Owen

Scaling Physical AI @ Robotics Lab • Built a 50k-person social club in NYC • Prev @jpmorgan

[Owen @owensways]

I love sales

[Nicolas Brillante @nickbruhman]

https://t.co/laggV6o3C7

[Owen @owensways]

Soon enough we’ll be using tools that no longer enhance our work and productivity. Some people will entirely replace their rational & logic and therefore replace themselves out of a role. The deep thinkers (who know how to lee rage these tools) will win. Every time.

[Kevin Jiang @jiang_kev]

We just raised $5.7M for @PolarBrowser, the AI browser that beats Anthropic and OpenAI on every major web agent benchmark.

- 4,500,000+ actions taken for users, automating sales, recruiting, and ops
- One company cancelled Clay and saves 25+ hrs/wk per person
- Team is from MIT, YC, Prod, Citadel, Jane Street, Perplexity, Modal, and Apple

100 hours of work. From 30 seconds of typing.

Download the world's most powerful AI browser: https://t.co/lUOm01Stm0

[Owen @owensways]

@711_Joseph @elonmusk @paulg I did not, super interesting. I’ve also heard they’re subsidizing majorly in SF so all the prices are cheaper than uber, Lyft, and Waymo atm. Haven’t tried it yet but now I’m excited to

[Owen @owensways]

Beyond the ads methodology, their hiring methods need to be studied also. The key here is that *one* person scaled their LinkedIn. Clay’s growth was certainly founder led at the beginning, but at some point the team started carrying the flag.

[paolo trivellato @paolo_scales]

pay attention to what Clay is doing on LinkedIn right now because this is the most underrated GTM playbook I've ever seen:

> one person ran their social and posted 961 times in 69 weeks
> grew the company page from 14k to 120k+ followers with zero paid ads
> every single department is consistently posting around their specific expertise
> customers started posting their own Clay workflows and results on LinkedIn unprompted
> no corporate speak at all, it's just people posting their actual expertise in their own voice

Clay went from near zero revenue in 2022 to a $3.1B
valuation

Worth studying

[Owen @owensways]

Hate or love ‘boring’ businesses… $5.65B is a crazy number. Not AI or a hyper scaler, just a simple good old business.

[Owen @owensways]

Watching the F1 race in Monaco and all those yachts parked in the marina made me think about something…

Marina Berths. Classic boring business. Went down a rabbit hole and found they have 70%+ gross yield margins. And the best part?

[Owen @owensways]

A company called Suntex has been buying all of them up over the past year. And what’s even more interesting… industry averages are 4-7x EBITDA. Why did Blackstone acquire 138 marinas & 50,000 slips at 21x EBITDA?

[Owen @owensways]

@711_Joseph Exciting times ahead. The market will react negatively when they eventually switch everyone to usage based. I see a world where non technical individuals will start using different IDEs and combining agents for different tasks when that happens. Time will tell!

[Owen @owensways]

This is great. What will the world look like in 25 years when children grow up in a place where most tasks will be done autonomously with words, or at the sense of touch? Communication remains a key component of connection today. I wonder if that will remain in the future.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

My 30+ observations on the greatest opportunities in AI agents right now:

And some ideas that are keeping me up at night.

1. The new buyer on the internet is an AI agent. Imagine billions of new customers showing up with money to spend but they only shop via MCP. That's what's happening. No MCP server means you're invisible to the fastest growing buyer on the internet.

2. Every franchise system in America (30,000+) needs an agent layer and none of them have one. One founder per franchise vertical. That's 30,000 businesses waiting.

3. Everyone said "distribution is the only moat" a year ago. Now I'd add that the only moat is distribution plus memory. The company that has your audience AND your agent's accumulated context is impossible to leave.

4. Consumer mobile is more interesting than it's been since 2012. Apps can finally DO things for you instead of showing you things. The next wave of $100M apps are being built right now.

5. The most interesting startup nobody has built is an agent marketplace where you rent access to someone else's trained agent. A recruiter spent 6 months training a sourcing agent on healthcare hiring. That agent is worth renting to every other healthcare recruiter on earth. The agent itself becomes the product.

6. A sorta strange phenomenon that's happening right now is agents are developing preferences. Give the same agent the same task 100 times and it starts developing patterns in how it approaches it. Nobody is studying this yet. But the agents that develop good patterns are worth more than the ones that don't. That's a new kind of asset.

7. Dead internet theory is about to become dead SaaS theory. Half the apps you use will quietly replace their support team, their onboarding team, and their content team with agents. You won't notice for months. Then you'll realize you haven't talked to a human at that company in a year.

8. The most valuable data in the world right now is sitting in the support tickets of small or mid tier SaaS companies. Every ticket is a customer telling you exactly what to build next. Mine this.

9. The most interesting pricing problem nobody has solved is how do you price a product when your costs change every time OpenAI or Anthropic updates their model pricing? Your margins can swing 40% overnight based on a decision made in San Francisco. The company that builds dynamic pricing infrastructure for agent-based businesses solves a problem every AI company has.

10. The best AI products feel like they're reading your mind. The worst ones feel like filling out a form with extra steps.

11. An interesting arbitrage I've noticed lately is hiring a human VA for $20/hour to supervise an AI agent that does $200/hour work. The human just checks the output.

12. The managed AI agent business is becoming the new agency model. $5k/month per client. You build it, run it, maintain it. The client gets a digital employee they never have to think about. This will be a $50 B+ category.

13. The first "shadow agent" scandals are about to drop. Employees running personal agents on company infrastructure without telling anyone. Using company API keys. Agents accessing internal docs. IT departments have little visibility into this right now. Lots of opportunity to build companies here. Definitely a painkiller not a vitamin type of business.

14. Right now there are probably millions of agents running on autopilot that their creators forgot about. Still burning tokens. Still sending emails. Still scraping websites. Still costing money. The "find and kill your zombie agents" tool is a product that writes itself.

15. Companies are starting to hire based on someone's agent portfolio instead of their resume. "Show me 3 agents you built that are running right now." It's REALLY early but it's starting.

16. Your Slack archive is a product. Every company's internal Slack has thousands of messages explaining how they actually do things. The company that lets you point an agent at your Slack history and auto-generate SOPs and agents from it will be enormous.

17. We're watching the cost of intelligence fall faster than the cost of distribution. Which means distribution is now the expensive thing.

18. The most underrated asset a human can have in 2026: the ability to sit in a room with another human, make eye contact, and have a real conversation. As AI handles more of the transactional stuff, the humans who can do the relational stuff become disproportionately valuable. The soft skills people used to dismiss as fluffy are becoming the hard skills. The hard skills people spent decades acquiring are becoming the soft ones.

19. There are MANY huge companies to be built around the fact that most people's agents are running on their personal laptops which they also use to browse the internet, check email, and download random files. The attack surface is enormous. One compromised Chrome extension and your agent's API keys, customer data, and workflows are exposed.

20. There's a new type of burnout forming that doesn't have a name. It's not from working too hard. It's from context switching between human work and agent work 50 times a day. Reviewing agent output, correcting it, approving it, reviewing again. The mental load of supervising agents is different from the mental load of doing the work yourself. Some founders are telling me they were less tired when they did everything manually because at least the cognitive pattern was consistent.

21. The cheapest form of market research: search "[your industry] spreadsheet template" on Google. Whatever people are tracking manually is your product.

22. Half the YC companies pivoted within 8 weeks of demo day. Not because they failed. Because agents let them test 5 ideas in the time it used to take to test one. The concept of "committing to an idea" is dissolving. Serial pivoting is becoming the default because 1) AI lets you move fast 2) the world is moving fast.

23. The loneliest job in tech right now is being the only person at your company who understands what the agents are doing. You can't explain it to your boss. You can't hand it off to a colleague. If you leave, everything breaks. You've become a single point of failure for an entire automated system. That person needs a title, a team, and a backup plan. Most companies haven't figured this out yet.

24. Your browser history is the most valuable training data you own and you're giving it away for free. Every site you visit, every product you research, every competitor you study, every pricing page you screenshot. That behavioral data, structured and fed to an agent, would make it understand your business better than any onboarding call. The company that lets you turn your browser history into agent context builds something nobody can replicate.

25. Everyone is building AI wrappers. Nobody is building AI unwrappers. The tool that takes an AI-generated document and tells you which parts a human wrote and which parts were generated.

26. Stripe just became the most important company in the agent economy and they barely had to do anything. Every agent that sells something needs Stripe. Every agent that buys something needs Stripe. They're the payment rail for the entire agentic internet by default.

27. The most undervalued API in the world right now is the US Postal Service address verification API. It's practically free. Every local business lead gen agent needs it. Every real estate agent needs it. Every direct mail agent needs it. Boring government infrastructure is quietly becoming the backbone of agent-native businesses.

28. The concept of "business hours" is for humans. Your agent closed a deal in Tokyo at 3am, processed the payment, sent the onboarding email, and updated the CRM before your alarm went off.

29. What happens when agents start recommending other agents? Your research agent finds that a competitor's sales agent is better and suggests you switch. Agent referral networks are forming organically. The first agent affiliate program is probably 6 months away.

30. Cal dotcom closed their source code. That's the canary. When open source companies start closing up, it means agents were cloning their product too easily. Every open source company is quietly asking the same question right now.

31. "AI for pet groomers" sounds like a joke and that's exactly why it will work. 150,000 of them in America. Zero tech. All scheduling by phone or IG DMs. The joke ideas always win.

32. The thing that will seem most obvious in hindsight: we spent 2025-2026 arguing about which model is best while the entire value was in the orchestration layer. The model is the CPU. Nobody buys a computer based on the CPU anymore. They buy it based on what they can do with it. Makes so much sense in hindsight. What else will be obvious in hindsight?

I'll share more notes soon.

I can't sleep with all that's going on. Maybe you too.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Owen @owensways]

AI over-reliance is a real issue, lol. Claude goes down for five minutes and the entire feed melts down

[Owen @owensways]

@EXM7777 MACHINES

[Owen @owensways]

@alexisohanian Peak and Pace is the biggest run club in NYC by far and they’ve grown from 12 to over 10,000 members in 1 year

[Ademi Adeniji @AdemiAdeniji]

Closed-loop robot policies directly from human interactions. No teleop, no robot data co-training, no RL, and no sim. Just Aria smart glasses.

Everyday human data is passively scalable and a massively underutilized resource in robotics...More to come here in the coming weeks.

[Owen @owensways]

@711_Joseph Yep. Hear you.

[Owen @owensways]

@711_Joseph You forgot Peak and Pace

[Owen @owensways]

@711_Joseph Shout out @peakandpace👀

[Owen @owensways]

If you’re serious about your goals, you know there’s a price tag that comes with it. Motivation and ambition are nice, but can you remain consistent to paying your dues on a daily basis? I know I have to, that’s the choice I made.

[ju$kii ひ @Soho_ju]

Support yourself. Speak highly about yourself. Motivate yourself. Pray for yourself.

[Orange Book 🍊📖 @orangebook]

You will lose health.

You will lose money.

You will lose family and friends.

You will lose sight of your goals.

Don’t ask why it happens.

That’s just part of life.

Invest in a more resilient mind.

Know you can always rebuild.

You can overcome anything life throws at you.

[Reece Wabara @ReeceWabara]

A decade of consistency will change your life

Bad days, bad weeks or bad year will not define you

But after 5-10 years, good/bad luck runs out & you see who was really working

The outcome of your life Is a sum of your long term habits, long term thoughts & long term decisions.