@magdovitz this time real sam

Today is the day you are reminded that Beta always dominates Alpha (sadly).

The most important book right now for understanding company building in the age of AI is about an agent... a hollywood one... Ari Emanuel's book ('roll the calls') -- there are TWO key lessons from it (one simple, one a bit more nuanced but even more important...)

The two:

First - the easy but important point... it is all sales right now as software commodifies, and the real lesson of first half of the book is simple -- as software commodifies and everything is just sales, if you get a 'no' call the next day... over and over and over... be relentless and keep asking til you get the answer you want. This mentality has historically not been in software / tech CEO DNA, but as the leverage of being 'unique genius' gets destroyed by arms-dealing AI / commodification of expertise (and certainly software) -- the winners are storytellers and salespeople.

Second - the more intellectual but even more important point - WHAT AGENTING REALLY IS? Why does anyone pay an agent... for trust / the relationship. What do agents do? Whatever the clients need / everything - not one thing. Why this matters? it totally changes business building. In a world where tech is 'hard' being a leader is figuring something out about the universe, building an advantage around that competency, and doubling down over and over on your 'advantage' in providing something specific. No more... whether for consumers or for companies...

if you are a 'business' in an agentic world, your asset it TRUST of your client, and you do as much for them as you can / anything (also send them random gifts). Your job is to get in the door, become trusted, and then pick up more and more business doing whatever the customer needs. This means the mission is SERVICE not PRODUCT or MISSION. The asset is the 'relationship' ... and the winners do everything they can for their clients.

If you are building a modern business right now - this reality changes everything from how tech companies were built over the last 20 years or so... mission is less important, top-down vision is less important, instead what matters is sales, clients, and being flexible with 'free to develop' software and services to SOLVE problems for your actual specific customers.

It this GOOD for most (startup) business... probably not.

Agents get fired all the time, there is less enterprise value in what they build, etc... also per Ari's book, in the agenting world, scale is everything -- but from a technological deterministic perspecitve... this is where we are going, and founders that understand that (relenteless sales, how do i get in the door with something and build trust, and then what I 'do' is everything ... will be the RELATIVE winners)...

Any firm not scaling their security spend at the same rate as their AI spend... is missing the moment.

Is does AI face the same problem as Oil Dependent Development?

Once you know a business can be bought and optimized (and everyone knows it), then the price goes up even before you 'drill', and the theoretical margin from drilling becumes a liability vs. asset.

@jsnnsa Here is Fable's summary, lol.

excellent 2026 ceo comms.

Fish, Lumber, and Parking were the major themes of Slow AGM this week... minors in lawfare and admittedly some chips, but i give us points for being sufficiently off theme ✅

second coolest website ... 🙌 -- seems as good a metric as any in this environment.

the most important metric for any VC is obviously how cool their website looks

so here are the top 10 VC websites:

1. paradigm.xyz (@paradigm)
2. slow.co (@slow)
3. blueyard.com (@blueyard)
4. airstreet.com (@airstreet)
5. 8vc.com (@8vc)
6. southparkcommons.com (@spc)
7. betaworks.com (@betaworks)
8. benchmark.com (@benchmark)
9. pillar.vc (@pillar_vc)
10. hummingbird.vc (@HummingbirdVC)

honourable mention to @BeginVC, because it's our ranking and we're obviously the most objective judges in the world

who did we miss?

@ScottPatterson0 nice -

btw, why don't people make truly edible/ high protein crayons. i would love to eat those... and so would kids.

@anirudhnarayan no - i am not - but i can articulate both sides of an argument.... because i am an adult.

Only 250 ppl spending $10M+ is wild & this is the Anthropic bull case succinctly put. It doesn't matter if margins come down / are thin, basically no one is actually using AI yet, and everyone will.

Huge riverside fan and heavy user ... excited to try this

@Marinperez @DaveRBanerjee No. It doesn’t. What I have said is that if you can’t handle your own liability profitably you shouldn’t be allowed to operate. Can be private insurance or could be provided at a fee by the government.But you can’t centralize profits and pass off risk for free because “too big”

@Melt_Dem @JayKapoor writing my newsletter draft flying to NYC.

@Melt_Dem lol that is literally what i call it 2 ... did we indecently come up with that or is it in the air?

The Information's polls app is legit good and useful pulse