Mike Burshteyn

Lead a tech, AI, crypto, privacy/security trial team @GT_Law w/ billions in controversy | ex-CEO @cryptomove | @caldebate | DJ 100 Commercial Litigators

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

why I am hiring humans for my team https://t.co/sXnFoPbFpr

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

.@danshipper: "The AI jobpocalypse is not a thing.

The mass unemployment thing that AI lab CEOs are talking about—that's not going to happen.

AI models make yesterday's human competence cheap.

But what's interesting is that since everyone's using the same models, it all looks the same. So it becomes commoditized. It's not valuable anymore.

And what humans do is we go in there, and we're like, yeah, we have all this frozen human competence from yesterday, how do I use this to make something new and interesting, today?"

[Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin @jasonlk]

A mediocre lawyer will constantly yell you why You Can't

A great lawyer will show you How

A scary lawyer will tell you No Worries

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

@euler_mab it's the best video game there is

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

@danshipper deserved

[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

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

Ahead of schedule

[Nike Basketball @nikebasketball]

Greetings, @NBA Finals.

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

Echoes of all this in using AI for legal work

[Armin Ronacher ⇌ @mitsuhiko]

Has been a while since I wrote about agentic engineering, so this time around some learnings of maintaining Pi as a junior maintainer to @badlogicgames :) https://t.co/TbD9Jvqk3t

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

+1

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

My biggest takeaways from @danshipper:

1. The future of work will happen inside Codex or Claude Code. Instead of putting AI into your SaaS tool, you’ll use your SaaS tools inside your favorite AI agents' in-app browser. Dan spends all his time in Codex now—writing documents, managing email, doing research, everything. He's using Google Docs, PostHog, and everything he needs within the agent's in-app browser. The agent can see what he’s doing, and has all of his context, so he and his agent collaborate quickly and super effectively.

2. Automation is a lie—every automation needs a human. Dan's company doubled in size this year despite being incredibly AI-forward. Why? Because in order to make automation work well, you need humans making sure everything keeps working. This is why benchmarks are misleading—they measure AI on problems we’ve already framed and can score, but there’s always a higher frame.

3. PMs will win the AI era. Marcus, a former PM who previously ran Axios’s writing product, joined Every after getting super AI-pilled. Now he runs their product Spiral, and ships faster than anyone on the team. He pairs technical knowledge with spiky product sense, deep user empathy, and an eye for what matters. Dan thinks any PM who gets really AI-native will be incredibly dangerous because the building is done for you—what matters is figuring out what to build and if it’s great.

4. Full-stack designers are becoming superheroes. Designers used to make beautiful interactions that engineers didn’t want to build or couldn’t execute properly. Now designers don’t need to hand things off; they can build it themselves. Designers are naturally creative people, and AI is the perfect tool for them because it lets them bring their vision to life without the traditional bottlenecks.

5. SaaS is not dead. In fact, Dan is bullish on SaaS stocks. When users bring their own AI (via Codex or Claude Code) to use SaaS products, the user—not the SaaS company—pays for tokens. This saves SaaS company’s margins. Since the agents need their own seats, Dan predicts that agents will create massive new demand for SaaS because there will be tons of agents using these products at high volume.

6. Every company will have one “super-agent” inside their Slack that every employee will use. Dan initially thought every employee would have their personal work agent, like a shadow AI org chart, but he’s completely flipped his view. He realized agents need humans who care about them. When someone gets tired of maintaining their personal agent, it becomes useless. The winning model is one forward-deployed engineer or AI-savvy person who maintains a company-wide agent (like Shopify’s River or Viktor), and then it trickles down to more specialized team agents as models improve and become less fiddly.

7. The AI job apocalypse is not happening, but you do need to evolve to stay relevant. Models make yesterday’s human competence cheap. But because everyone uses the same models, it all looks the same if you use it the default way; it becomes commoditized slop. Humans then take that frozen competence and use it to make something new and interesting for their specific situation. The key: “ride the models”—use them for everything you do, try new models when they drop, keep turning over rocks.

8. We will read way more AI-generated writing, and we will like it. Human writing is incredibly important for things that matter, but for internal docs, planning, and email, AI-generated is often better because most people are bad at writing strategy documents.

9. Build software for humans and agents to use together. The current model is building a CLI that an agent uses independently. Instead, you and your agent should be using the app together. This creates new design challenges—agents can make a billion requests in three seconds, so you need approval flows, inboxes that summarize what happened, logs, and easy rollback.

10. Forward-deployed engineers are the new most essential role. The big model companies have teams of people managing their internal agents, and those teams aren’t going away. It’s different from traditional software building, and certain engineers love it. As models get better, this role will evolve—you’ll be managing more agents doing more things.

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

@JacobRobinsonJD Yup

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

Great show last night

[RIFF @RIFFonline]

REVIEW: @machinegunkelly and @wizkhalifa light up 'Lost Americana' in Concord, with @bsd_wav. | #mgk #WizKhalifa✏️: Mike DeWald. 📸: Aaron Lee. https://t.co/bhuPHOa8E5

[RIFF @RIFFonline]

REVIEW: @machinegunkelly and @wizkhalifa light up 'Lost Americana' in Concord, with @bsd_wav. | #mgk #WizKhalifa✏️: Mike DeWald. 📸: Aaron Lee. https://t.co/bhuPHOa8E5

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

this is the way

[Thariq @trq212]

https://t.co/MXt5XS4xBX

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

Great fun was had by all

[Jacob Robinson @JacobRobinsonJD]

Such a great day with 100-plus of the best people in law x crypto, TY everyone who came through

already can’t wait for next year

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

it’s a good model

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

Agent Mode is here in Outlook!

Copilot can now help run your inbox and calendar, triaging emails, rescheduling meetings, and helping you stay on top of what matters most.

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

Saves legal fees too

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Here's YC's official advice about being truthful and precise about what is pilot, bookings, revenue and recurring revenue.

Founders, particularly first time founders, need to sear this into their brains. Don't mistake one tier for another. Be precise, and always be truthful.

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

yea

[Armani Ferrante @armaniferrante]

I'll probably get attacked for saying this, but every team in crypto should use this as an opportunity to slow down and focus on security.

If possible, dedicate an entire team to it.

I know how hard it is. There's an enormous amount of pressure to grow at all costs. Your runway will pressure you. Your investors will pressure you. Your token holders will pressure you.

But you can't grow if you're hacked.

Take time to stop what you're doing, stop stressing about growth, and audit your whole stack. Custody. Risk. Dependencies. Access control. Everything. The world will still be here when you get back.

Focus on the safety of your users' funds above all else. In the long term, this is the most important requirement to grow.

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

AI litigation trends + using AI for litigation. A KFC + Taco Bell style article. BSG & Zoolander references survived editing. https://t.co/R2RRrfxGif

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

first non under-40 award ⏰🚀

[Greenberg Traurig LLP @GT_Law]

🏆Congratulations to GT's Matt Rosengart and Michael Burshteyn on being named a “Leading Commercial Litigator” by the Daily Journal. This national award honors the top 100 commercial and bet-the-company litigators. Read more: https://t.co/F8gIX94crn.

#GTNews #Litigators

[Mike Burshteyn @burshteyn]

@sama smarter. it is already infinitely faster than a human who gets the same question would take for current level answers