AJ’s AI

President & Executive Director @aicollectiveco - growing the world’s largest AI nonprofit community!

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

Zero to $100M ARR in 8 months.
Acquired by Meta today.

Huge congrats to @Red_Xiao_, @hidecloud, and the entire @ManusAI team.

I’ve personally helped oversee 122 events in 2025, but this one stuck out as my favorite.

It was the day of our first event together.

At 9:00 AM, OpenAI dropped “Agent Mode."
Our event was at 5:00 PM.

Every other startup would have been frozen like a deer in the headlights. The largest player in the AI space just dropped a feature that could make your startup obsolete.

The @AICollectiveCo + @ManusAI team hopped on a call immediately.

We pitched a narrative shift: "The Battle of the Agents."

They didn’t hide from the news.
They put it on the big screen.

Manus showcased a LIVE demo of their agents vs. OpenAI’s release on stage that night.

And the Manus agent won.

Fast forward, and they achieved $100M ARR quicker than any startup in history.

That level of fearlessness is exactly why they won.

This was almost as fun as the first time we worked on their original product launch, but that’s a story for a different day. ;)

Huge kudos to the team on this massive milestone!

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

Josh Constine lost one of Silicon Valley's biggest breaking stories to Kara Swisher by just 45 seconds.

When Facebook acquired Instagram, Josh sprinted into a San Francisco coffee shop, opened his laptop, and published as quickly as possible.

Still too late.

After eight years as TechCrunch's Editor-at-Large and more than 4,000 published articles, Josh knows what separates great technology journalism from everything else.

His lesson?

Either be first, or be the last and best.

Break the story before anyone else, or publish the definitive analysis nobody else can replicate.

Everything in between is getting squeezed.

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

@lgsreal @AICollectiveCo @catrosemcmillan Looks amazing! Can’t wait to hear how it goes

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

🧵: Here are all the events happening at @AICollectiveCo today around the world

6 events. 4 time zones. 3 continents. 1 day 🌍👇

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

Startups are spending more time announcing products than building them (some more than others).

Josh Constine thinks they've got it backward.

After covering thousands of startups as the Editor-At-Large at TechCrunch and now investing as a Venture Partner at SignalFire, Josh has seen how startup launch culture has evolved.

Founders spend weeks producing cinematic launch videos, coordinating social campaigns, and perfecting announcements.

Meanwhile, the actual product is sitting on the sidelines.

His advice?

Ship it. Build in public.
Release improvements consistently.

Give users a reason to keep coming back.

The startups that win aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest launch campaigns.

They're the ones that turn relentless execution into their own distribution engine.

Don't let marketing become the bottleneck to building.

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

AI Collective Podcast Live — Wed Oct 21 https://t.co/xqlhiLvDD4

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

@AICollectiveCo @catrosemcmillan @gervais_johnson Find an AI Collective event near you 👇
https://t.co/5ieD4xvoMv

Which one would you be at today?

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

🧭 Indianapolis closes the day with Experiential AI

Tonight at 6 PM ET (3 PM PT) on N College Ave, hosts @gervais_johnson, Aaron Kopel, Anna Sieloff, Brian Beck and Ruby Kopel lead three tracks of real-world lessons.

- AI and data: readiness and observability
- AI and security: cybersecurity and safety
- AI transformation: how to actually execute it

Bring a question from your own rollout 👉 https://t.co/h7z5nNW8wd

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

Get the full breakdown, tools, and quick news in today's newsletter:
https://t.co/GckoxnDjB1

Which of these are you testing first?

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

🧵: Here's everything that happened today in the world of AI, 10/21/2026

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

🗣️ ElevenLabs just went straight at OpenAI's Realtime API.

Eleven Realtime packs speech recognition, turn-taking, the language model and the voice into one tuned system that starts talking in 0.57 seconds.

- The top v1 Max model answered 98.8% of spoken reasoning questions correctly in Artificial Analysis's tests
- It finished 87.1% of tool-use tasks, vs 60.3% for the cheaper v1 Mini
- It copies OpenAI's Realtime API format, so switching means changing the endpoint and model name

In voice, every half second of delay is the difference between a conversation and a phone tree.
Jennifer Zhang, who co-founded voice AI company https://t.co/kjTkxmzW16, joins us live today at 9:45 AM PT.

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

@ai_for_success literally I had an existential crisis when I maxed out my limits

@benln we need a reset!

[AshutoshShrivastava @ai_for_success]

Grok Bot team, a reset would be greatly appreciated 😊

I don't think I'm going to make it through today and the next 4 days without Grok bot.