i've been talking to a lot of normal ppl outside of tech about personal agents & the convos have been incredibly fascinating, particularly w.r.t. to retention. most consumer products typically have one of two types of retention, one is desire driven which is just pure dopamine (like insta, tiktok, games). they often don't even need notifications because you know there is a reward for your desire always waiting. the second is dependency driven, like emails, calendars, even credit cards & banking. most ppl have to do this, it's not something they necessarily desire (unless they are a sociopath). the challenge with personal ai agents right now is that they occupy a weird third space where they aren't emotionally rewarding most of the time to become entertainment like the first category, & they're not reliable / indispensable enough to become pure infra. i.e. they fail, & there is a lot of friction. outside of pure research driven tasks, even one failure is often enough to not come back for the utility value prop. which is why i think vertical agents that focus on making your life more interesting & entertaining are worth deep exploration still. & even very focused vertically integrated utility agents that work reliably will still be in demand. tons of ppl still think in jobs to be done when reaching for anything & with general purpose agents that's just not as crisp yet on what those critical jobs are.

NFTs are an area of crypto that i think deserves another look the 2021 boom and subsequent crash left a lot of people with a negative view of them, but the underlying concept still makes sense to me as more businesses move onchain, NFTs could become a useful way to represent ownership, experiment with revenue sharing and build communities around products i expect there's still a lot of room for experimentation beyond the NFT models we saw last cycle

OUSD launched on September 30 with over $1B in committed liquidity from Coinbase, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa, among others. Today, we’re excited to launch Sentora's new OUSD @Morpho Vault on @tempo. Read more:

The wallet wars are here. Very Good Security chief strategy officer Terry Angelos joins a16z's Alex Rampell, his TrialPay co-founder from back in 2006 (TrialPay was later acquired by Visa), to discuss how agents are learning to spend money. "Agents have all of a sudden become significantly more helpful and useful because they effectively have arms and legs, which are payment credentials." VGS holds the payment credentials behind about 1/3 of all e-commerce, and now it's helping AI agents pay merchants. If you've bought anything online, there's a good chance VGS has already helped keep your card safe. In the last three months, Terry says agents went from "spectators to actors." Once an agent has your payment credentials, it can book the piano teacher it previously could only find and recommend. Now Stripe's Link, Shopify's Shop Pay, and PayPal are racing to connect to agents. It's all headed toward open standards from the card networks: agentic tokens that let an agent pay with your actual card. VGS went from zero agentic tokens to a few million a week in three months. 0:55 From TrialPay to Visa to VGS 2:05 How VGS vaults 1/3 of e-commerce 6:05 Why big merchants use 3-5 processors 9:55 Why AI agents need a payment vault 12:15 Agents go from "spectators to actors" 13:40 The wallet wars, old and new 19:55 Walled gardens vs open standards 23:55 How agents can pay with your real card 26:40 Your saved card goes multiplayer 29:40 How do you trust an agent's purchase? 32:35 Who pays when your agent gets it wrong 35:40 Why Amazon blocks agents 39:50 What's overhyped and underhyped 43:35 When merchants get agents too 45:40 Why agents could break card rewards 47:00 VGS's eras: vault, updates, network @terryangelos @arampell

More SF observations: 1. Seeing the word "inference" on billboards in SF still blows my mind. 99.9% of america has no idea what inference is and I wonder how many know what an agent is. Will Muse, Instinct, Dots etc will change that over the next 12 months? 2. You know who doesn't get enough credit? Manus. In March 2025 they shipped the blueprint for AI agents: every task gets its own computer in the cloud, you can watch it work, it writes a todo list and checks it off, and you walk away while it finishes. So much of what we use today runs on those ideas! 3. Your product now has to sell itself twice. First the agent has to pick it, then the human has to trust that pick enough to say yes. 4. I was talking to a guy who told me we should just destroy all the data centers. I think that sentiment is more common than people in SF realize. You can already see some of the big AI companies adjusting positioning their AI as something that helps people and gives them more time/cures for cancers etc. 5. AI is making people work 5x faster (at least), so for freelancers/agencies that charge per hour you're earning 5x less per unit of work. But your rate is the same? I think a lot of freelancers and agencies are about to have to rethink how they price. 6. Running a company now feels kinda dystopian sometimes, especially with a small team of a few humans and a lot of agents. Some days the Slack channel is mostly bots reporting to each other, and you're the only one in the room with a pulse. 7. Every product company is turning into a product studio. I see it firsthand as a co-founder of @meetLCA , which is basically a Labs as a Service company incubating new products for companies. (DM me if you want to work together in 2027). 8. Personal software is exploding. People at every company are building their own little tools for their own jobs. It's amazing for productivity and a nightmare for IT, because nobody knows what's running or who owns it. 9. Revenue per human is the new flex. Founders used to brag about headcount. Now they brag about how much they're doing with how few people. 11. More founders are using agents for customer research. Agents run the interviews, read every support ticket and summarize what people are begging for. Synthetic market research is the new thing. 12. Shipping technology that actually takes 3-6 months with unique partnerships that are hard to replicate. So, partnerships are sooo back! 13. Insane amount of young people (22 or younger) making absurds amounts of money. At least it feels that way. Never seen anything like that, even during mobile era. 14. Only 2% of the US is paying for AI products, but it feels like 110% SF is. 15. Advice for college grads used to be “follow your passion” and now it’s follow careers that are not document- driven, rules-bound and verifiable 16. Seeing the word inference on billboards in SF still blows my mind. 17. Agents paying for things feels futuristic. I think its coming, only a matter of time, but I’m wondering when it becomes mainstream. 2027? 18. Lots of talk about proactive agents being the next phase of personal agents. Right now you ask your agent to do something. In 2027, it’s all going to be about noticing things (context/memory) and acting first. "Your flight got delayed, I already rebooked you." 19. The quote "what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in 10 years." by Chris Dixon. It feels like that length of time isnt 10 years anymore, its 12 months. 20. This is the most asymmetric window I've ever seen in business. My DMs are open. Respond to the most interesting ones. Loved my trip to SF. Until next time. Maybe NYC next? Thank you for everything. I'm rooting for you.