Bryant co-founded Webflow, now he's building Ploy - and if you build websites or run marketing, pay attention - the agentic era is here. We designed Ploy's brand, were early design partners and we've been shipping customer sites on Ploy every day since. Our conviction runs deep enough that we invested, too. If you build for the web, get in early. This is a generational opportunity.

Me and Fable 5 for the 3 days I had her

We're back inside a16z Speedrun. This time, half the team flew to SF. Right now we're embedded with a few dozen teams tearing through the final sprint to Demo Day - the moment where companies either become real or they don't. Brand, product, positioning, the whole thing. Fast, hard, no bullshit. This is what tonik was built for. Not polish (hehe), not cleanup. The founding moment - when everything is loud and undefined and the stakes couldn't be higher - that's when design actually matters. That's when we show up and make it feel inevitable. And the fact that a16z called us back? Into the room again, with the next generation of companies that are about to reshape entire industries? That means everything - the work spoke, the founders talked - tonik is now the design team that the most ambitious builders in the world trust when it counts most. We are so proud of this team and fired up for what's about to come out of this cohort. Design is the first lever. We've always believed that. Now we have the receipts.

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

massive market opportunity: claude code rehabs. i'm mass-approving code changes in golden gate park rn. the grass is being touched

If we all have more children, they can be put to work on these wheels to generate power for the AI data centers.

Looking for a short-term SF office (Feb to mid-March) for our ~20 designers. Preferably near Townsend & 3rd, preferably not a wework. Any recs? → ps@tonik.com

evergreen

Pathetic Losers geohot.github.io//blog/jekyl…

if i'm good at one thing as a founder, it's my ability to eat shit thanklessly for years on end based on the irrational belief that success is inevitable.

unifi cameras = instant regret I didn’t switch earlier. absurdly good hardware, flawless software. brutally moggs every other camera brand. watch in 4k. (dog snoring in the background for ambience)

not sure what a polish smile is? here’s Natalia, our head of brand, giving the masterclass at 0:45 promise we’re fun to work with ...unless you’re giving us feedback like *that.*

We’ve been brought in by @a16z to design inside @speedrun - their program backing the next generation of category-defining startups. We’re working directly with ~50 teams on brand and product in their final sprint to Demo Day. Not consulting. Not advising. We’re embedded - flew in our team here, working shoulder to shoulder with founders. Speedrun isn’t a typical accelerator - and this isn’t typical agency work. This is high-stakes, fast-moving, zero-bullshit execution at the earliest and most defining moments of a company’s life. Being trusted by a16z, inside a program like this, says a lot. About the standard we hold. About the team we’ve built. And about what tonik has quietly become: the design team founders trust to make their product, brand, and vision feel inevitable. It’s an incredibly proud moment for us, and proves what we’ve always believed: design isn’t the final layer - it’s the first lever. When it’s early, messy, and make-or-break - that’s when it matters most. If you’re a founder building something real - we’d love to help. If you’re a killer designer, strategist, or operator - we’re hiring. And if you’re in LA, come say hi. Let’s buuuuuuuild.

this is why i fw geo hotz

that Being John Malkovich scene where Maxine tauntingly says "even if you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me"

$10m? You can't do anything with ten, Greg. Ten’s a nightmare. The world's tallest dwarf. The weakest strong man at the circus.

The last thing your AI lab sees before getting one-shotted by a Chinese bootleg LLM team with a $5M cluster

Mike Skinner at 22.