Behrouz Hariri

Founder, Builder, Strategist

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

@skanwar @aratisharma @tobi @andrewgordonmac @ameetshah @melltruong @TOtechweek Reconnected with so many old friends this week. ✨

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

“With AI making code cheap to copy, what's going to be hard to copy is the shape of a company. How a team learns, decides, and ships.”

I think we will see many more “Executive IC” type roles popping up. Experienced free players can move fast, with conviction.

[Jean-Michel Lemieux @jmwind]

Very stoked about my next adventure. I’ve joined Spellbook, but not as CTO.

I’m joining as an Executive IC. It probably means different things to different people. It means I'm here to build and be hands on in every part of the company.

I've invested and been advising and getting to know @scottastevenson and the team for more than a year. At some point it became obvious the most useful thing I could do was stop talking about ideas and go work with the team.

With AI making code cheap to copy, what's going to be hard to copy is the shape of a company. How a team learns, decides, and ships. That's what I want to work on. It's what I've spent the last three decades learning to do.

Why Spellbook? The world has entered into one of the largest investment cycles in decades. Trillions of dollars are being deployed into energy, AI, manufacturing, transportation and the modernization of critical global systems. Despite this, progress still moves at the speed of contracts. Spellbook’s mission is to modernize the $1 trillion transactional legal market so the contract system can keep pace with the global economy.

At the same time, every contract ever signed is becoming searchable, comparable, and weaponizable by counterparties, regulators, and plaintiffs' lawyers. You will be attacked.

We're hiring. Slight bias toward Canada, but remote-friendly for great talent.
DM me.

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

Day 3 of @TOtechweek - as usual, the best part is running into so many friends. #torontotechweek

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

Kicking off @TOtechweek with @BetaKit and AXL labs’ @DanielWigdor #torontotwchweek

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

@alexandernorman Cliffhanger

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

There’s no tipping point coming where things flip and the jobs are gone. The new reality is the opposite—the more we automate, the more expert human work there is to do.

[Dan Shipper 📧 @danshipper]

We’ve automated every single thing we can @every with AI agents.

And yet there’s way more human work to do than ever. We’ve gone from 4 -> 30 human employees since GPT-3.

I wrote a report on the structural reasons: how AI makes expert competence cheap, why that drives up demand for experts, and why the dynamic only intensifies as we approach AGI.

After Automation: https://t.co/Lb7SUCduAg

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

Key slide from this @gregisenberg conversation:

When output gets cheap, taste gets more valuable. 👌

We’ve seen this cycle before. Everyone has an iPhone, but we don’t have more good photography. A good photo tells a better story.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

how to use Google's NEW open source Design.md + AI Skills to make your startup look like a $100 million company in 1 hour:

1. Design.md is an open source file from Google that captures the soul of a design. Typography, colors, spacing, all in one markdown file. You attach it to your prompt and your agent builds beautiful things every time.

2. Think of it this way. The HTML is the finished dish. The design.md is the recipe. The skills are the ingredients. Put them together and everything you build looks consistent and professional.

3. Don't create a design system from scratch. Find a brand you love. Linear, Stripe, Vercel, whatever resonates. Study it. Use ChatGPT or Claude to help you extract the design language into your own design.md file.

4. Build skills on top of your design.md. A landing page skill. A mobile app skill. A motion design skill. A slide deck skill. Each one references the same design.md so everything looks like it came from the same designer.

5. The biggest mistake people make: they nail one screen and then everything else looks generic. Design.md solves this. One file keeps every page, every format, every medium consistent.

6. Use it across everything. Your landing page. Your app. Your pitch deck. Your promo videos. Same DNA. Same taste. Same system. That's what separates a startup that looks real from one that looks vibe-coded.

7. Build a second brain for design inspiration. When you see something beautiful in the real world or online, capture it. Save it. When you're building something new, reference it. Taste is developed, not downloaded.

8. It's obvious but the difference between a product people trust and a product people bounce from is how it looks and feels. Design.md gives you that edge.

you can watch below

https://t.co/Am1BdxLtzM

shoutout to @mengto for coming on @startupideaspod and walking through his full workflow.

if you want to use AI to actually build gorgeous designs, you'll want to use see this.

watch

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

SPOT ON: You manage your team through the work. You don't just manage people.

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Brian on why pure people managers won't survive AI:

"I don't think people that only manage people will have any value in the future.

Everyone's going to have to be a hybrid people manager or manager IC.

In other words, even the managers need to code. You can't just be these managers where you're people's therapists and you're just doing meetings, just one-on-ones.

People who have lots of recurring one-on-ones are not going to survive.

That kind of leadership style is not gonna work. You need to have context.

I hear about heads of design, they don't actually manage the design. Johnny Ive manages the design. He designs and he leads people. A design leader who only manages the people that's crazy to me.

The way Frank Lloyd managed his design team is through the work. You don't manage the people, you manage the work.

I think a lot of people will survive this age of AI.

The two types of people that will not survive are pure people managers, and people that are rigid and don't want to change and evolve."

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

@evansammccann But with Amazon being Amazon this can also mean you talking to an anonymous account manager somewhere that keeps sending you a canned response. — I hope I’m wrong. 😑

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Whether it’s existing consulting firms, new ones that emerge, FDEs from agent vendors, or new internal agent engineering roles, the amount of work that is going to be created to implement agents in enterprises will exceed anything we imagine today.

The complexity of implementing agents in any existing organizations is very real. When I talk to large enterprises, as you move from a chat paradigm to agents that participate in meaningful workflows, there are a number of things they need to do.

First, you have to get agents to be able to talk to your data securely across your systems. In many cases, enterprises have decades of legacy infrastructure that contain the valuable context for AI agents. That’s going to take a ton of work to go modernize and move to systems that work well with agents.

Then, you need to ensure that you’ve implemented agents with the right access controls and entitlements, the right scopes to be safely used, and have ways of monitoring, logging, and securing the work that they do.

Next, you need to actually document the processes in the organization in a way that agents can utilize for doing the work. You also need to figure out what the new workflow looks like when agents and people are working together on a process, and who steps in where. Just replicating the old workflow will mute the gains. Oh and you likely need to create evals for your top new end-state processes.

Finally, you have to keep up with a rapidly changing set of best practices and architectural shifts happening in the agent space. While it’s fun for people to change their personal productivity tools on a dime, it’s 100X harder to do this in a business process. The speed of change is a blessing and a curse right now for anyone trying to keep a stable system design.

All of this means that individuals and companies that develop expertise on the above set of components (and more) are going to be needed to help organizations actually implement agents at scale. This is also the rationale for vertical AI agents right now that can go in deep on a business domain and help bring automation to it.

This is a huge opportunity right now whether you’re doing this internally or as an external business provider.

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

Upload an image and explore!

[Zain Shah @zan2434]

Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see.

@eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Another week on the road meeting with a couple dozen IT and AI leaders from large enterprises across banking, media, retail, healthcare, consulting, tech, and sports, to discuss agents in the enterprise.

Some quick takeaways:

* Clear that we’re moving from chat era of AI to agents that use tools, process data, and start to execute real work in the enterprise. Complementing this, enterprises are often evolving from “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach to adoption to targeted automation efforts applied to specific areas of work and workflow.

* Change management still will remain one of the biggest topics for enterprises. Most workflows aren’t setup to just drop agents directly in, and enterprises will need a ton of help to drive these efforts (both internally and from partners). One company has a head of AI in every business unit that roles up to a central team, just to keep all the functions coordinated.

* Tokenmaxxing! Most companies operate with very strict OpEx budgets get locked in for the year ahead, so they’re going through very real trade-off discussions right now on how to budget for tokens. One company recently had an idea for a “shark tank” style way of pitching for compute budget. Others are trying to figure out how to ration compute to the best use-cases internally through some hierarchy of needs (my words not theirs).

* Fixing fragmented and legacy systems remain a huge priority right now. Most enterprises are dealing with decades of either on-prem systems or systems they moved to the cloud but that still haven’t been modernized in any meaningful way. This means agents can’t easily tap into these data sources in a unified way yet, so companies are focused on how they modernize these.

* Most companies are *not* talking about replacing jobs due to agents. The major use-cases for agents are things that the company wasn’t able to do before or couldn’t prioritize. Software upgrades, automating back office processes that were constraining other workflows, processing large amounts of documents to get new business or client insights, and so on. More emphasis on ways to make money vs. cut costs.

* Headless software dominated my conversations. Enterprises need to be able to ensure all of their software works across any set of agents they choose. They will kick out vendors that don’t make this technically or economically easy.

* Clear sense that it can be hard to standardize on anything right now given how fast things are moving. Blessing and a curse of the innovation curve right now - no one wants to get stuck in a paradigm that locks them into the wrong architecture. One other result of this is that companies realize they’re in a multi-agent world, which means that interoperability becomes paramount across systems.

* Unanimous sense that everyone is working more than ever before. AI is not causing anyone to do less work right now, and similar to Silicon Valley people feel their teams are the busiest they’ve ever been.

One final meta observation not called out explicitly. It seems that despite Silicon Valley’s sense that AI has made hard things easy, the most powerful ways to use agents is more “technical” than prior eras of software. Skills, MCP, CLIs, etc. may be simple concepts for tech, but in the real world these are all esoteric concepts that will require technical people to help bring to life in the enterprise.

This both means diffusion will take real work and time, but also everyone’s estimation of engineering jobs is totally off. Engineers may not be “writing” software, but they will certainly be the ones to setup and operate the systems that actually automate most work in the enterprise.

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

@robjama @535TORONTO @tmrwai @buildfutureto @united_builder We know y’all can’t hold yourself from starting another community container. 🖖🏼 Only attended in person once, but met a few brilliant folks around the conversations. 🙏

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Perplexity just casually rebuilt Mint.

Mint died in March 2024 after 15 years because Plaid's data fees made every free user unprofitable. Intuit dumped 3.6 million users onto Credit Karma, which didn't even have budgeting.

Now Perplexity connects the same Plaid APIs, pulls the same transaction data, and offers the same spending tracking. The math works this time because nobody's signing up for Perplexity to budget. They're signing up for search. Finance is a retention feature on a $20/month subscription, not a standalone product bleeding money on every API call.

That's the structural reason AI companies keep eating vertical SaaS. The AI product already has the user and the subscription. Adding a vertical costs one Plaid integration. Building the vertical from scratch costs acquiring millions of users who won't pay.

Mint spent 15 years trying to make personal finance a business. Perplexity made it a Tuesday afternoon feature launch.

[Robleh @robjama]

you just have to do 2 things:

1. get started, because most people don't
2. keep going, because most people give up

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

@tallzabby @jen_keesmaat I'll share if I find it. I'm curious about the noise implications for the neighborhoods and the waterfront.

[Behrouz Hariri @_Behrouz]

@tallzabby @jen_keesmaat Alex thanks for sharing. Has the size of aircraft and type / power of propellant been discussed in the document. Couldn’t find it.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Narrative violation: Anthropic's Head of Growth says we'll need more PMs, not fewer.

"While PMs and designers are getting leverage from AI, engineering is getting the most leverage right now. If you think about a default team with 5 engineers, 1 designer, 1 PM—with Claude Code, that five engineers is like 2 to 3x'd, and the PMs and designers have also increased, but now they're managing what is effectively a much larger group of engineers.

So though the head count and the org structure hasn't changed, you're now just dealing with a situation of maybe 15-20 engineers, 2 PMs, and 2 designers across the board.

We're feeling PM and design is just being squeezed. Just absolutely squeezed. We just need to actually hire a ton more PMs."

[Saurabh Suri @surim0n]

🚨 Official @claudeai for Marketing & GTM Community Meetup

When: April 20th @ 6pm.
Where: Downtown Toronto 🇨🇦

This one's for the marketers, growth people, and GTM folks that are using AI in their workflows.

Live demos. Real use cases. People showing what they've built with Claude.

Whether you're already deep in it or just figuring out where AI fits into your marketing stack - this is the room to be in.

Spots are limited.

Sign up for demo's, volunteers and attendance in comments.

[Andrew Wilkinson @awilkinson]

Software is about to look a lot like ecommerce.

Shitty margins.
Unlimited competition.
A hard way to make a living.

Why? Because over the next few years, Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI are going to drink the software industry's milkshake 🥤

If you were looking for a hotel in 2010, this is how it went:

2010: Google "hotels in New York" → Google links you to TripAdvisor.

But by 2020...

2020: Google "hotels in New York" → Google shows its own hotel booking system integrated directly into the search results.

RIP TripAdvisor 🪦📉 (check their stock price 2015 vs today)

Google made a fortune by building products that captured demand on the keywords where they had the most traffic, like travel.

But Google had finite resources.

They only had so many developers to build these products, so it only made sense to do this for the largest categories: hotels, flights, shopping.

This same thing is about to happen to most digital services and software products. Except this time, the constraint that protected smaller categories is gone.

2025: Ask ChatGPT for the best CRM software → It directs you to Attio, Pipedrive, and Zoho.

2028: Ask ChatGPT for the best CRM → It builds one, imports your data, and runs it for you at a fraction of the cost.

The difference between OG Google and today's frontier models is that OG Google needed human engineers to build each vertical product.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and the Google of today (Gemini) won't have this constraint.

When the cost to build and maintain software approaches zero, there's no reason to stop at hotels and flights. You do it for everything, on demand.

Right now, vibe coding is still fiddly. It requires a human in the loop, it's insecure, and it depends on third-party hosting and infrastructure.

But I expect the frontier model companies to build out their own vertical infrastructure to run the software they generate, removing the current friction entirely.

Think Claude's artifacts, except full-fledged digital products—hosted, maintained, and updated by the same AI that built them.

The moat for most software companies isn't the code. It's the switching cost and the ecosystem lock-in. When an AI can rebuild your tool in seconds and migrate your data automatically, that moat disappears.

Everyone understands that vibe coding = infinite competition. But this is different.

They're taking your customer before they can even get to you.

So, software becomes a lot like ecommerce.

Near zero margin unless you own distribution and aren't reliant on Google/Meta for customers.

TLDR: They drink your milkshake. They'll drink it up.