Friday, October 23, 2026
Thursday, October 22, 2026
22: AI
Bleeding edge San Francisco AI startup: @MonidHQ Makes an automatic AI router to get your AI agents access to better models for what you are asking it to do. @shengkunye tells me why his is the best at his office at @fdotinc. One of San Francisco’s best startup factories. https://t.co/CHySOiUi4l
— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) October 22, 2026
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
14: India
Congrats! CEOs & execs posting to the public directly on ๐ is the best way to get your message out and drive product sales. Vastly more powerful and effective than a press release.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 13, 2026
I've heard thousands of pre-seed pitches. Bad pitches: • Open with the market size • Spend 10 minutes on features • Show a hockey stick with no assumptions behind it Good pitches: • Open with the thing you know that nobody else believes • Explain why now, not just why • Show what you've already built with almost nothing What's the one thing you know that nobody else believes?
— Martin Tobias (Pre-Seed VC) (@MartinGTobias) October 14, 2026
@paulg Not true. The YC Columbus model is a huge misfit for the next 10 years.
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 14, 2026
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies. My observations: 1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively. 2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now. 3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention. 4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is. 5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now. 6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text. They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it. 7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy. 8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies. Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here. 9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens. 10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity! 11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it. 12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable. 13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think. 14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data. 15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open. 16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down. 17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building? 18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone. 19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good. 20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped. 21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense. Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era. Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways. Happy to be home and locked in. Until next time!
— GREG ISENBERG (@gregisenberg) October 14, 2026
Congrats! CEOs & execs posting to the public directly on ๐ is the best way to get your message out and drive product sales. Vastly more powerful and effective than a press release.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 13, 2026
Saturday, October 10, 2026
AOC 2028: The First AI Election (Book)
AOC 2028: The First AI Election https://t.co/JBagJuayaa ๐@RepAOC @SenSanders @aoc @Ilhan @AyannaPressley @RashidaTlaib @RepJayapal @GregCasar @ZohranKMamdani @NYCMayor
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
In 2008, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign demonstrated how the internet and social media could transform political communication, organizing, fundraising, and participation. ๐๐ @RepSummerLee @MaxwellFrost @RepRoKhanna @RepMarkPocan @RepBarbaraLee @ewarren
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
AOC 2028: The First AI Election https://t.co/JBagJuayaa ๐๐@RepJudyChu @RepMaxineWaters @RepHankJohnson @RepTedLieu @RepJoeNeguse @RepSaraJacobs
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
AI could turn a temporary election campaign into a continuous civic network. Personal AI assistants could explain legislation, answer policy questions, and help citizens understand competing proposals. ๐๐@RepDeliaRamirez @RepChuyGarcia @RepHuffman @LloydDoggett @RepDeLauro
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
A prepared administration could use the same infrastructure to translate campaign commitments into legislation, implementation plans, and measurable outcomes. ๐๐@RepDinaTitus @RepEarlBlumenauer @RepNikema @RepDarrenSoto @RepWilson @RepCherfilus
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
Universal healthcare, lifelong education, and housing abundance become possibilities to investigate as technology increases productivity and potentially reduces the cost of delivering essential services. ๐๐@RepKamlager @RepLuzRivas @RepSchakowsky @RepCasten @RepLofgren
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
AOC 2028: The First AI Election https://t.co/JBagJuayaa ๐๐@RepGolden @RepAdams @RepGarcia @JasmineForUS @AnaMariaArchila @ZohranKMamdani
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
This creates the possibility of a state that is smaller in administrative headcount but larger in capability. ๐๐@AnnaForFlorida @AlexandriaRojas @JessicaCisneros @AbdulElSayed @SaikatChakra @CoriBush
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
It examines a proposed 70 percent top marginal income-tax rate as a policy hypothesis within a broader debate about taxation, productivity, and public investment. ๐๐@AOCpressley @DemSocialists @JusticeDemocrats
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
Greater economic interdependence and stronger institutions could create opportunities to reduce avoidable conflict and redirect resources toward human development. ๐๐@SunriseMvmt @WorkingFamilies @MoveOn @OurRevolution @PeoplesBudget @DataProgress
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
The book concludes with the Governing OS: an integrated democratic operating system connecting citizen participation, policy design, legislation, administration, and accountability. ๐๐@FightInequality @RealBankReform @ACLU @ACLUpeople @IndivisibleTeam @BoldProgressive
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
The election is the demonstration project. Redesigning democracy for the age of abundance is the larger ambition. ๐๐@DemandJustice @FairEconomy @EconomicPolicy @GreenNewDeal
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
The AOC Moment: Four Megatrends Reshaping America https://t.co/nYX5qGOo96 AOC 2028 https://t.co/mNXpIJyIXX AOC 2028: : The Future of American Progressivism https://t.co/OFT21hpjcu ๐๐
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 10, 2026
