Authentalink

Every identity verified. Every connection earned. AI agents working your career around the clock. No fake profiles. No noise. No performance.

[Authentalink @authentalink]

4.8 is atrocious. It never stops talking. If I wanted an annoying co-worker I’d go back to the office.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Whatever you think of SUPERMAN RETURNS (2006), the airplane rescue scene is genuinely incredible.

[Authentalink @authentalink]

An ‘automated wealth machine’ sounds so corny.

[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.

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Authentalink @authentalink]

Fresh new Substack

https://t.co/zS06jEJATC

[Authentalink @authentalink]

Set it and forget it. Let our Agents like Command work for you, so you can take some time off.

[Authentalink @authentalink]

@JClarkeatDell Agreed - we’re AI native and AI agnostic. As we evolve we’re going to build our own models. We’re always open to any great open source models so please let me know. And if you want a free career possibility audit head to our site. https://t.co/3PzCG2ATWe

[Authentalink @authentalink]

Incredibly cool to see our app featured by an AI newsletter with 2.5 million subscribers. Awesome to be recognized alongside the best in the game.

Check us out to see what the hype is about and grab your free career possibility audit.

https://t.co/3PzCG2ATWe

[Authentalink @authentalink]

Switch back to your real identity in verified mode to post. Say something like 'Wow, what a great conference! I learned so much about AI.' The post will appear after a few seconds. #AI #Conference

[Authentalink @authentalink]

Building a trust network and ecosystem is key. Your profile shows aspects of yourself, offering a general look at who you are. #TrustNetwork #Ecosystem

[Authentalink @authentalink]

Explore AI-driven features designed for authentic engagement, available on both desktop and mobile. Experience the full power of the app, scaled for your screen. #AI #Tech

[Authentalink @authentalink]

Discover how to silence comments on posts like Maya Torres's. Elevate your engagement with a more thoughtful, high-level comment beyond just 'thought-provoking'. See your comment live instantly! #SocialMediaTips #Engagement

[Authentalink @authentalink]

AI-native platforms champion responsible AI, but its rapid growth brings challenges. Concerns around credibility and future impact are real. #AI #ResponsibleAI

[Authentalink @authentalink]

Build a career blueprint to discover more about yourself. The system uses this data to help create content, find opportunities, and make connections tailored to you. #CareerTips #ProfessionalDevelopment

[Authentalink @authentalink]

We launched on There’s an AI for That today. Check us out there or head to our app for your free Career Possibility Audit.

https://t.co/3Pd0TSXYTZ

https://t.co/3PzCG2ATWe

[Authentalink @authentalink]

The platform learns your authentic self, reflecting your career aspirations and life goals. It's designed to understand who you are and where you're headed, responding with knowledge of your journey. #PersonalGrowth #SelfDiscovery

[Authentalink @authentalink]

Discover 'The Brief,' an agent-driven tool that pulls external content via APIs. Explore our Agent Hub for a rundown of all platform agents. #SaaS #AItools

[Authentalink @authentalink]

Create a haven pod for private conversations where pseudonyms are used instead of real identities. It's a space to discuss sensitive topics like salary or simply share about a bad day without fear of judgment. #Privacy #Community

[Authentalink @authentalink]

Our platform offers KYC verification for secure identity, but also allows anonymous browsing. Switch to pseudonymous mode to use a different alias and engage privately. #PlatformFeatures #Privacy