Tejas Shah

Median state of confusion. Building the future of personal finance

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@ctatedev The fact that you so consistently feel the same pain I do and then ship an improvement like... Every week is crazy. You are slowly becoming my favorite human

My wife is concerned

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The only thing worse than having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI is not having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI.

[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.

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

I think an addendum that would drive this point home is that for high leverage communication (an email to Paul Graham) using AI output OOB signals a lack of discernment

[Paul Graham @paulg]

A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@paulg I think an addendum that would drive this point home is that for high leverage communication (an email to Paul Graham) using AI output OOB signals a lack of discernment

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

An interesting side effect of this is that pessimism tends to lead to inaction/fear. Optimism tends to lead to curiosity/exploration

[Paul Graham @paulg]

There is nothing more powerful than well-informed optimism. It has to be well-informed though. The "everything will be fine" type of optimism may also be somewhat useful, but it's not as useful as the "Hmm, what if we tried x?" kind.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

There is nothing more powerful than well-informed optimism. It has to be well-informed though. The "everything will be fine" type of optimism may also be somewhat useful, but it's not as useful as the "Hmm, what if we tried x?" kind.

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

People keep forgetting that deploying intelligence is an old problem
- 2023 -> hire, organize, and lead people better than everyone else
- 2026 -> hire, organize, and lead people who are hiring, organizing, and leading agents better than everyone else

Founder diff 📈

[Hubert Thieblot @hthieblot]

The only unbreakable moat is a founder who literally cannot imagine doing anything else.

Competitors can copy your features and VCs can fund your rivals, but they can't replicate the stubborn refusal to let a specific future die.

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

I love seeing the best engineers feel liberated enough to tackle more ambitious problems. it's fueling such a fun new era for builders

[Chris Tate @ctatedev]

I built Zero in 3 days.

I didn't expect it to compile.
I didn't expect it to mostly self-host.
I definitely didn't expect it to work at all.

Inspired partly by Bun's rewrite to Rust, Zero started as an experiment. Honestly, the project says more about where AI is today than it does about the language itself.

It took more than 3,000 agent tasks to get here, and it's still nowhere near ready for serious comparisons, benchmarks or evals.

But the goal is bigger than the current result.

The hope is to either create a new language with tooling designed for agents from the ground up, or take learnings and apply it back to existing languages and ecosystems.

The ideas are simple:

1. Make languages (and new versions) easy for agents to learn, adapt to and fix on the fly, even when not in the training data.
2. Build a standard library comprehensive enough that most projects don't need external dependencies.
3. Create a tight, fast development loop that even small models can reliably work with.

I've never wanted to create a programming language.

But after repeatedly running into the same problems, safe but slow builds, fast but unsafe builds, agents struggling with new languages and version changes, wanting faster builds, smaller bundles and better DX, I started wondering:

Could accelerated, agent-driven iteration produce a language and tooling stack designed around these constraints from the start?

So Zero was born.

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@paulg that curve doesn't look flat before this view o.o

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@ixenoai @khushkhushkhush yes

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@oh__friend @khushkhushkhush im actually building this. a real tax + modelling engine so agents aren't trying to infer the whole shit but you dont have to wait for turbo tax to roll out an mcp and for chatgpt to learn how tf taxes work. wanna chat?

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@khushkhushkhush im building a non-ai-slop version (despite my claude desgin landing page). have 15m to see if you'd wanna try the alpha?

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@mattpocockuk Don't let your dreams be dreams. Today

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@hthieblot Don't assume people with bigger businesses are smarter than you

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@RhysSullivan The simple answer is you don't need to waste time building a harness for well defined long running tasks. Ex research alternative solutions to an architecture constraint via gh+web and test each implementation in worktrees, then nudge you on the best one and why

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@Jaytel It's still substantially better for creative work, but I hand every task off where I'm coding or all the thinking has been handled to codex (post spec or for verifying anything)

God bless conductor for making this pretty trivial to do

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@apple_SFY @isaac_tolley17 We have a few alpha slots left if you wanna try out https://t.co/feC2chuVr2, we'll release in a few weeks at full price

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@isaac_tolley17 "Simplify making personal finance decisions"

[Tejas Shah @SaaSBender]

@isaac_tolley17 Personal finance agent doesn't exactly explain anything, but sure