Our AI agent can now create a test environment, deploy a feature branch, and test it in a browser, all from a Slack request. It sends the preview URL, results, and a video back to the same thread for our team to review.

As we started building more products at Finrep, we saw that we were building the same agent setup again and again. So we moved the runtime out of Fina and made it a shared service. Now, for a new product, we mostly just need to add its tools, skills and prompts. The rest is config. Here’s how we did it:

I’ve been deeply involved with 5 public companies, including 2 as ceo. Cos typically went public for three reasons. To raise capital, to give early investors & employees liquidity, & to build credibility, because large enterprises preferred doing business with public cos over private ones. Today, private capital is abundant. Existing shareholders have ways to find liquidity. Enterprises no longer view being public as a meaningful signal of quality. However, mgmt teams spend enormous amounts of time & energy managing quarterly expectations & stock price volatility. Most of that effort creates little lasting value. There is a reason there are far fewer public companies today. Unless you need access to massive pools of capital, the case for going public is far less compelling than it once was.

cfos at public companies still draft 100-page filings in software nobody actually likes using. we're fixing that. hiring a full-time engineer in bangalore to help us ship. dm me.

A Final Message From Scott Adams

• 50 former founders work at Cursor • 35 former founders work at Notion What other companies do this?

Ben Horowitz on how to deal with “The Struggle” Ben is asked about his famous blog post “The Struggle” and how to deal with it. He recalls Business Week writing a cover story about his company Loudcloud titled “The IPO from Hell.” The Red Herring wrote an article speculating that Ben was taking the company’s cash and setting it on fire in his parking lot. “These things hurt my feelings… But most of the stress doesn’t come so much from what people in the press and people on Twitter think. It’s more how people in the company start to feel about it. You’ve brought all these people in. They believed in you. Things aren’t going as sold. And you feel that, and it’s going badly. And then it’s amplified if they read that you suck in the press, as they did about me many times.” He continues: “I didn’t care that they said I was an idiot. What bothered me was people who work for me would go home and their spouse would go, ‘You know your CEO is an idiot? I just read it here in Business Week.’” As an entrepreneur, Ben had never really found a great outlet for this. He vented to his friend Bill Campbell who had similar bad experiences running a company called Go. But that didn’t help that much: “We’d talk about it and he would understand, but it didn’t help that much. It’s still a struggle. It’s still difficult. You just have to focus your mind on what you can do… You can’t focus on what’s going wrong and what that might imply.” He recalls an analogy from a class Peter Thiel taught on startups: “He says there are people who believe in statistics — they believe there are probabilities, that things happen, and all you can do is run a process and it is what it is… And then there are people who believe in calculus, and they believe there’s a right answer. If you’re a startup CEO, you have to believe in calculus. You have to believe you can find the answer and that’s all you can focus on… And trust me, there’s always an answer… But that’s really all there is. There’s not that much comfort out there.” Video source: @StartupGrind (2014)