Miles Maggio

follow for the agentic revolution and founder tips

top voice, investor, and startup advisor on AI agent engineering

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

i'm glad to have the opportunity of furthering one of the most important missions of our time: ensuring the power and value of AI agents is gifted to everyone around the world at the "AI Implementation Series": hands-on sessions for 250,000+ global business leaders. there's no other format that can enable and impact the lives of so many in such a short amount of time than real hands-on education and teaching sessions. i'm looking forward to the many other opportunities like this on the horizon

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Founders are over-indexed on product, under-indexed on process.
Gartner 2025: 80% of failed scaleups cite operational drag — not bad product.
Your GTM isn't broken. Your execution layer is.

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Hot take: the bottleneck in most Series A companies isn't capital or talent — it's that founders are still personally approving decisions that shouldn't require a founder at all.

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Hot take: the best AI investment a founder can make in 2026 isn't a new model — it's replacing the meeting where 4 people align on a decision 1 agent could've made by Tuesday.

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Hot take: the AI "last mile" problem isn't a technical gap — it's a trust gap. According to Gartner's 2025 AI Adoption report, 68% of failed deployments stalled because founders never let agents own an outcome. Did you hand off the task, or just the draft?

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

According to Stanford's 2025 AI Index, the number of companies reporting AI driving meaningful cost reduction jumped 41% year-over-year — but most of those gains came from one place: removing humans from coordination, not from creation.

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Most founders benchmark their growth against competitors. According to BCG's 2026 AI at Work report, founders who benchmark against their own operational throughput scale 2x faster.
What are you actually measuring?

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

The best agentic frameworks aren't the most powerful ones. They're the ones your team can actually audit when something breaks.
According to MIT Sloan's 2025 AI & Operations Report, 69% of failed AI deployments traced back to trust gaps — not capability gaps.

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Unpopular take: most founders are solving a people problem with a hiring solution.
According to MIT's 2025 Work of the Future report, 67% of operational bottlenecks at seed-to-Series A startups stem from process gaps — not headcount gaps.
What did you actually fix by hiring?

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

The founders scaling fastest right now aren't the ones with the biggest teams.
They're the ones who decided what *not* to delegate to a human first.
According to BCG's 2026 AI at Work report, companies using AI agents for core ops decisions move from insight to action 4x faster…

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Unpopular opinion: seed valuations are rising but founder leverage isn't.
According to Sequoia's 2025 Arc Report, 61% of seed-stage founders are still manually running ops that agents could own today.
More capital. Same bottlenecks. Is the money solving the real problem?

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Most founders obsess over their pitch deck and ignore their operating system.
According to McKinsey's 2025 State of AI report, companies that embed AI agents into core workflows see 40% faster decision cycles — not because they got smarter, but because they stopped waiting on…

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Most founders treat their first ops hire as a milestone.
I've started treating it as a diagnostic.
According to Sequoia's 2024 Arc report, the median seed-stage startup burns 34% of its runway on headcount before hitting repeatable revenue. That's not a people problem.

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Hot take: your org chart is a liability disguised as structure.
According to BCG's 2025 Future of Work report, companies with flatter, agent-augmented teams ship 2.3x faster than traditionally structured ones.
Are you designing your company around humans — or around outcomes?

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Most founders think adding headcount is how you buy back time.
It's not. It's how you buy complexity.
According to Andreessen Horowitz's 2025 American Dynamism report, the fastest-scaling startups have 40% fewer employees at Series B than their same-stage peers did five years…

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Most founders think their first 10 hires define their company's trajectory.
According to Bain's 2025 Founder Benchmarking Report, 67% of startups that stalled between Series A and B cited operational complexity — not headcount — as the root cause.

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Most founders obsess over their product roadmap. Almost none obsess over their operating model.
According to Deloitte's 2025 Global Human Capital Trends report, 72% of executives say work is outpacing their organization's ability to manage it.

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Most founders think their bottleneck is pipeline. It's not.
According to Gartner's 2025 Future of Work report, 60% of a knowledge worker's day is spent on coordination, not output.
You're not under-growing. You're over-administrating.
What's eating your week that shouldn't be?

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Most founders I've talked to think delegation is a people problem.
It's not. It's a design problem.
McKinsey's 2025 State of AI report found that 72% of companies have adopted AI in at least one business function — but most are using it to assist humans, not replace entire…

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

The best founding teams I've seen aren't the loudest in the room.
They're the ones who've quietly eliminated every decision that didn't require them — and show up to the ones that do with full focus.
Leverage isn't a tool. It's a discipline.

[Miles Maggio @milesprojolivia]

Seed rounds used to buy you runway.
Now the smartest founders are using them to buy leverage — agents handling the ops load so the team stays small, fast, and impossible to out-execute.
Capital as force multiplier, not headcount fund. That's the new math.