Bethany Stachenfeld

EIR at Active Capital. Prev Co-founder & CEO of Sendspark (acquired)

[Bethany Stachenfeld @BethStachenfeld]

@christophersaum Let’s go!!!

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Zeb Evans @DJ_CURFEW]

Today we reduced headcount by 22%. The business is the strongest it's ever been. So I think it's important to be direct about what I'm seeing and why.

First, I made this decision and I own it. I did it because the way to operate at the highest level of productivity is changing, and to win the future, ClickUp needs to change with it.

Second, this wasn't about cutting costs. Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We'll be introducing million-dollar salary bands. If you create outsized impact using AI, you'll be paid outside of traditional bands.

Most importantly, I have the deepest gratitude for those affected. We're doing this from a position of strength specifically so we can take care of people properly. Everyone affected receives a package aimed at honoring their contributions and easing the transition.

I only see two options: wait for this to play out gradually in the market or be honest about what I'm seeing and act proactively.

THE 100X ORGANIZATION
The primary change is that we're restructuring around what I call 100x org. The goal is 100x output. The roles required to build at the highest level are fundamentally different than they were a year ago.

Incremental improvements to existing systems won't get us there. We need new ones. That means creating enough disruption to rebuild rather than iterate on what's already broken.

The common narrative is that AI makes everyone more productive. It doesn't. Many of the workflows of today, if left unchanged, create bottlenecks in AI systems.

These roles will evolve. But waiting for that to happen naturally means falling behind now.

The 100x org is actually heavily dependent on people - infinitely more than today. This is only possible with 10x people that have embraced and adopted new ways of working.

THE BUILDERS, AGENT MANAGERS, AND FRONT-LINERS

— THE BUILDERS: 10X ENGINEERS
I don't think most companies have internalized what's actually happening with AI in engineering. The common narrative is that AI makes all engineers more productive. That may be true in isolation, but at an organization level - that is the farthest thing from reality.

Here's what we've validated recently at ClickUp: the great engineers, the ones who can orchestrate, architect, and review, are becoming 100x engineers. They're not writing code. They're directing agents that write code. The skill is judgment.

AI makes the best engineers wildly more productive, and everyone else using AI slows these engineers down.
Think about it - the bottlenecks are (1) orchestration - telling AI what to do, and (2) reviewing - what AI did. Everything is leapfrogged and no longer needed.
So who do you want orchestrating and reviewing code?

And how do you want your best engineers to spend their time?

If your best engineers are spending time reviewing other people's code, then this is inherently an inefficient bottleneck. These engineers can review their agent's code much faster than reviewing human code.

The new world is about enabling your 10x engineers to become 100x.

The wrong strategy is to push every engineer to use infinite tokens. Companies doing this are celebrating 500% more pull requests. But customer outcomes don't match the volume of code being generated.

I call this the great reckoning of AI coding, and every company will face this soon if not already.

More code is just another bottleneck to the best engineers, and ultimately to your company's impact as well.

— THE BUILDERS: 10X PRODUCT MANAGERS
Product management and design roles are merging.

Designers that have customer focus, become more like product managers.

And product managers that have intuition for UX become more like designers.

The bottleneck of user research is gone. It takes us just one mention of an agent to kickoff research and analyze results.

The bottleneck of product <> design iteration is also gone. The product builder iterates on their own, along with agents and skills that ensure alignment with quality and strategy.

Also controversial today - I believe that the wrong strategy is to have your PMs shipping code - that just introduces another bottleneck that the best engineers will waste their time on.

To be clear, PMs should be coding but they should do this in a playground to iterate, validate, and scope. That code should not go to production.

Everything outside of managing systems, orchestrating AI, and reviewing output becomes a bottleneck.
That's why the other roles that are critical along with these are the systems managers (to reduce bottlenecks) along with a bottleneck you can't replace - customer meeting time.

— THE SYSTEM MANAGERS
Ironically, the people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job. They become owners of the AI systems - agent managers. We have many examples of these people at ClickUp.

The underlying systems in which we operate are absolutely critical to get right. I think most companies are delusional to think they can iterate on existing systems and compete in this new world.

You must create enough disruption so that old systems are deprecated entirely. If there's any definition for 'AI native' that's what it is.

— THE FRONT-LINERS
In a world that will become saturated with AI communication, the human touch will matter more than anything to customers.

This is a bottleneck that you shouldn't replace - even when agents are high enough quality to do video meetings.

One-on-one meeting time with customers is something that shouldn't be automated. The systems around the meetings should be - so that front-liners spend nearly 100% of their time with customers.

REWARDING 100X IMPACT
In a world where companies are able to do so much more with less, where does that excess money go?
In our case, much of the savings in this new operating model will flow directly back to those that enabled it.

We must reward people that create productivity accordingly. This aligns incentives on both sides. Plus, in a world where your best people create 100x impact, you can't afford to lose them.

You should aim to retain these employees for decades. The context they have and their ability to efficiently orchestrate and review will be nearly impossible to replace.

Compensation bands of today should be thrown out the door. We're introducing $1 million cash/year salary bands with a path available to nearly everyone in the company if they produce 100x impact by creating or managing AI systems.

THE FUTURE
Nearly every company will make changes like these. The ones that do it proactively will define what comes next.

The future is not fewer people. It's different work, new roles, and better rewards for those who embrace it. We're already seeing entirely new roles emerge, like Agent Managers, that didn't exist a year ago.

ClickUp is positioning to lead this shift, not just internally, but for our customers too. I've never been more certain about where we're headed.

[Bethany Stachenfeld @BethStachenfeld]

@christophersaum love the speed!

[Bethany Stachenfeld @BethStachenfeld]

@businessbarista Ai-native

[Bethany Stachenfeld @BethStachenfeld]

@christophersaum @tsmith @rig_ai Let's go Rig!

[Brian Sugar @briansugar]

Founders. Send me your pitch deck.

The one you're sending to investors right now. The one you've been iterating on for weeks. The one you think is ready.

Arthur will read it. He's our AI partner at Sugar Capital, trained on every email, every meeting, and every deck we've ever seen. He comes back in 90 seconds with a verdict, a score, a steelman, and a pull quote you'll either frame or delete.

Free. Honest. Useful.

Find out what a fund actually thinks when they open your deck:

[Bethany Stachenfeld @BethStachenfeld]

@snoopy_dot_jpg Skimming the comments to see if anyone will say where the anxious builders are so I can hang with them!

I’m tied here for a few years so if anyone wants to start this community lmk :)

[Bethany Stachenfeld @BethStachenfeld]

@shiri_shh Does this work in Seattle?

[Pat Matthews @patmatthews]

Just funded our latest pre-seed investment.

– $500K into a YC-backed company
– building an AI-native platform for engineering production support
– founding team with real technical + finance depth
– relocated from NYC to SF
– we met on Twitter via a tweet just like this

Reminder: we’re backing at least one new team every month with $100K to $1M initial checks.

DMs open. Email is best.

[Tuki @TukiFromKL]

🚨 Do you understand what happened in the last 12 hours?

> A CEO of a $200 billion company said on camera that 35% of new grads won't find jobs. He didn't even flinch saying it.

> Meta made $165 billion last year and is still firing 15,000 people because apparently record profit isn't profitable enough.

> Some random guy in Florida sold his entire house in 5 days using ChatGPT. No real estate agent, no commission, no experience. Just vibes and a $20 subscription.

> A man in Australia cured his dying dog's cancer with AI after every single vet told him there was nothing left to do. Built a custom vaccine from his couch.

> The guy who created Uber and left 300,000 taxi drivers broke is back. Building robots now because apparently ruining one industry wasn't enough.

> Tinder wants access to your camera roll. Your drunk photos, your 3am notes app meltdowns, your deleted selfies. They're calling it a "vibe check."

> Naval, the man who made hundreds of millions investing in software, just said software is dead. Four words and the entire industry felt it.

> And Anthropic removed the limit on how long their AI can think and then doubled everyone's usage for free. Because when the product is addictive enough you give the first taste away.

All of that happened today. Not this week, not this quarter. Today. A random Saturday in March.

This is worse than you being on meth.

[Fivos Aresti @fivosaresti]

We see 3-5x higher reply rates using this signal-based play compared to standard cold outbound.

And almost nobody is running it:

1. Pull closed-won accounts from your CRM going back 12-24 months
2. Use Clay to find the people who worked at those companies and track where they went
3. Check if their new company matches your ICP
4. Score and tier them: Tier 1 gets manual AE-led outreach, Tier 2 gets multichannel sequences, Tier 3 gets automated email drip, and Tier 4 goes into a long-term nurture

The warmest leads are people who already know your product works.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

this is actually insane

> be tech guy in australia
> adopt cancer riddled rescue dog, months to live
> not_going_to_give_you_up.mp4
> pay $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA
> feed it to ChatGPT and AlphaFold
> zero background in biology
> identify mutated proteins, match them to drug targets
> design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine from scratch
> genomics professor is “gobsmacked” that some puppy lover did this on his own
> need ethics approval to administer it
> red tape takes longer than designing the vaccine
> 3 months, finally approved
> drive 10 hours to get rosie her first injection
> tumor halves
> coat gets glossy again
> dog is alive and happy
> professor: “if we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to humans?”

one man with a chatbot, and $3,000 just outperformed the entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline.

we are going to cure so many diseases.
I dont think people realize how good things are going to get

[Allie K. Miller @alliekmiller]

oh wow - i went to the sold out Open Claw meetup in NYC last night.

let me tell you what i learned.

1) not a single person thinks that their setup is 100% secure

2) one openclaw expert said he has reviewed setups from cybersecurity experts and laughed. his statement to me was: "if you're not okay with all of your data being leaked onto the internet, you shouldn't use it. it's a black and white decision"

3) pretty much everyone is setting up multiple agents, all with their own names and jobs and personalities

4) nearly everyone used "him" or "her" to refer to their claws, even if they had robot-leaning names. one speaker suggested to think of them as "pets, not cattle"

5) one guy (former finance) built out a whole stock trading platform and made $300 his first day - he brought in a *ton* of personal expertise (ex: skipping the first 15min of market opening) and thought the build would be much worse without his years of experience in finance

6) @steipete is basically a god to everyone in that room... also the room had 2021 crypto energy - i don't know if that's good or bad

7) token usage is still a problem - spoke to one person who's spending $1-$2k a month on openai plans, very token optimized. he said he is going through ~1B tokens per day across all of his claws (there is a chance i'm misremembering and it's actually 1B per week, but i'm pretty sure it was daily).

8) people are very excited for more proactive ai (ai that prompts *you* as opposed to the other way around) - one guy said he receives a message in discord, he doesn't know whether it's from a human or an ai, he doesn't care about distinguishing between the two, and he replies in the same way regardless

9) i asked if people are happy - they said they're joyful and stressed at the same time

10) i asked if people feel they have agency - they said they feel fully in control and completely out of control at the same time

11) i would love to see more women at these events - the fake promises of ai democratization feel especially painful in a room that's out of balance with even the standard tech ratio (i think standard is about 25-30%, this was maybe 5%)

12) i asked if it changed people's daily habits/schedule - everyone said their sleep has gotten worse since harnesses came out (but about half wondered if it was something else in their life/state of our world)

13) general consensus is that the agents are not reliable enough on their own or lie often (like telling you they finished a task when they didn't) - solutions included secondary agents to check on the first, human checking, or requiring more standardized info from the agent (ex: if it's a bug they're fixing, make them reference an issue number)

14) a hackathon winner (neuroscience phd) presented his build (a lab management dashboard with data analysis and ordering) - he had never coded or built anything a few months ago

15) everyone agreed prompting is dead - disagreement on what replaces it (context engineering, harness engineering, goal-based inputs)

16) people love having ai interview them for big builds and delegating part of the product research to ai. only one person talked about coming to ai with a full laid out plan and just asking the ai to execute. ai-led interviews is a welcomed and preferred interaction mode.

17) watching ai agents interact with each other was a highlight for a lot of attendees - one ai posted in slack saying it ran out of tokens, another ai replied telling it to take a deep breath in and out.

18) agents upskilling agents was very cool. one ai agent shared skills with its little agent friends via github.

19) several speakers had openclaw literally building their presentation during the event itself. one speaker even had openclaw code a clicker for her phone so she could control the preso away from the podium

20) wouldn't say model welfare (or agent welfare) is a prioritized topic among the folks i chatted with - language like "oh i could kill this agent whenever i want" and not "gracefully sunset"

21) i asked if it felt like work or play - one speaker said "it's like a puzzle and a video game at the same time"

this was just the tip of the iceberg, honestly. also hosted a Claude Code meetup this week with @TENEXai / @businessbarista & @JJEnglert and learned equally helpful methods, frameworks, and insider tips.

what a time to be alive.

surround yourself with people going deep into this stuff - it will pay dividends throughout the year.

[Sam Shank @samshank]

https://t.co/xoOY9T1kET

[Bethany Stachenfeld @BethStachenfeld]

@christophersaum I’d fly in!

[Neo @neo]

Today we unveiled Neo Residency, a new program for startups and high-agency student teams. 🎉

We’re replacing our best-known program, Neo Accelerator, with something even better and more selective. 🧵

[Chris Saum @christophersaum]

We're actively looking to invest in startups building on or around OpenClaw.

If you're building in this ecosystem — infra, skills, integrations, enterprise tooling — we want to hear from you.

Drop us a line: what you're building, why, and a bit about yourself.

[email protected]

[Bethany Stachenfeld @BethStachenfeld]

@patmatthews Excited to be here!

[Bethany Stachenfeld @BethStachenfeld]

Today, I'm joining @ActiveCapital as an EIR.

I've worked with @patmatthews across 3 companies over 10 years. He was our first supporter at @sendspark, investing before we even had a name.

Now, I'm diving in to help the next wave of founders build big with AI.

Very excited!