Bobby

Project Family // Empowering the Greatest Generation
Prev @AirWorksUS

[Henry Dowling @henrytdowling]

Stash is hosting a hackathon this weekend along with our friends at @agihouse_org and @coframe!

We're very excited to share that attendees will get an opportunity to try out a preview of the upcoming Stash Developer Platform, which we're launching publicly next month. This feature will allow you to share memory across your users with strong privacy and data isolation guarantees.

There will also be a bunch of $$ prizes, wonderful guest speakers, and overall a great opportunity for a focused day of building in a beautiful space away from the distractions of SF.

If you're a Stash user and you're interested in attending, send me a DM after you submit your application :)

(pictured: me and @samzliu presenting a very early version of what would eventually become Stash at an AGI house hackathon last year)

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

Objective truth >>>>>>>>anything else

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

@BoBrainerd It is not important but existential that future consumer products are built in NYC.

[Bo Brainerd @BoBrainerd]

Consumer software belongs in New York.

Hinge.
Spotify.
Bilt.
Venmo.
Tumblr.
Etsy.

Completely different products.

Same advantage: they were built around how people actually live.

Everyday people.
Real behavior.
Real life.

That’s what I love about NYC consumer founders.

They understand the gap between a great demo and a product someone will genuinely use every day.

Now AI assistants, chatbots, and consumer agents are hitting the same wall.

They can reason about the world.

But the world still has websites, payments, availability, identity, forms, and legacy systems.

Too much of technology is built inside a bubble, assuming people will change their behavior to fit the software.

The best consumer founders do the opposite.

They build technology around people.

That’s why we’re building Ophelia here: the simplest, most reliable infrastructure for consumer AI to work in the real-world.

Built in the infrastructure capital of the world.

We understand the technology.
We understand the people.
And we’re committed to the mission.

If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.

More importantly, you can build something meant for anywhere.

We’re building the infrastructure to power what comes next and the teams behind those products.

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

@saradu Hope always. Humans get a benefit and they see design. Thats all the UX should be

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

@cognition Remember when people posted just to post. Crazy

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

@maticrobots Matic

[Henry Dowling @henrytdowling]

We have this theory that the output of a company that is going to really matter in 3 years is the tokens that are generated by a company’s agents. Assuming AI continues to get better at its current pace, we'll have these enormously productive AI employees massively outproducing their human counterparts.

Like, 99% of the information generated will be tokens created by agents, the other 1% will be human outputs. So a company’s IP will essentially be comprised of the tokens that their internal agents have outputted.

In this world, a couple things are true, one obvious and the other not obvious:

(1) If an enterprise AI like OpenAI is online continually learning on your tokens, they are in prime position to clone your business and compete with you- so that's bullish for open-source / "own your AI" people.

(2) A company’s effectiveness will depend heavily on its ability to *operationalize its tokens*. There will need to be infrastructure to *store* the tokens, to (continually learn* based off the tokens, to *effectively query* the tokens, etc.

People don't really think of *tokens that a company generates* as an important data source yet, but they should! Why are we throwing these tokens away right now? All the work that comprises a company- the meetings, the relationships, the code, the product decisions, will live in tokens generated by AI employees.

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

@brandonturp Just ping those guys again when they offer to buy you

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

@heshie Ai says, “you don’t look good, but we can fix you”. Worst comms issue in history

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

Hot take; paying for marketing should happen very late or never.

People should consciously decide to use and then market your company/product.

Anything short of that means your story or product is not good enough

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

@willccbb And too many products. Apple pre Jobs round 2

[Lulu Cheng Meservey @lulumeservey]

GO DIRECT: THE MANIFESTO

I. TRADITIONAL PR IS DEAD.

For too long, founders have yielded control over their narratives to media and middlemen.

Before the internet, it was by necessity. The way to reach large audiences was through the media, and the way to get media coverage was through professional publicists.

Today, most of the planet is directly reachable by social media or email. There’s no longer a need to go through traditional gatekeepers of information and brokers of reputation — especially as their own credibility has plummeted.

The old PR playbook of relying on third parties with misaligned interests is obsolete.

But while the world has changed, comms norms have not. Still encased in amber are the old habits: prioritizing media over social media, fishing for clicks instead of fostering communities, and avoiding risk by recycling worn-out tactics.

“Corporate communications” itself is now an oxymoron, as nothing meaningful can be communicated by a faceless committee. If press releases read like they were written by a baker’s dozen of middle managers, that’s because they were. Their only discernible purpose seems to be to avoid upsetting anyone and jeopardizing the future job prospects of those middle managers.

The resulting stories are bland and generic, with passion reduced to pablum. Traditional comms is an anachronism.

II. COMMUNICATION IS THE FOUNDER’S JOB.

For a decade, we’ve been told that tech founders are cartoon villains, venture-funded startups are grifts, and new technologies will destroy us all.

Maybe there was a time when founders could just focus on building — they were seen by the media establishment as a curiosity, not a threat to the natural hierarchy who needed to be put in their place. But if that time ever existed, it is now long gone.

You may not be interested in The Discourse, but it is interested in you. And if you bow out, you are forfeiting your license to build a movement and thus build a company.

Building a movement is hard, but it must be done, and it must be done by founders. A founder’s passion, vision, and conviction can’t be simulated by others — least of all the press-release-enjoying middle managers already scouting for their next jobs.

The best spokesperson for any endeavor is not the one who has the most polish, the longest tenure, or the “right” credentials. It’s the person who holds the secret knowledge upon which the enterprise is built, the person who can not only describe the idea but, in the face of inevitable opposition, fight for it and win.

Founders need to take their narrative as seriously as they take the rockets or robots. They would never outsource their product — and when it comes to convincing others to support the mission, the story is the product. Outsourcing comms is as bad as outsourcing code.

As evangelists, founders are irreplaceable.

III. GO DIRECT OR GO HOME.

Going direct to the people who matter is how founders retain control over their narratives and preserve their companies’ uniqueness. Those who are stubborn, unorthodox, and disagreeable should never have their edges filed down for fear of offending entrenched interests.

But going direct doesn’t mean going it alone. It doesn’t mean refusing help or spurning others who can amplify your message. And it certainly doesn’t mean just poasting more.

Going direct means crafting and telling your own story, without being dependent on intermediaries.

Just as founders might have more natural talents at product, management, or engineering, some founders will be naturals at communicating while others have a harder time.

The good news is that going direct and building a movement, while not easy, are skills that can be developed with discipline and time. The bad news is that, unlike with engineering or management, communications failures are immediately public and personally humiliating. It’s not surprising that many are loathe to take on this responsibility.

At the same time, founders willing to pick up that gauntlet will find that it gives them a massive edge in recruiting, fundraising, selling, and shaping the information environment needed for their companies to thrive.

IV. IT’S TIME TO REBUILD THE ROSTRA.

At the center of Rome, as it transitioned from a Republic to an Empire, stood a speaker’s platform from which the city’s leaders would address the public directly.

It was called the Rostra, so named because it stood atop the captured battle rams (or rostrums) of enemy warships. From here, speeches were given that would sway opinion, change regimes, and alter history.

That physical structure has been lost to time, but we now have something much more powerful: a free and open internet with which to build a speaker’s platform of limitless scale. All we need is the will to build it.

The conventional way of communicating has its allure. Outsource your message, let some removed third party go through the motions of getting “impressions,” and spare yourself the risks and discomfort that come with putting your own name on the line.

But that way is incompatible with greatness.

Reject convention — build your own platform, build your own audience, and build your own narrative.

Go direct.

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

@businessbarista Not crazy. I’d say it has to be the capital for consumer ai especially

[Joshua Kushner @JoshuaKushner]

if not you then who

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

All companies should be attempting to create a new playbook.

New tech = new capabilities = new GTM playbook

[David Senra @davidsenra]

“Everything seems fake now.”

.@lulumeservey on companies paying for retweets on their product launches:

“Every launch uses the same slop cinematic video, same template.”

“Half of them, you go to the engagement—it's completely fake.”

“You can just start to tell that the amount of engagement this thing has is completely disproportionate to how interesting it actually is. And when you look through the people engaging with it, it's all some random account in a developing country that has no other tweets other than shilling products like this.”

“When that happens, I write off the entire company as fake.”

“I don't think, ‘This was a fake video or fake engagement.’ I think to myself, ‘It's a fake company with a fake founder. I will never buy their product or do business with them. I would never recommend somebody go work with them. The whole thing is fake.’”

“It's better to put out something that truly represents the best version of what you’re doing that might get lower engagement, but the people who are engaging are actually real people, and they care. It's better to get 50 people who feel like this is speaking to them than to get 4,700 retweets that seem obviously fake.”

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

@oliverbrocato Only 5x?

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

@AlesyaMacWaters Accurate @DanicaG_pac

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

@zebird0 Best advice here

[Bobby @_BobbyTrickett]

@JakeFleshner Have you espresso’d at all?