Ayan Barua

Co-Founder @ - previously founded Siftery and led engineering at G2.

Relentlessly positive sum.

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

Your AI is vaporware without deep integrations with your customers’ systems of record.

Introducing @WithAmpersand: integration infrastructure for enterprise agents.

We power 11x, Orb, and Square's ability to take agentic action in systems of record like Salesforce, SAP, NetSuite, and Workday.

Ask anyone serious about building AI and they’ll tell you:

- The SaaSpocalypse didn’t happen. The world depends on CRMs, ERPs, HRISs, and ITSMs.
- Your customers customized their deployments beyond recognition.
- Systems of record companies are basically monopolies. They never had to make their APIs and MCPs user-friendly.
- Docs don't explain half the weird edge cases you'll hit.
- One bad write can blow up your pilot or renewal.
- Once you finally get it working, someone changes a field and it breaks again.

The world's data lives in structured databases. AI needs a translation layer to work with it.

So, for your AI to truly transform the way enterprises work, you'll need deep integrations built for:
- scoped permissions
- bi-directional actions
- real-time speed for agents
- custom objects, fields, and workflows for each of your customers

We built Ampersand to power the future of software.

AI didn't trivialize writing integrations. It made them the critical path.

I believe that deeply, so I didn't make a launch video about Ampersand.

Instead, it's the best builders I know explaining just how big of a challenge this is.

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

The counterpoint is that agent-to-agent coordination — which is inevitable, since swarms will be either a tree or a graph data structure — seems like a super interesting and hard problem to solve.

How do you evaluate agent-to-agent back-and-forth a very large number of times (so it isn't a law of diminishing returns)?

You cannot likely throw a protocol at this since the semantics of this communication are very context-dependent

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Moving from chatting back and forth with agents, to having agents that you spin up in the background to do useful work for you is probably on the order of 100X or 1000X more token consumption than what we’re seeing today.

Most work right now is essentially rate limited by our ability to process and work with information. Moving data between systems. Reviewing a document. Looking through code for security issues. Processing log data to look for even patterns. Looking up information about a prospective client. Almost all of knowledge work is constrained by these steps, and AI has become a huge unlock to that.

So our first step was to use AI to do these individual tasks much faster for us. That was the chatbot phenomenon that we have been experiencing for the past 3+ years. But we can still then only augment the work that we remain in the loop for, and we’re highly limited by our ability to parallelize this work by our own bandwidth and context.

But where we’re going is quite different. As AI models continue to improve at incredible rates, we can hand off more and more work to the agent. First it’s letting the agent run with a harder problem. Then it’s giving a few agents multiple parts of a task at once. But we’re not far off from being able to throw an arbitrary number of agents at a problem and just say “come back when you’ve accomplished this goal”.

Now imagine that agent swarm for any problem we can think of. Protecting our codebases, data, and systems. QAing every change we make and make sure all our infrastructure is robust and does what it should. Looking through every document for potential risks. Auditing this company with vastly more data reviewed. And on and on. Most of this isn’t even replacing existing work we do, it’s all net new.

These agents will get deployed as swarms by people, by workflows, by triggers, and by other agents. And none of this would be possible if the models weren’t getting better, and if the cost of AI didn’t make it affordable. Both of those trends though are playing out. Now the next frontier is just having enough compute. But this is where it’s heading.

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

@brettberson "portfolio concentration"

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

The best way to reject is to say something on these lines

"I don't have enough independent conviction yet to go on this journey with you. Maybe that will change as you iterate more, maybe it won't (and I am aware I may not get a shot then). But at this juncture, I'm not convinced we are a great fit, and you should only work with great fits to get to the next stage of the company"

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

Long live the B2B application stack

[Sequoia Capital @sequoia]

"What's the slowest thing to move in technology? The humans that work with it."

@Alfred_Lin on why the gap between model capability and real-world use is where the opportunity is at @stanfordaiclub

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

Bring in the intangibles and give purpose to AI

[Facu 🦦 @faqdev]

AI can code.

AI can design.

AI can write.

AI can analyze.

What's left that only humans can do?

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

"I am one of the best at using Claude Code, I am obsessed with getting 100x productivity out of AI"

or if you want to be fancier

"I am the human leverage your Claude Code enterprise tier needs"

[Denys Cherednychenko @Denche2005]

You're in a tech interview.

The interviewer asks:

"Why should we hire you when Claude Code can already write code?"

What's your answer?

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

@godardabel @G2dotcom super interesting - thanks for launching this Godard

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

@mehdidjabri Should build something together!

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

@samongaro_ people who build software well

https://t.co/PKHc8ZKBuU

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

If agents can reach the source of truth when evaluating a product and cut through marketing fluff, then product quality matters most.

Agents evaluating a real b2b software product is a bit far off, but this is directionally on point

Great counter-postiponed thinking from a generational entrepreneur when the prevalent SV echo chamber feels distribution is everything and product is easy to build

--

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

@laurenzlong @Chandrika633 @quivlyai @WithAmpersand @tanayagrawal19 amazing

the totes are super on point

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

@saranormous Human communication is full of friction too.

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

cleaning up the mess created by vibe-coded CRMs and ERPs

[Cory Althoff @coryalthoff]

Where are the billion-dollar vibe-coded startups?

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

I have met many Airtable folks over the years — they are an incredible group of people.

If you are looking for a small startup in SF building super interesting developer infra, @WithAmpersand just raised a Series A from Bessemer, is growing fast, and is hiring for several roles.

DMs are open!

[Federico Simionato @fedesimio]

Today we’re laying off a large part of the Airtable team.

This is not a reflection of their work but a reflection of our deep belief that small teams ship more and better.

For Airtable, better is about to look like:
- A new Core team shipping your top requests monthly (already 30+ shipped in 3 weeks)
- Upgraded Omni, Airtable Canvas, a stronger MCP, and BYO agents, coming soon
- New Performance and Infra teams focusing on speeding up bases and increasing limits on records, fields, and syncs

To everyone leaving: thank you. If you’re hiring, these are excellent people and worth a call.

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

@boardyai 🔗

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

@0xfJuan ask them to do stuff like "can you argue with DMV about this ticket?"

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

AMPERSONIANS!

[Lauren Long @laurenzlong]

Ampersand is hiring! I recently took some time to reflect on what I appreciate about our existing team members (or Ampersonians as I like to call them), and came up with our 6 cultural values:

- 𝗖𝗿𝗮𝗳𝘁. We care about the details and the quality of our work.

- 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵𝘆. We are our customers’ extended team.

- 𝗢𝘄𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽. We take full end-to-end responsibility for our work.

- 𝗩𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆. We move fast without cutting corners.

- 𝗔𝗱𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆. We thrive in ambiguity and are always learning.

- 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆. We are low ego, and are open to feedback.

I've been a part of companies where values were more for marketing than anything else, but these are 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗱 values exemplified by everyone that's on this journey with us. If you or someone you know resonate with these values, check out our open roles at https://t.co/Th2wNnzSJ9. We are hiring across eng + GTM (including our first Eng Manager and Sales Engineer!)

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

Anybody building an Instinct for early stage founders?

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

"I can orchestrate a 1000x outcome with Codex (or AI in general)"

[Hannah @anah_sahh]

You're in a tech interview and they ask you:

"Why should we hire you when Codex can write code?"

What's your answer?

[Ayan Barua @ayanb]

@danellisona linkedin = 💲
X = 🙃👻