1/9 A 🧵with simple lessons on writing well from my dozen years of writing at Amazon. cc @shreyas @lennysan @sachinrekhi @hnshah @gokulr @gibsonbiddle @kunalb11

Gotta love these football World Cup watch parties

Why I love tennis? Two world No. 1s went down at the French Open this year. Sinner won the first two sets against Cerundolo and lost in five. Sabalenka led a set and 5-3 against Shnaider, then dropped ten straight games. Look at the scoreboards. In both, the favorite was up by a margin that should have closed the match. What the underdogs did was stop playing the scoreboard. They played the point in front of them, then the next one. That was the whole strategy. The temptation is to look at the gap on the scoreboard and do math on it. The teams that win are the ones who put the spreadsheet away and just go win the next point with the customer in front of them. The score is a story the past tells you. The point is the only thing you actually get to play.

A prediction about demo automation: PE rollup activity will rise and standalone tools in this category will have been absorbed into something larger, likely a combination of legacy and new tools. AI didn't level the field between legacy providers and startups. It tilted it. The companies that have sold to the same buyer for years are struggling to reach parity with the agentic startups in their category, and the fastest way to close that gap is to buy it. So expect private equity to start rolling up the older platforms along with agentic platforms. And true live demo with data injection is both a gap in legacy platforms and is genuinely hard to get right. I expect more live demo solutions to get rolled up this year. Having studied PE rollups very closely over the years, the biggest risk is for the customers. Many roll up efforts tend to optimize for financial efficiency, not for innovation. You consolidate, you cut, you tune for margin. That math works against the one thing this category now demands, which is a fast pace of product innovation. Good news is that customers decide who wins this. They just have far better alternatives now, thanks to AI. At Olto, our customers set the pace. They kept raising the bar, and we kept shipping to meet it: AI-native live demos, sandboxes, demo videos, interactive tours, and product-trained agents that run live buyer conversations. The full platform, at a rapid clip, because the customers we sell to wouldn't have waited longer. I am genuinely curious, who thinks a Private Equity rollup can out-innovate a focused startup? There are smart friends on both sides of that question, and I'd love to hear how you're thinking about it.

Personalization that only touches the wrapper is theater. Personalization that touches the product is leverage.

Is there an easy way to search for an @Airbnb with tennis courts?

I have now sat through enough CROs and SE leaders conversations about agentic workflows to notice that we keep arguing past each other. Somebody says agents are overhyped. Somebody else says they tripled their output. Both are right, because they're talking about different things. There are three reasons to put an autonomous agent into your motion, and they're not the same reason. Mixing them up is why these conversations go in circles. Coverage. The agent does work no SE was ever going to do. The deal below your coverage line. The buyer who lands at midnight in another time zone. The expansion conversation your team can't get cycles for. Here the alternative isn't a human. It's nothing. Throughput. The agent does the same work in less time. The half-day of demo prep, pulling Gong calls and Salesforce notes and mapping them to features by hand, becomes thirty minutes of review. Same deal, same SE, a fraction of the prep. Quality. The agent raises the floor on every interaction. Same story from the first ad to the renewal. The buyer never hears one thing from the SDR, another from the SE, a third from the CSM. Consistency is quiet, and it's where trust actually compounds. Most teams chase all three with one deployment and get none. The teams that win pick the pillar that matches the moment. Start with coverage, because it's the easy yes and nobody loses. Move to throughput once you trust the output. Earn quality last, because quality at scale needs shared context across the whole journey, and that's the hardest thing to build.

Very sad to learn about the passing of S. Somasegar - learned a lot from him over the years. RIP 🙏 geekwire.com/2026/s-soma-som…

This

Canva is on an acquisition spree. Already acquired five companies this year, and likely more are coming. Major platform shifts create great opportunities for both bundling and unbundling.

PLG used to mean self-serve UI. Now it means AI does the selling.

What is PMF?

Congrats @samdblond, Abhishek, Prashant and the Monaco team on the launch and what a cool way to launch!

Modern GTM is no longer a persuasion problem. It is a product comprehension problem.

🔥🔥🔥🔥“Then I met Matic. It’s a complete rethink of the household robot. From design and navigation to cleaning performance and mobility, it’s been built from the ground up to address the problems of today’s robot vacuums. And it succeeds.” 🫡😍🥰