We just raised $20M (Menlo, Sequoia, Felicis, Snowflake, Databricks) and launched Kai—the first superintelligent AI co-worker for customer success. It shouldn't take 100 people to serve 1,000 customers. Kai knows every customer, acts instantly, never drops the ball. Agency.inc fortune.com/2025/11/12/elias…

We just raised $20M (Menlo, Sequoia, Felicis, Snowflake, Databricks) and launched Kai—the first superintelligent AI co-worker for customer success. It shouldn't take 100 people to serve 1,000 customers. Kai knows every customer, acts instantly, never drops the ball. Agency.inc fortune.com/2025/11/12/elias…

Developing and delivering cutting-edge AI, acquiring customers at lightning speed, and wowing investors with their dedication and product growth. That’s what it takes to stand apart when building an AI company, and we’re proud to announce our list of the founders and companies rising above the noise. These are the first-ever Cerebral Valley Heavy Weights, selected in partnership with @IndexVentures. They are: Parag Agrawal, of Parallel (@p0) Glen Takahashi, Barry McCardel, and Caitlin Colgrove, of @_hex_tech Tudor Achim and Vlad Tenev, of @HarmonicMath Russ d’Sa and David Zhao, of @livekit Jeff Huber and Anton Troynikov, of @trychroma Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu, and Robert Wachen, of @Etched David Singleton, Hugo Barra, and Nicholas Jitkoff, of /dev/agents Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli, of Pigment Sergiy Nesterenko, of @quilterai Elias Torres, of @Agency Jim Gao, Veda Panneershelvam, and Katie Hoffman, of @PhaidraAI Edwin Chen, of @HelloSurgeAI Garrett Lord, Ben Christensen, and Scott Ringwelski, of @joinHandshake Alex Mashrabov and Yerzat Dulat, of @higgsfield_ai Jordan Taylor and Kaelan Richards, of @Vizcom_ai Grant Lee, James Fox, and Jon Noronha, of @GammaApp More here: newcomer.co/p/meet-the-cereb…

I think @Agency just replied to @Agency Dead 💀 Our customer and I have been replying to each other back and forth but we are not writing the emails. World’s first time. Noted.

After advising 50 consumer companies over the last year, the one thing that separates those who can execute and those who can't: Having a full-time designer in the room at all times I've met with countless companies that have raised millions—and even one that has raised billions—that do not even have a designer on payroll. This makes product development broken: 1/ You simply cannot have constructive conversations about ideas without visualizing them in real-time 2/ Your experiments will frequently have inconclusive results because users cannot discover features or they misunderstand how they work 3/ There is no one who can galvanize the team with a vision of what the product could look and feel like And to be abundantly clear: I'm not referring to visual UI or graphics. I'm talking about someone who can think through the fundamental building blocks of product comprehension—like navigation, interaction and copywriting—and is technically savvy enough to visualize those components in high resolution. There can certainly be exceptions to not having a designer, like where the CEO is an exceptional visual thinker, but that does not scale beyond a small team. At the end of day, products live and die in the pixels: it's what the users see and tap. And without someone shepherding that process, you are effectively wandering the desert blind.

@Agency: Everyone is a founder