David Cancel

Serial Entrepreneur. Investor. Trustee @WhitneyMuseum, Former Entrepreneur-in-Residence @HarvardHBS. 🇺🇸🇵🇷🇪🇨

[David Cancel @dcancel]

Seats count logins.

Outcomes count customers who got what they came for.

When AI does the work, nobody's paying for the chair anymore.

[sarah guo @saranormous]

startup who want AI-scale revenues must measure themselves on outcomes over seats and stations https://t.co/hRf8ZcESuC

[David Cancel @dcancel]

Every form was a wall.

Every chat window was a door.

Now they don't even have to type.

[Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang]

🚨MUSE FEATURE ALERT 🚨

muse voice is out for everyone in the US!

you can now phone call and video chat with your muse whenever you need.

i personally have a sticky situation today, and asked muse for some advice. sage and calm as always ❤️

[David Cancel @dcancel]

@hnshah Exactly, my friend.

A person owns the outcome. The agents catch the problems before the customer ever feels them.

That's the job now ⚡

[David Cancel @dcancel]

Hiten's right, and it isn't only a coding thing.

Every agent that touches a customer needs someone accountable for it too.

Somebody has to own what the customer actually experiences.

Agents change who does the work, not who's responsible.

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

Your coding agents should have a manager. That manager should be a coding agent.

We’ve been quietly working this way since February. Here’s the setup we’ve arrived at.

1) Give each project a lead agent. It keeps the plan, remembers decisions, delegates work and knows what’s stuck.

2) Let it start other agents for specific tasks. They work in parallel, bring questions to the lead and report back.

3) Have agents show what they made. Screenshots, live pages, different options and what changed since the last round.

4) Put everything that needs your judgment in one queue. Point at what needs changing, give feedback or approve the work. Your response goes back to the agent.

5) Keep feedback open until it’s addressed. Test changes before they land, get a second opinion on merges and approve anything risky.

I spend far more time looking at actual work now. The agents keep track of the rest.

[David Cancel @dcancel]

@2havnhavnot Miss you Kevin 🙏🏽

[David Cancel @dcancel]

Fortunate to have built conversational products before it was cool.

Grateful to be backing the founders building what comes next 🙏🏽⚡️

[David Cancel @dcancel]

Every customer has the one workflow no vendor will ever build for them.

Now they can build it themselves.

Smart companies will hand them the tools, not fight it 🔑

https://t.co/yOUyGvX8oR

[sarah guo @saranormous]

a few years ago, I started out skeptical that many non-engineers really wanted to make/mod their own personal software -- but I've come around, think I was wrong. range of desires from:
- I feel so powerful
- no one will make me the workflow/personalization I need
- can I just PM the product for a few weeks and fix this thing that is driving me crazy

obvious in retrospect, but if the ease:power ratio is good enough, of course people will make their own software

[David Cancel @dcancel]

@venkchandran Appreciate you, Venk 👏🏽

Front of the house was the point. A buyer with a question is a customer with a problem.

Solve it fast and the sale takes care of itself.

[David Cancel @dcancel]

We launched chatbots at Drift in 2015.

The lesson then is the lesson now:

Customers don't want to talk to a bot.
They want their problem solved.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now

[David Cancel @dcancel]

Those who *talk* about AI.
Those who *ship* with AI.

Same as it ever was.

[David Cancel @dcancel]

@Bonini84 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

[David Cancel @dcancel]

Unpopular opinion:

AI won't kill SaaS.

It'll kill the companies that stopped listening to customers.

[David Cancel @dcancel]

@MachinesDontEat 😅

[David Cancel @dcancel]

@imzodev 👏🏽😭

[David Cancel @dcancel]

@AnikaCodes Facts ✅

[David Cancel @dcancel]

@ayo_deshina Amen!

[David Cancel @dcancel]

We said it on Seeking Wisdom back in 2016:

The companies winning are the ones closest to the customer.

AI didn't change that. It just raised the cost of being far away.

[David Cancel @dcancel]

@FpeSre Truth 🙏🏽

Not listening used to take years to show up in the numbers.

Now it shows up fast.

[David Cancel @dcancel]

@mwajahatanwar Exactly. Faster build, same wrong guess.

Speed only helps when you're pointed at a real customer problem 🔑