Congrats to the Profound team on their Series D. If your team isn't investing in your AEO, you're already late. And great to watch them evolve from AEO services into a full blown agentic marketing platform. Let's go.

The best place to learn isn't in the lab. It's in the real world, in actual deployments with actual customers. Skild has shown off their impressive tech before, but they're now also showing off their impressive commercial traction and have already passed 100M ARR. If we haven't reached the "ChatGPT moment for physical AI" yet, we're surely close.

Two things early founders often get wrong, and should remember: 1) Building culture can feel like it's just fluff at the start. Until you start to raise capital or hire teams, and then you see how it shapes everything you do moving forward. 2) You should build a team so talented that it makes you slightly uncomfortable to be with them, because you know you are going to have to raise your game to keep up.

Great piece by my partner Konstantine, on how AI is a cognition revolution and how it compares to what we saw with the industrial revolution. "Over the course of about two centuries, physical work went from 99% biological to 99.9% machine. [...] A century ago, 99% of cognitive work was done by humans. In the near future, 99.9% will be done by machines. What stays economically human the longest is what was never really cognition to begin with: wanting things, choosing between them, being accountable for the choice, and being trusted by other people."

Great to chat with @AndrewYNg at the Agentic AI Conference at Berkeley. Our full talk is now available on YouTube. We discuss if we should expect an AI jobpocalypse, the importance of open models, and whether AGI is still 50 years out or happened 30 years ago.

Great insights from my partner @DavidCahn6 on the latest @BigTechPod with @Kantrowitz. Worth a listen if you care about the state of AI and how these big bets will pay off. A few good ones: On Jensen: "He was one of the first people to make a bet on AI. The way that everybody else is fighting over share and this and that, I think Jensen just wants the pie to be really big. His fundamental world model is you win, I win." On resource allocation: The winners will be decided by what resources each player has (cash, talent, chips, distribution) and how coherently they allocate them. Founder-led companies play coherent games; committees don't. On market reactions: The lab leaders have told us what they believe and they're all playing for AGI. Back-test their decisions against that world model and the moves make sense. Markets get confused because they underprice both AGI and a correction while overpricing the status quo.

In re-sharing this post, I went down a rabbit hole on the Empire State Building. It was built in 1930 in 410 days and landed under budget, despite having none of our modern-day advantages or technologies. As a corollary, the World Trade Center broke ground in 1966 and took 7 years to build. The ESB is ~1,250ft to roofline, the WTC was ~1,370ft to roofline. The ESB did it by subordinating every design decision to speed: - No exotic materials or systems were used; just known steel, floor, and window systems - Window placement, stone thickness, and cladding attachment were all chosen to minimize on-site cutting and hand-fitting - Engineers explicitly designed systems so trades could work independently and in parallel without waiting on each other, reducing the risk of delays - Demolition started before design was finished, foundations were poured while upper floors were still being designed, steel was ordered a month ahead of need - The owner, architect, engineer, and contractor sat together through construction, resolving details jointly instead of each one handing off their piece independently - On-site narrow-gauge railways, dedicated hoists for brick and stone, and on-floor cafeterias removed friction from moving material and people Interestingly, the profit-maximizing design was determined to be 63 stories, but they built it to 85 stories for prestige and to beat Chrysler. Speed discipline saved the vanity height economics. For contrast, the WTC took over a decade because it was plagued by lawsuits, political fights, and novel/untested systems, the reverse of the ESB's playbook. Lots of learnings for startups, both inside the building (focus, parallelizing vs serializing, etc) and outside the building (regulatory, etc).

Kareem is a very thoughtful CEO and it's been a pleasure to work with him, Varun, and the Clay team. Great thoughts in here on his role as a "momentum detective" hopping into areas where energy is waning, Clay's just-in-time decision-making and preference for open communication, and their commitment to radical transparency with both their employees and customers.

"Underneath the statute is a belief, the one that strung the wire and funded the labs and put men on the moon: that building hard things at scale is worth doing, and that this is the country that does them. The American method was never the state alone or the market alone. The wire reached the farms because federal credit met local cooperatives that did the stringing. Apollo was a government program executed by four hundred thousand people who mostly worked for contractors. Warp Speed was public money and private molecules. Public purpose set the pace and wrote the check. Private ingenuity built the thing. Deep capital markets funded the improbable. A bankruptcy code cleared failure fast. Immigration imported a century of talent. The answer to a rival that builds by command isn’t to become one. It’s to run the harness again, by choice this time."

Our intern just built the first zero-person company. Listen's agent ran a loop: - Interview users - Build - Test with real people - Fix issues - Repeat 2,000 interviews and 100 concepts later: an app with 100s of paying customers. Here’s how it works:

There is a reason that advice is free. It worked for the person asked, but that advice is unlikely to work for us. Our situation is different. The world has moved forward. New solutions developed, and new challenges are present. What has worked in the past is unlikely to work precisely in the future.

Q2 recap for @harvey - +$100M NNARR - 53% DAU/MAU Key hires (including Q1) - Anique (CPO) - prev VP of Product at Rippling - Rachel (CMO) - prev CMO at Notion - Brooks (CISO) - prev CISO at Roblox - Keith (CSO) - prev CPO at Google Product - Agent unification - cloud agents can use all Harvey product surfaces - Command center (EA) - monitor adoption and ROI by use case - Contract intelligence (EA) - agentic contracting platform for enterprises Eng - Migration to cloud agent infrastructure - Integrating open source inference providers - Scaling document processing (54TB / week) AI - Legal Agent Bench - Open source post training - Published multiple research directions with partners We invested heavily in cloud agent infrastructure at the end of last year and in Q1. In Q2 we also unified many of our product surfaces (collapsed as @winstonweinberg says) by making them all tools accessible by our cloud agents. Prior to this, there were a lot of capabilities in Harvey that were often only discovered by power users. As cloud agents get better and our product becomes more connected we are seeing users discover more of the product by learning from their agents (see plot of product surfaces per user).

What we learned from the DeepSeek R1 moment, that also applies to GLM-5.2, and will apply to others in the future: Limits push you to get creative - Not having enough, whether it's chips, money, or time, forces clever solutions that you'd never find when you have plenty. So treat limits as a reason to invent, not a problem to fix. When you're stuck, try the opposite of what feels natural: cut the budget, shorten the deadline, or raise the bar instead of adding more. The big surprises are usually predictable - When a model is improving fast, that speed is the clue. Strong results aren't a shock; they're just where the trend was already heading. People come around to new ideas slowly, so if you pay attention and form a view early, you can get ahead before everyone else catches on. Don't write off huge leaps as cheating or fake - When a competitor jumps way ahead, the easy reaction is to assume they cut corners or made up the numbers. Maybe some of that is true, but there's almost always real innovation behind it. Better to assume they genuinely beat you at something and figure out what you can learn.

Very excited to see this new effort from Stripe, Visa, Coinbase, Mastercard, Amex, Blackrock, and many others to build a new open stablecoin that shares economics back to users and distributors. OpenUSD will be natively issued on Tempo on day 1!

Palmer gets it: If you're going to say something everyone agrees with, you might as well have said nothing at all. You're not going to build a following of people who say, "I just love his right-down-the-middle, very hedged takes that everyone agrees with." If some people love what you're saying and some people hate what you're saying, that's a lot better than having everybody lukewarm agree with you. Don't waste time communicating about what everyone already agrees on. Focus on the things where you need to change their mind.