the web still favors humans and avoids (or blocks) bots and agents (via CAPTCHAs, etc). i suspect it will be the opposite in less than 5 years. the first banks, services, and stores that provide preferred access to “favored" (verified) agents will prosper from this massive new audience, armed with credit cards...

the true unlock for these new consumer agents is "Favored Agent" status. and the ultimate opportunity for businesses is to build an agent-first UX. been going deep with Instinct etc and truly mesmerized. via a simple text, I can optimize my subscriptions on Amazon, prepare for a trip to Europe, etc...all especially powerful when you feel remembered and considered by these agents. with Instinct, each time the agent needs access to a website (my credit card statement, Amazon, Airbnb, etc), it asks for my login via an encrypted link and then saves it for next time. but even the best agents still run into situations where they hit a bot check. While I am able to help the agent overcome any two-factor authentication issues, they still aren’t able to complete CAPTCHAs and other bot checks for obvious reasons (they are bots!). which leads me to an idea: What if the moat for these agent companies is to achieve “favored agent” status with direct preferred access to services like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Amex, and the long-tail of companies that otherwise guard against bots? What if the agent-service relationship becomes a new marketplace for underlying service providers (like Uber, Amazon, etc) to grant access (or perhaps even provide faster and cheaper access than humans ordinarily get?) in exchange for becoming the preferred default vendor for a particular need? What if the ultimate business model for agent companies is to strike these “default provider” deals? Or perhaps buying this “favored agent” status is the ultimate cost for these agent companies? the first “favored agents" that get proprietary and preferred access to the banks and stores and other online processes of our lives will have an incredible advantage. right now, agents are trying to navigate websites made for humans and pass login constraints designed to block bots, but favored agents that pass some level of security authentication should be able to go direct to the data and the services of the companies that we interact with daily. And the companies that open their doors to legitimate agents will prosper from this massive new and action-oriented audience, often armed with credit cards!

beautifully put by scott belsky: "I crave more time to follow the threads of my obscure fascinations, and I firmly believe that such curiosity-fueled binges of imagination yield new lenses on the world. The strange and weird ideas that surface through dedicated time and attention are, in fact, the edges that may someday become the center. I often feel like attention-seeking algorithms are robbing me of the very thing I value most: creativity born from curiosity."

Last night we announced our $100m fundraise at $1B led by @ICONIQCapital. The response has been tremendous. We're creating an entirely new category of finance. Right now this seems ambitious but five years from now, what we're doing will seem obvious. The future runs on @RilletHQ. Let's go

IMPLICATIONS edition 46: (1) the best software in each industry being tailor-made (2) the emergence of “favored agent” status (3) five things you MUST love as a product leader (4) “focus, as a service,” & the post-MCP era question “to be or not to be a DAU, that is the question,

surprised we still don’t have an OS-level security layer AI, running locally, that simply tells us “don’t click on that link,” or “don’t answer that text,” etc in a world where AI that can socialize or trick us becomes ubiquitous. working/living without this AI safety layer will soon be like riding a motorcycle without a helmet. scam detection datasets would greatly benefit from network effects, and the models could prob run on device

“Etched has compressed an extraordinary amount into just three years: from a contrarian bet on inference to working silicon, a complete frontier inference cluster, significant contracted demand, and production workloads.” congrats @robertwachen and team on all the progress…💥

“Throughout the whole history of science, most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity…The real enemy of the human race is not the fearless and irresponsible thinker, be he right or wrong. The real enemy is the man who tries to mould the human spirit so that it will not dare to spread its wings." - A. Flexner, The Uselessness of Useless Knowledge, 1939

I'm already seeing this firsthand as we organize a traditional/ historic crafts festival. These specialized craftsmen are in such high demand that they can afford to be selective; it’s ultimately up to them which projects or festivals they choose to participate in.

i suspect demand for labor-intensive aesthetics will go up over the coming decades. furniture with wood carving, stone masonry, architecture that incorporates sculpted structure, and other deep crafts. and there will be a talent shortage. we need more schools of lost crafts.

one consumer product attribute that matters more these days in the first mile experience is TRUST. in past eras, onboarding didn’t require access to your data/life, but today’s agentic data-hungry consumer apps require a lot of trust up front. cool area to innovate.

consumer products ultimately succeed because of how people feel about themselves using them, and how quick the tricks of past eras (ego analytics, surprise + delight, and hooks to appeal to our initial laziness, vanity, and selfishness in the first mile of a new product experience) are now being reimagined, but still hold true. - new agent experiences must yield a quick ROI on the time and data we are willing to give them. - onboarding must balance generalized value with personalized problem solving - new cohorts of new customers are different, and the onboarding that worked during your beta with early adopters won’t necessarily scale… nice to know in product land that some things change, and some things stay the same…

the purest form of motivation is curiousity. hopefully in something that is unclear or boring to others but super interesting to you. curiosity-driven motivation also prevents against BUI (building under the influence…of headlines, buzzwords, what VCs are chasing, and other signs that you’re following, not leading). curiosity also summons energy you didn’t know you had, and it’s infections with the type of people you’ll need for your journey.

the more people you consult for advice, the more likely you’ll make a bad/average decision. (1) ppl are, on average, risk averse...and, in quantity, will blunt your boldness. (2) ppl may hate/envy opportunities they lack. (3) ppl tend to mix cynicism (bad) w/ criticism (good)