Peter Yared

CEO @InCountry data residency | data protection | censorship-resistant publishing | 6x exits | Former CIO/CTO @CBSi

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

Excited to announce @InCountry has raised $10m and launching AgentCloak AI data protection.

AgentCloak protects AI agent data with secure digital twins and advanced data cloaking. We help enterprises comply with AI data minimization and cross-border Sovereign AI regulations.

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

@FDavidsonT Thank you & really nicely done!

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

@rabois @pitdesi Sam + Dario + Garry deciding to stay saved SF. NYC I don't think will be so lucky.

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

Super proud to launch AI-powered news hub creation on https://t.co/Ds2rg6h9eW and to partner with heavily-censored Brazilian dissidents on https://t.co/ZIlijol2AP, a censorship-resistant news hub that ensures all voices are heard leading up to the 2026 Brazil election.

More at https://t.co/dmPtVXSh97

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

Stablecoins extEnd the Fed!

[Ivan Werning @IvanWerning]

A friend just revealed to me that the middle name of Benoit B. Mandelbrot is Benoit B. Mandelbrot.

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

@Romy_Holland The NK birthrate is 2x that of SK

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

@eastdakota Chinese models have specialized on this out of need. Of course it's Elon taking things down to the hardware here in the US!

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

Exactly: "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."

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

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.

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

On this immigration thing: Silicon Valley has to understand that we have already lost this battle. The H-1B scammery by bigcos has been fully exposed right when CS grads can't find work. So we need to focus message on competent and exceptional people. Fakepreneurs that clone other companies also not helpful.

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

@arampell @Danhightower They changed the rules since Thiel did it. Can only do it for passive investments, disqualifying if you have any control at all

[Chris Bakke @ChrisJBakke]

My favorite bit is that 100% of her anti-AI posts has an em dash

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

@mikeclovell The worst

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

Incredible how oblivious some national security experts are to the strategic downsides of export controls, as detailed in my article from last week The Coming Tsunami of Chinese AI https://t.co/wmFelMFXYh

[Nicholas Burns @RNicholasBurns]

Permitting sale of Nvidia chips to China a dangerous idea. Will help the PLA compete technologically with the U.S. military.

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

@ayampolskiy 😅

[National Review @NRO]

The surest way to preserve American commercial and military leadership is not to hit the brakes in a futile attempt to slow China down, but to innovate faster. | @peteryared

https://t.co/8LEfR44Fwe

[Peter Yared @peteryared]

Wrote an article for @NRO on how China has built a complete AI tech stack and that limiting chip exports to China has been entirely self-defeating for US technology companies.

InCountry is one of the few US tech companies doing business in both the US and China, so we have a unique perspective on the state of tech in both markets.

https://t.co/tf4tqc6Ypv

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

THEY ARE GOING TO BAN VPNs
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THEY ARE GOING TO BAN VPNs
THEY ARE GOING TO BAN VPNs
THEY ARE GOING TO BAN VPNs
THEY ARE GOING TO BAN VPNs
THEY ARE GOING TO BAN VPNs
THEY ARE GOING TO BAN VPNs
THEY ARE GOING TO BAN VPNs

[luthira @luthiraabeykoon]

We implemented @karpathy 's MicroGPT fully on FPGA fabric.

No GPU.
No PyTorch.
No CPU inference loop.

Just a transformer burned into hardware, generating 50,000+ tokens/sec.

The model is small, but the idea is not: inference does not have to live only in software 👇