partner @ Accel. head cheerleader @ gamma, lovable, radar, ironclad, transcend, permitflow. formerly: frame (ADBE), spoke (OKTA), segment (TWLO), deepmap (NVDA)
Joined April 2009
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Org context is indispensible when deploying agents. You don't just want "plausible" actions, you want actions grounded in your team's meetings, convos, and past decisions. We led the first round of @withscuba to wrangle this temperamental but super valuable data to support all kinds of agent workflows across product, engineering, design and GTM.
With founders (and great humans, @noah_weiss, @dolapo) who've lived the problem from their early days @SlackHQ
At the risk of shoving my nose in where it doesn't belong....I'm sadly known at Accel as a big fan of call option thinking. It's not meant to reduce a Seed check to a lottery ticket we stick in a drawer -- to the contrary we treat each Seed like a Series A, highly engaged.
But a "call option" is a clean way to mathematically represent what's happening at Seed. Which is to say, you'll see more value with longer duration (maintain runway, run lots of experiments, see lots of data), volatility (the types of experiments you run allow you to spike asymmetrically to the upside), and ideally an entry price that reflects the risk of the stage. Big ups to my homies Black and Scholes.
None of that makes it a passive lottery ticket. Convexity and duration are things we try to underwrite, and what makes the work so involved -- gotta think big and long term, and gotta stay in the game.
The framework biases us to default optimism which is why I love it.
Duration: keep trying, mind your burn….give yourself lotssss of time to witness upside. How many startups saw a better opportunity b/c they stayed in the game long enough for AI to show up? Sure - opposite can be true as well, duration can move against you. But usually not at Seed … still nimble enough to adjust to new forces.
Btw, investors who anchor a bridge round to extend said window, give us more time — that’s optimism in practice.
Positive volatility: think ambitiously about the unique and durable value we offer the world (volatility that spikes positively) and how it can quickly spread. Bold risk-taking ftw. Great products well distributed. Nuff said.
It’s a way of showing up.
Gamma saw AI flattening creativity into a mess of undifferentiated output and said, game on.
Gamma 5. There’s no pacing the frontier of one’s imagination, and Gamma will be there every step of the way.
@GammaApp @thisisgrantlee
Everyone is sick of generic AI, including us.
Gamma was the first AI presentation platform to reach real scale. But now that AI tools are everywhere, everything looks the same.
Earlier this summer, we came to an uncomfortable conclusion: without a step change in visual variety, Gamma’s output would look and feel too similar to all the other AI tools. The entire point of a presentation is to help someone "get" your idea, to see it as unique and do something with it.
We started over. Today we're shipping Gamma 5, the biggest product overhaul in our company's history.
We rebuilt Gamma to create presentations that actually look like you and your brand. Your teams can design anything they dream up, following your brand's aesthetic or something entirely new, with every frontier and image model under the hood. And the same goes for your docs, social assets, and graphics.
We revamped our agent, design tools, editing, import, export, connectors, and more.
Get your ideas out there.
Very excited to be chatting with the incredible @ElenaVerna on all things growth, branding and marketing @Lovable -- and the importance of branding and storytelling at the earliest stages. A topic near and dear to my heart. Join us on Thursday in SF at the @claudeai Founder House! @AnthropicAI @Accel.
Sometimes you build the infrastructure for a certain app and the "real" app surprises you. Transcend powered through the policy/privacy law/regulatory infrastructure for years. Now agents are a voracious consumer of that truth....what data can an agent access, how is it used -- solved singularly in a clean and scalable abstraction.
Introducing Transcend Rails - agent policy as code. We're inflecting .... again! Come join us!
Your agents have access. Now they need permission to act.
Today, we announce the launch of Transcend Rails, an agent policy-as-code platform that decides and enforces what every AI agent is allowed to do at runtime.
Identity tells you who an agent is. Gateways tell you what it can reach. Governance tools document what it should do.
Rails governs the action, answering the question: Can my agent do this, for this purpose, right now?
Rails applies policy before the action happens. Every action resolves to allow, deny, or escalate. Every decision is logged with an owner, reason, and policy version.
Rails runs on the same policy foundation Transcend has used to make 203 billion automated data decisions for Fortune 500 brands, and it's already live with customers across media, consumer, and healthcare.
transcend.io/rails
#AI #AIGovernance #AgenticAI #DataGovernance #AIInfrastructure
Finding the signal I most closely watch these days is a company's metabolic rate. How a company takes in data about its market and customers, and how it converts it into product/positioning. The amazing thing is what agents can do to orchestrate and drive each.
Brand & story are the SUPER critical outer loop -- a great one will expand your reach, and get you more shots on goal with customers, partners, talent. Great brand means tons of intake.
Product is the critical inner loop that turns the aforementioned reach into feedback --> tickets --> shipped value.
Fascinating to watch agents autonomously run (if not accelerate) each loop, and the best of the best are finding the highest leverage points to inject human judgement.
This new "agent era" reminds us of the stickiness & value of existing systems of record, complex UI/UX notwithstanding. Customers get fast outcomes along with the provenance of the record underneath -- business teams get speed, compliance gets its audit trail. Why vibecode new software when agents work with what you already have...
See it firsthand in a bunch of our fastest growing companies:
@linear is accelerating as the record behind all work-in-process software development. Everyone builds more software -- agents read from and write to Linear's source of truth.
@useagave agents operate across the ERP stack (Oracle, Sage, ViewPoint, Autodesk) that sits behind critical real world projects No one rips out years of cost codes/project history ... but they gladly welcome our agents to operate atop what they have. (FYI - hiring!)
AskFelicity.ai is growing fast as the post-RPA solution for brittle, complex workflows across healthcare, HR, compliance, insurance, etc. -- things with low error tolerance. We see negligible rip-and-replace from customers...just a deep need to operate what they have better and more deterministically.
@usekernel, @modal etc. are all growing so quickly offering the core primitive (VMs/environments) for agents and software to interact.
Maybeeeee all this software sticks around after all....
Agents don't "visit" a site, they load the data into their own context window and make their own decision, immune to whatever conversion path the UX was built to drive. Agents mediating the web def moves rents up a layer and that's a big re-ordering of the web's value chain. Bit easier to name the businesses that lose rents -- starting to see it in the traffic-dependent public names. Trying to find the long side of the trade though outside the obvious names....
vas natarajan retweeted
Lovable’s agent infrastructure records ~500M events on a typical weekday.
Today we’re launching Chats, built on that foundation.
Getting agents to work together means more than handing off a task. What happens when the receiving agent is already busy? Which history should it see? How do results get back to the conversation that started the work?
Our approach separates an agent’s history, its incoming messages, and the machinery that runs it.
Chats uses that foundation to send work to the agents building your apps and bring their progress back into one conversation.
We’ve shared the architecture and tradeoffs for anyone building agents that need to work together.
Full breakdown: lovable.dev/blog/how-lovable…
If AI flattens everything else, speaking extemporaneously is maybe the last unassisted/unmediated read on any counter-party. Big win for those of us who love large words but generally have little to say...I'll take it!
Interactive voice/video is one of the main frontiers in HCI. How do we wrap users in believable but safe experiences so we’re willing to engage AI across more areas of our life. Those are complex multi-modal systems problems and the team @nuance_ai is chipping away to shave down the gap between what’s possible today — and true emotional intelligence. Thrilled to have led the seed and for this awesome milestone!
We’re excited to share that @nuance_ai has raised a $50M Series A led by @lightspeedvp, joined by @Accel, @spc, @nvidia, and @definevc!
Much of human communication happens beyond words. Before we can speak, we learn to read faces, return smiles, follow gestures, and sense when someone is listening. That visual and emotional vocabulary stays with us for life.
At Nuance Labs, we’re building a foundation model that understands and responds to the full spectrum of human emotion. A single full-duplex audio-visual model that sees, listens, and responds in real time, with the natural give-and-take of a conversation with a friend or colleague.
We believe the best interface with a machine is the one we’ve practiced since birth.
Join us!
Every AI company is growing revenue. Where the equity value settles is the harder question I'm trying to answer.
Those with a shorter hold-period somewhat absolved. Near-term the whole thing is re-rating higher on fundamentals + story. Everything looks great.
But if you're holding for 8-10 years like most private investors, you have to figure out what the market will value at maturity. If multiples compress in that time, you've lost the benefit of some if not all growth. Ideally the growth can outrun the loss in multiple. Or one can exit before it becomes apparent. And the pace of tech cycles today are making this even harder.
Not at all pessimism - just pragmatic underwriting, which means knowing where you are getting in, and having a POV of how you get out.
What a moment, @cursor_ai! Congrats to you! How often do you see a company's pace of innovation inflect again after an acquisition announcement... this team is absolutely cooking.
Side note, this will go down as one of the all-time greats @Accel and @Mkclements @agbraccia. To catch a breakout company and stay convicted at every fundraise along a never-before-seen trajectory ... one of the hardest parts of our job is to let your mind explore outcomes that break every internal model. Bravo!
Congratulations and thank you @mntruell and the entire @cursor_ai team.
Grok Bot and Grok 4.6 are just the faintest preview of what's to come from this extraordinary group of builders.
It is so, so early.
accel.com/news/spacex-cursor…
Lovable blew past vibe-coding a long time ago. The typical customer today is very deliberate about telling their story, serving their customers, and scaling their business etc. They want a platform to meet their ambition -- and @Lovable is their AI-native infrastructure.
Artificial-intelligence startup Lovable has raised fresh funds at a $13.3 billion valuation, highlighting investor enthusiasm for vibe-coding tools on.wsj.com/45XqlWM
.@Permitflow (YC22) one of the faster-growing under-the-radar applied AI companies doing just that-- reasons about what *can* be built (local building regs/zoning laws) -- and connects that with complex knowledge work happening across architects, engineers, lawyers, designers, etc to iterate on approvals and licensure.
vas natarajan retweeted
Now that AI has compressed the design phase for so many products, there is going to be more demand for technologies that compress the construction phase. After we get those, the final frontier will be regulation.
vas natarajan retweeted
CRACKED ALERT: The startup powering @sgl_project, @radixark, has some of the most hardcore engineers in inference. They power production at @xai and at many Chinese labs.
