What have people in SF built with Astra? (GPT-6 Community Night edition🌌) I got accepted to attend the @OpenAI GPT-6 Community Night out of 40,000 people who applied! Not only did I get to meet Sam Altman but I also learned what builders are creating with Astra:) Someone's building... "The first ever shitty cloud for shitty apps." A wine-collection tracker. A DIY hardware note-taker wired up in Blender. A "second brain" pulling in every X bookmark and YouTube video, 9 months deep. An action short pulled off a phone and auto-edited in DaVinci Resolve. Got to talk to some incredible people doing this: @katedeyneka (@reelful), @jsmarr (@Shopify), @danizeres (@OpenAI), @ZergGirl (@Replit), @scasa1 (@Target), @wongmjane, @theo, @iHarnoorSingh (@AssemblyAI) and more. Full reel ↓

What have people in SF built with Astra? (GPT-6 Community Night edition🌌) I got accepted to attend the @OpenAI GPT-6 Community Night out of 40,000 people who applied! Not only did I get to meet Sam Altman but I also learned what builders are creating with Astra:) Someone's building... "The first ever shitty cloud for shitty apps." A wine-collection tracker. A DIY hardware note-taker wired up in Blender. A "second brain" pulling in every X bookmark and YouTube video, 9 months deep. An action short pulled off a phone and auto-edited in DaVinci Resolve. Got to talk to some incredible people doing this: @katedeyneka (@reelful), @jsmarr (@Shopify), @danizeres (@OpenAI), @ZergGirl (@Replit), @scasa1 (@Target), @wongmjane, @theo, @iHarnoorSingh (@AssemblyAI) and more. Full reel ↓

@OpenAI GPT-6 Community Night Meeting Recap :) -met and talked with @sama for the first ever time -met and talked with my podcast inspiration @ti_morse for the first ever time -interviewed a few people asking them “what’s the coolest thing you’ve built with astra” -got to see a lot of other cool people like @katedeyneka from @reelful, @jsmarr from @Shopify, @danizeres from @OpenAI, @ZergGirl from @Replit, @scasa1 from @Target, @wongmjane, @theo !! alsoo i got complimented on my shirt and how it matched the theme, it wasn’t even intentional hehe 🥹

@OpenAI GPT-6 Community Night Meeting Recap :) -met and talked with @sama for the first ever time -met and talked with my podcast inspiration @ti_morse for the first ever time -interviewed a few people asking them “what’s the coolest thing you’ve built with astra” -got to see a lot of other cool people like @katedeyneka from @reelful, @jsmarr from @Shopify, @danizeres from @OpenAI, @ZergGirl from @Replit, @scasa1 from @Target, @wongmjane, @theo !! alsoo i got complimented on my shirt and how it matched the theme, it wasn’t even intentional hehe 🥹

how to not fall for phishing attacks: 0. remember you can't be hacked just by clicking on links you can only be hacked if you actively enter your password and 2FA code in places you're not supposed to 1. always read the URL you click on the url in the the current phishing messages is postdmca-x. com do you think anyone from X will use that random domain? they'll only use the official domain. if you read the URL you basically avoid 99.99% hack attempts. 2. never enter your real password in any form if you still feel convinced, just submit with a wrong password if it still "logs you in", you know you just saved your ass from a hacking attempt why? because a phishing form will always accept any password input as successful, because it doesn't really know the correct password only the real server knows your actual password and will give you an "incorrect password" error

I GOT MY ACCOUNT BACK. For about 36 hours my account was sending phishing DMs to a lot of you. If you got one, IM SORRY, IGNORE. If you clicked it and entered anything, change your password now and turn on a passkey!! How it happened: same DM, from someone I had no reason to doubt. That's the whole attack. It looked SO LEGIT. Two things I'd do differently: check the domain before typing a password anywhere, and use a passkey! I HAVE ONE NOW. Thank you to everyone who messaged me, reported the DMs, and warned their own networks. That's what got it shut down. Back to regular programming. Now my account is extra secured :D BRB gonna send an apology message to everyone the scammer messaged in my DMs (there's alot:,))

I GOT MY ACCOUNT BACK. For about 36 hours my account was sending phishing DMs to a lot of you. If you got one, IM SORRY, IGNORE. If you clicked it and entered anything, change your password now and turn on a passkey!! How it happened: same DM, from someone I had no reason to doubt. That's the whole attack. It looked SO LEGIT. Two things I'd do differently: check the domain before typing a password anywhere, and use a passkey! I HAVE ONE NOW. Thank you to everyone who messaged me, reported the DMs, and warned their own networks. That's what got it shut down. Back to regular programming. Now my account is extra secured :D BRB gonna send an apology message to everyone the scammer messaged in my DMs (there's alot:,))

Every company has the same problem says @ashwingop. One team learns something. Nobody else finds out. The lesson gets relearned six months later by someone else. "How do you make sure that if one part of the company learns about something, everybody else learns it too? So you don't relearn experiences. You move faster. You move as a single unit." That's what @sentra_app is building: organization memory. A company brain. Full convo below.

How do you introduce AI to a child who has already interacted with it but has no idea it's not a person? @Ashwingop's daughter started talking at @ChatGPT the same way she talks to her grandparents on the phone. She couldn't tell the difference. Full convo below

Instinct is the AI assistant every VC is chasing. Its founder, @noahrshinn, co-wrote Reflexion, one of the earliest agentic frameworks with MIT's @ashwingop. Noah chose to build agents for individuals. Ashwin quietly went the other way and founded Sentra to bring memory to enterprise agents. @sentra_app is now the company brain of a $12B public company-- 18,000 employees, and the CXOs start their day on it. Nothing like it exists in public. I sat down with Ashwin at Land's End in San Francisco before any of this was revealed. We got into: •Why memory is not a knowledge base •Why organizational memory is easier to build than individual memory •Why he thinks the AI race is nowhere near over •Who's actually accountable when AI gets something wrong •What worries him about his daughter growing up unable to tell AI from a person 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Meet Ashwin at Land's End (00:48) What Sentra Builds (03:53) Why Agents Need Memory (06:44) Memory vs. Knowledge Base (08:38) Why Org Memory Works (13:02) Who's Accountable When AI Gets It Wrong (15:36) Humans Becoming AI (18:52) The AI Race Is Not Over (29:43) Choosing the Right Team (36:10) The AI Transition and Perspective (39:34) Kids Growing Up With AI (46:09) Agency as the Edge

My conversation with @jerryjliu0. He's building @llama_index: document infrastructure for AI agents, the layer underneath everything models need to work. Did you know he's the guy whose tool half the industry used for RAG? Then he called RAG a hack, two years before the field agreed. Here's the problem he's pointing at: 90% of the world's information is locked inside PDFs, PowerPoints, and Word documents. The models are already smarter than humans. But until an agent can read and reason over all that, it just sits still. RAG was the hack everyone reached for to bridge that gap: chunk, embed, retrieve, done. The easiest thing that kind of worked, so people could ship demos. Anything complex, and it falls apart. We got into: •Why RAG has no first principles, and what's replacing it •Why context, not intelligence, is the real bottleneck now •Why even MCP doesn't fully solve context •How you get agents to follow a company's culture, not just its instructions •What he'd build if he started LlamaIndex today 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) The Context Bottleneck (02:00) One Commit, One Tweet: The Origin (05:00) Feeding GPT-3 Your Private Data, Pre-RAG (08:00) From Quora to Uber's Self-Driving Lab (11:00) Meeting His Co-Founder at Uber ATG (14:00) Document Infrastructure for AI Agents (18:00) "RAG Is a Hack" — What He Meant (22:00) Why Production Search Is Still Unsolved (24:00) How a Research Background Changes How You Build (33:00) The Open Problem: Context Across Sources (38:00) Specs, Cultural Context, and Underspecified Tasks (40:00) What He'd Build Differently Today

Michael Blau (@blauyourmind) went from the investment team at @a16z Crypto to CTO at Royal, working with is brother. Something he learned was... "A great team with a bad idea will always beat a great idea with a bad team. The great team can figure it out, pivot, build something new. Our ideas don't matter, we just need the best, most flexible people around us." And if he wasn't in tech? He'd have his own parlor magic show on the Las Vegas Strip. He's been doing card tricks since he was 12. And that dream isn't going anywhere. What would you be doing if you weren't in tech? Full convo below.

"That's interesting" is founder speak for "I don't care." @Calcsam showed up to Next Conf three weeks into building @Mastra. Talked to 11 or 12 people. Heard "oh, that's interesting" over and over again. By 1:30 PM they'd had enough. Walked to a bar two miles away and asked themselves: "What did we f*** up?" "Don't just accept someone who says 'yeah, it's great.' You gotta dig deeper. When someone said 'oh, that's interesting' we knew they actually weren't that interested." The best feedback is rarely the feedback you get. It's the feedback you pull out. Full convo below.

At 22, Dan Romero (@dwr) thought Bitcoin was stupid. Then he joined @Coinbase. Now Dan is GTM at @Tempo and is one of the clearest voices explaining where stablecoins matter: •Cross-border payments: new companies are building entirely on stablecoin rails because they're internet-native and work across any country •Marketplace payouts: @DoorDash is piloting paying restaurants after every single delivery, even on weekends "What's gonna make a real difference is the fact that stablecoins create tangible consumer and business benefit. Getting paid faster is something everyone can understand." Full convo below.

Inside @Stripe's MPP IRL: machine payments, stablecoins, and the future of agent commerce. Agents are starting to pay for things on their own: API calls, services, each other. Nobody's agreed on how that should work. This panel was three takes on it. @BackseatVC (Stripe) leads product for Machine Payments — the open standard for how agents pay for things. @dwr (@tempo) is building stablecoin payment rails, and thinks that's what agent commerce runs on, not cards. @blauyourmind (Royal) magician turned @a16z Crypto partner turned CTO is exploring programmable money for creators, and why the demand side is barely here yet. We got into: • Why HTTP 402, a status code from the early web, is suddenly the backbone of agent payments • Why Dan thinks a credit card is a private key and why stablecoins are safer for agents • Where stablecoins actually win first • Whether you should build for agent payments now or wait • Why the demand side is "virtually nonexistent" and what that means if you're building 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Event Kickoff JEN LEE — Product Lead, Stripe (00:44) What the Machine Payments Protocol Is (01:28) How MPP Works — the HTTP 402 Payment Challenge (03:25) Adoption So Far: ~30,000 Transactions (04:04) Building Trust — Shared Tokens & the Link Agent Wallet (05:56) What the Creator Economy Looks Like When the Audience Is Agents (07:15) What She Was Certain About at 22 That's Now Wrong DAN ROMERO — GTM, Tempo (08:34) Meet Dan (08:49) Why Stablecoins, and the Genius Act Tailwind (09:48) "A Credit Card Is Basically a Private Key" (11:19) Should Every Company Be Thinking About MPP? (13:03) What to Be Wary Of (15:15) Where Stablecoins Win — Payouts, Remittances, DoorDash MICHAEL BLAU — CTO, Royal (16:36) Meet Michael (17:13) From Magician to a16z Crypto to CTO (17:57) Team Over Idea — His a16z Takeaway (18:26) "The Demand Side Is Virtually Nonexistent" (19:03) Closing

Most companies today are renting their intelligence a token at a time. That's @baseten @philipkiely's read, and it's the take from our conversation I wanted to highlight. AI equals @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI, @GeminiApp tokens flowing into whatever you're building. Which means the thing you're built on isn't yours. A price hike, a deprecated model, a rate limit you didn't see coming and your product breaks on someone else's schedule. You don't own your roadmap. You're leasing it. The companies Philip watches are done with that. Fine-tuning their own models, running open weights, owning their tokens end to end. The GPT wrapper era is over. He's blunt about it: cool in 2023, uncool by 2024, dead now. What replaces it is companies that own the thing they're built on. His other take:"I am not worried about an AI bubble." I didn't have to take his word for it. Since we filmed, the receipts came in. @Baseten raised a $1.5B Series F at a $13B valuation — their fourth raise in 18 months, inference volume up 40x in a year. The line in their announcement: Their customers are "more motivated than ever to own their intelligence." Same phrase Philip used with me on the pod. The companies that own their intelligence just got $1.5B of validation. The ones renting it got a deadline. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Intro (02:30) What Inference Actually Is (05:00) Why You're Renting Your Intelligence (08:00) OpenEvidence & When Latency Means Lives (11:00) Writer Who Engineers, or Engineer Who Writes? (15:00) Joining Baseten Before ChatGPT Shipped (19:00) What He Got Wrong About Inference in 2022 (23:00) GPT Wrappers Are Dead. Good. (27:00) Writing 256 Pages in a Field That Moves Weekly (32:00) The Chapter to Read With the Most Skepticism (36:00) The 24 Hours After DeepSeek Drops (42:00) Why 8 GPUs Is the Magic Number (47:00) Rent vs. Own: Where the Break-Even Sits (51:00) "I Am Not Worried About an AI Bubble" (56:00) Every Wafer Gets a Chip Pressed Into It (01:00:00) Will NVIDIA's Moat Ever Crack? (01:05:00) Is There a Black Market for GPUs? (01:09:00) Inference Engineering as a Career (01:13:00) There Are Only Two Kinds of Models This is a @Composio "Agents at Work" podcast, where I chat with founders building the next leap of AI. Follow for more :)