter.Ontario once again promises to nix $100 million Starlink deal over Trump tariffsOpenAI reportedly plans to charge up to $20,000 a month for specialized AI 'agents'Kevin Rose, Alexis Ohanian acquire DiggDoes the World Even Want Digg in 2025?Scrolling Through Social Media Has a Unique Effect on Your BodySpaceX's latest Starship test flight ends with another explosionA second Intuitive Machines spacecraft just landed on the moon — and probably tipped overTouch down on the moon with private Blue Ghost lander in this amazing videoMEDIA CANDYHow Many Episodes Should You Watch Before Quitting a TV Show? A Statistical AnalysisNetflix Is Using AI to Upscale a 1980s Sitcom and the Results Are Borderline HorrificDaredevil: Born AgainDavid Duchovny to Explore Real-Life X-Files for History ChannelBeyond Belief: Fact or FictionAncient MysteriesIn Search Of...82% of indie artists can't afford to tour anymoreAPPS & DOODADSThe Humane Ai Pin Has Already Been Brought Back to LifeChatGPT on macOS can now directly edit codeA quarter of startups in YC's current cohort have codebases that are almost entirely AI-generatedThe Vanishing Middle Class of TechWill the future of software development run on vibes?Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakesAT THE LIBRARYThe Tempest (First Contact) by Peter CawdronOn Tyranny by Timothy SnyderWarning - DomesticIs Trump preparing to invoke the Insurrection Act? Signs are pointing that waySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Have you ever left a VC meeting feeling confused about the feedback you received? Are you tired of trying to decipher cryptic responses from potential investors?In this episode, Chris Saad and Yaniv Bernstein dive into the world of venture capital communication, breaking down common phrases VCs use and what they really mean. Drawing inspiration from a LinkedIn post by YC alum Nilay Modi, they explore the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways investors convey their thoughts on startup pitches.In this episode, you will:Decode common VC phrases like "not aligned with our strategy" and "need to see more traction"Understand the importance of demonstrating progress and traction to investorsLearn why founder pedigree matters and what it really meansDiscover the motivations behind VCs asking to "keep them in the loop"Gain insights on balancing grand visions with practical execution plansExplore the role of information, deal flow, network, and judgment in VC decision-makingDevelop strategies for interpreting and responding to VC feedback effectivelyLinkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/thenilaymodi_yc-demo-day-survival-guide-what-vcs-say-activity-7244767753084051456-JEuI/The PactHonour The Startup Podcast Pact! If you have listened to TSP and gotten value from it, please:Follow, rate, and review us in your listening appSubscribe to the TSP Mailing List at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://thestartuppodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Secure your official TSP merchandise at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://shop.tsp.show/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow us on YouTube at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@startup-podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Give us a public shout-out on LinkedIn or anywhere you have a social media following.Key linksThe Startup Podcast is sponsored by Vanta. Vanta helps businesses get and stay compliant by automating up to 90% of the work for the most in demand compliance frameworks. With over 200 integrations, you can easily monitor and secure the tools your business relies on. For a limited-time offer of US$1,000 off, go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.vanta.com/tsp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Get your question in for our next Q&A episode:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://forms.gle/NZzgNWVLiFmwvFA2A⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Startup Podcast website:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tsp.show⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn more about Chris and YanivWork 1:1 with Chris:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://chrissaad.com/advisory/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Chris on Linkedin:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrissaad/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Yaniv on Linkedin:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/ybernstein/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CreditsEditor:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Justin McArthur⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Content Strategist: Carolina Franco https://www.linkedin.com/in/francocarolina/Intro Voice:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jeremiah Owyang⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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

Our website got slammed by LLM bots from Amazon and Anthropic, which could've cost us $7k in Vercel image optimization costs!Get Metacast podcast app for Android and iOS at https://⁠⁠⁠metacast.app⁠⁠⁠.Join the ⁠⁠r/metacastapp⁠⁠ subreddit.Segments[00:20] Introduction and episode overview[01:31] New features and updates[03:02] Why do we keep applying to YC?[08:53] The LLM bot invasion incident[21:26] We re-allowed LLM bots to crawl the site[28:22] Book & podcast recommendationsShow notesPostsLLM bots + Next.js image optimization = recipe for bankruptcy (post-mortem)BooksRed Rising by Pierce BrownLittle Golden America by Ilya Ilf and Eugene PetrovGet in touch

Cam Doody is the Co-founder and General Partner of Brickyard, the venture capital firm moving founders to Chattanooga, Tennessee to lock-in with no distractions until they find product market fit.Brickyard is one of the most unique venture firms you'll ever come across, and we get into how it how it was inspired by a 16x fund based in Chattanooga, why Cam and his co-founders started it during ZIRP, and why they hope everyone copies their model.We also get into Cam's startup Bellhops, which he started in 2011 and has since grown into the third largest moving company in the US. We talk running a local services business, why 5-star review systems don't work, and how U-Haul almost killed Bellhops overnight back in 2016.Thanks to Nader Khalil, Matt Harb, Austin Beveridge, and Spencer Levitt for their help brainstorming topics for Cam!Timestamps:(0:00) Intro(03:33) Chattanooga: Dirty manufacturing city to high tech(05:23) Brickyard's precursor, the Lamp Post Group (a 16x fund)(09:46) How ZIRP screwed up early stage investing(13:49) What is Brickayrd?(21:14) Getting Brickyard off the ground in 2021(26:25) 100+ year old rug warehouse + maintenance nightmares(33:13) Cam wants everyone to copy Brickyard(36:31) Why economic development startup programs don't work(38:59) YC teams doing Brickyard to escape the Trough of Sorrow(44:07) How Brickyard companies raise Series As(46:10) Nvidia acquiring Brev(52:18) How to deal with a co-founder breakup(55:45) Starting Bellhop to build a better moving company(1:02:27) How U-Haul almost killed them overnight(1:06:54) Marketing tactics for a local services business(1:12:05) Why 5-star review systems don't work(1:18:16) How Cam's view of VC's changed after becoming one(1:20:37) Ways VC's actually add value(1:25:05) The thesis for Bitcoin(1:39:21) Cam's annual remote desert island vacationReferencedCheck out Brickyard: https://www.justlaybrick.com/The Trough of Sorrow: https://andrewchen.com/after-the-techcrunch-bump-life-in-the-trough-of-sorrow/Bellhops: https://www.getbellhops.com/Follow CamTwitter: https://www.twitter.com/camdoodyLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cam-doody-b489a124Follow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

Please join us for this episode with Liam Collins, a Wharton MBA Class of 2025 member and the co-founder / CEO of Proxis, a Y Combinator backed startup. Liam and his co-founder created Proxis to help companies distill large language models into smaller, more useful and faster models for specific tasks. In this episode we dive into all things AI, the life of being a founder, what it is like being part of YC, and how the business has taken off since launch. If you are interested in entrepreneurship and AI this is definitely the episode for you! 

El dia de hoy en el canal de YouTube de #ElFilip te invito a conocer la historia de una Mujer, que muchos de nosotros hemos visto alguna vez en pelicualas de la #EpocaDeOro del cine mexicano. #CarmelitaGonzalez ¿Como fue que llegó a la cumbre de su carrera? ¿Y Cómo fué que llegó a su lamentable final?

Uri Levine is a co-founder of Waze (which was acquired by Google for $1.3 billion in 2013), along with nine other companies (including another company he sold for over $1 billion). He's also been on 20 boards and has been an advisor to over 50 startups. He recently released a new chapter of his best-selling book Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, which provides a guide to surviving crises at your company. In this episode, we cover:• The two types of startup crisis and how to handle them• Why speed of action is the most important thing• How to keep your team motivated when things look dire• A framework for deciding whether or not to pivot• What to do when product-market fit disappears• How to approach raising money during a crisis• More—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs• Rippling—Automate HR, IT, and finance so you can scale faster• OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-founders-guide-to-crisis-management-uri-levine—Where to find Uri Levine:• X: https://twitter.com/urilevine1• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uri-levine• Website: https://urilevine.com• Book: https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Love-Problem-Solution-Entrepreneurs/dp/1637746601/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Welcome back, Uri!(05:10) The new chapter: navigating crises(08:15) Types of crises founders face(29:10) Navigating cash crises(38:31) The importance of never giving up(46:26) How to keep people engaged through a crises(47:59) Transparency in crisis management(56:58) Navigating product-market-fit challenges(59:27) Deciding when to pivot or shut down(01:13:34) Real-life startup survival stories(01:17:06) Avoiding and preparing for crises(01:21:21) Final thoughts and book promotion—Referenced:• Waze: https://www.waze.com/• Moovit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moovit• Order Chat: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/order-chat• Fibo: https://finder.startupnationcentral.org/company_page/fibo• Behind the founder: Drew Houston (Dropbox): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/behind-the-founder-drew-houston-dropbox• TomTom: https://www.tomtom.com/• Khosla Ventures: https://www.khoslaventures.com/• WeSki: https://www.weski.com/• Larry Silverstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Silverstein• Oversee: https://oversee.biz/• Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-1000-yc-startups• Tobi Lütke's leadership playbook: Playing infinite games, operating from first principles, and maximizing human potential (founder and CEO of Shopify): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/tobi-lutkes-leadership-playbook• Harley Finkelstein on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harleyf/• Zip: https://zip.co/us• Qualcomm: https://www.qualcomm.com/• Einstein quote: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/albert_einstein_148788—Recommended book:• Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs (updated 2025 version): https://urilevine.com/book/#Pre-order—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Conor McCarter, Co founder of Prequel, joins the show to talk about:The founding story behind Prequel, the YC experience, and pivoting during the program.Market overview on the state of data management and positioning of Prequel.The fundraising process for Prequel and importance of not beating yourself up as a founder and staying creative amidst the grind.

Bundle tickets for AIE Summit NYC have now sold out. You can now sign up for the livestream — where we will be making a big announcement soon. NYC-based readers and Summit attendees should check out the meetups happening around the Summit.2024 was a very challenging year for AI Hardware. After the buzz of CES last January, 2024 was marked by the meteoric rise and even harder fall of AI Wearables companies like Rabbit and Humane, with an assist from a pre-wallpaper-app MKBHD. Even Friend.com, the first to launch in the AI pendant category, and which spurred Rewind AI to rebrand to Limitless and follow in their footsteps, ended up delaying their wearable ship date and launching an experimental website chatbot version. We have been cautiously excited about this category, keeping tabs on most of the top entrants, including Omi and Compass. However, to date the biggest winner still standing from the AI Wearable wars is Bee AI, founded by today's guests Maria and Ethan. Bee is an always on hardware device with beamforming microphones, 7 day battery life and a mute button, that can be worn as a wristwatch or a clip-on pin, backed by an incredible transcription, diarization and very long context memory processing pipeline that helps you to remember your day, your todos, and even perform actions by operating a virtual cloud phone. This is one of the most advanced, production ready, personal AI agents we've ever seen, so we were excited to be their first podcast appearance. We met Bee when we ran the world's first Personal AI meetup in April last year.As a user of Bee (and not an investor! just a friend!) it's genuinely been a joy to use, and we were glad to take advantage of the opportunity to ask hard questions about the privacy and legal/ethical side of things as much as the AI and Hardware engineering side of Bee. We hope you enjoy the episode and tune in next Friday for Bee's first conference talk: Building Perfect Memory.Show Notes* Bee Website* Ethan Sutin, Maria de Lourdes Zollo* Bee @ Personal AI Meetup* Buy Bee with Listener Discount Code!Timestamps* 00:00:00 Introductions and overview of Bee Computer* 00:01:58 Personal context and use cases for Bee* 00:03:02 Origin story of Bee and the founders' background* 00:06:56 Evolution from app to hardware device* 00:09:54 Short-term value proposition for users* 00:12:17 Demo of Bee's functionality* 00:17:54 Hardware form factor considerations* 00:22:22 Privacy concerns and legal considerations* 00:30:57 User adoption and reactions to wearing Bee* 00:35:56 CES experience and hardware manufacturing challenges* 00:41:40 Software pipeline and inference costs* 00:53:38 Technical challenges in real-time processing* 00:57:46 Memory and personal context modeling* 01:02:45 Social aspects and agent-to-agent interactions* 01:04:34 Location sharing and personal data exchange* 01:05:11 Personality analysis capabilities* 01:06:29 Hiring and future of always-on AITranscriptAlessio [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 SmallAI.swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we are very honored to have in the studio Maria and Ethan from Bee.Maria [00:00:16]: Hi, thank you for having us.swyx [00:00:20]: And you are, I think, the first hardware founders we've had on the podcast. I've been looking to have had a hardware founder, like a wearable hardware, like a wearable hardware founder for a while. I think we're going to have two or three of them this year. And you're the ones that I wear every day. So thank you for making Bee. Thank you for all the feedback and the usage. Yeah, you know, I've been a big fan. You are the speaker gift for the Engineering World's Fair. And let's start from the beginning. What is Bee Computer?Ethan [00:00:52]: Bee Computer is a personal AI system. So you can think of it as AI living alongside you in first person. So it can kind of capture your in real life. So with that understanding can help you in significant ways. You know, the obvious one is memory, but that's that's really just the base kind of use case. So recalling and reflective. I know, Swyx, that you you like the idea of journaling, but you don't but still have some some kind of reflective summary of what you experienced in real life. But it's also about just having like the whole context of a human being and understanding, you know, giving the machine the ability to understand, like, what's going on in your life. Your attitudes, your desires, specifics about your preferences, so that not only can it help you with recall, but then anything that you need it to do, it already knows, like, if you think about like somebody who you've worked with or lived with for a long time, they just know kind of without having to ask you what you would want, it's clear that like, that is the future that personal AI, like, it's just going to be very, you know, the AI is just so much more valuable with personal context.Maria [00:01:58]: I will say that one of the things that we are really passionate is really understanding this. Personal context, because we'll make the AI more useful. Think about like a best friend that know you so well. That's one of the things that we are seeing from the user. They're using from a companion standpoint or professional use cases. There are many ways to use B, but companionship and professional are the ones that we are seeing now more.swyx [00:02:22]: Yeah. It feels so dry to talk about use cases. Yeah. Yeah.Maria [00:02:26]: It's like really like investor question. Like, what kind of use case?Ethan [00:02:28]: We're just like, we've been so broken and trained. But I mean, on the base case, it's just like, don't you want your AI to know everything you've said and like everywhere you've been, like, wouldn't you want that?Maria [00:02:40]: Yeah. And don't stay there and repeat every time, like, oh, this is what I like. You already know that. And you do things for me based on that. That's I think is really cool.swyx [00:02:50]: Great. Do you want to jump into a demo? Do you have any other questions?Alessio [00:02:54]: I want to maybe just cover the origin story. Just how did you two meet? What was the was this the first idea you started working on? Was there something else before?Maria [00:03:02]: I can start. So Ethan and I, we know each other from six years now. He had a company called Squad. And before that was called Olabot and was a personal AI. Yeah, I should. So maybe you should start this one. But yeah, that's how I know Ethan. Like he was pivoting from personal AI to Squad. And there was a co-watching with friends product. I had experience working with TikTok and video content. So I had the pivoting and we launched Squad and was really successful. And at the end. The founders decided to sell that to Twitter, now X. So both of us, we joined X. We launched Twitter Spaces. We launched many other products. And yeah, till then, we basically continue to work together to the start of B.Ethan [00:03:46]: The interesting thing is like this isn't the first attempt at personal AI. In 2016, when I started my first company, it started out as a personal AI company. This is before Transformers, no BERT even like just RNNs. You couldn't really do any convincing dialogue at all. I met Esther, who was my previous co-founder. We both really interested in the idea of like having a machine kind of model or understand a dynamic human. We wanted to make personal AI. This was like more geared towards because we had obviously much limited tools, more geared towards like younger people. So I don't know if you remember in 2016, there was like a brief chatbot boom. It was way premature, but it was when Zuckerberg went up on F8 and yeah, M and like. Yeah. The messenger platform, people like, oh, bots are going to replace apps. It was like for about six months. And then everybody realized, man, these things are terrible and like they're not replacing apps. But it was at that time that we got excited and we're like, we tried to make this like, oh, teach the AI about you. So it was just an app that you kind of chatted with and it would ask you questions and then like give you some feedback.Maria [00:04:53]: But Hugging Face first version was launched at the same time. Yeah, we started it.Ethan [00:04:56]: We started out the same office as Hugging Face because Betaworks was our investor. So they had to think. They had a thing called Bot Camp. Betaworks is like a really cool VC because they invest in out there things. They're like way ahead of everybody else. And like back then it was they had something called Bot Camp. They took six companies and it was us and Hugging Face. And then I think the other four, I'm pretty sure, are dead. But and Hugging Face was the one that really got, you know, I mean, 30% success rate is pretty good. Yeah. But yeah, when we it was, it was like it was just the two founders. Yeah, they were kind of like an AI company in the beginning. It was a chat app for teenagers. A lot of people don't know that Hugging Face was like, hey, friend, how was school? Let's trade selfies. But then, you know, they built the Transformers library, I believe, to help them make their chat app better. And then they open sourced and it was like it blew up. And like they're like, oh, maybe this is the opportunity. And now they're Hugging Face. But anyway, like we were obsessed with it at that time. But then it was clear that there's some people who really love chatting and like answering questions. But it's like a lot of work, like just to kind of manually.Maria [00:06:00]: Yeah.Ethan [00:06:01]: Teach like all these things about you to an AI.Maria [00:06:04]: Yeah, there were some people that were super passionate, for example, teenagers. They really like, for example, to speak about themselves a lot. So they will reply to a lot of questions and speak about them. But most of the people, they don't really want to spend time.Ethan [00:06:18]: And, you know, it's hard to like really bring the value with it. We had like sentence similarity and stuff and could try and do, but it was like it was premature with the technology at the time. And so we pivoted. We went to YC and the long story, but like we pivoted to consumer video and that kind of went really viral and got a lot of usage quickly. And then we ended up selling it to Twitter, worked there and left before Elon, not related to Elon, but left Twitter.swyx [00:06:46]: And then I should mention this is the famous time when well, when when Elon was just came in, this was like Esther was the famous product manager who slept there.Ethan [00:06:56]: My co-founder, my former co-founder, she sleeping bag. She was the sleep where you were. Yeah, yeah, she stayed. We had left by that point.swyx [00:07:03]: She very stayed, she's famous for staying.Ethan [00:07:06]: Yeah, but later, later left or got, I think, laid off, laid off. Yeah, I think the whole product team got laid off. She was a product manager, director. But yeah, like we left before that. And then we're like, oh, my God, things are different now. You know, I think this is we really started working on again right before ChatGPT came out. But we had an app version and we kind of were trying different things around it. And then, you know, ultimately, it was clear that, like, there were some limitations we can go on, like a good question to ask any wearable company is like, why isn't this an app? Yes. Yeah. Because like.Maria [00:07:40]: Because we tried the app at the beginning.Ethan [00:07:43]: Yeah. Like the idea that it could be more of a and B comes from ambient. So like if it was more kind of just around you all the time and less about you having to go open the app and do the effort to, like, enter in data that led us down the path of hardware. Yeah. Because the sensors on this are microphones. So it's capturing and understanding audio. We started actually our first hardware with a vision component, too. And we can talk about why we're not doing that right now. But if you wanted to, like, have a continuous understanding of audio with your phone, it would monopolize your microphone. It would get interrupted by calls and you'd have to remember to turn it on. And like that little bit of friction is actually like a substantial barrier to, like, get your phone. It's like the experience of it just being with you all the time and like living alongside you. And so I think that that's like the key reason it's not an app. And in fact, we do have Apple Watch support. So anybody who has a watch, Apple Watch can use it right away without buying any hardware. Because we worked really hard to make a version for the watch that can run in the background, not super drain your battery. But even with the watch, there's still friction because you have to remember to turn it on and it still gets interrupted if somebody calls you. And you have to remember to. We send a notification, but you still have to go back and turn it on because it's just the way watchOS works.Maria [00:09:04]: One of the things that we are seeing from our Apple Watch users, like I love the Apple Watch integration. One of the things that we are seeing is that people, they start using it from Apple Watch and after a couple of days they buy the B because they just like to wear it.Ethan [00:09:17]: Yeah, we're seeing.Maria [00:09:18]: That's something that like they're learning and it's really cool. Yeah.Ethan [00:09:21]: I mean, I think like fundamentally we like to think that like a personal AI is like the mission. And it's more about like the understanding. Connecting the dots, making use of the data to provide some value. And the hardware is like the ears of the AI. It's not like integrating like the incoming sensor data. And that's really what we focus on. And like the hardware is, you know, if we can do it well and have a great experience on the Apple Watch like that, that's just great. I mean, but there's just some platform restrictions that like existing hardware makes it hard to provide that experience. Yeah.Alessio [00:09:54]: What do people do in like two or three days that then convinces them to buy it? They buy the product. This feels like a product where like after you use it for a while, you have enough data to start to get a lot of insights. But it sounds like maybe there's also like a short term.Maria [00:10:07]: From the Apple Watch users, I believe that because every time that you receive a call after, they need to go back to B and open it again. Or for example, every day they need to charge Apple Watch and reminds them to open the app every day. They feel like, okay, maybe this is too much work. I just want to wear the B and just keep it open and that's it. And I don't need to think about it.Ethan [00:10:27]: I think they see the kind of potential of it just from the watch. Because even if you wear it a day, like we send a summary notification at the end of the day about like just key things that happened to you in your day. And like I didn't even think like I'm not like a journaling type person or like because like, oh, I just live the day. Why do I need to like think about it? But like it's actually pretty sometimes I'm surprised how interesting it is to me just to kind of be like, oh, yeah, that and how it kind of fits together. And I think that's like just something people get immediately with the watch. But they're like, oh, I'd like an easier watch. I'd like a better way to do this.swyx [00:10:58]: It's surprising because I only know about the hardware. But I use the watch as like a backup for when I don't have the hardware. I feel like because now you're beamforming and all that, this is significantly better. Yeah, that's the other thing.Ethan [00:11:11]: We have way more control over like the Apple Watch. You're limited in like you can't set the gain. You can't change the sample rate. There's just very limited framework support for doing anything with audio. Whereas if you control it. Then you can kind of optimize it for your use case. The Apple Watch isn't meant to be kind of recording this. And we can talk when we get to the part about audio, why it's so hard. This is like audio on the hardest level because you don't know it has to work in all environments or you try and make it work as best as it can. Like this environment is very great. We're in a studio. But, you know, afterwards at dinner in a restaurant, it's totally different audio environment. And there's a lot of challenges with that. And having really good source audio helps. But then there's a lot more. But with the machine learning that still is, you know, has to be done to try and account because like you can tune something for one environment or another. But it'll make one good and one bad. And like making something that's flexible enough is really challenging.Alessio [00:12:10]: Do we want to do a demo just to set the stage? And then we kind of talk about.Maria [00:12:14]: Yeah, I think we can go like a walkthrough and the prod.Alessio [00:12:17]: Yeah, sure.swyx [00:12:17]: So I think we said I should. So for listeners, we'll be switching to video. That was superimposed on. And to this video, if you want to see it, go to our YouTube, like and subscribe as always. Yeah.Maria [00:12:31]: And by the bee. Yes.swyx [00:12:33]: And by the bee. While you wait. While you wait. Exactly. It doesn't take long.Maria [00:12:39]: Maybe you should have a discount code just for the listeners. Sure.swyx [00:12:43]: If you want to offer it, I'll take it. All right. Yeah. Well, discount code Swyx. Oh s**t. Okay. Yeah. There you go.Ethan [00:12:49]: An important thing to mention also is that the hardware is meant to work with the phone. And like, I think, you know, if you, if you look at rabbit or, or humane, they're trying to create like a new hardware platform. We think that the phone's just so dominant and it will be until we have the next generation, which is not going to be for five, you know, maybe some Orion type glasses that are cheap enough and like light enough. Like that's going to take a long time before with the phone rather than trying to just like replace it. So in the app, we have a summary of your days, but at the top, it's kind of what's going on now. And that's updating your phone. It's updating continuously. So right now it's saying, I'm discussing, you know, the development of, you know, personal AI, and that's just kind of the ongoing conversation. And then we give you a readable form. That's like little kind of segments of what's the important parts of the conversations. We do speaker identification, which is really important because you don't want your personal AI thinking you said something and attributing it to you when it was just somebody else in the conversation. So you can also teach it other people's voices. So like if some, you know, somebody close to you, so it can start to understand your relationships a little better. And then we do conversation end pointing, which is kind of like a task that didn't even exist before, like, cause nobody needed to do this. But like if you had somebody's whole day, how do you like break it into logical pieces? And so we use like not just voice activity, but other signals to try and split up because conversations are a little fuzzy. They can like lead into one, can start to the next. So also like the semantic content of it. When a conversation ends, we run it through larger models to try and get a better, you know, sense of the actual, what was said and then summarize it, provide key points. What was the general atmosphere and tone of the conversation and potential action items that might've come of that. But then at the end of the day, we give you like a summary of all your day and where you were and just kind of like a step-by-step walkthrough of what happened and what were the key points. That's kind of just like the base capture layer. So like if you just want to get a kind of glimpse or recall or reflect that's there. But really the key is like all of this is now like being influenced on to generate personal context about you. So we generate key items known to be true about you and that you can, you know, there's a human in the loop aspect is like you can, you have visibility. Right. Into that. And you can, you know, I have a lot of facts about technology because that's basically what I talk about all the time. Right. But I do have some hobbies that show up and then like, how do you put use to this context? So I kind of like measure my day now and just like, what is my token output of the day? You know, like, like as a human, how much information do I produce? And it's kind of measured in tokens and it turns out it's like around 200,000 or so a day. But so in the recall case, we have, um. A chat interface, but the key here is on the recall of it. Like, you know, how do you, you know, I probably have 50 million tokens of personal context and like how to make sense of that, make it useful. So I can ask simple, like, uh, recall questions, like details about the trip I was on to Taiwan, where recently we're with our manufacturer and, um, in real time, like it will, you know, it has various capabilities such as searching through your, your memories, but then also being able to search the web or look at my calendar, we have integrations with Gmail and calendars. So like connecting the dots between the in real life and the digital life. And, you know, I just asked it about my Taiwan trip and it kind of gives me the, the breakdown of the details, what happened, the issues we had around, you know, certain manufacturing problems and it, and it goes back and references the conversation so I can, I can go back to the source. Yeah.Maria [00:16:46]: Not just the conversation as well, the integrations. So we have as well Gmail and Google calendar. So if there is something there that was useful to have more context, we can see that.Ethan [00:16:56]: So like, and it can, I never use the word agentic cause it's, it's cringe, but like it can search through, you know, if I, if I'm brainstorming about something that spans across, like search through my conversation, search the email, look at the calendar and then depending on what's needed. Then synthesize, you know, something with all that context.Maria [00:17:18]: I love that you did the Spotify wrapped. That was pretty cool. Yeah.Ethan [00:17:22]: Like one thing I did was just like make a Spotify wrap for my 2024, like of my life. You can do that. Yeah, you can.Maria [00:17:28]: Wait. Yeah. I like those crazy.Ethan [00:17:31]: Make a Spotify wrapped for my life in 2024. Yeah. So it's like surprisingly good. Um, it like kind of like game metrics. So it was like you visited three countries, you shipped, you know, XMini, beta. Devices.Maria [00:17:46]: And that's kind of more personal insights and reflection points. Yeah.swyx [00:17:51]: That's fascinating. So that's the demo.Ethan [00:17:54]: Well, we have, we can show something that's in beta. I don't know if we want to do it. I don't know.Maria [00:17:58]: We want to show something. Do it.Ethan [00:18:00]: And then we can kind of fit. Yeah.Maria [00:18:01]: Yeah.Ethan [00:18:02]: So like the, the, the, the vision is also like, not just about like AI being with you in like just passively understanding you through living your experience, but also then like it proactively suggesting things to you. Yeah. Like at the appropriate time. So like not just pool, but, but kind of, it can step in and suggest things to you. So, you know, one integration we have that, uh, is in beta is with WhatsApp. Maria is asking for a recommendation for an Italian restaurant. Would you like me to look up some highly rated Italian restaurants nearby and send her a suggestion?Maria [00:18:34]: So what I did, I just sent to Ethan a message through WhatsApp in his own personal phone. Yeah.Ethan [00:18:41]: So, so basically. B is like watching all my incoming notifications. And if it meets two criteria, like, is it important enough for me to raise a suggestion to the user? And then is there something I could potentially help with? So this is where the actions come into place. So because Maria is my co-founder and because it was like a restaurant recommendation, something that it could probably help with, it proposed that to me. And then I can, through either the chat and we have another kind of push to talk walkie talkie style button. It's actually a multi-purpose button to like toggle it on or off, but also if you push to hold, you can talk. So I can say, yes, uh, find one and send it to her on WhatsApp is, uh, an Android cloud phone. So it's, uh, going to be able to, you know, that has access to all my accounts. So we're going to abstract this away and the execution environment is not really important, but like we can go into technically why Android is actually a pretty good one right now. But, you know, it's searching for Italian restaurants, you know, and we don't have to watch this. I could be, you know, have my ear AirPods in and in my pocket, you know, it's going to go to WhatsApp, going to find Maria's thread, send her the response and then, and then let us know. Oh my God.Alessio [00:19:56]: But what's the, I mean, an Italian restaurant. Yeah. What did it choose? What did it choose? It's easy to say. Real Italian is hard to play. Exactly.Ethan [00:20:04]: It's easy to say. So I doubt it. I don't know.swyx [00:20:06]: For the record, since you have the Italians, uh, best Italian restaurant in SF.Maria [00:20:09]: Oh my God. I still don't have one. What? No.Ethan [00:20:14]: I don't know. Successfully found and shared.Alessio [00:20:16]: Let's see. Let's see what the AI says. Bottega. Bottega? I think it's Bottega.Maria [00:20:21]: Have you been to Bottega? How is it?Alessio [00:20:24]: It's fine.Maria [00:20:25]: I've been to one called like Norcina, I think it was good.Alessio [00:20:29]: Bottega is on Valencia Street. It's fine. The pizza is not good.Maria [00:20:32]: It's not good.Alessio [00:20:33]: Some of the pastas are good.Maria [00:20:34]: You know, the people I'm sorry to interrupt. Sorry. But there is like this Delfina. Yeah. That here everybody's like, oh, Pizzeria Delfina is amazing. I'm overrated. This is not. I don't know. That's great. That's great.swyx [00:20:46]: The North Beach Cafe. That place you took us with Michele last time. Vega. Oh.Alessio [00:20:52]: The guy at Vega, Giuseppe, he's Italian. Which one is that? It's in Bernal Heights. Ugh. He's nice. He's not nice. I don't know that one. What's the name of the place? Vega. Vega. Vega. Cool. We got the name. Vega. But it's not Vega.Maria [00:21:02]: It's Italian. Whatswyx [00:21:10]: Vega. Vega.swyx [00:21:16]: Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega.Ethan [00:21:29]: Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega.Ethan [00:21:40]: We're going to see a lot of innovation around hardware and stuff, but I think the real core is being able to do something useful with the personal context. You always had the ability to capture everything, right? We've always had recorders, camcorders, body cameras, stuff like that. But what's different now is we can actually make sense and find the important parts in all of that context.swyx [00:22:04]: Yeah. So, and then one last thing, I'm just doing this for you, is you also have an API, which I think I'm the first developer against. Because I had to build my own. We need to hire a developer advocate. Or just hire AI engineers. The point is that you should be able to program your own assistant. And I tried OMI, the former friend, the knockoff friend, and then real friend doesn't have an API. And then Limitless also doesn't have an API. So I think it's very important to own your data. To be able to reprocess your audio, maybe. Although, by default, you do not store audio. And then also just to do any corrections. There's no way that my needs can be fully met by you. So I think the API is very important.Ethan [00:22:47]: Yeah. And I mean, I've always been a consumer of APIs in all my products.swyx [00:22:53]: We are API enjoyers in this house.Ethan [00:22:55]: Yeah. It's very frustrating when you have to go build a scraper. But yeah, it's for sure. Yeah.swyx [00:23:03]: So this whole combination of you have my location, my calendar, my inbox. It really is, for me, the sort of personal API.Alessio [00:23:10]: And is the API just to write into it or to have it take action on external systems?Ethan [00:23:16]: Yeah, we're expanding it. It's right now read-only. In the future, very soon, when the actions are more generally available, it'll be fully supported in the API.Alessio [00:23:27]: Nice. I'll buy one after the episode.Ethan [00:23:30]: The API thing, to me, is the most interesting. Yeah. We do have real-time APIs, so you can even connect a socket and connect it to whatever you want it to take actions with. Yeah. It's too smart for me.Alessio [00:23:43]: Yeah. I think when I look at these apps, and I mean, there's so many of these products, we launch, it's great that I can go on this app and do things. But most of my work and personal life is managed somewhere else. Yeah. So being able to plug into it. Integrate that. It's nice. I have a bunch of more, maybe, human questions. Sure. I think maybe people might have. One, is it good to have instant replay for any argument that you have? I can imagine arguing with my wife about something. And, you know, there's these commercials now where it's basically like two people arguing, and they're like, they can throw a flag, like in football, and have an instant replay of the conversation. I feel like this is similar, where it's almost like people cannot really argue anymore or, like, lie to each other. Because in a world in which everybody adopts this, I don't know if you thought about it. And also, like, how the lies. You know, all of us tell lies, right? How do you distinguish between when I'm, there's going to be sometimes things that contradict each other, because I might say something publicly, and I might think something, really, that I tell someone else. How do you handle that when you think about building a product like this?Maria [00:24:48]: I would say that I like the fact that B is an objective point of view. So I don't care too much about the lies, but I care more about the fact that can help me to understand what happened. Mm-hmm. And the emotions in a really objective way, like, really, like, critical and objective way. And if you think about humans, they have so many emotions. And sometimes something that happened to me, like, I don't know, I would feel, like, really upset about it or really angry or really emotional. But the AI doesn't have those emotions. It can read the conversation, understand what happened, and be objective. And I think the level of support is the one that I really like more. Instead of, like, oh, did this guy tell me a lie? I feel like that's not exactly, like, what I feel. I find it curious for me in terms of opportunity.Alessio [00:25:35]: Is the B going to interject in real time? Say I'm arguing with somebody. The B is like, hey, look, no, you're wrong. What? That person actually said.Ethan [00:25:43]: The proactivity is something we're very interested in. Maybe not for, like, specifically for, like, selling arguments, but more for, like, and I think that a lot of the challenge here is, you know, you need really good reasoning to kind of pull that off. Because you don't want it just constantly interjecting, because that would be super annoying. And you don't want it to miss things that it should be interjecting. So, like, it would be kind of a hard task even for a human to be, like, just come in at the right times when it's appropriate. Like, it would take the, you know, with the personal context, it's going to be a lot better. Because, like, if somebody knows about you, but even still, it requires really good reasoning to, like, not be too much or too little and just right.Maria [00:26:20]: And the second part about, well, like, some things, you know, you say something to somebody else, but after I change my mind, I send something. Like, it's every time I have, like, different type of conversation. And I'm like, oh, I want to know more about you. And I'm like, oh, I want to know more about you. I think that's something that I found really fascinating. One of the things that we are learning is that, indeed, humans, they evolve over time. So, for us, one of the challenges is actually understand, like, is this a real fact? Right. And so far, what we do is we give, you know, to the, we have the human in the loop that can say, like, yes, this is true, this is not. Or they can edit their own fact. For sure, in the future, we want to have all of that automatized inside of the product.Ethan [00:26:57]: But, I mean, I think your question kind of hits on, and I know that we'll talk about privacy, but also just, like, if you have some memory and you want to confirm it with somebody else, that's one thing. But it's for sure going to be true that in the future, like, not even that far into the future, that it's just going to be kind of normalized. And we're kind of in a transitional period now. And I think it's, like, one of the key things that is for us to kind of navigate that and make sure we're, like, thinking of all the consequences. And how to, you know, make the right choices in the way that everything's designed. And so, like, it's more beneficial than it could be harmful. But it's just too valuable for your AI to understand you. And so if it's, like, MetaRay bands or the Google Astra, I think it's just people are going to be more used to it. So people's behaviors and expectations will change. Whether that's, like, you know, something that is going to happen now or in five years, it's probably in that range. And so, like, I think we... We kind of adapt to new technologies all the time. Like, when the Ring cameras came out, that was kind of quite controversial. It's like... But now it's kind of... People just understand that a lot of people have cameras on their doors. And so I think that...Maria [00:28:09]: Yeah, we're in a transitional period for sure.swyx [00:28:12]: I will press on the privacy thing because that is the number one thing that everyone talks about. Obviously, I think in Silicon Valley, people are a little bit more tech-forward, experimental, whatever. But you want to go mainstream. You want to sell to consumers. And we have to worry about this stuff. Baseline question. The hardest version of this is law. There are one-party consent states where this is perfectly legal. Then there are two-party consent states where they're not. What have you come around to this on?Ethan [00:28:38]: Yeah, so the EU is a totally different regulatory environment. But in the U.S., it's basically on a state-by-state level. Like, in Nevada, it's single-party. In California, it's two-party. But it's kind of untested. You know, it's different laws, whether it's a phone call, whether it's in person. In a state like California, it's two-party. Like, anytime you're in public, there's no consent comes into play because the expectation of privacy is that you're in public. But we process the audio and nothing is persisted. And then it's summarized with the speaker identification focusing on the user. Now, it's kind of untested on a legal, and I'm not a lawyer, but does that constitute the same as, like, a recording? So, you know, it's kind of a gray area and untested in law right now. I think that the bigger question is, you know, because, like, if you had your Ray-Ban on and were recording, then you have a video of something that happened. And that's different than kind of having, like, an AI give you a summary that's focused on you that's not really capturing anybody's voice. You know, I think the bigger question is, regardless of the legal status, like, what is the ethical kind of situation with that? Because even in Nevada that we're—or many other U.S. states where you can record. Everything. And you don't have to have consent. Is it still, like, the right thing to do? The way we think about it is, is that, you know, we take a lot of precautions to kind of not capture personal information of people around. Both through the speaker identification, through the pipeline, and then the prompts, and the way we store the information to be kind of really focused on the user. Now, we know that's not going to, like, satisfy a lot of people. But I think if you do try it and wear it again. It's very hard for me to see anything, like, if somebody was wearing a bee around me that I would ever object that it captured about me as, like, a third party to it. And like I said, like, we're in this transitional period where the expectation will just be more normalized. That it's, like, an AI. It's not capturing, you know, a full audio recording of what you said. And it's—everything is fully geared towards helping the person kind of understand their state and providing valuable information to them. Not about, like, logging details about people they encounter.Alessio [00:30:57]: You know, I've had the same question also with the Zoom meeting transcribers thing. I think there's kind of, like, the personal impact that there's a Firefly's AI recorder. Yeah. I just know that it's being recorded. It's not like a—I don't know if I'm going to say anything different. But, like, intrinsically, you kind of feel—because it's not pervasive. And I'm curious, especially, like, in your investor meetings. Do people feel differently? Like, have you had people ask you to, like, turn it off? Like, in a business meeting, to not record? I'm curious if you've run into any of these behaviors.Maria [00:31:29]: You know what's funny? On my end, I wear it all the time. I take my coffee, a blue bottle with it. Or I work with it. Like, obviously, I work on it. So, I wear it all the time. And so far, I don't think anybody asked me to turn it off. I'm not sure if because they were really friendly with me that they know that I'm working on it. But nobody really cared.swyx [00:31:48]: It's because you live in SF.Maria [00:31:49]: Actually, I've been in Italy as well. Uh-huh. And in Italy, it's a super privacy concern. Like, Europe is a super privacy concern. And again, they're nothing. Like, it's—I don't know. Yeah. That, for me, was interesting.Ethan [00:32:01]: I think—yeah, nobody's ever asked me to turn it off, even after giving them full demos and disclosing. I think that some people have said, well, my—you know, in a personal relationship, my partner initially was, like, kind of uncomfortable about it. We heard that from a few users. And that was, like, more in just, like— It's not like a personal relationship situation. And the other big one is people are like, I do like it, but I cannot wear this at work. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Because, like, I think I will get in trouble based on policies or, like, you know, if you're wearing it inside a research lab or something where you're working on things that are kind of sensitive that, like—you know, so we're adding certain features like geofencing, just, like, at this location. It's just never active.swyx [00:32:50]: I mean, I've often actually explained to it the other way, where maybe you only want it at work, so you never take it from work. And it's just a work device, just like your Zoom meeting recorder is a work device.Ethan [00:33:09]: Yeah, professionals have been a big early adopter segment. And you say in San Francisco, but we have out there our daily shipment of over 100. If you go look at the addresses, Texas, I think, is our biggest state, and Florida, just the biggest states. A lot of professionals who talk for, and we didn't go out to build it for that use case, but I think there is a lot of demand for white-collar people who talk for a living. And I think we're just starting to talk with them. I think they just want to be able to improve their performance around, understand what they were doing.Alessio [00:33:47]: How do you think about Gong.io? Some of these, for example, sales training thing, where you put on a sales call and then it coaches you. They're more verticalized versus having more horizontal platform.Ethan [00:33:58]: I am not super familiar with those things, because like I said, it was kind of a surprise to us. But I think that those are interesting. I've seen there's a bunch of them now, right? Yeah. It kind of makes sense. I'm terrible at sales, so I could probably use one. But it's not my job, fundamentally. But yeah, I think maybe it's, you know, we heard also people with restaurants, if they're able to understand, if they're doing well.Maria [00:34:26]: Yeah, but in general, I think a lot of people, they like to have the double check of, did I do this well? Or can you suggest me how I can do better? We had a user that was saying to us that he used for interviews. Yeah, he used job interviews. So he used B and after asked to the B, oh, actually, how do you think my interview went? What I should do better? And I like that. And like, oh, that's actually like a personal coach in a way.Alessio [00:34:50]: Yeah. But I guess the question is like, do you want to build all of those use cases? Or do you see B as more like a platform where somebody is going to build like, you know, the sales coach that connects to B so that you're kind of the data feed into it?Ethan [00:35:02]: I don't think this is like a data feed, more like an understanding kind of engine and like definitely. In the future, having third parties to the API and building out for all the different use cases is something that we want to do. But the like initial case we're trying to do is like build that layer for all that to work. And, you know, we're not trying to build all those verticals because no startup could do that well. But I think that it's really been quite fascinating to see, like, you know, I've done consumer for a long time. Consumer is very hard to predict, like, what's going to be. It's going to be like the thing that's the killer feature. And so, I mean, we really believe that it's the future, but we don't know like what exactly like process it will take to really gain mass adoption.swyx [00:35:50]: The killer consumer feature is whatever Nikita Beer does. Yeah. Social app for teens.Ethan [00:35:56]: Yeah, well, I like Nikita, but, you know, he's good at building bootstrap companies and getting them very viral. And then selling them and then they shut down.swyx [00:36:05]: Okay, so you just came back from CES.Maria [00:36:07]: Yeah, crazy. Yeah, tell us. It was my first time in Vegas and first time CES, both of them were overwhelming.swyx [00:36:15]: First of all, did you feel like you had to do it because you're in consumer hardware?Maria [00:36:19]: Then we decided to be there and to have a lot of partners and media meetings, but we didn't have our own booth. So we decided to just keep that. But we decided to be there and have a presence there, even just us and speak with people. It's very hard to stand out. Yeah, I think, you know, it depends what type of booth you have. I think if you can prepare like a really cool booth.Ethan [00:36:41]: Have you been to CES?Maria [00:36:42]: I think it can be pretty cool.Ethan [00:36:43]: It's massive. It's huge. It's like 80,000, 90,000 people across the Venetian and the convention center. And it's, to me, I always wanted to go just like...Maria [00:36:53]: Yeah, you were the one who was like...swyx [00:36:55]: I thought it was your idea.Ethan [00:36:57]: I always wanted to go just as a, like, just as a fan of...Maria [00:37:01]: Yeah, you wanted to go anyways.Ethan [00:37:02]: Because like, growing up, I think CES like kind of peaked for a while and it was like, oh, I want to go. That's where all the cool, like... gadgets, everything. Yeah, now it's like SmartBitch and like, you know, vacuuming the picks up socks. Exactly.Maria [00:37:13]: There are a lot of cool vacuums. Oh, they love it.swyx [00:37:15]: They love the Roombas, the pick up socks.Maria [00:37:16]: And pet tech. Yeah, yeah. And dog stuff.swyx [00:37:20]: Yeah, there's a lot of like robot stuff. New TVs, new cars that never ship. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking like last year, this time last year was when Rabbit and Humane launched at CES and Rabbit kind of won CES. And now this year, no wearables except for you guys.Ethan [00:37:32]: It's funny because it's obviously it's AI everything. Yeah. Like every single product. Yeah.Maria [00:37:37]: Toothbrush with AI, vacuums with AI. Yeah. Yeah.Ethan [00:37:41]: We like hair blow, literally a hairdryer with AI. We saw.Maria [00:37:45]: Yeah, that was cool.Ethan [00:37:46]: But I think that like, yeah, we didn't, another kind of difference like around our, like we didn't want to do like a big overhypey promised kind of Rabbit launch. Because I mean, they did, hats off to them, like on the presentation and everything, obviously. But like, you know, we want to let the product kind of speak for itself and like get it out there. And I think we were really happy. We got some very good interest from media and some of the partners there. So like it was, I think it was definitely worth going. I would say like if you're in hardware, it's just kind of how you make use of it. Like I think to do it like a big Rabbit style or to have a huge show on there, like you need to plan that six months in advance. And it's very expensive. But like if you, you know, go there, there's everybody's there. All the media is there. There's a lot of some pre-show events that it's just great to talk to people. And the industry also, all the manufacturers, suppliers are there. So we learned about some really cool stuff that we might like. We met with somebody. They have like thermal energy capture. And it's like, oh, could you maybe not need to charge it? Because they have like a thermal that can capture your body heat. And what? Yeah, they're here. They're actually here. And in Palo Alto, they have like a Fitbit thing that you don't have to charge.swyx [00:39:01]: Like on paper, that's the power you can get from that. What's the power draw for this thing?Ethan [00:39:05]: It's more than you could get from the body heat, it turns out. But it's quite small. I don't want to disclose technically. But I think that solar is still, they also have one where it's like this thing could be like the face of it. It's just a solar cell. And like that is more realistic. Or kinetic. Kinetic, apparently, I'm not an expert in this, but they seem to think it wouldn't be enough. Kinetic is quite small, I guess, on the capture.swyx [00:39:33]: Well, I mean, watch. Watchmakers have been powering with kinetic for a long time. Yeah. We don't have to talk about that. I just want to get a sense of CES. Would you do it again? I definitely would not. Okay. You're just a fan of CES. Business point of view doesn't make sense. I happen to be in the conference business, right? So I'm kind of just curious. Yeah.Maria [00:39:49]: So I would say as we did, so without the booth and really like straightforward conversations that were already planned. Three days. That's okay. I think it was okay. Okay. But if you need to invest for a booth that is not. Okay. A good one. Which is how much? I think.Ethan [00:40:06]: 10 by 10 is 5,000. But on top of that, you need to. And then they go like 10 by 10 is like super small. Yeah. And like some companies have, I think would probably be more in like the six figure range to get. And I mean, I think that, yeah, it's very noisy. We heard this, that it's very, very noisy. Like obviously if you're, everything is being launched there and like everything from cars to cell phones are being launched. Yeah. So it's hard to stand out. But like, I think going in with a plan of who you want to talk to, I feel like.Maria [00:40:36]: That was worth it.Ethan [00:40:37]: Worth it. We had a lot of really positive media coverage from it and we got the word out and like, so I think we accomplished what we wanted to do.swyx [00:40:46]: I mean, there's some world in which my conference is kind of the CES of whatever AI becomes. Yeah. I think that.Maria [00:40:52]: Don't do it in Vegas. Don't do it in Vegas. Yeah. Don't do it in Vegas. That's the only thing. I didn't really like Vegas. That's great. Amazing. Those are my favorite ones.Alessio [00:41:02]: You can not fit 90,000 people in SF. That's really duh.Ethan [00:41:05]: You need to do like multiple locations so you can do Moscone and then have one in.swyx [00:41:09]: I mean, that's what Salesforce conferences. Well, GDC is how many? That might be 50,000, right? Okay. Form factor, right? Like my way to introduce this idea was that I was at the launch in Solaris. What was the old name of it? Newton. Newton. Of Tab when Avi first launched it. He was like, I thought through everything. Every form factor, pendant is the thing. And then we got the pendants for this original. The first one was just pendants and I took it off and I forgot to put it back on. So you went through pendants, pin, bracelet now, and maybe there's sort of earphones in the future, but what was your iterations?Maria [00:41:49]: So we had, I believe now three or four iterations. And one of the things that we learned is indeed that people don't like the pendant. In particular, woman, you don't want to have like anything here on the chest because it's maybe you have like other necklace or any other stuff.Ethan [00:42:03]: You just ship a premium one that's gold. Yeah. We're talking some fashion reached out to us.Maria [00:42:11]: Some big fashion. There is something there.swyx [00:42:13]: This is where it helps to have an Italian on the team.Maria [00:42:15]: There is like some big Italian luxury. I can't say anything. So yeah, bracelet actually came from the community because they were like, oh, I don't want to wear anything like as necklace or as a pendant. Like it's. And also like the one that we had, I don't know if you remember, like it was like circle, like it was like this and was like really bulky. Like people didn't like it. And also, I mean, I actually, I don't dislike, like we were running fast when we did that. Like our, our thing was like, we wanted to ship them as soon as possible. So we're not overthinking the form factor or the material. We were just want to be out. But after the community organically, basically all of them were like, well, why you don't just don't do the bracelet? Like he's way better. I will just wear it. And that's it. So that's how we ended up with the bracelet, but it's still modular. So I still want to play around the father is modular and you can, you know, take it off and wear it as a clip or in the future, maybe we will bring back the pendant. But I like the fact that there is some personalization and right now we have two colors, yellow and black. Soon we will have other ones. So yeah, we can play a lot around that.Ethan [00:43:25]: I think the form factor. Like the goal is for it to be not super invasive. Right. And something that's easy. So I think in the future, smaller, thinner, not like apple type obsession with thinness, but it does matter like the, the size and weight. And we would love to have more context because that will help, but to make it work, I think it really needs to have good power consumption, good battery life. And, you know, like with the humane swapping the batteries, I have one, I mean, I'm, I'm, I think we've made, and there's like pretty incredible, some of the engineering they did, but like, it wasn't kind of geared towards solving the problem. It was just, it's too heavy. The swappable batteries is too much to man, like the heat, the thermals is like too much to light interface thing. Yeah. Like that. That's cool. It's cool. It's cool. But it's like, if, if you have your handout here, you want to use your phone, like it's not really solving a problem. Cause you know how to use your phone. It's got a brilliant display. You have to kind of learn how to gesture this low range. Yeah. It's like a resolution laser, but the laser is cool that the fact they got it working in that thing, even though if it did overheat, but like too heavy, too cumbersome, too complicated with the multiple batteries. So something that's power efficient, kind of thin, both in the physical sense and also in the edge compute kind of way so that it can be as unobtrusive as possible. Yeah.Maria [00:44:47]: Users really like, like, I like when they say yes, I like to wear it and forget about it because I don't need to charge it every single day. On the other version, I believe we had like 35 hours or something, which was okay. But people, they just prefer the seven days battery life and-swyx [00:45:03]: Oh, this is seven days? Yeah. Oh, I've been charging every three days.Maria [00:45:07]: Oh, no, you can like keep it like, yeah, it's like almost seven days.swyx [00:45:11]: The other thing that occurs to me, maybe there's an Apple watch strap so that I don't have to double watch. Yeah.Maria [00:45:17]: That's the other one that, yeah, I thought about it. I saw as well the ones that like, you can like put it like back on the phone. Like, you know- Plog. There is a lot.swyx [00:45:27]: So yeah, there's a competitor called Plog. Yeah. It's not really a competitor. They only transcribe, right? Yeah, they only transcribe. But they're very good at it. Yeah.Ethan [00:45:33]: No, they're great. Their hardware is really good too.swyx [00:45:36]: And they just launched the pin too. Yeah.Ethan [00:45:38]: I think that the MagSafe kind of form factor has a lot of advantages, but some disadvantages. You can definitely put a very huge battery on that, you know? And so like the battery life's not, the power consumption's not so much of a concern, but you know, downside the phone's like in your pocket. And so I think that, you know, form factors will continue to evolve, but, and you know, more sensors, less obtrusive and-Maria [00:46:02]: Yeah. We have a new version.Ethan [00:46:04]: Easier to use.Maria [00:46:05]: Okay.swyx [00:46:05]: Looking forward to that. Yeah. I mean, we'll, whenever we launch this, we'll try to show whatever, but I'm sure you're going to keep iterating. Last thing on hardware, and then we'll go on to the software side, because I think that's where you guys are also really, really strong. Vision. You wanted to talk about why no vision? Yeah.Ethan [00:46:20]: I think it comes down to like when you're, when you're a startup, especially in hardware, you're just, you work within the constraints, right? And so like vision is super useful and super interesting. And what we actually started with, there's two issues with vision that make it like not the place we decided to start. One is power consumption. So you know, you kind of have to trade off your power budget, like capturing even at a low frame rate and transmitting the radio is actually the thing that takes up the majority of the power. So. Yeah. So you would really have to have quite a, like unacceptably, like large and heavy battery to do it continuously all day. We have, I think, novel kind of alternative ways that might allow us to do that. And we have some prototypes. The other issue is form factor. So like even with like a wide field of view, if you're wearing something on your chest, it's going, you know, obviously the wrist is not really that much of an option. And if you're wearing it on your chest, it's, it's often gone. You're going to probably be not capturing like the field of view of what's interesting to you. So that leaves you kind of with your head and face. And then anything that goes on, on the face has to look cool. Like I don't know if you remember the spectacles, it was kind of like the first, yeah, but they kind of, they didn't, they were not very successful. And I think one of the reasons is they were, they're so weird looking. Yeah. The camera was so big on the side. And if you look at them at array bands where they're way more successful, they, they look almost indistinguishable from array bands. And they invested a lot into that and they, they have a partnership with Qualcomm to develop custom Silicon. They have a stake in Luxottica now. So like they coming from all the angles, like to make glasses, I think like, you know, I don't know if you know, Brilliant Labs, they're cool company, they make frames, which is kind of like a cool hackable glasses and, and, and like, they're really good, like on hardware, they're really good. But even if you look at the frames, which I would say is like the most advanced kind of startup. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was one that launched at CES, but it's not shipping yet. Like one that you can buy now, it's still not something you'd wear every day and the battery life is super short. So I think just the challenge of doing vision right, like off the bat, like would require quite a bit more resources. And so like audio is such a good entry point and it's also the privacy around audio. If you, if you had images, that's like another huge challenge to overcome. So I think that. Ideally the personal AI would have, you know, all the senses and you know, we'll, we'll get there. Yeah. Okay.swyx [00:48:57]: One last hardware thing. I have to ask this because then we'll move to the software. Were either of you electrical engineering?Ethan [00:49:04]: No, I'm CES. And so I have a, I've taken some EE courses, but I, I had done prior to working on, on the hardware here, like I had done a little bit of like embedded systems, like very little firmware, but we have luckily on the team, somebody with deep experience. Yeah.swyx [00:49:21]: I'm just like, you know, like you have to become hardware people. Yeah.Ethan [00:49:25]: Yeah. I mean, I learned to worry about supply chain power. I think this is like radio.Maria [00:49:30]: There's so many things to learn.Ethan [00:49:32]: I would tell this about hardware, like, and I know it's been said before, but building a prototype and like learning how the electronics work and learning about firmware and developing, this is like, I think fun for a lot of engineers and it's, it's all totally like achievable, especially now, like with, with the tools we have, like stuff you might've been intimidated about. Like, how do I like write this firmware now? With Sonnet, like you can, you can get going and actually see results quickly. But I think going from prototype to actually making something manufactured is a enormous jump. And it's not all about technology, the supply chain, the procurement, the regulations, the cost, the tooling. The thing about software that I'm used to is it's funny that you can make changes all along the way and ship it. But like when you have to buy tooling for an enclosure that's expensive.swyx [00:50:24]: Do you buy your own tooling? You have to.Ethan [00:50:25]: Don't you just subcontract out to someone in China? Oh, no. Do we make the tooling? No, no. You have to have CNC and like a bunch of machines.Maria [00:50:31]: Like nobody makes their own tooling, but like you have to design this design and you submitEthan [00:50:36]: it and then they go four to six weeks later. Yeah. And then if there's a problem with it, well, then you're not, you're not making any, any of your enclosures. And so you have to really plan ahead. And like.swyx [00:50:48]: I just want to leave tips for other hardware founders. Like what resources or websites are most helpful in your sort of manufacturing journey?Ethan [00:50:55]: You know, I think it's different depending on like it's hardware so specialized in different ways.Maria [00:51:00]: I will say that, for example, I should choose a manufacturer company. I speak with other founders and like we can give you like some, you know, some tips of who is good and who is not, or like who's specialized in something versus somebody else. Yeah.Ethan [00:51:15]: Like some people are good in plastics. Some people are good.Maria [00:51:18]: I think like for us, it really helped at the beginning to speak with others and understand. Okay. Like who is around. I work in Shenzhen. I lived almost two years in China. I have an idea about like different hardware manufacturer and all of that. Soon I will go back to Shenzhen to check out. So I think it's good also to go in place and check.Ethan [00:51:40]: Yeah, you have to like once you, if you, so we did some stuff domestically and like if you have that ability. The reason I say ability is very expensive, but like to build out some proof of concepts and do field testing before you take it to a manufacturer, despite what people say, there's really good domestic manufacturing for small quantities at extremely high prices. So we got our first PCB and the assembly done in LA. So there's a lot of good because of the defense industry that can do quick churn. So it's like, we need this board. We need to find out if it's working. We have this deadline we want to start, but you need to go through this. And like if you want to have it done and fabricated in a week, they can do it for a price. But I think, you know, everybody's kind of trending even for prototyping now moving that offshore because in China you can do prototyping and get it within almost the same timeline. But the thing is with manufacturing, like it really helps to go there and kind of establish the relationship. Yeah.Alessio [00:52:38]: My first company was a hardware company and we did our PCBs in China and took a long time. Now things are better. But this was, yeah, I don't know, 10 years ago, something like that. Yeah.Ethan [00:52:47]: I think that like the, and I've heard this too, we didn't run into this problem, but like, you know, if it's something where you don't have the relationship, they don't see you, they don't know you, you know, you might get subcontracted out or like they're not paying attention. But like if you're, you know, you have the relationship and a priority, like, yeah, it's really good. We ended up doing the fabrication assembly in Taiwan for various reasons.Maria [00:53:11]: And I think it really helped the fact that you went there at some point. Yeah.Ethan [00:53:15]: We're really happy with the process and, but I mean the whole process of just Choosing the right people. Choosing the right people, but also just sourcing the bill materials and all of that stuff. Like, I guess like if you have time, it's not that bad, but if you're trying to like really push the speed at that, it's incredibly stressful. Okay. We got to move to the software. Yeah.Alessio [00:53:38]: Yeah. So the hardware, maybe it's hard for people to understand, but what software people can understand is that running. Transcription and summarization, all of these things in real time every day for 24 hours a day. It's not easy. So you mentioned 200,000 tokens for a day. Yeah. How do you make it basically free to run all of this for the consumer?Ethan [00:53:59]: Well, I think that the pipeline and the inference, like people think about all of these tokens, but as you know, the price of tokens is like dramatically dropping. You guys probably have some charts somewhere that you've posted. We do. And like, if you see that trend in like 250,000 input tokens, it's not really that much, right? Like the output.swyx [00:54:21]: You do several layers. You do live. Yeah.Ethan [00:54:23]: Yeah. So the speech to text is like the most challenging part actually, because you know, it requires like real time processing and then like later processing with a larger model. And one thing that is fairly obvious is that like, you don't need to transcribe things that don't have any voice in it. Right? So good voice activity is key, right? Because like the majority of most people's day is not spent with voice activity. Right? So that is the first step to cutting down the amount of compute you have to do. And voice activity is a fairly cheap thing to do. Very, very cheap thing to do. The models that need to summarize, you don't need a Sonnet level kind of model to summarize. You do need a Sonnet level model to like execute things like the agent. And we will be having a subscription for like features like that because it's, you know, although now with the R1, like we'll see, we haven't evaluated it. A deep seek? Yeah. I mean, not that one in particular, but like, you know, they're already there that can kind of perform at that level. I was like, it's going to stay in six months, but like, yeah. So self-hosted models help in the things where you can. So you are self-hosting models. Yes. You are fine tuning your own ASR. Yes. I will say that I see in the future that everything's trending down. Although like, I think there might be an intermediary step with things to become expensive, which is like, we're really interested because like the pipeline is very tedious and like a lot of tuning. Right. Which is brutal because it's just a lot of trial and error. Whereas like, well, wouldn't it be nice if an end to end model could just do all of this and learn it? If we could do transcription with like an LLM, there's so many advantages to that, but it's going to be a larger model and hence like more compute, you know, we're optim

Aaron Harris was a partner at YC for 7.5 years where he funded Deel, OpenSea, Scale AI, Rappi, Lattice, and others. He also built YC's Series A program where he worked with founders on over 200 Series As and Bs that raised in excess of $3B in capital. He joined Sam Kirschner, VP at Village Global, to give Village Global founders helpful tips on fundraising.Takeaways:Investors bet on stories, not just data. Your job? Tell a story of massive economic opportunity — not just how you fit into the future, but how you create it.Hype lowers the barrier to turn attention into excitement.Fundraising isn't the trophy, even though it's celebrated as such. But if you optimize for raising money, you get great at burning money and miss the real point: building something that lasts through the hype cycles.Think about raising money with terminal value in mind, not just the value of this current round.Raising an A: you'll need to raise about 20% of your company. Series B: 15-20%. Seeds are all over the place. More competition in a round means less dilution; less competition means more dilution. Hype helps reduce dilution.Be aware of dilution on SAFEs so that you don't all of a sudden start arguing about a point of dilution here or there on a given round.AI companies have been getting faster investor movement. The hottest deals land term sheets in 48 hours. Next tier? 1-2 weeks. Beyond that, a 2-6 week grind with unpredictable timing. After 6 weeks, rounds can stretch to 3-4 months where persistence is what leads to success.Understand the market and how investors think by having casual, no-pitch-deck coffee chats. The real signal? Not a follow-up meeting — that's just a VC's job. Look for action: are they willing to spend political capital for you? That's true interest.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Nikita Shamgunov is a native of Russia, coming to the US for grad school in 2005. Eventually he worked at Microsoft on the SQL Server product. A fun fact - Nikita quit business school on the first day, and decided to join Facebook and find his future co-founder. All of this worked out, and he and his co-founder built SingleStore, which is one of the highest valued companies at YC. Outside of tech, he was a semi-professional athlete in Ping Pong, achieving the status of Top 10 in Washington State back when he was at Microsoft.Nikita completed his "tour of duty" at SingleStore, and post that, he joined a venture fund. He pitched incubating an idea of his at the fund, which was rolling up all Postgres instances in the world. He started to engineer an approach, the team, and the architecture - and did so in some very unique, and deliberate ways.This is the creation story of Neon.SponsorsRapyd CloudSpeakeasyQA WolfSnapTradeLinkshttps://neon.tech/https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikitashamgunov/Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORYSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Y Combinator has just released its latest Request for Startups, which covers nearly every theme related to AI and agents. From infrastructure to vertical applications, YC's vision for the upcoming wave of startups provides insight into what they believe will shape the industry. This episode analyzes their predictions, the largest opportunities, and why managing AI agents rather than replacing jobs might be the true future of work. Brought to you by: KPMG – Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.kpmg.us/ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more about how KPMG can help you drive value with our AI solutions. Vanta - Simplify compliance - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vanta.com/nlw The Agent Readiness Audit from Superintelligent - Go to https://besuper.ai/ to request your company's agent readiness score. The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/ Join our Discord: https://bit.ly/aibreakdown