I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.
I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.
My takeaways:
1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.
2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.
3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)
4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.
5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million
6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.
7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.
8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.
9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.
10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.
11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.
12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.
13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.
14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....
15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.
16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.
17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.
It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.
But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.
We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.
What an incredible time to be building.
xcode just dropped an official mcp 👀
been testing it for the last 12 hours and honestly… this might be a game changer. feels like i finally found a clean setup for ios testing that doesn’t feel like duct tape
still early, but promising. will keep pushing it and share a proper breakdown soon
Building an AI feature for my app right now.
Stuck between Gemini and Kimi for the backend.
Gemini feels safer. Kimi feels… interesting.
Which one are you betting on?
@ijsthee In crowded markets, features blur. Signature moments stick. It’s often a tiny detail that makes an app feel “intentional” instead of generic.
Have you ever seen a signature moment directly impact retention?
@ClimStefan That might be part of it, but if traction was mostly crickets, it’s usually not a conversion issue — it’s a distribution issue. Conversion matters when people are actually arriving with intent.
Performance posts work because they signal proof, not opinion. If people only engage when you post numbers, they might be following the outcome — not the thinking.
The real leverage comes when people engage with your process, not just your results.
Instead of just sharing the metric, break down:
– what you expected
– what surprised you
– what you’d do differently
Not broad subs like r/startups. I look for specific threads where someone is actively describing the exact problem my product solves.
Example:
Instead of posting “I built X” in r/startups, I’d search for:
“struggling with [problem]”
“how do you handle [pain]”
“tool for [specific use case]”
Then I comment with insight first. If the conversation goes deeper, then I mention what I built. Distribution is about entering existing pain, not announcing your existence.
Day 8 of building apps to $10k MRR
I’m now focusing on validating my app idea on Reddit by engaging in conversations with people who might be my target audience. No pitching, no links. I just warming up, listening, and understanding the real problems first.