Ali Rowghani

Building @firstharmonic. Formerly: MD @ycombinator, COO @Twitter, CFO @Pixar. Investor in Stripe, DoorDash, Zapier, Deel, Webflow, Zip, Kalshi, Vanta, Ironclad.

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

The industry needs trust certification standards to make sure that we can all use AI agents safely. That's what AIUC-1 is all about, and it's great to see @Lovable taking this issue so seriously

[Rune Kvist @RuneKvist]

Today @Lovable announced their AIUC-1 certification - earning the trustmark for AI agents.

Congrats on passing this milestone @antonosika & @FabianHedin - proud to see the Nordics set the pace here!

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

@btaylor @claybavor @letsleverup Congrats to @letsleverup on this acquisition. You've built a stellar product and team. You got a great one, @a_a and @btaylor!

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

@anm @amirmova @firstharmonic @Arcteryx It’s definitely part of @amirmova’s brand

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

I could not be more excited to announce that @amirmova has joined the team @firstharmonic.

Amir and I have known each other for 15 years. He was one of the best hires I made in my five years at Twitter. Amir made a huge impact, including helping to lead the company’s IPO efforts in 2014. A few years later, he became the CFO at Mixpanel and then the COO, leading the GTM organization and owning the sales number. I knew Amir to be an extraordinary operating executive, but did not expect him to become a CEO as quickly as he did. But that’s exactly what happened when Mixpanel's founder stepped down in 2017 and asked Amir to take over.

Mixpanel was once the market leader in product analytics, but had lost its lead. As CEO, Amir led an amazing turnaround in the company’s performance. He remained CEO for eight years before recruiting his replacement and stepping down earlier this year, with Mixpanel growing, thriving, and profitable.

Amir is a builder. He is a winner. He cares deeply about his work and the people he works with. His breadth of experience at both private and public companies is remarkable, and I believe he will become a tremendous resource to First Harmonic’s founders through all stages of their journey.

Welcome to the team, Amir. I’m delighted to work with you again.

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

@anm @amirmova @firstharmonic @Arcteryx That was my joke, @anm!

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

@t_blom @NotTomBrown This is awesome - congrats @t_blom

[Mia Mabanta @miamabanta]

This week, @firstharmonic hosted its first sales-focused Builders Table (Sellers Table?) with top AEs from @DecagonAI, @Rippling, @fal, @getserval, @_hex_tech, @stripe, @coderabbitai, @figma, and other great companies.

Some interesting takeaways from the room:

1/ Most sellers are using AI for meeting prep and follow-up, not as much for building decks or writing emails (!).

2/ The thing sellers most WISH AI could do for them is automate CRM input (hard relate).

3/ Most sellers think that there will be fewer SDRs in five years, and that they'll have different skills than they do today.

4/ Most sellers think Salesforce will eventually get displaced, but not for 10+ years.

5/ The "AI tool" that sellers value most isn't an AI-native tool at all; it's @Gong_io.

Personally, I learned that the most cracked sellers are the ones who show up at a dinner on the last day of the quarter, the week before 4th of July!

Thanks to all who joined us. We want to do more of these dinners: for engineers, salespeople, marketers, you name it. DM or email me if you want to get on the list.

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

Own your intelligence, don't rent it! Great interview from @ypatil125 from @appliedcompute

[Yash Patil @ypatil125]

"There should be as many models in the world as firms in the world."

Satya and I dig into when to own vs. rent your intelligence, why every company should be building and climbing its own private evals, and what makes for a stable frontier.

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

We @firstharmonic are proud to co-lead @PoeticHQ's Series A round.

Founders come in all shapes and sizes, but few come with as much light, passion, and energy as @markiewagner. She has built one of the most talent dense teams I’ve seen, and together they have built a breakthrough product that is already loved across the Fortune 500.

@PoeticHQ has built the first product that combines the intelligence of agents with the reliability of code. This architecture will revolutionize how companies run by turning process into software at every large company in the world

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

@firstharmonic is proud to co-lead @PoeticHQ's Series A round.

Founders come in all shapes and sizes, but few come with as much light, passion, and energy as @markiewagner. She has built one of the most talent dense teams I’ve seen, and together they have built a breakthrough product that is already loved across the Fortune 500.

@PoeticHQ has built the first product that combines the intelligence of agents with the reliability of code. This architecture will revolutionize how companies run by turning process into software at every large company in the world.

[Markie Wagner @markiewagner]

Introducing @PoeticHQ: a new AI system that executes complex multi-hour tasks with 99%+ accuracy and 10x fewer tokens than agents.

We raised $50M at $500M from Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, First Harmonic, and Genius Ventures to build AI that does complex work inside Fortune 500 companies without hallucination.

While code is too brittle, agents are too unpredictable. The work that runs the global economy - anti-money laundering, fraud investigations, underwriting - needs extreme accuracy.

So we built a new kind of software that pairs the flexibility of AI with the predictability of code.

When the world stays the same, Poetic runs fixed code: fast, cheap, identical every time. When the world changes, Poetic uses AI to regenerate its approach and find its way back to the objective.

In one year, we went from zero to an eight-figure run rate as a team of four.

Since then, we’ve scaled the team and executed the highest-stakes processes at AIG, SoFi, and Chime. At SoFi, a large US bank, Poetic reached 99%+ quality on fraud investigations in five weeks.

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

@ericwu01 This is awesome, @ericwu01 Congrats!

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

We hosted a Builders Table event with leaders from @AnthropicAI last week. It was amazing to hear about their experiences using Mythos internally, managing the unprecedented growth they are seeing, and learning about new products they are hoping to build.

Thanks so much to the @AnthropicAI team (@bcherny, @mikeyk, @alistaiir, @OmidMogasemi, @jwbaskerv, and especially @RazRazcle), and to the great engineers who spent their evening with us.

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

Amazing accomplishment for @christinacaci and the Vanta team! I'm proud to be an early investor and admire the way they have navigated an incredibly competitive industry to reach this milestone.

[Christina Cacioppo @christinacaci]

It took us two years to grow from $10 mm to $100 mm in Annual Recurring Revenue and 15 months to reach $200 mm. Nine months later, we crossed $300 mm. Vanta’s growth rate increased each of the past four quarters – compounding really is the eighth wonder of the world!

“But wait,” you might be thinking. “How does a software company founded before 2022 *increase* its growth rate?” Narrative violation!

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

Actively AI (@useactively) is leading an inevitable transformation in the modern sales stack. Within five years, no one will believe that sales teams used to work without per-account agents working alongside them to guide their actions with intelligence.

I heard about Actively two years when a CRO told me it was the most transformative sales tool he’d ever seen. We then worked closely with @mgarimella and @agupta_108 in the @firstharmonic program and were blown away by their tenacity and commitment. We see enormous potential in their business.

Today, we're very excited to co-lead Actively's Series B and help realize their vision of intelligence-led revenue.

[Mihir Garimella @mgarimella]

📣 We just raised our $45M Series B from @TCVTech and @firstharmonic, with participation from @BainCapVC, @firstround, and @AlkeonCapital.

Sales is the most expensive function in most companies — and one of the hardest. Hundreds of accounts, different context, different stakeholders, different dynamics, and a different path to close. No one can do that perfectly. Critical things get missed.

So we gave every account its own AI agent — working 24/7, maintaining full context, progressing it through the funnel, and guiding reps and leaders on what to do next.

The greatest privilege has been building alongside companies like @Samsara @tryramp @ironclad_inc and @attentiveHQ — enterprises with thousands of sellers who are already living in the future.

There are only two unbounded upside problems out there: building and selling. Every company sells. and @useactively is building the system they'll all run on. We’re excited to pull every revenue team into the future we know is inevitable.

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

@sama Very sorry to hear about this, Sam, and glad you and your family are ok

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

There are many forums for founders to learn from each other, but fewer for engineers and researchers. If you'd like to attend an @firstharmonic Builders Table event, please DM me or @miamabanta. The discussions are stellar!

[Mia Mabanta @miamabanta]

The way we align and shape model behavior is evolving quickly. Last week, we had the pleasure of gathering SF's post-training experts from companies like @appliedcompute, @OpenAI, @cursor_ai, @thinkymachines, @mercor, @cognition, @xai, @flappyairplanes, and others.

Post-training is a nascent field, and I learned a ton:

1/ Reward modeling is becoming the bottleneck. The gap between what we can train models to do and what we can reliably evaluate is widening fast.

2/ The line between post-training and product is blurring. Teams that treat RLHF and fine-tuning as an afterthought are falling behind those that treat it as a core part of the product loop.

3/ Evaluation is still surprisingly artisanal. The tooling isn't where it needs to be, and there's a real opening for better infrastructure.

This event was part of @firstharmonic's Builders Table series: intimated, curated dinners where you almost certainly won't be the smartest person in the room. DM me if you're interested in coming to the next one.

[Silas Alberti @silasalberti]

people often conflate two types of spreadsheets + AI:

1. enhancing previous-gen spreadsheet with an agent sidebar (e.g. Claude in Excel, ChatGPT for Excel)
2. spreadsheets as a next-gen interface for agent swarms (e.g. Paradigm)

Paradigm is the only real product pursuing this vision and so much potential in this category

[Mia Mabanta @miamabanta]

We hosted 30 of SF’s best engineers at our Builders Table event with @cursor_ai last week. The way we code is changing fast, and Cursor is one of the companies at the forefront. The team shared their perspectives on questions like:

- Will engineers even look at their code in a year?
- Will the future of coding be in the IDE, the CLI, or in something else entirely?
- What will the role of an engineer look like in the future?

There are many forums for founders to learn from each other, but fewer for engineers. We loved creating one and hope to do more. If you’re an engineer and interested in attending a future @firstharmonic event, DM me!

[Ali Rowghani @ROWGHANI]

Very excited to back @catheryn_li and @Zach_Kamran who are build AI agents that can sell

[Alex Konrad @alexrkonrad]

EXCLUSIVE: startup Simple AI has raised $14M to help customers like Omaha Steaks boost sales with AI phone reps.

Is AI ushering in a voice revival? We talked to founders @catheryn_li and @Zach_Kamran -- both former YC staffers -- about what's going on.

https://t.co/QjpPB8ou5j