Iri Menn

Love life. Bullish on AI. Product at 4x startups. 2x founder.

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@steipete That’s awesome

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@steipete Is OpenClaw the WordPress of the agentic era?

[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.

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@nikitabier A set of baseball cards

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@garrytan Is Y Combinator accepting restaurant chain idea applications? Please me know where to apply

[Iri Menn @stempm]

Makes sense and a huge opportunity for consumer robotics together with the residential construction industry to rebuild for the next generation of smart homes. Or maybe we should call them intelligent?

[TBPN @tbpn]

.@mcuban says humanoid robots won't last more than 5-10 years.

Instead, we'll "design the house to fit the robot, and design the robot to fit the house."

"You could create a house where the pantry, the refrigerator, and the washing machines were hidden behind the garage, if you even have a garage. That way you could redesign the house so that all the living space was for people."

From his appearance on the show in March.

[Iri Menn @stempm]

Crazy talent recognizes crazy talent. The boundary-breakers usually don’t look optimized on paper because their brains are wired for first-principles thinking, not consensus thinking. The hardest part isn’t finding them — it’s creating an environment that doesn’t sand down their edges and lets them thrive

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@jefielding The reasons for returning cash to investors could have nothing to do with product/market, etc. Especially if the revs are growing. It could be something personal (founders are humans), could also be a move to buy equity back and prep for a quick exit. This story feels incomplete

[Iri Menn @stempm]

Product is not alignment. It is value delivered to the customer.

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@karaswisher it was great to see you in the Hamptons with Ms. Priestly. You rock

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@karaswisher it was great to see you in the Hamptons with Ms. Priestly. You rock.

[Iri Menn @stempm]

GameStop Makes $56 Billion Offer to Buy eBay - WSJ #bigmove https://t.co/cYazfIfQHL

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@garrytan Why not run them on a server?

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@zan2434 There are products that run on duct tape and string for 19 years, this tech is huge. You should be able to find money for extra GPUs in no time. Can I help?

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@eddiejiao_obj @zan2434 @karpathy @drewocarr Btw, what are your plans for this tech? I’d love to connect to learn more. Please add me to the big fans club

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@eddiejiao_obj @zan2434 @karpathy @drewocarr Thanks! I’ll try that

[Iri Menn @stempm]

For 27 years (or more?) this has been a vision and now it is a reality. When people talk about new category products, here is one

[Zain Shah @zan2434]

Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see.

@eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@gokulr @adamnash And that is where you stop selling technology and start selling products. Bring back the Product Manager

[Iri Menn @stempm]

@sairahul1 Also, how do you save X posts, there is no save button