Scooter Taylor

building @westpeek 📍 brooklyn

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

every time I get in a situation and think it’s the end of the world, I think about the last time I got in a situation and thought it was the end of the world

[New York Magazine @NYMag]

It takes an inordinate amount of wit and charm to best Conan O’Brien in a riff-off. The most an average comedian or host can hope for is not to embarrass themselves trying, which is largely how Kareem Rahma fared in a recent episode of his popular social-media series, Subway Takes. But toward the end of the interview, Rahma and O’Brien were shown up by a stranger named Debbie Shields who just so happened to be commuting on their train.

The 68-year old native New Yorker didn’t know what ‘SubwayTakes’ was, or that she was about to get pulled into a viral improvisational comedy bit. But thanks to a childhood spent performing in church and experience hosting comedy and karaoke nights, she says her instincts kicked in immediately.

This 'SubwayTakes' appearance isn’t even the first time she has been put on the spot by someone with a huge comedy platform.

Shields shares which comedian once pulled her onstage at Barclays Center, how she’s handling her virality, and whether she’d be interested in hosting a show of her own: https://t.co/WktKtAC7Fu

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

If you’re not careful they’ll put a homecoming memory in your - nvm

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

you can please some of the people all of the time

you can please all of the people some of the time

but you can't please all of the people all of the time

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

this Tuesday is feeling very Thursday

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

@natashaghoskins lmao!

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

reminder: i can be behind on some things and still be moving forward.

[Jen Abel @jjen_abel]

startups, here's enterprise decoded ...

1. 'circle back' = dead
2. 'get it done asap' = within 90 days
3. 'send me what I can share internally' = 3 bullets
4. 'this is exciting' = let me play a role in shaping this for us internally
5. 'send me your paper' = i will send you mine back
6. 'how much time is needed' = 30min OR less
7. 'I will bring my boss' = I expect a match in seniority
8. 'no questions from my side" = I have no idea what just happened
9. 'this price seems fair' = this falls below what I had budgeted
10. 'give me time' = stop following up

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

remember you was livin at The London for a month

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

Meta Muse will probably create 1000+ millionaires

This is the most slept on arbitrage I’ve seen in years and it’s not even close.

Here’s how i’d build a 1 person business powered by AI/Muse with with $0 and 0 social following

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

ooooo Jalen Hurts 🙏🏾

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

@_SydniePaige lmao😂😂

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

I commit to building companies that support the life I want, rather than sacrificing my life to support the companies.

[philip lewis @Phil_Lewis_]

Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, has been fired, after less than a week on the job, NYT reports https://t.co/zhcTtZ9qDw

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

i been taught to never lend somebody what you need right back

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

did he make a car fly and flip?!

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

don’t let people say mean and cruel things to you and act like they didn’t say mean and cruel things to you

[Scooter Taylor @ScooterTaylor]

BAG WITH A PIPE LIKE THEY CAME FROM A SCOTTISH HOME

[Steph Mui @stephmui]

it's only been 2 months of using personal agents (instinct, muse, caspian) for shopping and my spending habits have already meaningfully increased and shifted as a result

as one example: i love secondhand / vintage, but hate the digging/sifting process which i've now entirely outsourced to these agents

> my average my spending in this category has increased from $365 average to $820 in the last 2 months (they are really really good at uncovering hidden gems i'd never have the time discover on my own)

> my spending has shifted majorly towards sites that are agent-friendly

before: 65% eBay / 25% TheRealReal
now: 50% Poshmark / 30% ThredUp

(all bc my agent can actually send me listings from poshmark/thredup that match what i'm looking for 🫠)

as someone who has no patience for nonstop clicking and sorting i can't see myself going back

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.

My observations:

1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.

2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.

3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.

4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.

5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.

6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.

They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.

7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.

8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.

Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.

9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.

10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!

11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.

12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.

13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.

14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.

15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.

16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.

17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?

18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.

19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.

20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.

21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.

Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.

Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.

Happy to be home and locked in.

Until next time!