Rishit Shah

[Eric Rea @ericwilliamrea]

The crazy thing about this is that the progress we have made over the last three years will be dwarfed by the progress we'll make over the next six months

[Eric Rea @ericwilliamrea]

3 years ago, the average engineer at Podium shipped around 5 PRs a week. Today, we have several engineers shipping well over 100.

This didn't happen organically. We basically tortured our engineering team to greatness over the last 3 years.

But we ran into an interesting problem. Our engineers got so fast that our entire CI/CD pipeline became the bottleneck.

In January of this year, we completely broke it down and rebuilt it from scratch. Here's what we did:

- Standardized AI coding workflows across our engineering org.
- AI now reviews 100% of PRs and auto-approves 60%.
- Built WALL-E, an internal agent that diagnoses CI failures, reruns jobs, and fixes issues without an engineer getting involved.
- Cut our median PR cycle time from \~1,000 minutes to 200.
- Kept our change failure rate below 1%.

We've spent the last 3 years completely rethinking how we build software at Podium. And we're pushing to ship 10x more code this year than last year.

The absolute best part is how quickly we can build and improve products that help our customers make more money.

Our engineering team wrote up how we did it. Pretty awesome stuff.

https://t.co/wpbfRQk0fq

[Eric Rea @ericwilliamrea]

We just crossed $100M in AI agent ARR in under 24 months.

Not because of a viral launch or AI hype.
But because of a crazy bet we made in 2023.

At the end of 2023, over 60k local businesses were using @PodiumHQ to centralize their leads and customer communication into one platform.

It’s a great product. Customers convert more leads and make more money with it.

But one reality became impossible to ignore:

Our customers’ biggest constraint isn’t software. It’s staffing.

→ 75% annual turnover
→ 30% of leads come after hours
→ Every missed call can be $20,000+ in lost revenue

Business owners don’t care about software.
They care about making money.

And the best software in the world doesn’t matter if there aren’t enough people to run it.

So we built Jerry, the perfect user of our own platform.

Not a chatbot. An AI employee that uses Podium to:
- Qualify and schedule every lead
- Handle objections and follow up
- Learn through natural-language coaching
- Work 24/7

Demos are easy.
Real AI employees are not.

To work in the real world, AI has to think, act, understand context, and use tools.
It has to handle thousands of edge cases every day.
It has to be coachable. Like a human.

That leap is enormous.

Agents aren’t a feature. They’re the foundation.

That’s why we rebuilt Podium as an AI-first system of agents.

Today:
- 10,000+ AI agents live in production
- AI now outperforms humans in many jobs
- $100M+ in AI agent ARR, and accelerating

This is still day one.

The future isn’t software. It's AI employees that do the work and unlock growth for businesses.

We’re early in building what we believe will become the most impactful AI employee ecosystem for the $3T SMB market.

We’ve seen 300% year-over-year AI revenue growth and we’re just getting started.

[Orange Book 🍊📖 @orangebook]

Great parents don’t tell you how you should live your life, they teach you timeless principles and equip you with a moral compass that end up being your most valuable asset whatever path you choose for yourself.

[Naval @naval]

Every piece of advice must be taken before it’s given.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

No matter what you do for work, no matter how you live your life, no matter what your stances are—there will be some crowds who respect you for it and others who don't.

If you live true to your values, you'll win the respect of the people you respect. That's all that matters.

[Naval @naval]

Big companies and repeat entrepreneurs struggle to go from zero to one because they refuse to restart at zero.

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

What others say doesn't directly affect your emotions. Between their words and your feelings is your interpretation of their intention.

Agency lies in the space between stimulus and response.

A sign of emotional intelligence is recognizing your power to change your assumptions.

[Temet Nosce @GnothiSea]

Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting. It is a sign of our unwillingness to move on, to flow with life.

Nisargadatta Mahara

[Naval @naval]

Selfish morality:

[Prof. Feynman @ProfFeynman]

Teach your children early what you learned late.

[Naval @naval]

Your success in life depends on your ability to make good decisions. Your happiness depends on your ability to not care about the outcomes.

[Nisargadatta Maharaj @Nisargadatta_M]

Be sure your attitude is of pure goodwill, free of expectation of any kind. Those who seek mere happiness may end up in sublime indifference, while love will never rest. As to method, there is only one—you must come to know yourself—both what you appear to be and what you are.

[Prof. Feynman @ProfFeynman]

Things that Schools should teach: 🧠

• Being wrong is not a bad thing.
• It's Okay to question what you have been taught.
• Grades aren't as valuable as skills.
• Understanding is more important than memorization.
• Making mistakes is Okay. Learn from your mistakes.

[Nisargadatta Maharaj @Nisargadatta_M]

Rely entirely on your clarity of thought, purity of motive and integrity of action. You cannot possibly go wrong. Go beyond and leave all behind.

[Chrisman @chrisman]

Hiring more won’t make you go faster because the output of your projects follows a power law.

When constrained by people, you focus on the 1-2 most critical bottlenecks.

When you have extra people they work on non-bottlenecks, which does nothing to increase overall speed.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

It’s 5pm, freezing outside, and I’m two whiskies deep.

A few thoughts and hot takes (on a wide variety of topics):

[Boyan Slat @BoyanSlat]

Problem-solvers take an issue and cut it up into small, solvable chunks.
Problem-sellers do the opposite: bundling various remotely-connected issues together into one big, scary problem.
The consequence is that problem-sellers make problems look insurmountable when they're not.

[Mark Manson @Markmanson]

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” – Rumi

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

Impostor syndrome is a paradox:
-Others believe in you
-You don't believe in yourself
-Yet you believe yourself instead of them

If you doubt yourself, shouldn't you also doubt your judgment of yourself?

When multiple people believe in you, it might be time to believe them.