Co-Founder & CEO @EspaLabs. Previously @forethought_ai (acq. @Zendesk). Tweeting about AI, tech, entrepreneurship. Sometimes physics, hip hop, and parenthood.
Joined May 2014
- Tweets 1,670
- Following 863
- Followers 1,986
- Likes 4,918
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Pinned Tweet
28 Apr 2017
That awkward moment when you realize giving up is just not in your DNA. #backonthegrind
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Jun 12
Product-market fit doesn’t come from guessing.
It comes from talking to users — deeply, repeatedly, and with better questions.
AI won’t replace listening to users.
It helps you scale it.
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@MarkieWagner explaining to @TBPN how Poetic is able to run multi-hour complex processes for F500s with 99% accuracy in production, all with minimal token spend.
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Deon Nicholas retweeted
Jun 9
cursor, lovable, cognition numbers all a big narrative violation. wasn’t everything in the path of agi labs (especially the #1 fight, coding agents) supposed to die, not accelerate
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Jun 10
This is so cool. New class of software that learns like AI but executes with deterministic accuracy of code. Very proud to see @PoeticHQ @markiewagner launch!
Jun 10
Introducing @PoeticHQ: a new AI system that executes complex multi-hour tasks with 99% accuracy and 10x fewer tokens than agents.
We raised $50M at $500M from Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, First Harmonic, and Genius Ventures to build AI that does complex work inside Fortune 500 companies without hallucination.
While code is too brittle, agents are too unpredictable. The work that runs the global economy - anti-money laundering, fraud investigations, underwriting - needs extreme accuracy.
So we built a new kind of software that pairs the flexibility of AI with the predictability of code.
When the world stays the same, Poetic runs fixed code: fast, cheap, identical every time. When the world changes, Poetic uses AI to regenerate its approach and find its way back to the objective.
In one year, we went from zero to an eight-figure run rate as a team of four.
Since then, we’ve scaled the team and executed the highest-stakes processes at AIG, SoFi, and Chime. At SoFi, a large US bank, Poetic reached 99% quality on fraud investigations in five weeks.
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Jun 10
Proud to be an early angel investor in Poetic, building a new class of software that learns like AI but runs like code. They launched out of stealth today with $50M Series A at a $500M valuation from Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, First Harmonic, and OpenAI.
Congrats Poetic! 🤩
Poetic, an AI startup, is emerging from stealth with $50 million in funding from OpenAI and other investors to help businesses streamline complex tasks, ranging from insurance underwriting to financial compliance. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Deon Nicholas retweeted
May 20
"There will be things your company is good at today that AI has simply become better up tomorrow, and that is okay. Embrace it. That is organizational humility." - @dojideon closing out the morning keynote of @Zendesk's user conference #ZendeskRelate. Catch the replay tomorrow!
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Deon Nicholas retweeted
May 15
"I was probably building the company completely wrong for the first three to four years."
@dojideon, Co-Founder & CEO of @EspaLabs, on learning your own superpowers as a founder:
"Every CEO has their own superpowers and their own blind spots. Being extremely in tune with what those are is how you build a great company around yourself. Every company culture is a reflection of both the strengths and weaknesses of the CEO."
"I come from a deeply technical background. When I first went to fundraise, investors kept asking, 'You're an engineer, your co-founder is an engineer — who's going to sell the product?' I weirdly internalized that a lot."
"For the first couple years, I assumed we had to hire other people who could sell. Eventually I started realizing — I'm closing this deal, I'm closing that deal. My teammates are bringing me in to pitch and storytell."
"The ability to connect with people, to storytell, to sell, to fundraise, to recruit — that's one of my superpowers. Knowing that teaches you where you actually need to hire."
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Deon Nicholas retweeted
May 15
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May 15
“Having used [Espa] for a week, I’ve found it to be fresh, intriguing, and, most important, useful—and yes, it feels a little like having a trusty human helper on call.”
TY @harrymccracken @FastCompany for the thoughtful piece on @EspaLabs ! 🙌
fastcompany.com/91542768/esp…
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May 15
“It does things Siri can’t. It’s way safer than OpenClaw. And it all happens in your messaging app.”
The time is now for AI assistants, because only now can you get an AI assistant that actually does things, is completely personalized to you, and is private/secure by design.
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May 8
The best operators don't win alone. They have the support that lets them focus on what actually moves the needle. We built that in @EspaLabs. Try it free at espa.ai
Introducing Espa.
Your AI assistant for work and life — manages your inbox, drafts in your voice, and handles the schedule so you don’t have to.
Try it free → espa.ai.
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Deon Nicholas retweeted
May 8
Today is launch day @EspaLabs , and I sat down with @dojideon to talk about it.
Deon is one of those founders who has been right about AI before it was obvious. His first company, Forethought, won TechCrunch Disrupt in 2018, scaled to ~ 1 billion customer interactions a month, and was recently acquired by Zendesk. Now he is back, applying everything he learned about agentic AI to a market that OpenAI, Anthropic, and others aren't structurally built to serve.
May 7
Today I'm launching @EspaLabs, the AI executive assistant for everyone.
Honest explanation for why: I still forget to follow up on my own emails 😅.
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Deon Nicholas retweeted
May 8
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May 7
Today I'm launching @EspaLabs, the AI executive assistant for everyone.
Honest explanation for why: I still forget to follow up on my own emails 😅.
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May 6
First time flying since my Achilles surgery and all I can say is, I’ve never been so grateful for airport service staff and crew.
Bless y’all 🙇
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Deon Nicholas retweeted
Apr 2
"I'm the one like Neo... so you can keep your damn pills" 😂😍
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