Ben Taylor

founder of @spec (hiring, DM me!) // prev yc w19 (acq)

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

Your Mac just got a brain. 🧠

Spec proactively drafts replies, summarizes docs, and helps before you ask. It connects knowledge and memory across iMessage, Slack, email, and your calendar, finally making your apps work together.

Goodbye silos and context switching.

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

@amytam01 @SpaceX @xai Congrats Amy!!! So excited for you 😊

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

@sporadica @_nontechnical 🔥🔥🔥

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

@EmmaQian_ @samuely4ng @nova_ai @chemistry @Accel @conviction Congrats @EmmaQian_ and @samuely4ng, so excited for your success 🥹

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

Congrats to the legend himself @Harryoc493!

[Thiel Fellowship @thielfellowship]

Welcome 2026 Thiel Fellows!

WHO ARE THEY?

Victor Boyd: Birmingham, AL - @VictorWBoyd
Cavalla is on a mission to get anything anywhere in under 5 hours. Starting by building autonomous forklifts, through to developing hypersonic highways.

Samuel Carvalho: Recife, Brazil - @samuelclcc
Praso is building the new infrastructure for wholesale commerce — powering procurement, credit, and workflow tools for SMBs across underserved areas in Brazil.

Nick Dobroshinsky: Sammamish, WA - @NDobroshinsky
EveryTicker is democratizing institutional-grade financial research across the entire U.S. stock market, including the thousands of smaller companies Wall Street ignores.

Ishan Gupta: Kanpur, India - @ishangpta
Juicebox is building an AI recruiter that helps companies make better hiring decisions. Agents that understand real skills and move hiring from guesswork to true meritocracy.

Antoni Kiszka: Strzyżowice, Poland - @antoni_kiszka
Derpetual is building the infrastructure to create a market for any asset — with leverage.

Milan Lustig: Cold Spring Harbor, NY - @HighPriestOfSWO
Opt32 is building modern compute infrastructure to put AI onboard objects in the physical world — from robots to cars and drones.

Galen Mead: Chapel Hill, NC - @g413n
Standard Intelligence is building aligned general learners, pretraining large models to actively explore and learn from the Internet.

Aubrey Niederhoffer: New York, NY - @needaubrey
Swoop is building the super app for Africa, starting with food delivery in Nigeria and expanding into financial services across the continent.

Harry O'Connor: Cork, Ireland - @HarryOC493
Sentient Machines is a research lab building foundational models for robotics that generalize across tasks and environments.

Alex Shieh: Salem, NH - @alexkshieh
The Antifraud Company is a fraud bounty hunter defending American taxpayers with AI and investigative journalism.

Claire Wang: Los Angeles, CA - @clairebookworm
Claire is building biologically accurate simulations of entire nervous systems, starting with C. elegans. Developing a simulated brain that researchers can communicate with helps lay the foundation for brain-computer interface (BCI) technology.

Kyler Wang: Portland, OR - @kylerywang
Action is an artificial intelligence company in stealth.

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

@lillysharples 💀💀💀

[Miranda Nover @mirandanover]

Introducing Fort, a wearable that automatically tracks strength training.

Strength training is one of the best things you can do for your health and longevity. It deserves better tools.

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

We’re so

[Eugenia Kuyda @ekuyda]

everyone just keeps building the same thing:

2024: deep research and “operator” (browser clickers)
2025: actual browsers and prompt-to-app
2026: some version of openclaw

there’s a lot of alpha in original product thinking while big labs (and many startups too) are all busy building identical products

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

@hustle_fred the real milestone is when they stop asking about your job and just start asking for money straight up

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

running coding agents overnight and waking up to see what disaster they created is the new checking your drunk texts

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

@signulll you get to overpay for everything in exchange for being surrounded by people who also overpay for everything. it's called networking.

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

@Codie_Sanchez completely agree but telling people agencies suck is like telling people not to touch a hot stove. they gotta find out for themselves.

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

@MrGoldBro they figured out if you make chicken the exact shade of a Cheez-It and serve it in a mall people will make you a billionaire

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

Can Waymos get DUIs (Driving Under the Inference)?

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

@SahilBloom there's definitely a business here but only until products stop being confusing. then the concierge thing becomes pointless

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

If your emotional state is a direct pipeline to your MRR dashboard you need to log off and touch grass not raise a Series A

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

@ThinkingUSD bitcoin down bad so now we're investigating the Saudis... least unhinged day in crypto.

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

I don’t miss being bored. I miss being bored without feeling guilty about it. Now, if you’re not doing something you feel like you’re wasting potential, which is a terrible way to live.

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

@Kalshi Youtube TV changed everything it's unmatched

[Ben Taylor @bentay]

@sama the moment where we realize the agents need gatekeepers and of course that’s a product