Sean

I think about the economic infrastructure of the internet in an AI world. | fmr @Pinterest @Gitcoin | Dad x3 | trail runner

[Sean @smacmannis]

i work in web3 to help build an internet where:
-we’re all owners
-we build together
-we play positive sum games
-we share the profits
-we use our💰 to regenerate the 🌎

[Sean @smacmannis]

@AnnikaSays was it openclaw?

[Sean @smacmannis]

@AnnikaSays how did you go about this? i feel like the best way to do this changes by the week and is very different for each person - curious to know what you did!

[Paul Millerd @p_millerd]

the biggest thing that happens when people find work thats sustainably meaningful for them is that they lose judgements of others and genuinely want others to succeed. not in a transactional, i hope to gain from others success but sincere joy of seeing others win

[Sean @smacmannis]

@lizwandersworld This video makes me so anxious.

[andrew chen @andrewchen]

2010: startups raised to hire devs
2016: startups raised to buy clicks
2022: startups raised to buy GPUs
2026: startups raise to buy tokens

the scarce thing shifts over time!!

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

If you are in startups or tech

It is literally cook or be cooked

[anand iyer @ai]

Since founding my company in 2013, I’ve believed in one rule above all else: move fast, or the window closes. It has shaped how I build, invest, and advise founders ever since.

But I learned about Eigenzeit this week and it will not leave me alone.

In German, it translates to "proper time." Einstein used it in relativity to describe the time that belongs to a specific object. It’s why a twin traveling near the speed of light ages more slowly than the one on Earth: each moves according to their own eigenzeit.

The metaphor for company building feels almost too perfect.

Trust between a founder and their market has an eigenzeit.
A new category has an eigenzeit.
Even a team finding its rhythm has an eigenzeit.
Reputation has an eigenzeit.

996 culture can't compress these things. Capital can't rush them.

Some things move at the speed of execution.

Others move according to their own clock.

(h/t Colin Bryant, Coatue)

[Sean @smacmannis]

Agent-native design be like

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

Sometime in the next 2-3 years agents will be using the internet more than humans

We designed the whole thing for human eyes, human emotions, human attention spans

Agents do not have any of that

The internet as we know it was built for the wrong user

The opportunity is rebuilding everything for the new user

Agent-native search. Agent-native commerce. Agent-native discovery

Every category is open again

I can't stop thinking about it.

[Tanning Salon Don @TheSalonDon]

A loan officer at a local bank told me that anyone applying as a "CEO" is flagged for manual review

Successful small business owners don't call themselves that

[satvik @sxtvik]

It feels increasingly contrarian to still want to build technology that is defined by its positive social impact

[mert @mert]

enough with the emotional self-defeatist mentality in this industry

yes. there's tremendous potential left in crypto. we haven't even surfaced 1% of it

crypto is the universal API for money, markets, and capitalism

blockchains didn't even scale past steam-engine performance until 2 years ago

unstoppable private money, programmable finance, internet capital markets, perpification of all assets on earth, decentralized coordination for physical infrastructure, lightspeed planetary payments with a line of code, a sanctuary economical system for anyone who didn't luck into being born in the west, zero knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, freedom, self-custody of assets without requiring permission from suits, property rights, contract enforcement, capitalism based on cryptography instead of the crony

trillions

[Dan Shipper 📧 @danshipper]

if you’re freaking out about Mythos, remember:

Never make any major life decisions within 30 days of a meditation retreat, psychedelic trip, or first encounter with a frontier AI model.

[Sean @smacmannis]

If AI leads to this future then maybe we’ll all be OK

[Anton Osika @antonosika]

People often ask where Lovable users find time to build side projects.

What I'm seeing: people are choosing to build instead of passive consumption, like endless doom scrolling.

Creativity is reclaimed from consumption.

[Sean @smacmannis]

Vibe coding works.
Vibe coding your design? Not so much.

Met @yarik_designer through @patel0phone while working on @AtriumAcademy.

First thing I did as VP Marketing in my last role?

Hire him to build our brand foundation.

Now we’re building Tribe together.

Something we keep seeing:

Founders can ship product faster than ever.

But they’re still showing up like an MVP.

And that gap kills trust.

Not because the product is bad.
Because the presentation says “not ready.”

Most teams think design is polish.
It’s not.

It’s the difference between
“this project is interesting” and “this company gonna blow up.”

Getting v1 design done is easy now.

Building something that actually holds across product, site, and marketing is not.

[Sean @smacmannis]

Hot take from @impranavm_ at the Digital Frontier Summit at UC Berkeley:

“AI agents right now are basically toys that adults over 25 are playing with.”

He’s probably right.

But agents themselves aren’t the interesting part.
They’re the apps of the AI internet.

What matters is the infrastructure underneath. Builders today are racing to figure out:

identity
permissions
payments
guardrails

But almost no one is asking the deeper question:
Who owns the context those agents operate on?

Because once agents remember your preferences, goals, relationships, and history… they stop being tools.

They become personal intelligence.

If platforms own that context → AI becomes the strongest lock-in ever created.

If individuals own it → AI becomes open infrastructure.

That’s the real battle for the next internet. Who's working on that? DM me.

[Sean @smacmannis]

@gregorykennedy come back!

[Sean @smacmannis]

if AI makes context the real control layer, what has to exist so individuals retain real leverage instead of all the value compounding to platforms and employers?

[Sean @smacmannis]

people should not have to rebuild their digital mind every time they switch tools, jobs, or platforms

[Sean @smacmannis]

Right now in AI:

Platforms own your identity.
Platforms hold your memory.
Platforms run the agents.

So the intelligence acting on your behalf runs on context you don’t control.

The obvious architecture is the opposite:

Users own identity.
Users own memory.
Agents plug into that.

Maybe working in blockchain just red-pilled me. But building “personal AI” on platform-owned memory feels a lot like rebuilding the same old internet… just with better autocomplete.

[Sean @smacmannis]

i concur. this is a good reason.

[signüll @signulll]

if you ask most peeps why they want kids they’ll give you some npc answer.

the reason why i think having children would be amazing is that you get a front row seat to consciousness booting up. like watching an os that god wrote light up for the first time.

& as they grow up you get to examine the world through an innocence lens you basically shedded a long long time ago.