Thanks @benthompson for such a wide-ranging and fun conversation.
Read/listen if you want to go deep on business models around content for an agentic web.
We’re bringing the web to your data 🌐
Hex already knows what's happening inside your business, and now the Hex agent can fill in the gaps with what's happening outside.
The Hex agent can search the web, powered by @p0
Learn more in the comments below ⬇️
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.
We're thrilled to build on our collaborations with @stripe, joining Stripe Projects to make it easier than ever to provision high-accuracy web search from the terminal.
Here's how quickly you can get started:
Following rapid growth, a $100M Series B, and a slate of new launches, I sat down with Parallel co-founder @travers00.
@p0 is building core search infrastructure for the agentic web: systems that enable AI to retrieve, structure, and reason over information across the internet with speed, accuracy, and reliability.
I joined Travers at Parallel’s new Palo Alto office for a wide-ranging conversation on:
> The pace going from launch last August to becoming critical infrastructure powering production workflows at companies like Notion, Harvey, Granola, and more.
> Why Parallel sees the future of search as far beyond “ten blue links,” toward systems built for retrieval, reasoning, monitoring, and computation.
> The changing nature of the web itself: its economics, openness, and what happens as agents become primary users.
> The artistry and legacy of internet history shaping the company: Olivetti typewriters, Douglas Hofstadler, Lloyd Shapley, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Google’s Search Box, and how it inspired programs like the Museum of the Human Web.
This is an extensive and wide ranging look into one of the most interesting sectors of the agentic web. We @terraincap feel lucky to have worked with Travers and the team since the start just two years ago. So much to do.
Parallel now supports x402 payments.
AI agents are expanding their presence across the open web. For that to scale sustainably, they need to pay for what they use, programmatically, at runtime.
x402 gives any agent access to Parallel's Search, Extract, and Deep Research APIs, starting at $0.01 per call.
Get started: https://t.co/sWPyoCGMUu
@CoinbaseDev@linuxfoundation
Yes! For humans, ads was the most efficient business model due to the human cognitive overhead with payments. With agents, direct payments will work much better.
This is why I’m so optimistic about high quality content thriving on the web as agents take over.
Cool release from @p0. I think this use-case (agents paying content creators for access via @mpp) will be very big. Micropayment walls haven't worked (as Clay Shirky anticipated many years ago) because of human cognitive overhead, but agents can make arbitrarily granular determinations without decision fatigue.
There are a small number of elite go to market leaders. Graham Moreno is one of them.
He recently joined @p0 to help lead GTM. Before that, he was at Cognition, Grafana, and MongoDB.
One of his core philosophies is that a great go to market system raises the floor and introduces predictability while still leaving space for exceptional people to use their judgment to delight the customer.
“One of my favorite stories is, one of the best reps I’ve ever worked with, during the pandemic found out that the son of a champion at one of his companies had been taking guitar lessons and couldn’t anymore because of COVID. So he ended up teaching this guy’s kid guitar over Zoom during COVID.
And he also didn’t tell anyone. No one found out about this for a long time. Then the champion at this account brought it up on a call with me six months later and was like, ‘Oh yeah, Isaac has been teaching my son how to play guitar.’ At no part in our process does it say, ‘teach someone guitar.’”
This is one of my favorite deep dives on what it means to be an executional revenue leader in a post AI world. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Timestamps
00:32 Has the sales playbook changed in the AI era?
02:13 Why "showing up" beats letting the marketplace decide
06:50 Why great salespeople sell to engineers and executives in one motion
11:37 Selling to AI-native buyers who grew up on ChatGPT
13:49 Same seller, different tempo: 8 weeks vs. 8 business days
15:57 How AI-native buyers handle build vs. buy decisions
17:48 The rep who taught a champion's son guitar over Zoom
19:03 Raising the floor without capping the ceiling
22:09 Why too much process narrows the kind of seller you attract
25:46 The three pillars of GTM excellence
31:00 Building peers who are 80% aligned, not 100%
38:03 Whether AI is changing what good enablement looks like
41:35 Selling against direct and implied competitors at once
42:45 Instrumenting the funnel from stage zero to close
45:57 Why post-sales should always roll up to the revenue leader
48:19 The case for outsized commissions
52:02 The 96 hours of panic before Cognition acquired Windsurf
53:04 How far out should a GTM leader be planning?
57:53 What a normal week looks like in hypergrowth
We started @p0 based on the belief that AI agents will use the web 1000x more than humans, and we need new tech and business models as a result.
We are already seeing agents scale on our infrastructure, and this is the starting point for a new business model for the web.
I joined @p0 because of THIS mission - we power the best web search for AI agents, AND we're now launching the platform for the world's leading publishers and content creators to get paid for their content. Journalism deserves more, and we are hoping to usher in that change ✨
Excited to finally share what I've been working on at @p0 -- it represents the culmination of a thesis I've had for >2 years & many months of hard work from this team.
I became obsessed w Shapley values during my time in crypto, & I'm making the bet that they'll reshape the economics of the web as agents come online.
Please reach out if you're interested in joining us.
we started @p0 because we believed agents would be the primary users of the web, that they'd use it far more than humans, and that they'd need new infrastructure and new business models to support that
the first part is already playing out. today we're announcing the second
I've been really impressed with what Parallel is building, and what my friends Nick and Carra are doing on the publisher side.
"Content that's uniquely valuable, hard to replace, or used in high-value agent work earns more."
Excited to partner and experiment with them.
One of my longstanding fears about AI has been that it would further centralize the web– after all, agents are a new kind of app store.
But increasingly, I’ve come to believe the agentic web can be less concentrated than the human one. Agents reason massively in parallel. They are not deterred from clicking through the 5th page of Google or the 50th page of an S1. The arrival of agents could be the best thing to happen to long tail content in a generation. But this can only happen if there’s a functional economic model to incentivize it.
Index is our attempt at putting that economic model in place. We hope you’ll join us.
I'm excited to be a Parallel launch partner
@paraga and team are working on an important problem: rewarding content creators for their agent audience, which I suspect will only grow for publishers of all types