Viksit Gaur @viksit

well known vc once forgot he passed when i was raising the first round, and in the next, wanted to participate. no context at all. also joined the call late. another once told me they didn’t find my energy levels high enough in the conference room. 🤷🏽

GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg

3 days ago

I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A. 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going. I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a

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Home alone. Remote work can adversely influence mental health. A new study @ScienceMagazine science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

billion-dollar company is the Vercel for internal agents. an employee writes a Claude Code agent, hits deploy, and gets hosting plus a Convex database in one click. IT scopes what it can touch, watches every execution, and tracks token spend per agent

Every Agent Needs a Human Dan Shipper, CEO of Every, interviewed by Lenny Rachitsky (Lenny's Podcast) I post one executive summary daily of an interview I enjoyed and learnt from. I loved this interview that @lennysan did with @danshipper. Great insights around building and running a AI-native company for founders and operators. Summary: Dan Shipper runs what is probably the most AI-forward company in the wild, has doubled headcount in a year, and thinks the AI job apocalypse is wrong. His read after a year inside the frontier: agents do not work without a human running them, the work surface for knowledge work is collapsing into Codex and Claude Co-work, and the people who win are the ones who keep riding each new model into work they could not do before. SaaS is back. PMs and designers are back. Buy the stocks. 1. Automation Is a Lie. Every agent needs a human who cares about it. The minute you sever that connection, the agent stops being useful. Shipper has doubled Every's headcount in a year while running 6 AI products internally, and the math still works because someone has to watch the agent, add context, and fix it when it breaks. Treat "fully autonomous AI" as a marketing line. Staff for the human who keeps the agent working. 2. The Super Agent Won. Shipper used to believe in personal agents on every laptop. He flipped. The pattern that actually works is one company-wide agent with a forward-deployed engineer who keeps it healthy: Shopify has River, Ramp has theirs, Every has Claudie. Build for the central agent first. Push specialization down only as the models become more independent. 3. Codex Is the OS. The work surface for knowledge work is collapsing into Codex and Claude Co-work. Shipper has been at inbox zero for 10 days because Codex pulls every email, opens an in-app browser to research, and drafts replies while he monologues at it. The agent watches him, he watches the agent, and the document, the browser, and the model are all in one window. Anything you ship for knowledge workers in 2026 needs to make sense inside that one window. 4. CLIs Are Over. Most technical people at Every have moved off the CLI back into GUIs for Codex and Cloud Co-work. GUIs were invented for a reason and the benefits of the CLI era port cleanly into a window. Stop bragging that your product is terminal-native. Ship the GUI. 5. The SaaS Apocalypse Is Dumb. Shipper would buy SaaS stocks today. Every is the most AI-pilled company he knows and Every's SaaS spend is up year over year, because agents multiply the number of users a SaaS product serves. The right move for a SaaS founder is to design for humans and agents working on the same surface at the same time. The customer brings the tokens. You keep the margin. 6. The CEO Test. "Your company is only going to go as far as your CEO goes in AI." Shipper sees this with every senior leadership team he works with: CEOs who delegate AI exploration lose intuition for what their org can ship, and the company plateaus there. The CEO has to keep hands on Codex every week, even when it would be easier to hand off to a chief of staff. If you stopped playing with each new model drop, your team will too. 7. Yesterday's Competence, Commoditized. Models make yesterday's human competence cheap. The moment a new model lands, anyone can make a landing page or write a tweet or ship a feature at the median of yesterday's craft, so that work commoditizes overnight. Humans then take the frozen competence and push past it into something the model has not seen. The job is to stay on the edge of that gap, finding what the model has not yet absorbed. 8. Benchmarks Lie About Autonomy. Shipper built a "senior engineer benchmark" by handing models his own vibe-coded codebase and asking them to rewrite it. GPT 5.5 hit 62, up from 30 the prior generation, and headlines would say senior engineers are about to be replaced. The trick is that the prompt itself, telling the model to rip out the vibe-code and start from first principles, took weeks to craft, and a senior engineer would have known that on their own. The benchmark measures what we already learned to articulate. Humans do the part you cannot score yet. 9. PMs Eat the Future. A PM at Every named Marcus took a year off, got AI-pilled, learned Cursor and Claude Code, and now ships faster than anyone on the team while keeping his product instinct intact. A year ago Every could not have hired him for this role. Today he runs Spiral, Every's writing app, solo. PMs with a feel for users, taste for writing, and the discipline to drive a coding agent are the most valuable hire in tech right now. If your PMs have not flipped, that is the gap to close. 10. Designers Ship Now. Designers at Every are opening pull requests directly, because Claude Code makes the gap between mockup and merged interaction collapse. The interactions they design are the exact thing vibe-coding cannot do, which is why every "AI-built" site looks the same. A full-stack designer with strong taste is now a one-person feature team, and the design job market data has not caught up yet. Hire them while it has not. 11. Strategy Docs by Agent. Every ran its 2025 Q4 planning entirely through Notion agents. Each team talked to the agent about goals, metrics, and pushback against top-down strategy. Shipper got back planning docs better than most humans would have written on their own. The new etiquette: send AI-written docs all you want, but stand behind every line. If you cannot answer a question about something your agent wrote, you do not get to send it. 12. Ride the Models. The single instruction Shipper gives anyone worried about losing their job: ride the models. Every time a new model drops, point it at the thing you actually do, find what it cannot do yet, and come back next release. The frontier of AI is wherever a model meets a real human doing a real job. Every is in Brooklyn precisely because that distance from the lab is an advantage. Find your moment of joy with AI, share it, repeat.

@ben8128 @abarrallen @gokulr @mignano @fredwilson tbh when do you find time to listen to something that long?

@abarrallen @gokulr @mignano @fredwilson came here for this haha

The Three Humans Left in a VC Firm Fred Wilson, co-founder, Union Square Ventures, interviewed by Michael Mignano (USV) [I post one executive summary daily of an interview I enjoyed and learnt from. I loved this interview that @mignano did with @fredwilson, who I've learnt a tremendous amount from on the board of Coinbase. Tons of great nuggets for founders and investors.] Summary: After 40 years in venture, Wilson has rebuilt USV around a single conviction. Only three things in the firm still need a human: picking the thesis, building relationships with founders working in that thesis, and supporting them after the check. Everything else, including sourcing, diligence, term sheets, and CRM, is being handed to agents. The interview is a working sketch of what a venture firm looks like when the back half of its job becomes software, and a clear read on what stays human-only and why. 1. The Three Humans Left. A year ago Wilson wrote a memo to his partners saying that if he were starting USV from scratch today, only three jobs would stay with humans: high-level thesis development, building relationships with founders inside that thesis, and supporting them after the check. Everything else gets handed to agents. USV is now executing on that memo, not theorizing about it. For founders raising, this is the new operating profile of the firm sitting across the table. 2. Agents Love Data Rooms. "I hate data rooms. Agents love data rooms." USV no longer asks a junior associate to scrub the data room before a term sheet. An agent reads the room and answers questions in conversation: cap table, vesting, founder ownership, anything in the corpus. The effect on partner time is direct, with less work on the parts of the job no one enjoys and more time with founders. 3. Term Sheets Without Lawyers. USV's term sheets are now written by an agent, with no outside counsel stamp at the term-sheet stage. The firm seeded the agent with standard term sheets by sector and by stage, then partners shape each document in conversation with the agent. Wilson does not yet trust an agent to write long-form definitive docs. The implication for founders: term sheets land faster, with less round-trip friction, and the cost structure of the next-generation venture firm starts to drop. 4. The Kill Zone Test. Wilson ran a sample contract through a legal-AI startup and through raw Claude Code, side by side, and Claude's markup was better. "All of legal AI is in the kill zone." The test is portable to almost any AI vendor pitch. If a wrapper company cannot outperform the raw model on the thing it sells, the wrapper is paying for the privilege of being disrupted. Operators should run the same test before signing a multi-year contract. 5. No Wrappers Allowed. To survive the kill zone you cannot wrap a model. You have to rebuild the business model from scratch around the new economics. Cursor is the example Wilson reaches for: it has been hugely successful, but more developers are dropping back to raw Claude Code, and nothing stops Anthropic from shipping an IDE. A defensible AI company redesigns the workflow itself, so the foundation lab would have to abandon its current pricing model to copy. 6. Energy Is the AI Trade. About a third of USV's deployment now goes to energy, because no matter which model wins, the winner needs power. The firm has backed a decentralized model-training network and a company that turns each grid-scale solar and wind plant into a mini data center selling inference tokens. The trade is indexed to AI without forcing USV to pick the model. Builders hunting for a less crowded adjacent market should read the same memo, because the picks and shovels of AI run through electricity. 7. Sellers, Not Coders. The skill USV now overweights in founders is selling: recruiting, fundraising, convincing customers, inspiring teams. Forty years has taught Wilson that the founder who can tell the story and bring it to life wins more often than the founder who can write the code. The corollary is uncomfortable for technical founders. "Actually being able to write code is probably not a big deal anymore," though enough technical vision to see three moves ahead still matters. If you are a CEO who cannot recruit, that is now your constraint. 8. The 80–90% Open Source Window. Open-source models, especially the ones shipping out of Asia, are running at 80 to 90 percent of the quality of the closed frontier models. Right now the closed labs are subsidizing usage, so price does not force the comparison. When the labs have to charge a real margin, open source becomes a serious value alternative and the playing field levels. Wilson is not betting the firm on this outcome, but he is hedging into the quadrant where open source wins. 9. Founders Still Want Humans. Founders do not want to raise money from an agent. They want to know the human they are getting in business with, and that is why Wilson does not see VC automating itself out of a job in the short term. The firm can automate the back half of the workflow. The front half, sitting across from a founder at 11 p.m. when they have had a horrible day, stays human. 10. Don't Pass on Price. The biggest regrets of Wilson's career are deals he passed on because the price was too high. The market-clearing valuation will almost always feel uncomfortable a year later, and the right answer is to find a way in, even if that means buying secondary instead of leading the round. Saying no on price is a defensive move masquerading as discipline. Founders raising can use the line in negotiation, because a firm that walks on price is telling you it has not adjusted to the current market. 11. Offense Over Defense. Wilson lost $25 million in six months in 2001 and learned that getting it wrong is a byproduct of the job, not a verdict on the investor. He spent his first 15 years scared of losing money and only got good at venture once he stopped playing defense. The advice is harder to apply for someone breaking in, because the first checks really do matter, but the directive holds at every level. For operators, the analog is the founder who refuses to ship until the product is perfect, because you cannot win a game you are not playing. 12. The Relationship Is the Moat. After 40 years and an AI rebuild of the firm, Wilson's one-line summary of the venture business is the same as it was on day one. The relationship between the investor and the founder is the secret sauce. Everything else, including the work USV used to staff up to do, gets compressed by technology. Find great founders, build real relationships with them, and help them build great companies. If your venture pitch to LPs does not lead with that, you are pitching the wrong business.

Wise words. This matches what I’m seeing on the ground every day. thefp.com/p/i-built-an-a…

“Unfortunately, AI companies have an incentive to make apocalyptic statements like this. Nothing markets a technology like the suggestion that it’s too powerful to exist. But such pronouncements are making the public needlessly afraid of what is, in fact, a miracle. Electricity was a miracle. The internet was a miracle. Today, we take them for granted. Within a few years, we won’t remember why we got so worked up about AI coding agents. We’ll take them entirely for granted too. That’s how technological miracles go. In 1900, about 40 percent of Americans worked on farms. Today it’s just 2 percent. If you’d told someone in 1900 that 95 percent of farmers would lose their jobs to machines, they would have predicted mass starvation and ruin. Instead, we went on to do almost everything we now think of as modern life: We designed cars, wrote software, piloted airplanes, manufactured TVs, made movies, built skyscrapers, and launched satellites. Those last 2 percent now feed the rest of us, and they feed us better than any society in history. Fewer farmers didn’t mean less food. It meant more of everything else.”

Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca

24 hours ago

Wise words. This matches what I’m seeing on the ground every day. thefp.com/p/i-built-an-a…

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Very clever expansion by Ramp. So impressive to see the rate at which they’re building and solving problems, and making so many professionals’ lives easier.

Eric Glyman @eglyman

2 days ago

Introducing Stack. The AI operating system that lets accounting firms take on more clients without hiring. Learns your firm's process, runs the close, posts the journals. Fully auditable. We’re living through the biggest shift in accounting since the spreadsheet.

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ooh this is exactly what i built early last year into @selvedgeai open source. the challenge i ran into was that the model layer couldn’t do workflows well enough. excited to see it finally come to life

Thomas Karatzas @karatzas_thomas

2 days ago

UI Workflow builders weren't designed for the coding agent era. Today, we're sharing Terse in early access: a TypeScript-first AI workflow orchestration platform built to work with coding agents on your machine.

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@can ooh this is exactly what i built early last year into @selvedgeai open source. the challenge i ran into was that the model layer couldn’t do workflows well enough. excited to see it finally come to life

@NoahZiems @PrimeIntellect amazing stuff!

Quick update! This summer I am interning at @PrimeIntellect where I'm doing applied research in reinforcement learning. Lots of exciting things coming soon 👀

Banganapalli was always the mango we got in bulk. Big yellow boxes of it. My grandmother in Hyderabad would slice them cold, straight from the fridge. No ceremony. Just fruit on a summer afternoon ☀️ I didn't know then that most of the world had never heard of Banganapalli. Or Kesar. Or Himayat 🥭 When I started travelling across Asia and through the west, I kept finding mangoes I couldn't name. Tree-ripened Irwin from Miyazaki. Ataulfo in a Mexican market. Each one carrying its own season, its own name in three languages, its own story about where summer happens. I've always loved a good atlas. The kind that makes the world feel bigger and more specific at the same time. So when @arjunphlox and I started talking about building something together, this was the one. A small, playful atlas for mangoes. Where they come from, what they taste like, what people call them at home. Mangoes Around the World is live today at mangoesoftheworld.com. If you know a variety we've missed, send it our way! Enjoy ☺️

a standing ovation for daraxonrasib at asco. over 40k oncologists, entrepreneurs, investors, and patient advocates together celebrating revmed's breakthru in the fight against pancreatic cancer. u never forget these moments. it's what innovation is all about.

A standing ovation for a pancreatic cancer drug is how you know it’s good

Rod Wong, MD @docrodwong

4 days ago

a standing ovation for daraxonrasib at asco. over 40k oncologists, entrepreneurs, investors, and patient advocates together celebrating revmed's breakthru in the fight against pancreatic cancer. u never forget these moments. it's what innovation is all about.

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very nice investigation, i wonder who did it

News18 @CNNnews18

4 days ago

#Breaking: CBSE Removed Blacklisting Clause Before OSM Contract Was Awarded, Documents Reveal CNN-News18 has accessed the original 132-page tender document issued by the CBSE to firm in August @SimranBabbar_05 shares more details @poonam_burde | #CBSE

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One of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: a standing ovation for the full Daraxonrasib results I feel inspired and energised, to put it mildly — we have a targeted therapy for pancreatic cancer now, and nothing is undruggable anymore