Cloudflare CEO Prince on how AI changes who gets laid off first: Two weeks ago I laid off more than 20% of my workforce. I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling. We posted record revenue growth, have strong free cash flow and are adding an unprecedented number of customers around the world. I did it because business is changing, and to win the future, Cloudflare needs to change with it. We haven’t found another example in U.S. business history of a public company growing at more than 30% that laid off more than 20% of its workforce. Yet what we did is likely going to become the norm over the next year. This is a story about artificial intelligence, but executives and commentators are misunderstanding how it will disrupt business and who will be affected. AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees. For Cloudflare, internal audit previously picked a handful of business risk areas to scrutinize each quarter. Now we’re moving to a system in which every business risk is audited continuously. We’re closing our books faster. We’re making fewer mistakes and catching the ones we do more reliably. And, as CEO, I’ve never had better tools to measure exactly how the business is performing, including identifying our rising stars. The vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers. We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively. We consolidated our operations functions into a single group that can support teams across the business, using AI to gain specific expertise when needed. We significantly reduced our marketing team, which, like in most companies, was teeming with measurers. Across our finance team, we found opportunities to consolidate and automate. We received almost a million applicants for 1,111 paid internships this summer. The interns we hired are extremely qualified and AI-native. They’re all builders or sellers, and we expect that the majority will get full-time offers.

it’s in gemini, just create it in ai studio. oh, that’s for your personal google one account. for workspace you need gemini business. no, not gemini advanced, that’s ai pro now. unless you need ai ultra. oh agents? you do that in spark actually. no, not gemini api managed agents, that’s different. for coding use jules. unless you mean the agentic ide, that’s antigravity. no, that’s the old antigravity, download the new one. actually gemini cli is being deprecated, use antigravity cli. no the flash model is smarter than the pro model. unless you need pro. if it’s video, use flow. no, flow uses veo. no, nano banana is images. actually that’s in gemini now. unless you’re in search, then it’s ai mode. no, research is notebooklm. anyway it’s all very simple.

Everyone switching from Markdown to HTML is missing the nuance. The optimal approach (most of the time): If it's for a human to read, yeah, use HTML. BUT If an agent is consuming it, use Markdown!

WSJ: Anthropic is wrapping up a deal to set up a joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and other Wall Street firms, with the goal of selling AI tools to private-equity backed companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are expected to put in about $ 300M each, while Goldman Sachs is expected to invest about $ 150M. The new company would work like an AI deployment arm, meaning it would not just sell Claude access, but help companies rebuild workflows around LLMs, from customer support and finance to coding, legal review, and internal research. Private-equity firms are the target because they own many companies, measure every cost tightly, and can force software changes faster than slow public companies. Anthropic gets distribution, Wall Street gets a stake in the AI services layer, and portfolio companies become a large testing ground for enterprise AI. The deeper move is that AI labs are no longer only competing on model quality, but on who controls the path from model to business process. --- wsj .com/business/deals/anthropic-nears-1-5-billion-joint-venture-with-wall-street-firms-8f5448ee

AIs replace UIs and APIs.

SITUATION BREWING: OpenAI is reportedly working on its own phone to take on the iPhone, targeting a 2028 release. It will use custom processors from MediaTek and Qualcomm, running OpenAI's own OS that replaces traditional apps with AI agents.

I'm convinced that the biggest vertical SaaS companies of the AI era will not be vertical. They will be horizontal AI harnesses that let the customer build the vertical themselves. For my entire career, vertical SaaS meant the software company learned the industry and built product/marketing specific for it. The moat was domain knowledge, and the vendor was the expert, and the customer was the user. The harness era flips it. Inference has disrupted the moat. The customer is the expert... again. The vendor's job is not to know the industry. It's to build the rails the customer assembles their own software on top of. The industry is about to split in two. The companies that own the rails, payments, identity, compliance, data, become infrastructure. The companies that owned only domain knowledge become a feature on someone else's harness.... There is no third outcome. Vertical SaaS was built on the premise that the vendor was smarter than the customer about the customer's own business. The premise was always weirdly insulting and now it is also obsolete.

feels like a good time to seriously rethink how operating systems and user interfaces are designed (also the internet; there should be a protocol that is equally usable by people and agents)